Copper Ravens(3)

Both Max and I had since tried dreamwalking to Dad, but we both came up short. We’d been terrified at first, thinking our lack of success meant that Dad was gone, but Micah had assured us that this wasn’t necessarily the case. Most likely, Dad was being held somewhere that was warded against dreamwalking.

“Or perhaps,” Micah had amended, seeing my horrified face, “he has made himself unreachable.” Well, that was certainly a more attractive concept than Dad being surrounded by wardsmiths strong enough to keep out Dreamwalkers.

When Mom had first heard the news that her husband was probably alive and possibly being held by evil sorcerers, she tried every trick she knew to find him—charmed maps, locator spells, you name it, she conjured it. And, none of them worked.

After her hundredth failure, she had started these daily meditations in the orchard; at first, we thought she was trying to come up with a new spell. When Max had offered to help her with said spell, she confirmed that she was merely trying to clear her head, along with my worst fears. Just like she’d done in the Mundane world, Mom was withdrawing into herself rather than admitting that she needed help. It was a supreme irony that the individual most capable of freeing Dad from any sort of evil magic was the one hiding in the back yard.

I sighed, and decided that leaving Mom alone with her memories was the best course of action, for now at least. I continued on to the ground floor of the manor and found Sadie in one of the many empty rooms.

My kid sister was seated on the floor, smack in the middle of the room, intently staring at a few lumps of metal. Mustering all my stealthiness, I hung back and watched as she coaxed the metal into long ribbons, up and up and over her head, stretching and curling before her in a serpentine dance. They curled into and out of spirals, perfectly symmetrical, like tiny metal clouds bouncing across the sky. I was impressed; she had excellent control of the metal, but then again, she’d been practicing. Give Sadie a structured lesson plan, and she could move mountains.

“Very good,” I murmured, only to watch the ribbons fall to the floor and shatter.

“Sorry,” I offered as I plopped down beside her. “That was really cool, though.”

“Yeah.” Sadie fingered the broken metal; she’d stretched it so thin it was translucent, like a fine china teacup. “How was the Gathering?”

“Long and frustrating. Where’s Max?”

“Out.” She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask. Not having specific knowledge of Max’s extracurricular activities had always served us well.

“You know, as the Inheritor you should really be going to these Gatherings with me and Micah,” I said.

“And do what? Show off my party tricks?” Sadie’s head drooped, and she covered her face with her hands. “I’m useless.”

“You’re not. You’re just new at it.” Sadie nodded but remained silent. I idly poked at the bits of metal scattered across the ground; she’d been working not only with copper but with a few hunks of silver, too. I squinted and probably screwed up my mouth in the way that always makes Micah laugh. Since working with metal was also new to me, I tended to overcompensate.

Slowly, the copper and silver pieces worked themselves into segregated piles, then they morphed and melted and stretched into long wires. After wiggling them this way and that, I willed them toward each other and twisted them together in a single fluid motion. A moment later, a heart formed of the two metals floated onto my lap.

“Thinking of Micah again?” Sadie said with an eyeroll. I shoved her in retaliation, but it was playful. Undeterred, Sadie took the heart and ran a finger along its curves. “You really love him?”

“Yeah.” My belly warmed just thinking about him. “I do.”

“So, what’s all this heir business?”

I sighed and took the heart back. I remembered one of the first talks Micah and I had had about heirs—children, I mean children. His and my potential children. Babies.

My hands trembled just thinking about it.

We hadn’t started out discussing babies, though. It had been two days after Micah had rescued me from the Institute where Max was held, the morning after the first night I’d spent in the manor. I was wearing the silverkin’s first attempt at jeans—a noble effort on their part, but so very, very wrong. The pockets were too low on the sides of my legs, so I couldn’t stuff my hands in them, and they were way too loose. Still, I had appreciated that they had tried, so I had worn them.

We won’t discuss the monstrosity of a sneaker they produced.

Baggy denim notwithstanding, I was on cloud nine. Micah was all warm and snuggly in the morning; I’d worried that our first morning together would be awkward, all bed head and bad breath, but it wasn’t. Micah had asked the silverkin to serve us breakfast in bed, and we had lazed around, getting crumbs and tea stains on the sheets, for the better part of the morning. We had decided to get up shortly before noon, really only so someone else could deal with all those crumbs and tea stains, and Micah had taken me on a tour of the manor’s gardens. They were vast, lush, and colorful, packed with flowers and herbs and beautiful vine-covered nooks where we could while away the day.