Page 68 of The Last Wish of Bristol Keats
“We need to talk. About Willow.” She pushed her way past him, and glanced around, eyeing other escapes in case she needed one. It was a cramped cottage, an unmade bed pushed up against one wall, a stove on the opposite one. Almost a hovel. No other doors, and not what she expected.
When she turned to face him, she saw that the mention of Willow’s name had punched the bluster out of him. He was silent now, but his face was a chiseled nightmare, like a gargoyle in a graveyard. But then his sunken cheeks began to flush. He blinked, his crow-like eyes flashing in the firelight.
“Coffee?” he finally said. “I was just about to pour some.”
If he was trying to shock her, he achieved his goal. She couldn’t think of a more unlikely response, but then she realized,hewas the one who was in shock. He didn’t know what else to say. The name Willow had completely stymied him. Master Reuben didn’t look like a master of anything at the moment.
He walked to the stove and lifted two mugs from hooks on the wall behind it. He stared at their shimmering surfaces long after he filled them with coffee, then finally picked them up and brought them to the small table in front of the fireplace. Bristol hesitated, but took a seat opposite him.
“You found Willow?” he said in an uncertain voice.
“No,” Bristol answered, “she found me. She told me about your role in my father’s abduction.”
“She’s here? Is she well?”
Well?He was asking after her well-being? Like Bristol had simply run into an old friend? No, she was not well. And neither was Bristol. “She is crazed, Reuben! She’s rambling about my father and not being able to find him. She called you cruel and said taking my father from the mortal world wasyouridea. I didn’t come here for coffee, Reuben. I came for answers, and I want them now! How are you involved with Willow?”
His thin lips pressed together, and he nodded. His smug scowl was long gone—instead, he looked like a scarecrow with the stuffing pulled out of him. He couldn’t seem to focus.
“Everything, Reuben,” she said to nudge him.
“Willow,” he finally said, like he was confirming they were on the same topic. He heaved out a slow breath. “Willow is the biggest regret of my life. I could never make it right. I figured this day would come eventually. No one knew her name. No one but me. She was my secret.”
Bristol stared at the transformed Reuben, no longer the arrogant master alchemist with sharp words and haughty stares, but someone else confessing the biggest secret of his life.
“Back then—during the time period you mentioned—our relationship was new. She lived in a little shanty in the woods. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was magical.” His dark eyes lit up with the memory. “Shewas magical. I’d steal away for days at a time, between my studies at the university, to be with her. She was wild, and playful, and she completely entranced me. I led two separate lives back then—my strict internship under the High Witch, and my untamed days with Willow. I loved her.” He squinted at the memory. “But, as I discovered, I didn’t love her more than my ambitions. One day she asked me to stay and not go back to the university. She wanted me to stay for good.We could have a baby, she said.Wouldn’t a baby be nice, Reuben? We could be a family. We could make this little place bigger. That was when I made my greatest mistake. I tried to let her down gently, to tell her it was impossible, that I had a different future in front of me, but I said it all wrong.Yes, a baby would be nice, I told her,but. . . She never heard the but, or what came after. I should have known. Willow was carefree and impulsive, everything that I wasn’t. That’s what I loved about her. She was the light to my darkness.”
Bristol sipped the last of her coffee, but Reuben’s remained untouched. He said when he returned two days later, he heard squalling coming from the shanty. Willow was rocking a baby, trying to calm it. She had happily explained how she found the baby in a meadow, and that she came along just in time because surely a wolf would have eaten him.See what a good mother I am already?she told him.
“I was horrified and told her she had to take him back, immediately. I raised my voice. I yelled at her for the first time in our relationship. She was distraught by my reaction and only remembered a meadow—a mortal meadow. I tried to help her retrace her steps but soon realized it was hopeless. Willow only lived in the happy moments of life. She couldn’t navigate the sad ones. That was when I told her she had to take him to the queen herself. She did as I ordered, but said I had destroyed her. She hated me after that and never returned to her shanty. She escaped to the mortal world, which was probably for the best. Unfortunately, the baby’s parents were never found, and he was given over to the Sisters to raise him. I always carried guilt about it, wishing I would have been harder with Willow from the start, no mincing of words and trying to placate her, but my wishes were worthless. So as the baby grew, I did everything I could to help him, but slyly, because I was still shamed by my mistakes with Willow. I knew how difficult it would be for him growing up in a fae world, so over the years I made sure he had the finest amulets to amplify his skills and to protect him. And far later, I helped Kierus when he wanted to leave Elphame once and for all.”
As he spoke, the breath in Bristol’s lungs thinned, like she had stepped into an alternate world. A world where Reuben was an ally? “Youhelped my father?”
“Many times, though he proved himself quite capable, his tongue as much a weapon as anything else. He could disarm others without magic. But when I did help him, I thought that maybe it was a way to redeem Willow—and myself, especially when I helped him return to the mortal world at last. I understand he was happy there for many years. He had the life he wanted, his art, his wife, his family, you. I helped him in ways I shouldn’t have. I was the one who planted Fritz’s bloody cloak so he could escape with your father. And I provided a distraction so Fritz could slip into Celwyth and access Jasmine’s art collection when Kierus needed funds.”
Bristol didn’t know of any person in her father’s life named Fritz. If he came with her father to the mortal world, she never saw him. “Who is this Fritz person?” she asked.
“The doorward of Celwyth Hall. But you probably knew him in his other form, as Angus. Not many knew he was a shape-shifter. He preferred it that way.”
Bristol showed no emotion. She didn’t feel like a surprised novice anymore, but a jaded veteran of this world. Still, anger curdled in her stomach at the lies she never saw. Angus was a shape-shifter. The family’s long-lived ferret who always managed to disappear at convenient times. Hehadbeen listening to them all those years. And he didn’t take crumpled letters from the trash to shred the paper. He read them.
“Fritz told me about you,” Reuben said. “May the great gods save me, I never wanted you to come here. Except for a few artists who stick close to the conservatory, things rarely end well for mortals in this world. Even da Vinci suffered a gash that nearly disemboweled him when he ventured too far. Elphame is a dangerous world that’s often difficult to escape once you’re here, especially if you become someone of particular worth. That’s why I told you to go home, Miss Keats. Before you or anyone else discovered your value.”
Value. A chill trickled down her spine. She was the only known bloodmarked in Elphame besides her mother. The thought had lurked in her mind, cloudy and unformed, but now she saw the danger of it, fully formed in Reuben’s eyes. There was a threat in being needed by the wrong people. Her mother was proof of that. But Bristol had the means to leave whenever she wanted to. Her timemark was safely hidden away.
“That’s also why I put your father’s note in your room,” he continued. “I thought if I couldn’t convince you to leave, surely he could. He had the golden tongue that I was not blessed with, but clearly you were immune to his pleadings too.”
“He came to you with the note?”
“No. It was Mae who passed it on to me. She was the go-between for a trow who knew of my involvement with Willow. He requires a favor of me from time to time for his silence, though that time I was happy to oblige.”
Bristol hissed out a breath. “Mae told me she hated trows.”
“She does, but she’ll do anything for a coin.”
Anything?Bristol remembered the cloaked mercenary guide who led her to her father at the barn, always rubbing his fingers together, requiring coin for the smallest bit of information. His identity was carefully disguised. A glamoured Mae? Bristol sighed. She had been duped by a master. Mae would probably be the first to calculate Bristol’s value. “That’s why you ordered me to leave, to spare me?”
“Why else? Some mistakes I can never fix. That only leaves me to mitigate the mistakes about to happen. You’re a prize, Miss Keats, and at risk.”
