Whichwood(46)

“Azizam,” Baba said again. “Azizam, please look at me.”

Finally, she felt her mouth move. The seam of her lips had gone dry; her jaw throbbed in her skull. “I will not,” she whispered.

She heard the sound of metal—a key? A few clicks. The distinct sounds of manacles clanging open and closed.

And then—

A warm hand against her face.

Laylee opened her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks. She wore no expression as her heart exploded in her chest, as her father stood before her and said, “Laylee, I finally found him.”

“No,” she tried to say. “No,” but it wouldn’t come out.

“He finally came to me this morning,” Baba said, all gums and glittering eyes, “and told me we’d speak soon.”

Laylee felt her limbs grow thick and heavy, her veins knotting under her skin.

“I told you,” said Baba, smiling, “I told you I’d find him, azizam.”

He was talking about Death, of course. Baba had left two years ago to find Death and had never returned. It was his great mission—to find the creature responsible for taking his wife. And now Death had promised him an audience, and Baba couldn’t understand why.





Everything happened very quickly after that.

The Elders dragged Baba away, telling Laylee that she could visit him in his cell just before his public humiliation later that evening. He would stand in chains before a crowd as a very dark magic reached into his chest and disintegrated the heart beating within him. It was a simple procedure, they’d said. Shouldn’t be too painful, they’d said. They assured her he would be dead before sunset.

Laylee nodded without meaning to—wondering all the while what had compelled her to do so—and looked at no one and nothing as her life was dismantled before her. The decision to sentence Baba to death had not only been made quickly and without ceremony, it had been pushed through as an emergency ruling in favor of an angry mob demanding justice. This, the execution of her father, was done as a supposed kindness to Laylee, because after Baba was dead, Laylee’s punishment would be far less severe: she would be put on trial for treason.

“Once the anger of the people has been sated with the blood of your father, they might be willing to listen to your cause,” she remembered someone saying to her.

She was told she’d be given an opportunity to defend herself, her actions, and the necessity of her profession in court, but that this was not a guarantee of anything. If the jury ruled in favor of the people, Laylee’s entire purpose as a magical person would shatter, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was a clause—a protection in the old magic—that, in the case of danger or disaster, the results of a proper court trial could overturn ancient magical tradition. It was a judicial process that had never before seemed threatening.

But now?

Laylee had gone numb in parts of her face.

Alice and Oliver were by her side, holding her upright, and though both Alice and Oliver say they tried to hug her, to speak to her—to offer words of comfort—Laylee claims she heard nothing.

You might now be wondering why none of the children had tried to stop the Elders from taking Baba—after all, together they could do quite a bit of powerful magic—and you’d be well within your right to wonder. But the situation with Baba was much more complicated in the moment than it might have seemed. It all happened so quickly—and it was such a shocking revelation—that it had rendered the group of them temporarily impotent. Suddenly, in the face of a towering group of powerful and angry Elders, Alice and Oliver and Laylee felt fully their age—too young and too old all at once. Laylee felt small. She remembers feeling scared.

She remembers sitting somewhere inside of her house.

She remembers walking in, somehow, and she remembers Maman screeching at her. “Where have you been? I was worried sick! Who was that out there? Who are these children you’ve brought into our home? Laylee—Laylee—”

She remembers the birds tapping at her windows, their sharp beaks pecking ceaselessly, and she remembers someone reaching into her chest and ripping out her heart, and she remembers exhaustion, she remembers blurriness. And there was something else; she remembers something else, too—

“Oh, no!” Alice gasped, reaching for Oliver’s arm.

“What is it?” he hissed, wrenching his arm away from her. “You’re cutting off my circulation, Alice, good grief—”

“Father is here.”

Oliver Newbanks jumped two feet in the air. His first thought was to hide, but there was no time. It seemed a perfect coincidence that Alice had looked out the window at precisely the right moment to see her father strolling up to the door of Laylee’s castle, but the fact that Father was here was far from fortuitous. Father’s arrival in Whichwood could only mean that Alice and Oliver had ruined everything. The thing was, Ferenwood parents never came to collect their children in the middle of a task—not even in the face of failure. It was up to the children to deal with the tasks on their own. That Father had come to fetch Alice meant that she was in very, very deep trouble. (And Oliver, who’d run away from home to accompany her, was about to be caught and thoroughly punished.)

Laylee doesn’t remember much more than this.

She doesn’t remember meeting Alice’s father; she doesn’t remember his condolences or his assurances that he’d tried desperately to convince the Whichwood Elders to change their minds. She doesn’t remember his offer to take her away with them to Ferenwood.