Work Text
i.The rules of Auradon weren’t all that much different from the rules of the Isle, if you asked Carlos.Show respect to authority. Keep quiet, it’s safer to be unnoticed. People see you as a threat and will act accordingly. At least on the Isle they kept these things clear – you knew where you stood with people on the Isle. In Auradon people expected you to cover things up with pretty smiles and pleases and thank yous, telling lies through your gritted teeth and darting eyes. No matter how much the people tried to hide it, Carlos could feel the resentment and nervousness and anger towards them growing, festering like an infected wound. Even here, under the flowering trees and the lush greenery that covered the grounds of Auradon Prep, even with Jay lounging by his side and Dude at his feet, Carlos found that he could not breathe.He buried his fingers in the dirt, tearing up blades of grass and twisting them into knots. It was the anticipation that was the worst. Carlos had grown up with a mother who was constantly changing the rules, so no matter how careful or clever you tried to be, it was never quite good enough. Carlos had grown up waiting for the other slap to land, so to speak, and he could never quite relax until it did.Carlos gazed across the courtyard, where Mal was walking with Jane. She could feel it too, he was sure. Mal had grown up the same as him. Although she was too far away for him to see clearly, he knew her eyes would be scanning across the school’s pristine gardens, watching for threats. There were knives carefully hidden under the heavy folds of her dress and sparks of magic in her fingertips, but she walked with caution even here in Auradon – perhaps especially here in Auradon.Carlos leaned back against the tree and sighed. With his eyes still closed, Jay shifted his weight slightly and pressed himself against Carlos’ side, steady as a ship’s anchor. Carlos could feel his warm skin and solid muscles even though the layers of cloth that separated them. This also left him unable to find his breath, although this time for entirely different reasons.He wanted nothing more than to relax his shoulders and slump down against Jay in turn, but they were outside, in the open, there could be danger stay awake stay alert danger danger danger –Carlos’ thoughts were cut off by the sensation of Dude’s damp nose snuffling at his hand and his rough little tongue licking at Carlos’ fingertips. Carlos came back to himself, realized that his breath was coming fast and shallow, and that his muscles had locked and were holding him still as a statue. He forced himself to take a breath and made his muscles relax, reaching down to pat Dude on the head as a thank-you. He settled back against their tree trunk, only for Jay to sit up and study him. “Hey, you alright?”It was more of an invitation than a question. After years of living on the Isle, Jay was a keen observer with a finely-tuned sense of his friends’ mental states. He knew that Carlos wasn’t alright – or rather, that Carlos was even less alright than usual. It was simply a matter of whether these particular symptoms were something that Carlos wanted to acknowledge or something that should be covered up before the enemy could identify them as weaknesses.Carlos hesitated, pinned under the steady weight of Jay’s dark brown eyes, and finally nodded his head. He trusted Jay with his life, but he wasn’t sure how to explain the nerves that had consumed him ever since they set foot in Auradon – it was as if the sun was too bright, the colors too vivid, the scents too strong. Everything seemed to grate against his nerves, leaving them frayed and raw.Carlos sometimes wondered if he was just too broken for Auradon.Jay’s eyes stayed on him for another moment, concerned but trusting. Many people would find themselves distracted by Jay’s impressive physique or his crooked grins, but Carlos was most entranced by his eyes – they were warm and hawk-bright, burning like the banked embers of a fire.Jay started to relax, but a whistled tune on the breeze made him pause, with only the smallest twitch of his muscles to show how tense he had suddenly become. Anyone else would have sworn that the two boys were perfectly relaxed, but Carlos could tell that Jay was forcing himself calm, that he wanted to run and run and run, following Mal’s song until they could make sure she was out of danger.The tune started growing fainter: what do you do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning? Their call for help.Carlos got slowly to his feet. Everything seemed to settle into place around him – the garden shone out clear as a battlefield and his heart pounding in his ears suddenly felt right. His panic crystalized into perfect focus. He reached down and helped Jay to his feet, already tracking where Mal’s location would be. “Let’s go.”
ii.They did not walk slowly, but they did not walk quickly either. Carlos even stopped to tie his shoe at one point, letting his eyes sweep across the gravel pathways and manicured lawns as he paused. Dude trotted along beside them, his tongue lolling from his mouth in a doggy grin.They did nothing at all to arouse suspicion, but the students of Auradon Prep still gave them fleeting sideways glances. Even after the events of Ben’s coronation, after all the feasts and celebrations and fireworks, the other students would still shy away from them. They would walk in groups of twos and threes – safety in numbers, of course – and their hands had a tendency to hide their valuables should they talk to anyone of the Isle.On another day it might have angered Carlos. Or made him sad. Or made him feel some cocktail of emotions that he could barely contain inside his skin, let alone begin to tease out and name. But all that paled in comparison to the mission in front of him. Every beat of his heart sounded out the same instructions: find mal, find mal, find –And suddenly there she was, walking along the path in front of them. She looked fine – Mal had always carried herself as though she was bigger than she actually was; her chin was raised, her shoulders squared, her eyes sharp and glittering. She wore no bruises and her clothing wasn’t torn, there were no signs of a fight. But Carlos’ heart refused to slow down even when it was presented with this evidence. His eyes darted about, scanning each hedgerow for danger. Mal had never called for help before – something had to be wrong and he just wasn’t seeing it.Jay jogged forward, closing the last few yards of space between them. He threw an arm around Mal’s shoulders and flashed a bright grin towards Jane. “Sorry to interrupt, Miss Jane. Mind if we borrow Mal for a bit?”Carlos saw Jane’s nose wrinkle slightly in distaste before she caught herself and smoothed out her expression. Auradon Prep was a place of grandstanding, of courtly gestures, gloved hands rather than bare skin. The royal students seemed to frown on the level of casual contact between the villain kids, but no one had dared tell them to stop outright.However, Jane was properly Nice and Good – or she tried to be, at least – and usually let them do as they liked. She was one of the few students who would go out of their way to interact with the children of the Isle; Carlos thought she might feel bad for her part in freeing Maleficent from the Isle, or even for the cruel things she has said to Mal before the coronation. She was still a nervous, fluttering thing – he could see her bracing herself before every conversation with them – but she did it anyway. Perhaps she was braver than any of them gave her credit for.Still, people had a tendency to become flustered when Jay turned his smiles on them. Jane was not an exception to that rule. Her hands came up to fiddle with her short hair and a pink flush made her round cheeks glow. “You really don’t need to call me miss – I mean, just Jane is fine, if you’d rather, not that I’d assume to be too familiar –” She cut herself, blushing even harder. Jay’s smile remained bright and steady and focused entirely on her. Carlos could sympathize – he found Jay’s smiles overwhelming too. “I’ll just get out of your way. Bye Mal!”Jane gathered her long skirts up in one hand and rushed off down the path, shaking her head slightly as though she was trying to clear cobwebs from her mind. Having three pairs of eyes fixed on you, intent and unblinking, had a tendency to leave people extremely discomfited, even if they couldn’t quite say why. It was a handy trick that the villain kids could use in Auradon, and one of their most subtle – after all, it was polite to look at someone while they were speaking, wasn’t it?As soon as Jane was out of sight and they were alone, Mal let out a gasp, all air in her lungs leaving in a great whoosh, and her careful façade of control collapsed. She sagged against Jay’s side, letting him take her weight as she curled in on herself. One hand came up to the center of her chest, clutching at the fabric of her dress. Now that Carlos was able to look more closely, he could see that her skin was so pale that it was almost translucent, and that small beads of sweat clung to her hairline. She was shaking.Jay leaned down, trying to get a better look at her while still supporting her. “Mal, what’s wrong?”Mal sucked in a deep breath, trying to reign herself in. She straightened slightly and concentrated, delivering the details in one quick burst. “I felt dizzy. We were walking, and then my chest went funny. Like someone reached in and squeezed.”Carlos felt the blood drain from his face. “I’m getting Evie.”
Mal had never gotten sick before. Even when the worst of infections swept through the Isle, she had remained stubbornly on her feet. She had escaped broken bones, fevers and flus – even the common colds and coughs that sprung from the damp sea air hadn’t dared to touch Mal. And yet, here in Auradon, she was laid out in bed with Evie examining her.“Did you eat or drink anything strange today? Any exposure to unusual objects or potions?” Evie asked her questions quickly but calmly, her hands deft as they took Mal’s pulse and checked her temperature. The Isle was a dangerous place and the four of them had a protocol for emergencies like this – retreat to a safe place, assess the situation, and make sure the harm can be minimized or hidden from others.Mal shook her head, propped up against the small mountain of pillows that had found their way to her bed. She looked smaller than usual on the massive four-poster mattress, pale even to the pointed tips of her ears, but her eyes were sharp and alert. “Everything I ate was served at breakfast. Didn’t taste unusual, so they’ve either got a great poisoner in the kitchens or it wasn’t the food.”Carlos watched them carefully from his perch by the room’s tall windows. Evie had been the closest thing to a physician that they’d had on the Isle; her mother’s library of ancient potion guides were filled with annotations and corrections based on Evie’s own experiments with the Isle’s flora and fauna. She had seen plenty of death and disease on the Isle, but Carlos could see past the calm Evie projected. Having Mal as the one under her care unnerved her.
“That’s good,” Evie said softly. She was half talking to herself as she consulted her books, which were spread out in a semicircle around her on the floor. “You should throw it up just to be on the safe side – Jay, make sure she only gets safe food over the next couple of days.”“I’m on it.” Jay had been pacing ever since they’d snuck into Mal’s room, a frantic circuit from the door to the closet to the window and back again, monitoring all weak points of the room. He looked grateful to have something practical to do.“Maybe it’s some kind of Auradon disease that I don’t have notes on,” Evie flipped through her books, her eyes flying down the text. “There are at least a dozen illnesses that have chest pains as a major symptom, but you don’t have any of the other indications–” Her voice grew more panicked and higher-pitched the longer she spoke, until Mal reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.“Evie. I’m fine, the pain’s already gone. I just got dizzy for a minute and now it’s over.” She tried to punctuate her sentence by levering herself out of bed, but Evie rounded on her faster than a striking snake.“Oh no,” she said, pointing a finger at Mal. “You’re going to rest for today at least and we’re going to make sure this doesn’t come back. It’s better than having it happen again in public and needing to rush you out of there.”Mal hesitated, her eyes narrowing as she considered her options. “One day,” she said finally. “One day and if there’s nothing strange, we’ll call it a fluke and carry on as usual. And I want strawberries.”“Deal.”Mal settled back against the pillows. Despite her protests, Carlos could see that her eyelids were already dropping. “And I need to tell Ben that I won’t be able to make it to lunch this afternoon,”“Hey, don’t worry about that,” Jay said quickly. He crossed the room to Mal’s side, fitting his arm around her shoulders in a half-hug. He shot Carlos a smile like sunlight. “Carlos and I’ll let him know.”
iii.Auradon glittered.There was no other way to describe it. The crystal chandeliers gleamed, the gilt decoration glowed, the entire castle was kept at a fine polish by an army of servants. It made Carlos profoundly uncomfortable. He almost missed the gloom and fog that often enveloped the Isle – it let you disappear from sight, it could keep you safe if you used it right. In Auradon, you were left exposed and examined. In Auradon, they pretended that shadows didn’t exist.Carlos wanted to fall back behind Jay, to hide in the comfort of his shadow, but you didn’t get anywhere on the Isle by letting people know you were afraid. So Carlos drew his skinny body up tall, put his eyes forward. He fell into step beside Jay, matching their strides until they moved as a single unit. Jay shifted slightly, letting his shoulder brush against Carlos’ arm, a subtle reminder that they were together – that Carlos was safe.They made their way through the maze-like castle to Auradon Prep’s receiving hall. Ben had been spending most of his mornings there ever since the coronation, taking comments about the state of the kingdom and dealing with incoming paperwork. Evie, who was the most well-versed in royal protocol out of the four of them, had explained that the coronation hadn’t been to crown Ben King, but to let Belle step down from her role as Queen Regent and officially recognize Ben as heir to the kingdom.King Adam guarded his rule carefully, even from his own son. The crown would not leave his brow for a long while – if Carlos was any judge, the King had held tighter to his throne ever since the arrival of the Isle children. To be fair, they had attempted to overthrow him…but Carlos couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the infamous Beast of Auradon had been looking for an excuse to cast them out from the moment they set foot in his kingdom. Mal’s very public display of loyalty – and Ben’s steel-eyed insistence that they had clearly fixed any damage they’d caused – had been the only thing to save their skins.They arrived at a small, out-of-the-way entrance to the receiving hall – the door stood in one of the less traversed hallways and was perfect for their purposes. Carlos stood guard, every sense alert, as Jay knelt down next to the door and tested the handle. Finding it locked, Jay unrolled the neat bundle of lock-picks that were always hidden inside his jacket and set to work on the door. Carlos counted in his head as he scanned the hallway, until he heard the tell-tale click of the disengaged lock.“Twenty-three seconds,” he informed Jay softly. “That’s a new record.”“I live to serve,” Jay gave a small flourish of his hands – the lock-pick kit disappeared into thin air – and he opened the door a crack, ushering Carlos inside.The receiving hall was large, designed to impress and intimidate. The tall windows flooded the room with early afternoon sunshine, setting everything aglow. They had entered in the back corner of the room, behind Ben’s desk and nearly out of sight. Carlos gave his head a little shake – they really needed to give the school guards a few pointers. Decades of peace had softened Auradon’s security standards and blunted their survival instincts.Ben was bent over an imposing desk stationed in the center of the room, his quill pen flying across the page as he scribbled down notes. His blond hair flared golden in the sunlight, bright against the dark blue of his jacket. Jay started to step forward, but Carlos’ eyes caught a tiny movement from across the thirty foot hall: the twisting of a doorknob.Carlos lunged forward, catching hold of Jay’s shoulder. Jay instantly took two steps back, until he was pressed up against the wall with Carlos. Carlos cast his eyes around the space, performed some quick calculations in his head, and slid to the left on silent feet. Jay followed him, pressed so close to his side that Carlos feel him breathing. The movement brought them them into the shadow of a plinth that bore a large bust of King Adam; so long as they crouched down and everyone else stayed within a five foot radius of Ben’s desk, Carlos reasoned, the plinth would keep them hidden from view.He had hoped they would catch Ben between meetings, so that they could deliver Mal’s message and get out quickly. Luck had never smiled on the children of the Isle.The doors swung wide and a single man entered; his clothing was well-worn, his skin burnished by the sun, his hands rough with work. He held a basket at his side, but Carlos was unable to make out what was in it from their distance.Ben stood up, moving around his desk to greet the man with a handshake. The stranger looked startled for a moment – it wasn’t every day you got to shake hands with a prince. If there was one thing you could say about Ben, Carlos thought, he truly believed that everyone deserved a chance.“It’s Marchand, isn’t it? Bastien Marchand,” Ben let go of the man’s hand and sat back behind his desk, tiding the many stacks of paper that crowded its surface. He pulled out a file from the middle of a stack, by some miracle not knocking over the whole thing, and opened it on the desk. “And you’re here to make a statement about the condition of the spring harvest?”“Y-yes, your majesty,” said Marchand, with the air of a man who had been planning an opening statement only to find that it was entirely unneeded. He looked a bit off-kilter without the safety of his prepared words, but forged ahead anyway. “It’s failing, you see.”He thumped his basket onto the desk, causing the paper stacks to wobble. Ben reached into the basket and pulled out – well, if you squinted and looked closely, as Carlos did, you might be able to identify it as a potato. The surface was covered with a dark fuzz of mold, and there were holes where bugs had eaten through it. Ben dug his fingers into the skin and the potato crumbled, revealing flesh that looked black and chalky.Carlos felt his stomach turn. Even on the Isle, no one would risk eating something that decayed.Ben let the potato fragments drop back into the basket. His expression was grave. “I’m assuming that this is not an outlier.”“No, sir. The whole crop has been like this. All my neighbors have had the same problem. They elected me to bring it to your attention, sir,” Marchand began to pace back and forth in front of the desk, his jaw clenched, his hands balled into fists. He was angry, the deep slow-burning anger of a man who felt that he had been scorned and taken for granted. Carlos’ eyes darted back and forth as he traced the man’s path, every step bringing him closer to the edge of their safe radius.Don’t move, don’t move, an insidious voice in his head whispered. His muscles were growing sore from holding the crouch so long, but Carlos had held that pose for much longer times. He knew the value of staying silent, of observing, of not being noticed. It had been the only way to survive in his house. He felt his breath catch, and suddenly it was if there was another world layered on top of the reception hall; suddenly he was back in his mother’s coat closet, the darkness pressing against his eyes, muscles locked still, not daring to breathe don’t move don’t move don’t move –Then there was a hand on his wrist, and he felt Jay’s thumb sweep back and forth across his pulse point. The steady movement shook Carlos from his daze and he was suddenly vividly aware of Jay’s body pressed against his back, his breath hot against Carlos’ ear. Carlos gave a small nod, trying to indicate that he was alright, but on the inside he was still shaking.“Honestly, the harvest has been declining ever since the villains returned,” Marchand said, the anger building in his voice. Even Ben was eyeing him carefully now. “I think that witch might have put a curse on us!”“Have care of how you speak—” Ben started to retort, but at that moment Marchand turned at just the wrong angle, letting him see Jay and Carlos.“You!” Marchand roared. He charged across the room and caught Carlos by the arm with a grip like steel. “What have you done to us?”He jerked Carlos forward roughly and Carlos felt himself freeze in response – there were too many thoughts in his head, don’t move, don’t call attention to yourself, don’t hurt the people of Auradon, they’ll send you away they’ll send you back—Jay caught hold of Marchand’s wrist, put one hand on his shoulder and wrenched him away from Carlos, putting himself between his friend and the attacker. “Don’t touch him,” he said, his voice low and deceptively calm.Marchand struggled against him; Jay was strong, but Marchand was a farmer who had labored hard day after day, year after year. Ben was standing and shouting and moving towards them and guards were flooding into the room and Carlos was standing frozen in the center of it all, he was in Auradon, he was trapped in the closet, his heart was beating fast fast fast but he wasn’t able to breath –Jay glanced over his shoulder, locking eyes with Carlos. He jerked his head toward the door and mouthed the word ‘Run!’Carlos ran.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
iv.Carlos ran until his lungs ached and his legs threatened to fail, and then he ran some more. He was hardly aware of where he was going, only that he needed to be away from people, away from the constricting walls of the school, away from the noise and confusion – just away.The world in his peripheral vision was a blur as he sprinted down the empty hallways, his footsteps nearly silent on the marble floor. Most students were in class at the moment, but they would be out soon and he needed to be gone by then. His feet knew their path; the first day they’d arrived in Auradon, the children of the Isle had crept through the school by night and tested every possible exit and escape route.Carlos burst through a small side door and launched himself into a garden courtyard, not even breaking stride as the surface changed from smooth stone to rough gravel. Every thought in his head fell away when he ran; on the Isle he had been an escape artist, smoke through the fingers of anyone who tried to capture him. He had been a shadow.(On Auradon they called you a coward if you ran – as if they had ever been faced with real danger.)Soon the gardens fell away, giving way to the tangled underbrush and hushed shade of the woods that surrounded the school. He wasn’t able to move as quickly or as quietly across the cluttered surface of the forest floor, but that didn’t matter – Carlos found a tree that looked nearly impossible to climb and scaled it quickly, hoisting his too-thin body up through the branches until he could no longer be seen from the ground.Chest heaving, his breath coming in harsh pants, Carlos leaned back against the tree trunk and stared up into the canopy of green leaves above him. His heart was beating so fast, pounding against his rib-cage like it was trying to break free. The tree’s rough bark cut into his hands, but the hurt felt good, grounded him in the hurt of the present instead of the hurt of the past.
Safe. He tried to tell himself that he was safe – but his mind wasn’t listening. As soon as the panic began to subside, another wave of anxiety would crash into him, fiercer than the sea in a storm. Instead of the forest around him, he could only see his mother reaching for him, her fingernails digging into his flesh like claws, the smoke from her cigarette filling his lungs and choking him – she was dragging him through the house, it never did any good to struggle against her –“Carlos? Are you up there?”Jay’s voice cut through the whirlwind of his mind, breaking a bit of the memory’s hold on him. Slowly, half his mind still in the past, Carlos reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, smooth stone. He weighed it in his hand for a moment before tossing it down to Jay, one of the signals that they had worked out for when he was unable to talk.“Okay. I’m keeping watch, alright? Ben’s with me. Do you want him to stay?”Carlos hesitated, turning the question over in his mind. Ben had never hurt him; he had stood by the children of the Isle through worse than this. Maybe he was safe too.Carlos tossed down another stone, his hand shaking.“Okay,” Jay said.
His voice was calm, but projected loud enough that Carlos could just hear it if he concentrated. “Okay. Dude’s here with us too, I think he’s worried about you. He keeps trying to shake my hand like you taught him, he’s learned that one really well. It kind of figures that you would go and adopt the smartest dog in Auradon…”Jay carried on talking, his voice a soft steady hum in the back of Carlos’ mind. He talked of silly things, inconsequential things – how the librarians kept having to escort Evie out of the library when she tried to stay there all night reading; how Mal had discovered all the different paint colors available in Auradon and was trying to figure out how to work them into her art; how it was so easy to startle the Auradon students, you’d think they’d never seen a card trick in their lives, some of them wouldn’t even believe that he wasn’t using magic…Slowly, bit by bit, Carlos came back to himself. His breathing calmed, his heartbeat finally slowed, his panic exhausted itself. Jay’s words gave him a thread to follow, one that drew him away from his memories and back into the present. When he was sure that his moment of panic had passed, he carefully began to make his way down from the tree. Jay kept speaking as he clambered down from the tree, not stopping until Carlos’ feet touched the ground.“Carlos? Are you alright?” Ben started to step forward but then seemed to think the better of it, wringing his hands together as if he wanted to reach out and touch but wasn’t sure if it would be welcome.Carlos held up a hand and made a ‘so-so’ gesture before letting his hand drop back to his side. All the adrenaline had left his body, leaving his limbs feeling heavy and exhausted. The world seemed strangely muted, as though he was watching things happen from far away. Ben still looked worried, so Carlos let himself sway forward, butting his head gently against Ben’s left shoulder in an attempt to comfort him. It was strange, but Ben actually seemed to think that they were worth giving a damn about; Carlos didn’t want him to be more upset than he already was.“Alright, c’mon,” Jay reached out and ran his hand up Carlos’ back, over his neck, coming up to ruffle his hair, his movements slow and telegraphed so that Carlos would notice them even through his current haze. Carlos let himself lean into the touch, knowing it was Jay’s unobtrusive way to check that he hadn’t been injured – he tried to ignore the tendrils of heat that bloomed through his body wherever Jay’s hands wandered. “That was a mile, running flat out. New records all around, man.”“We should head back to the school,” Ben said anxiously, craning his neck to judge the position of the sun. “It’s getting late, I was supposed to have lunch with Mal.”“Yeah, about that,” Jay slung an arm over Carlos’ shoulder, letting him rest his weight against Jay’s body as they started to walk. “Funny story…”
v. The one rule that Fairy Godmother had been truly insistent about was that girls and boys should not share dorm rooms – so they paid her the courtesy of pretending to obey. Just as the day was fading into twilight, Carlos snuck into the girl’s wing of the school and knocked on Mal’s door: one knock high, one to the left, and then one down, forming a rough ‘C’ shape against the wood.“Come in.”Carlos opened the door and slipped into the room, leaning his back against the door until it closed with a click. Mal was lying on her bed in the soft glow of candlelight, an open book propped up against her knees. She looked far more alert than before; a bowl of strawberry hulls on her bedside table proved that she had eaten. Without looking up from her reading, she patted the space on the bed next to her.Carlos crawled up onto the bed and settled next to her, curling himself into a ball and resting his head near Mal’s hip. Her left hand came down and began to card through his hair, her fingernails just sharp enough to scratch against his scalp but not sharp enough to hurt. They laid in the quiet together, chests rising and falling in tandem, the silence only broken by the rustle of turning pages.It hadn’t always been this comfortable between them. When Carlos had first started running with Mal’s gang, he had shied away from any touch, had flinched back from even Evie’s delicate hands. The others had let him be, had given him his space – and would have continued to do so, if Carlos hadn’t been overtaken by a fever the following winter.His memories of the time were hazy; he had fallen unconscious on Hell Hall’s hard stone floors, but the next time he woke up he had been cloistered in Evie’s room. Mal had been lying on the bed next to him, humming nonsense under her breath and running her fingers through his sweat-soaked hair, trying to keeping him quiet while Evie distracted her mother from the boy hidden in her bedroom.As he hovered somewhere between consciousness and oblivion, trying to comprehend the sensation of touch without pain, some part of his fever-addled brain had marked Mal as safe.Now he could not imagine life without the touch of his friends – Evie’s soft hands forever plucking at his clothes and hair, Mal’s twitching fingers drawing out new designs on his skin, the steady pressure of Jay’s hands against his back, Jay’s flesh against his flesh, Jay’s lips against his lips –Carlos caught himself and tried to break away from that line of thought. It was better not to think of Jay like that, it was better to keep things as they were, better to have friendship than to have nothing. Carlos felt the panic rushing back again, rising up like bile in his throat. He didn’t want this, he couldn’t handle this, he was already exhausted to his bones from the attack this morning – but the voice was whispering that he was going to lose Jay, he was going to lose Jay, hewasgoingtoloseJay –“Breath, Carlitos.” Mal’s voice broke through the silence of the room. She nudged him closer to her side, until he could feel the steady beat of her heart through her clothes. “I’m keeping watch. Nobody will come close. You can relax.”Carlos nodded, knowing that she would feel the movement against her ribs. Mal started stroking his hair again; this time he focused only on the sensation of her fingernails instead of letting his mind wander. He relaxed his muscles one by one, releasing the blankets that had gotten caught up in his clenched fists, letting himself sink down into the strangely soft mattress.
He felt Mal’s smile rather than saw it. She had begun to sing under her breath, letting her fingers move in time to the tune. “Óró, sé do bheatha 'bhaile, oró, sé do bheatha 'bhaile, oró, sé do bheatha 'bhaile…” Her voice was surprisingly sweet.Carlos swallowed hard several times, forcing his tight jaw to relax. “That one’s new,” he said, once he felt that he could speak.“It’s been stuck in my head ever since we got to Auradon. No idea where I heard it.”Carlos gave a thoughtful hum. Perhaps it was because of her fae blood, but Mal had always seemed to have one foot in another world – things came to a bit differently than they did to others. Sometimes she knew the meanings of words that no one had ever taught her, sometimes words from other languages and worlds would get caught in her mind. Once, when she was seven, the phrase ‘soaring, flying’ had gotten stuck in her head for no discernible reason and stayed there for a month straight.Mal closed her book and set it on the bedside table, twisting so that she was lying down and facing Carlos. “What’s on your mind?”Carlos searched his mind, trying to find the words to explain how he was feeling – that everything was too good to be true, that he spent every moment waiting for people to turn on them, that everything was going to come crumbling down. He finally settled for saying “Things are just strange here.”Something like understanding flashed in Mal’s eyes as she parsed the unspoken words between them. “Yeah, I know,” she said.Carlos looked at her carefully: her face was drawn and there were deep shadows under her eyes, so dark that they were nearly the same purple as her hair. She was exhausted too, he realized, and instantly felt guilty for taking up her time.His thoughts must have shown on his face, because Mal reached out and very gently flicked him on the nose. “Oi, none of that,” she said. “I hear Ben’s got a situation on his hands. Break it down for me.”Carlos took a deep breath, marshaling his thoughts together. Now this, he was used to. This was almost like being back on the Isle. “The most manageable thing we can do right now is to find out how much food they have stored up, the amount of people in the kingdom, and how far rations will stretch if they’re needed.”Mal nodded along, picking up his line of thought and running with it. “Start preserving the food that they currently have, figure out the expense of bringing it from other places – do we know how widespread this is yet?”“Not yet, we got interrupted before they got to all the facts of the matter.”“And I suppose it’s too much to ask that they know what’s causing it?”“Evie and I will look into it.”
vi.Ever since the coronation, it had become rare for Ben to have even a moment of free time. Cogsworth had always ensured that his days were rigorously scheduled, so he was exceptionally confused when Lumière waylaid him on his way to lunch with the King.The man had thrown a lanky arm over his shoulders and deftly steered him off his intended path, chattering all the while – surely the young master would care to take his lunch in the atelier this afternoon, the view was absolutely magnificent today, if he did say so himself – before depositing him in front of the studio doors.“Er – Lumière, I appreciate it, but I really need to get to the palace –”Lumière only gave him a bright, fixed smile and gestured emphatically towards the studio. “But the view is incredibly lovely today.”
Ohhh.
Ben cleared his throat and straightened up, putting on the airs of a prince with the same ease that he would put on a coat. “Lumière, would you please send my father a message explaining that a malfunction occurred with the carriage and, unfortunately, I will not be able to attend lunch with him.”“But of course, my prince,” Lumière said, and then ruined his straight-faced act by winking roguishly at the prince and sniggering as he walked away.Ben laughed softly before stepping into the school’s art studio. Lumière had been right, the sunlight bouncing off the whitewashed walls was lovely, as was the view overlooking the rolling hills and valleys that surrounded the school – but none of it could compare to the sight of Mal standing in the center of it all. She was alone, her back to him; she appeared to be in a world of her own, humming softly to herself as she swayed back and forth between her palette and the canvas in front of her.Ben felt a curious warmth spread throughout his body. Being a prince took a toll on him – the worries of his people lived in his head, the burden of a kingdom weighed heavy on his shoulders, the rumors and doubts and unease of the court burrowed deep into his bones – but the sight of Mal seemed to take it all away. If it was rare for Ben to have a moment to himself, it was unheard of for him to have a moment alone with Mal.The last time he had managed to get a catch her alone had been after the coronation, while the chaperones were too distracted by rounding up crowds and sobering up over-indulgent students to pay attention to him. He had caught her – very carefully – by the elbow and ducked into first empty room he’d been able to find.
She had raised her eyebrows, a smirk dancing on her lips as she reached for the buttons of his jacket. “This is a surprise,” she had purred. “I thought Auradon boys were supposed to be shy.”
Ben had scrambled back so fast that he tripped over an empty chair and sent himself sprawling on the floor, crown askew. She had laughed at that, open and bright and somehow more herself than she had been a second ago.
“Oh, god, no – I’m sorry – not that you aren’t – I just want to talk, that’s all,” he had finally managed to say, using the chair to pull himself back to his feet.
Mal had settled back from him, her back against the wall and her arms crossed. She was guarded, but at least she was letting him know she was guarding herself; either he had gotten better at reading her or she had stopped putting on a mask for him. “What’s there to talk about?”
Ben had sighed, had taken off the heavy crown and run his hands through his hair. “Getting close to the wand – that was the reason you used the love potion, wasn’t it? It wasn’t because you were afraid I wouldn’t like you back.”
She hadn’t even blinked, but in a split-second her face had gone blank and inscrutable. “Yes. Looking back, we should have come up with a better plan. But we were pressed for time and you saw what my mo – what Maleficent does to people who disobey her.”
“I know. I know and I don’t blame you. But I think neither one of us entered this relationship completely aware of what has happening.” He had watched her closely, had remembered her facing down a dragon for her friends, had remembered how easily she would sacrifice herself for them. “And I think I understand how you think a bit better now, and Mal, I hope I don’t offend you by saying this, but please know that nothing would change for your friends if you didn’t want to be with me. You would not lose me as an ally or as a friend, if all you want is friendship.”
She had actually looked surprised at that. “But you said you loved me.”
“Well, I was supposed to be under a love spell at the time,” he’d said. “I was trying to make it realistic.”
That had earned him a quick smile, and the heavy tension between them eased somewhat. “You’re more devious than you look, your highness,”
“I’m learning. I think I might need it if I’m going to keep up with everything around here. But in all seriousness,” he had stepped forward and stretched a hand out towards her. “I’m not sure what love feels like either, not for someone outside my family or beyond the idea of my kingdom. It takes time – but maybe we could figure it out together?”
She had taken his hand – she hadn’t joined their hands together, but she had traced her fingertips over his wrist, his palm, his fingers, as she considered her answer. Her touch had left him shivering. “And if I say yes?”
“Then I would like to ask your permission to court you, Mal of the Isle.”
“Gang activity, Ben, remember? Break it down for me.”
“It’s just – starting a relationship, I suppose, without the formality or pressure of a betrothal. We can spend time together, no spells or pretending, and see if we actually like each other.”
“I see.” She had hesitated a moment longer before twining their fingers together, her ring gleaming in the moonlight between them. “Let’s try it.”
“Mal!” he called out, stepping towards her. She didn’t turn around, her glazed eyes focused on the canvas and her darting paintbrush. Her humming seemed to grow louder, the melody high-pitched and sickly-sweet. Ben reached out and tapped her shoulder; the second he touched her, the spell over her seemed to break.Mal whipped around, spinning the paintbrush in her fingers so that the wooden end was facing Ben. He had no doubt that if he hadn’t taken a large leap back and Mal hadn’t arrested her movement, that paintbrush would have gone through his eye.Mal blinked rapidly, giving her head a quick shake. “Ben?”“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I called, but you didn’t answer.”“Was I singing?”“You were humming, it seemed like –”She reached out and caught him by the shoulders, her brush flicking drops of paint onto his jacket. “What did it sound like?”Ben blinked, caught off guard by the urgency in her voice. “A bit like – hmm, hmm, hm, hm, ha hm hm –” He frowned, but the melody had already faded from his memory. No matter how hard he tried to grasp it, it slipped away. “Why can’t I remember?”“Damn,” Mal’s shoulders slumped and she loosened her grip on his suit. “I was hoping you could tell me. There’s this song that always gets caught in my head, but only when I’m not thinking of it. The second I notice it, it vanishes.”Mal turned away and dipped her paintbrush into a cup of water, watching as dark gray swirls of paint clouded the water. “I think it’s a lullaby my mother used to sing,” she said, so softly that he barely hear her voice.Ben felt something in his heart twist and give with a sharp crack. Mal rarely talked about her mother; when she did it was usually to forsake her name. Mal guarded her heart carefully, but this one half-glimpsed memory of kindness, of motherhood as-it-should-have-been, was like an arrow that could pierce through any armor. To have hope that Maleficent must have once truly cared for her, against all other evidence, must have been agonizing to her.Ben had no idea where to start when it came to anyone’s parents and the cruelties they had delivered unto their children. He knew it was a subject he could never truly comprehend, let alone begin to offer some kind of comfort or advice on. He had watched Carlos shake himself apart and pull himself back together without shedding a tear, but Ben had gone to his mother afterwards and sobbed onto her shoulder until he couldn’t breathe.Mal let out a soft sigh and Ben rushed to change the subject, if only to distract her from her thoughts. “Are you feeling alright? Jay said that you needed to rest yesterday.”Mal shrugged dismissively, putting away her brushes and paints before settling herself onto one of the plush portraiture chairs that were stored in the room. “Whatever it was, it passed. Not even Evie could find anything wrong with me -- and believe me, she would have kept me resting another day if she could.”Ben dragged another chair over to hers, trying to keep a respectable distance between them, but Mal caught hold of the chair and dragged it closer, until their knees were touching. She leaned back in her chair, hooking one of her ankles around his. Mal was built like a switchblade: small and sharp. She had a pert nose, a pointed chin, cheekbones that could cut glass. Ben was acutely aware that even the bones in her ankles were sharp; he could feel the jut and press of them against his trousers.He tried not to think too much about anything above her ankles. That kind of thinking just made things awkward for everyone involved.
Ben hesitated for a split-second and then asked, “Is Carlos okay?”“He’s been better, but he’s also been worse.”“Mal, I don’t want to pry, but can you explain what happened? I just want to help.”Mal shut her eyes tight for a second, taking a deep breath. Ben watched her patiently. It wasn’t anything personal; she had explained to him once that it was dangerous to reveal any kind of weakness on the Isle – to deliberately talk about things with outsiders was unheard of – and it was a difficult habit to break in Auradon.After a long moment, Mal nodded to herself and opened her eyes, satisfied with whatever calculations she had run about the risks of sharing information. “He gets…overwhelmed. On the Isle, the person who can spot the most danger is safe, and the person who can escape the fastest is safe – and even if you overestimate the amount of danger you’re in, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And now Carlos is in Auradon and he’s still watching for danger, only there’s not much danger here, but it all gets mixed-up with everything that happened on the Isle. It’s like he’s got an alarm system that’s constantly being tripped. That’s the best way I can think to explain it.”Ben sat back in his chair, trying to process everything she had just told him. The first thing that sprang to his mind was “I wonder if Audrey has something like that.”Mal nodded, and something that might have been guilt made her look beyond him, examining the view out the windows instead. “I wouldn’t be surprised. It can happen to anyone, but high-strung types get it worse, if you ask me.”“What’s the best way to help? Jay just kept talking until he calmed down, is it alright for me to do that?”“Maybe. The thing is, he knows that we’ll be aware of anything dangerous coming, so he trusts us to keep watch while he sorts things out. I’m not sure if it would work with someone from Auradon. Don’t let people grab him unexpectedly. He’s fine with wood smoke, but tobacco smoke can set him off. If he looks like he’s panicking, don’t draw attention to it; that only makes things worse – just keep distracting people from him if you can’t escape the situation altogether.”“You do that all the time,” Ben said slowly, memories rising to the surface of his mind. It made sense, looking back on it – Carlos had been the quietest among the four of them; had always watched everything with wide solemn eyes and rarely drew attention to himself. Anyone who got too close to him would be gently drawn into conversation with Evie, or diverted by the presence of Jay and Mal. “You’ve done that to me.”Mal shot him a look that was almost defiant, almost daring him to condemn their methods. “He’s ours,” she said, a strange emphasis on the word. “We look after what’s ours.”
“No, no, it’s not that – I should have been more aware, I should have spoken to father about the Isle sooner,” Ben rose to his feet and began to pace, his hands tugging at his hair. Sorrow rose up and threatened to choke him, and then rage came rushing behind it. He took a deep breath and tried to compose himself, tried to be a king like his parents had always instructed him whenever his emotions had become too strong.Mal stood up and swung herself in front of him, stopping him mid-step. She brought her hands up to frame his face and tugged him down until his forehead was pressed against hers. The touch, familiar to her but alien to him, made something inside Ben go still and quiet. It felt like swearing some kind of fealty. “There’s no point in wishing. It’s been done. We’re doing what we can now – that’s what matters.”Ben nodded, his breathing falling into rhythm with hers. Sometimes it was easy to see how Mal had taken charge on the Isle – there was authority in her voice, something that suffered no arguments.“Let’s stop being miserable. I haven’t given you a proper ‘hello’ yet, have I?” Mal’s smile turned wicked, and she pressed her lips against his.Ben felt all the thoughts in his head burn away like dragonfire.
vii.Evie luxuriated in knowledge the same way some people luxuriated in fine wine. She drank it in constantly and could often be found haunting the darkest and dustiest corners of the library in search of a certain vintage of book. She had probably become an expert in agriculture in the week they had spent researching the crop failure.Based on the deliberately gentle way she closed her current book, Carlos could tell that even she was nearing the end of her rope. Nobody, not even Evie, was that careful with a book unless they were resisting the urge to slam it shut and throw it across the room.“Nothing?” Carlos asked softly. The library of Auradon Prep held an almost sacred quiet and he was loath to break it. The library was one of his favorite places within the school: it was dim and cool, filled with tall shelves and rolling ladders, the air heavy with the scent of old paper and glue. He and Evie had commandeered a table in the back corner of the library, where few students bothered to tread, and had set up camp there every day from dawn until dusk.“You can cross any Maldonian diseases off the list,” Evie said, her voice muffled. She was resting her head on the table, her dark hair concealing her face from sight. Carlos had to rise up on his tip-toes to peer over the small fortress of books that she had built up around her. “None of their specialized crops are grown in Auradon, and I don’t see any matching symptoms in any of our shared crops.”Carlos foraged through his own pile of notes until he uncovered their master list, and put several small ‘x’ marks next to some of the listed diseases. For lack of a better system, they had made a gigantic list of any possible causes and their worlds of origin and started to go down the list alphabetically by country. It was taking an agonizingly long time, and they still had a dozen pages left on the master list.“I just don’t understand it,” Evie said. She took the top book from the stack next to her and opened it, but she seemed to be looking past the words instead of reading them. “It’s spread out among the crops without discriminating by their species, there’s signs that it could be a parasitic invasion but they haven’t been able to find any parasites, the mold on the plants is definitely a reaction to rot instead of a cause of disease…there’s just nothing that adds up. There’s nothing that should be able to cause this much uniform dieback across so many different crops.”The echoing sound of whispered and hushed giggles crossed into their section of the library; Carlos dismissed it as a small herd of students on their way to study, but Evie sat bolt upright. Her hands flew to her head, smoothing out any tangles and fly-aways in her hair, checking for smudges in her make-up.“Carlos,” she whispered, but he had already ducked under the table and popped up by her side. He leaned into her touch as she straightened his jacket and wiped a smudge of dust from his cheek, let her make him presentable. Presentable, he knew, was Evie’s version of safe.“There,” she said. “We’re good, we’re good, we’re good.” Her hands were shaking from the sudden shot of adrenaline.“We’re good,” Carlos agreed, catching hold of her hands. He felt them go still as the sounds of people faded away again. “But I think we should take a break.”
viii.Evie always walked with her chin up, her eyes fixed ahead, her long-legged strut swallowing up the ground in front of her. Carlos knew that if she walked like that, she could pretend she didn’t see the heads turning as she walked past, the way that students would lean in and whisper to each other behind her back. Carlos was intensely aware of it, his eyes sharp for anything that might bring harm to his friend, his sister-by-choice, his good-left-hand.If there was one thing was one thing that could have made Carlos hate Auradon, it was the fact that Auradon thought that Evie did not deserve its respect. The people had jumped to judge her by her looks, by her short-cut dresses, by her painted lips and fluttering eyelashes. They had not bothered to ask her what was in her mind. They had reinforced everything her mother had ever told her and Carlos found that difficult to forgive. Evie’s cleverness was matched only by her beauty – it had made Carlos’s heart ache for her every time Queen Grimhilde had insisted that only her beauty mattered.Evie wore her practiced smile as they crossed the courtyard, the one that looked calm and peaceful but didn’t quite reach her eyes. Carlos did his best to turn her smile real. He darted about as they walked, his path an orbit around her strides; he broke the stems of spring-blooming flowers, alstroemeria and amaryllis, and braided them into a crown for her.Let them watch him instead of her, let their eyes track his erratic movements instead of her steady ones. For Evie he would risk bringing attention to himself. He would draw their gazes from her as she always drew their gazes from him.“The Queen of Spring,” he said under his breath as he placed the crown on her head, giving her a tiny flourish of a bow. The flowers were bright against her dark hair, and she transformed them into something prettier than any metal crown that Auradon could offer.“My loyal knight,” she replied with a laugh, finally turning to look at him instead of keeping her gaze on the distance – and her eyes slid past Carlos’, shifting to look at something behind him. Evie tilted her head thoughtfully, curiosity sparked in her eyes. “She looks nervous.”Carlos ducked to Evie’s other side, looking over her shoulder. Jane was sitting on a small stone bench across the garden, twisting a handkerchief around her fingers in an endless loop. Her shoulders were slumped and she was worrying at her lower lip.“More nervous than usual,” Carlos said. That was quite a feat for Jane. He watched for a moment; a few other students peeked over at Jane, but none of them bothered to approach her. She was left alone, vulnerable and exposed and no one at her side. It made Carlos’ instincts shriek out wrong wrong wrong.Evie glanced back at Carlos, raising one of her eyebrows. Carlos nodded in response and Evie caught hold of his hand, switching their path and leading him across the garden.By the time they reached Jane, Carlos had built another flower crown of daffodils and daisies. He placed it gently on Jane’s head in lieu of a greeting and gave her his brightest smile when she looked up in surprise.“Yellow suits you,” Evie said, sitting down on Jane’s other side. “Not that blue isn’t a good color, otherwise I’d be one to talk, but you could definitely get away with something bolder if you wanted it.”“Er, thank you,” Jane said, her voice strangled and barely above a whisper. She offered Evie a fleeting smile, but her lips were quivering. Carlos cocked his head, peering at her more closely. Jane’s eyes were wide and bright, but only because they were gleaming with unshed tears.
She wasn’t just nervous, he realized. She was afraid.Carlos knew what it was to be afraid and he did not wish it on others. He glanced at Evie, an unspoken agreement passing between them over the top of Jane’s head. Evie immediately linked her arm through Jane’s and tugged her gently to her feet. “Carlos and I were just going to make some tea, you really should join us,”“I suppose so,” Jane said, her voice small, letting Evie guide her down the path. Trying to resist Evie was like trying to resist a whirlwind; she filled the air with bright chatter and careless laughter as they hurried along, trying to coax a smile out of Jane. In a matter of moments she had guided them into the shade of an empty student common room, settled them into plush chairs and slid a steaming cup of tea in front of the fairy girl.Jane reached for the tea but then hesitated, glancing up at Evie uncertainly. She was clearly torn between politeness and caution – Carlos couldn’t blame her for that, it was common sense on the Isle to only accept food from trusted parties. Jay would be incredibly pleased that there was at least one student in Auradon with some form of survival instinct.Carlos reached out a hand and picked up Jane’s teacup, taking a quick sip. “Lavender, for calm,” he said to her, setting her cup back in front of her. “Good choice,” he said to Evie as she placed another cup in front of him.Jane glanced between them and a look of steel appeared in her eyes. Quickly, as though she was afraid she would stop herself, she picked up Carlos’ teacup and took a gulp from it, mimicking his gesture.Carlos felt a kind of aching warmth shoot through his heart. It was surreal to see an Isle custom captured in Jane’s stilted movements – it was like hearing your own language in a foreign country, it was seeing a complete stranger extend a hand. The people of Auradon were keen on the virtues of charity, of pity, of showing-them-the-light, but never had they turned to the children of the Isle and listened.
Carlos felt Evie’s entire posture shift; she was suddenly looser, more relaxed, her motions fluid instead of rehearsed and perfect. She curled up on her chair, tucking her feet underneath her like a cat, and twisted to look at Jane.“Do you want to talk about it, or do you just want some company?”Jane blinked, her eyes going wide and startled. “What?”“We won’t pry if you don’t want to talk, but it looked like something was on your mind.” Evie reached out and gently tucked a stray lock of Jane’s hair behind her ear, the same way she would have fussed over Mal or Jay or Carlos. “Is something wrong?”Her soft touch seemed to undo the last of Jane’s defenses. She stared down into her tea for a long moment and gave a loud sniff. Slowly, her chin started to tremble, chattering her teeth together, and silent tears began to flood down her cheeks. “I did something bad,” she said, her voice so choked that the words could barely be heard.“We’re experts at bad,” Carlos said, politely ignoring her tears. “Can you tell us what happened?”Jane shook her head frantically, but she still began to speak, her words punctuated by small gasps and sobs. “My mother – and I were visiting the castle – and she had to go talk to the king – and I couldn’t help it, I was curious and I listened at the door and I heard–” She broke off with a large hiccup and clutched at Evie’s hand. “Please, promise you won’t share this with anyone!”Carlos shared a glance with Evie. Whatever Jane had heard obviously weighed heavy on her mind, something so forbidden that she wouldn’t even turn to her mother for explanation, but it did them no good to make a promise they might have to break.Evie stroked the back of Jane’s hand. “I can promise that I wouldn’t share it with anyone besides Mal, Jay or Ben, but they’re my people and I can’t hold secrets from them. But we might be able to help you, whatever is going on.”Jane nodded, swiping the fast-flowing tears from her eyes. She took a deep shuddering breath, trying to compose herself. She really was very brave, Carlos thought.Jane met their gaze, her eyes tear-bright and determined, her hands trembling but her voice finally steady. “My mother told King Adam that the Barriers are failing.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
ix.Very little was known about the Barriers.Even the name they had been given was slightly misleading; to most people they appeared as doorways. They appeared in ancient caves, in twisting castle corridors, even in the back of dusty old wardrobes every now and then. They appeared so suddenly and quietly that most people didn’t even notice them – and if you pointed it out to them, they would swear that the doorway had always been there, they had lived in this building for a decade, of course they knew every door in this place.Most people have the extraordinary capacity to accept the unexplainable. They exist in worlds ruled by scientific laws that they don’t understand, operate machines whose inner working they can’t comprehend, live and breathe and think with bodies and minds that they cannot even begin to fathom – but they accept these things for what they are and carry on as usual. But there are also people who are curious, who will let an unanswered question or an unopened doorway itch at their minds until their curiosity has been sated.A doorway can take a person like that anywhere.For instance, it took Belle, Enchantment-Breaker and Lady of Villeneuve, to Auradon.It had been a miracle for the Lord and Lady – even if a magical doorway could ever be considered anything but miraculous. Not only had the doorway given them an escape from a revolution that had been slaughtering the French aristocracy, it had led them to a perfect untouched world. It had been almost simple for them to take their citizens, servants and friends and cross over into a new land. The Beast, in all his wisdom, declared that they would look after the land and shape it to its full potential – a place where they would fear no villains, no magic powers, no wars or disasters. It would be perfect, under his command.A few years after the Beast of Villeneuve established himself as Adam, High King of Auradon, others began to arrive. They came from vast desert kingdoms, wild forests, and strange modern worlds with wonders that could even compete with magic. They quickly learned that their kingdoms were completely separate from each other. The King of Corona had never heard of France and likewise, the people of Maldonia had never heard of the great Kuzcotopian Empire. Auradon seemed to be its own separate world between worlds, connecting everything through its doorways and separating everything with its barriers.The leaders of all these kingdoms, supreme in their wisdom and foresight, agreed to King Adam’s terms of peaceful cooperation and no magic. After all, Auradon was a wonderful place, if you used it right. It allowed them a safe place to store extra crops and resources, for when their own worlds were in need. It allowed them a place to keep their children safe from the dangers of their home worlds. It allowed them to trade goods and information, without ever having the worry of going to war with another kingdom or accidently sabotaging the historical record. And – perhaps best of all – it had a visiting fairy godmother who took some of the barrier’s magic and created a prison, one that no magic could cross and no villain could escape.“Is that seriously all we know?” Mal asked, after Evie finished summarizing the information they had gleaned from Auradon’s history books. “No alchemic properties? No testing to see how Merlin’s basic laws applied to it? Not even an energy reading and analysis! Did they just stop doing research?”“There was never any point!” Jane protested, and then shrank back in her seat when Mal turned look to her. “I mean – nobody ever does magic. Mother knew enough to create the Isle Barrier and that’s all Auradon ever needed.”“And how’s that working out for you now?” Mal asked, slumping back in her chair. The words might have been harsh, but more than anything Mal just sounded tired. Carlos knew that she hadn’t slept ever since Jane had told them about the barriers yesterday. The last twenty-four hours had been a flurry of research and theorizing, racing their way through books and hunting down every reference to the barriers – and all it had led them to were dead-ends and the fairy-tales that Auradon had turned into history. Now they were holed up in Mal’s room, trying to piece this new puzzle together.Carlos hooked his ankle around Mal’s, a silent show of support. The reading had been exhausting for the four of them, in more ways than one. The writers had glossed over the struggle that the villains had put up before they had been imprisoned – Maleficent’s magic and Ursula’s storms and Clayton’s gunfire. All the stories that the children of the Isle had grown up with, and now Carlos had no idea what was true and what was false, what narratives had been erased by the winners and which been created by the losers. It had left him feeling strange and unmoored, and he was certain that he wasn’t the only one that felt that way.Mal gave him a half-smile for his troubles, and pressed her ankle lightly against his. She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, reaching over the table to reorganize her research. “Alright,” she said. “Let’s go over this again. Jane?”Jane nodded and rubbed her eyes, just as tired as the rest of them. Evie and Jay reached out at the same time, from either side of her, to pat her on the back. Their touch sent a blush blazing across her cheeks and she sat up straight, flustered enough that her exhaustion vanished. “Last week, my mother was going is visit Agrabah, but when she opened the doorway, there was nothing behind the door. She tried it again and the way was open, but it was enough to worry her.”Evie stood up and crossed the room, where she had tacked a number of papers to the wall. All of them were connected by brightly colored thread, crisscrossed over different data points. She stared at the wall, tapping a finger against her lips as she thought. “How many doors did she test out again?”“About half a dozen. One or two of them were sealed off, but the ways would open when she would try again.”“She didn’t try any of the doors multiple times, did she?”“I don’t know – I get scared and left before I heard much.”“Damn,” Evie sighed. “That’s going to make it hard to figure the odds.”“What’s the worst case scenario?” Mal asked. Her eyes flicked to each one of them in turn, but Jay was the one to answer her.“Worst case scenario, the doorways shut down permanently. Realistically, there’s about thirty known doors, so take the three that were shut – right now we’re looking at ten percent of the doors being shut down fifty percent of the time, but we’ve got no way of knowing if they’re going to stay that way unless we test them out.”Carlos turned his head to look at Jay. Jay was hunched over the table, squinting down at the information that they had gathered. His eyes were glinting in the firelight – they had little flecks of gold that were prettier than any stolen treasure, in Carlos’ opinion. Jay looked up and caught his eye with a smile. Carlos knew that he had been staring too long, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away.“No one is going to let the children of villains near any doorways,” Mal said. “Providing that the kingdom does research this, I doubt we’ll be able to bribe anyone into giving up that information. If they haven’t even told Ben about this, it’s not likely that they’re going to share it with the public.” She scowled down at the table, flipping rapidly through her notes. “I can’t believe this is all the library had.”The five of them lapsed into silence, the quiet broken only by the crackling of the fire. The room was dark and warm, spring rain was tapping against the windows, and Carlos felt half-drunk from the lack of sleep. Carlos tucked his knees to his chest, rested his chin on his knees, and let his eyes roam across the room. He noted things idly, turning them over in his mind – Jane’s ears were rounded, not pointed like Mal’s, were their mothers different kinds of fairies? Evie had only picked at her food, was she too worried to eat? Their stack of books was dangerously close to the edge of the table, maybe he should move them –“Someplace else,” Carlos said out loud, the solution coalescing in his head as he picked the books up. “Mal, the palace library –”Mal’s eyes went wide, picking up his thought before he could even finish speaking. “Of course! We could –”“Do it during the spring festival,” Jay broke in. “That’s the only time you’ll have a real excuse to go. Evie, could you –”“I’m on it,” Evie called, already bolting towards the closet and riffling through the dresses that hung inside. “One spring festival dress, with hidden pockets!”Jane twisted in her chair, trying to keep up with their sudden flurry of activity. “What are you all talking about?”“Queen Belle’s library!” Jay ruffled Carlos’ hair as he moved past the table. Carlos leaned easily into his touch, a shiver of satisfaction running down his spine. “If there’s anything else written on magic, it’s bound to be there.”x.Mal watched the manservants move through the hall, their motions graceful and choreographed as they ladled delicacies – fluffy cheese gougères, tiny mushroom tarts, coquilles Saint-Jacques served in seashells – onto the plates of visiting royalty. The menu informed her that they would be followed by pot-au-feu and ratatouille, and poached salmon in beurre blanc sauce, and chocolate religieuse for dessert.Mal sat at the high table, and watched, and wondered how many people her meal would have fed on the Isle. She calculated how much of it would end up as scraps, how much of it would be hauled on a barge to the Isle, how much of it would be picked off by seabirds on the trip over, how much of it would rot under the hot sun before someone could snatch it for themselves.She tried to think about at it calmly and rationally – but she was her mother’s daughter, for better or worse, and she could feel her rage building, smoldering in her chest like dragonfire. A dull, aching pressure began to beat against her ribs, constricting her breath.“Mal?” Ben reached over and gently caught her hand – she had been massaging the sore spot on her chest without even realizing it. He raised their joined hands and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. Anyone watching them would have seen his lover’s gesture, and not the concern that the motion disguised.
And Mal knew the rest of the room was watching them, whether they would admit it or not. It was her first outing since they had begun courting – and she was a curiosity, a danger, the villain-girl who had hypnotized their prince. Mal caught every half-glance towards her and answered it with a smile. She let them decide for themselves if they had seen any ferocity lurking behind her teeth.What had Audrey called it – a bad girl infatuation? She wondered if they realized how much they acted like Isle-dwellers, with their snipping and glaring and undermining. Being in Auardon meant that there were new players and new moves for her to learn, but it was still the same old game Mal had always played. She had held her line on the Isle, and she would hold it here, and she would not change to please them.Because as far as she could tell, being good did not necessarily mean being nice.“I’m alright.” Mal twisted their hands and kissed his in turn, keeping her eyes fixed on Ben’s face. She knew that if she took her eyes off of him, she would see the disgruntled look that the Beast was aiming towards his son, and her anger would begin growing again. She had yet to win over the King and Queen, and she doubted that tonight would improve their feelings towards her.“Did I mention how beautiful you look tonight?” Ben asked softly, his head bent close to hers. He was still holding her hand, his thumb gliding back and forth over her skin in a soothing motion. His words feel strangely intimate, whispered to her alone in the crowded banquet hall.Mal couldn’t stop herself from smiling, from letting it be a true and soft smile for him. He was trying to distract her – but he was doing a good job, so she let herself be distracted. “I think others deserve more credit than I do.”Evie had taken one of her own dresses and tailored it to fit Mal; it was pure white cloth, slippery and satin-smooth against her skin. Carlos had presented her with bunches of white heliotrope flowers and Jay had braided them into her hair with his clever fingers, making them into a crown. A cape hung over her shoulders, embroidered with rose blooms and thorny vines, just warm enough to keep away the spring chill and stitched with enough hidden pockets for her to smuggle out an entire library.“Then I’ll pass them my compliments,” Ben said, “After all, it’s difficult to improve on a masterpiece.”“Flatterer.” Mal squeezed his hand and turned her attention back to the banquet hall, eying up the visiting royal families. “Tell me about the people here.”She could practically feel Ben’s focus snap to the new topic, and his demeanor shifted instantly. He still leaned in close, but his tone had become measured and even, his words clipped but diplomatic as he described the worlds of the royal families, their resources and policies, the goals of their advisors and their heirs. Mal felt a pleased shiver run down her spine as Ben whispered sweetly into her ear, explaining the politics behind an attempted coup in China and the strategy Fa Mulan had used to uncover it.The dinner flew by quickly now that she had diverting conversation. Before Mal knew it, the dishes had been cleared and Ben was whirling her across the dance floor, carefully navigating a wide path around his parent’s graceful waltz.Ben finished telling her a story of his first meeting with the Queen Cinderella, when he had been a toddler and had been absolutely entranced by her glass slippers, and in the same breath asked her “Are you still going to do this?”Mal spun out from his arms, the candlelight blurring around her as she turned in neat circles. By the time she returned to Ben’s arms, she had gauged their distance from the High King and Queen, estimated the number of eyes on her, who was paying the most attention, who was the most wary of her presence. Ben’s arm curled against her, bending her into a dip, and she locked eyes with him. “Yes.”Ben pulled her up from the dip, his feet weaving neatly around hers as he led her through the dance’s arching turns. “And then you’ll tell me what’s going on?”“Yes. I’ve got a theory, but I want evidence one way or another before I explain it to you.”Ben tilted his head, studying her as they spun through the room. The music swelled around them, building to the song’s climax. “Trust and honesty?” he asked.“Trust and honesty,” Mal agreed – their watchwords, a promise they had made to each other after the rocky start to their relationship.The musicians struck their last high notes, the sound echoing in the sudden silence. Mal’s skirts swished against the floor as they came to a halt, and the audience around them burst into applause. Ben pressed his forehead against hers for a split-second, breathing out the word “go” so that only she could hear it.Mal dropped Ben’s hands and slipped away from the dance floor, sinking back into the crowd as other couples moved forward to join in the dancing. She glanced back and saw Ben moving towards his parents, game to distract them for as long as he could.When she turned back to the ballroom doorway, she could see Prince Aladdin watching her, with a look almost like sympathy on his face. With the smallest of nods in her direction, he turned to speak to the guards at the door, distracting them just enough for Mal to steal through the doorway unheeded.Outside the ballroom, the palace was huge and quiet around her, and Mal felt that she could breathe easily once again. She gave herself a moment, tucked herself into an alcove, pressed her forehead against a window’s cool glass, and thought about luck.She thought about sticky fingers and hearts of gold and roguish smiles, and how sometimes those things landed you a royal marriage and how sometimes they landed you on the wrong side of a barrier.She thought about how it all came down to who was in charge and how favorable they were feeling towards you.She thought about the cold rage that burned in her chest, because it was unjust and unfair and they still judged her for doing what needed to be done.Mal thought about luck. And then she took a deep breath, pushed herself back to her feet, and decided that she would make her own.xi.Carlos was always careful not to fidget. It gave away a little too much of your emotions, it told people which way you were going to move, it revealed your hiding places if you were too loud. But there was a restlessness in him tonight, one that made it difficult not to tap his feet or flinch at every small noise. Mal had been escorted to the palace to attend the spring festival and, for the first time since they arrived in Auradon, she was separated from them.The three of them had been on edge all evening. Everything in Carlos itched to be with Mal, to watch her back against a room full of strangers.To sooth their nervous energy, they broke into the library.Sitting across from Jane, watching her in the dim lamplight, it was clear to Carlos that no one had ever taught her the dangers of fidgeting. She was fiddling with her own hands as she read, picking at her nails and scratching at her skin. Every so often, she would dig her nails into her flesh, so hard that her lips would begin to quiver from the pain.Every time she winced and blinked back tears, Carlos could feel her anxiety feeding into his own, an endless loop that left him on the verge of panic. Carlos stood up from their table abruptly, catching hold of Jane’s hand and pulling her to her feet. He grabbed one of their lanterns with his other hand. “I want to see if there’s anything else on China’s native pests.”“Mm-hm,” Evie waved a hand in acknowledgement, too absorbed in her current text to reply. They had kept the lanterns lowered to avoid drawing attention, and she held the book close to her face, eyes open deliberately wide to avoid the wrinkles that came from squinting.“Come on,” Carlos tugged on Jane’s hand until she followed him, weaving in and out of the stacks until they were a fair distance away from the others. Dude scampered beside them, his tail waving as he sniffed all the new scents in the building.The lantern-light was warm, but it barely banished the shadows around them. The stacks looked tall and imposing, looming out of the darkness. Once he was sure that no one would overhear them, Carlos scooped Dude into his arms and settled himself onto the floor, tucked in between the rows of bookcases. He jerked his head toward the floor, watching Jane until she sat down. Her eyes were wide and alarmed in the flickering lantern-light. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Talk.”Jane hunched in on herself, her eyes darting about to look anywhere but him. She shook her head, but she was still clawing at her own hand, her sharp fingernails leaving scrapes on her skin. Carlos felt the tension in him rising as her silence stretched on. “Is it your mother?” he finally asked, desperate. “If your mother’s going to hurt you, we can protect –”“No,” Jane gasped. “No, she would never hurt me!”“But I heard her call you pet – ” Carlos snapped his mouth shut as a shudder wracked his body, jerking his head back so that it slammed against the hard edge of the wooden shelf. He shut his eyes tight, breathing deep as pain blossomed at the base of his skull. Dude reared back and balanced his tiny paws against Carlos’ chest, licking at Carlos’ chin until he finally opened his eyes.Carlos kept his head tilted back for a moment, watching the light waver and bounce against the gilt patterns on the ceiling. Jane was staring at him, distracted from her own thoughts for a moment. Before she could ask him any questions – and before she could start scratching herself again – Carlos picked up Dude and placed the puppy on Jane’s lap. She looked started for a moment, but then she wrapped her arms around Dude and cuddled him to her chest, rocking her body back and forth.“I’m just – what if this is all my fault?” she said, rushing the words out so fast that Carlos could barely understand them. “What if I did something with the wand and it broke the barrier and I ruined everything just because I wanted to be pretty?”She was crying, silently, miserably, self-loathing thick in her voice. Carlos almost wished that she would just scream at him and slap him away; he was at least used to dealing with that.“And I can’t even help fix it – I don’t know magic or how to talk to people or how to fight – I’m just useless!” She buried her face in Dude’s fur, muffling the wordless wail that tore itself from her throat.Carlos reached out and touched her hand – gently, just the tips of his fingers, Auradon people don’t like to be touched. “You’re not useless,” he said. “You’re kind.”Jane shook her head vigorously, still hiding her face. “I’m not! I said those horrible things –”Carlos tapped a knuckle against the crown of her head; that was enough to get her to look up at him. Her skin was flushed red, a sharp contrast to the tear-bright blue of her eyes. Carlos rested his hands against hers; her fingers were tangled up in Dude’s fur, but they were gentle, not scratching or breaking his skin. “You’re upset, but you’re not hurting Dude.” He took one of her hands and raised it to his neck, wrapping her fingers around the column of his throat so she could feel the pulse beating against his skin. “You’re upset, but you’re not hurting me.”Jane blinked rapidly, the tears spilling out of her eyes. “Carlos, maybe that was considered kindness on the Isle –”Carlos shook his head. “Kindness is hard,” he said, trying desperately to articulate it so she would understand, so that she would see what he saw. “Being kind and good and patient is hard – maybe it was harder on the Isle, but it’s still hard here. And you keep trying – you’re brave because you keep trying,”Jane tried to glance away but Carlos followed her movements, forcing her to look him in the eye. “Cruel people don’t regret the things they’ve done,” He held her hand up to the lantern, so that she could see the scratches she had etched into her skin. “Cruel people don’t hurt themselves instead of others.”He dropped her hand and tugged up his own sleeve, so she could see several of the thin scars littered on his skin. “Should I keep being punished when I make a mistake?”Jane shook her head, eyes wide as she stared at the scars. “Of course not!”“Then why should you?”“I don’t know!” Jane slumped back against the bookcase and made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “I don’t know.”“You’re kind, and brave, and smart. And you made a mistake, like everyone does. That’s all.” Carlos said. He wasn’t quite sure why he needed her to believe it so badly – maybe it was because the children who thought they were worthless didn’t last long on the Isle. Maybe he was just trying to convince himself that even broken things had a place in Auradon. But Jane seemed to hear his words, and that was all that mattered.They sat in silence for a while, regaining their breath and settling their thoughts. The lantern light grew lower and lower, until the darkness was pressing in on their hiding place. It felt like the moment was something fragile and private between them, and it would vanish as soon as the light went out. Carlos stared into the lantern, into the bright, brilliant heart of it. Before the moment disappeared, before he could stop himself, he said “I like Jay.”It was the first time he had said it out loud, even to himself. The words felt strange and heavy in his mouth – they were dangerous words, the kind of words that refused to take themselves back.Jane leaned in close, lowering her voice to a whisper matching his. “You mean like…you want to kiss him?”Carlos stifled a laugh. “Yes, I want to kiss him.” Among other things, anyway.“And he doesn’t know.”“He doesn’t know.”Jane shifted, unfolding from her hunched-over position. She stretched out her legs until the tips of her toes were pressed against his. A small comfort, but sometimes small comforts were the ones that helped the most. “For what it’s worth, I think you should tell him. Maybe if mother and I had actually tried talking to each other, none of this nonsense would have happened.”“Maybe,” Carlos said. “Or maybe I’d ruin everything.”“Do you think there’s anything that could really ruin the four of you?” Jane asked, and the lantern flickered out before Carlos could answer.“Come on,” he said instead, reaching out through the darkness and taking her hand. “Let’s get back to the others.”
“Did you find anything?” Evie asked as they returned to the table, flipping listlessly through the book in front of her. Strands of hair had escaped from her braid; they hung about face, tickling her neck and cheeks until she swatted them away.“Nothing about plants,” Carlos said vaguely, stepping behind Evie so that he could re-braid her hair. Evie slumped back in her chair with a sigh, tilting her head so that he could work more easily. “I just don’t understand why this is happening all at once,” she said.“Who said it’s happening all at once?” Jay’s voice drifted down from the top of a bookshelf. Carlos craned his neck back to watch him pace across the shelves, a deck of cards flying between his hands so quickly that it seemed to blur. Jay had been the most restless of all of them tonight; nervous energy crackled off him like lightning from a storm. He was Mal’s left hand, the first at her side, and Carlos knew that it was hurting him to be parted from her.“Because that’s what that famer said was happening,” Evie said, her eyes shut. She relaxed into Carlos’ hands as he played with hair.“No, he said that it was happening to him and his neighbors.” Jay sat down on the edge of the shelf, his feet dangling into the empty space below. “That’s a group of people, right on the borders of the capital. It could have happened to other people before them.”Evie sat bold upright, some invisible equation falling into place for her. Carlos dropped her braid before it could be yanked out of his hands. “God, I’m an idiot! We were looking from something fast acting –”“Why don’t you check the census?” Jane asked. Her voice was quiet and scratchy from crying, but she spoke steadily. “They take them every two years.”“That’s perfect,” Evie said, clearing space on the table. “Jay, could you find some maps?” She glanced up at the bookshelves, but Jay was already darting off into the darkness, leaping easily across the space between shelves.“Come on,” Jane tugged on Carlos’ arm. “Help me carry the census books.”She dragged him over to a shelf of books, each one thicker than the span of her hand, and began loading them into his arms. “Nice one,” he said, and she responded with a thin smile.“I think I’m getting the hang of how you all think.”They returned the table; Evie had cleared off all their old books and was standing at the head of the table, pen in hand and poised to write. Jay appeared a few moments later, jumping down from the shelves and landing with ease. A dozen maps, all shapes and sizes, were bundled in his arms.Jay spread the largest map out on the table and then covered it with a sheet of vellum, so fine and thin that it was nearly translucent. Carlos could see the markings on the underlying map through the vellum. “That’s perfect,” Evie sighed, twirling her pen in her fingers like a baton. “Now, tell me which farms closed down.”That process took quite a while, checking each census against the others and calling out to Evie whenever something seemed amiss, whenever they thought a farm had fallen to blight. Auradon did not have a long history, but its censuses were thorough. Carlos and Jane were soon sacked out on the floor, trading off between napping and reading, using their books as pillows. Jay pushed himself into a series of handstands as he read, using the strange position to keep himself awake.Soon the faintest hints of dawn were beginning to paint the sky, and Carlos knew that they would have to clean up and disappear before they were discovered in the library. Before he could open his mouth and suggest it to the others, Evie threw her pen down on the table and said, “I think I see what’s happening here.”Carlos grabbed the edge of the table and hauled himself up, Jane close at his side. Evie had traced her findings onto the vellum, recording their progress without leaving a mark on the map itself. The map was covered in dots, each one neatly labeled with the name of the farm and the year it had gone out of business. There were only a few of them, at first, but as the years went on, the vanished farms became more and more frequent, creating bands of dots across the map.“You see it too, right?” Evie asked, exhaustion heavy in her voice. “It’s not just me imagining things?”“Yeah, I see it,” Carlos said. There was a shake in his voice, just enough that Jay leaned over, bracing his shoulder against Carlos’. “I see it.”The dots on the map formed circles – some of them were scare and scattered, and there were a few outlying dots, but for most part they were as clear and countable as rings on a tree stump. There was a disease slowly sweeping through Auradon, and it was radiating out from a single point on the map.
xii.Mal wandered through the royal library, letting her fingernails clack against the gilt-and-leather spines of the books as she read their titles. It was quiet here, and peaceful, and there were more books here than she had ever seen in her life – more than her mother’s library, more than Queen Grimhilde’s, more than the library of Auradon Prep.Not a single one was what Mal was looking for.Mal was nearly through the second story of shelves before she began to slow down, weariness settling heavily onto her shoulders. She plucked a book from the shelf – a slim volume titled Candide – and turned it over in her hands. She leaned back against the banister and tried to picture a younger Ben reading this, whiling his hours away in the sun-soaked library, curled up by his mother’s side. It was a nice thing to imagine.And then Mal felt the sounds before she heard them – the wood shifting under heavy footsteps, the slow grind of metal hinges as the door opened. She felt the vibrations of a voice before it even formed words, a voice as rough as gravel and deep as an ocean.The voice echoed out from behind her: “Looking for something?”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
xiii.Mal slid the book back onto its shelf. She took her time, adjusting it so that it was lined up, neat and exact, with its neighbors. Then she took a deep breath and turned around to face the Beast.“You have a lovely library, your highness,” she said, leaning out over the banister, not quite answering his question. “A gift to your wife?”High King Adam of Auradon, the Beast of Villeneuve, did not answer her. He simply stood in the center of the room, studying her just as she studied him. The strong and silent type. Mal felt her lips twitch up into a smile. People determined to stay quiet were the most fun to bait.“Of course, that was when she was being held captive in your castle,” Mal called out, dragging her fingers along the polished wooden bannister as she moved along the walkway. From the corner of her eye, she saw his face do a funny kind of twitch – a furrowing of the brow, a quick curl of the lips. It was not so much regret, she thought, as it was anger at the subject being brought up. “You do seem to like trapping people in inescapable prisons.”Mal made her way to the bottom of the small spiral staircase and stopped in front of the Beast, looking him full in the face. This was the first time they had been truly alone together, no Ben or Belle or fawning courtiers to put on an act for. Mal took the opportunity to examine the king.He was impossibly tall and broad, and his muscles shifted smoothly under his well-tailored suit, radiating power with every movement. When his eyes caught the light, they had a shine to them that was a bit more animal than human – some curses left a mark on their victims, even after they were removed. Despite herself, Mal felt a frisson of fear race down her spine. It was a feeling she hadn’t felt since she had confronted her mother. Some animal instinct, rooted deep in her mind, told her that she should run from this man.The Beast smiled – or at least, his lips drew back slowly to reveal his teeth. “Only those that are – what was your charming little phrase? ‘Rotten to the core’?”That was all it took for her anger to rise up, to add a reckless edge to her fear. “I think some credit is due to the man who left us there to rot!”The Beast took a step forward – just a small step, but it took everything in her not to bolt for the door. It was one thing to taunt a beast from a distance, but it was quite another thing to do it up close. A sudden spike of adrenaline sent her heart hammering, readying her to fight or flee. Mal reached towards the sleeve of her dress, then remembered that she had left her bracers and knives back at school –“I’ll only ask you once more, what are you look –”“Mal! There you are!” Ben stepped into the library. The low candlelight gleamed against his hair and the fine gilt of his suit; his presence alone made the room shine a bit brighter. “You got ahead of me, I was afraid you got lost.”Ben crossed the room to her side, taking her hand in his. Mal leaned against him, resting her head against his shoulder as her heartbeat slowed. Ben smiled down at her before a moment before glancing to his father, the picture of a sheepish son. “The crowds were getting a little overwhelming, so I thought I would show Mal the library!”The Beast sighed, shaking his head as he turned away. “Have a chaperone take you next time. You know the rules, Ben.” He sounded weary, but not angry. Ben’s arrival had shattered the strange tension building in the room and Mal could not have been more grateful for his timing.Ben started to step back towards the door, back to the party, but Mal tugged gently on the sleeve of his jacket. “If it’s alright with you,” she said softly, “I would like to go back to the school now.”Ben took one look at her – the pallor of her cheeks, the sweat on her palms, the rapid beat of her pulse – and went to find a carriage.
Mal sank back into the carriage’s soft cushions, tucking herself back into seat’s corner and squeezing her eyes shut. The carriage’s interior was covered in soft fabric, both for warmth and the comfort of its passengers, and it felt much safer to be held so close and enclosed. The carriage began to roll forward, away from the castle, and Mal felt the tension in her chest begin to unwind. By the time the party lights had faded into the distance, swallowed up by the darkness, she was breathing slow and easy once again.Ben sat across from her, watching the darkened landscape sail by. He had insisted on seeing her back to school; Mal had half expected the Beast to protest, but Belle had simply shot her son a knowing look and shooed the two of them away. Now Ben turned to look at her, only half of his face illuminated by the carriage’s swaying lanterns, and asked “Now will you tell me what you were looking for?”Mal opened her eyes and straightened up, giving Ben her full focus. She opened her mouth, paused for a moment, and then closed it again as she tried to sort out her thoughts. This was not a theory that she had shared yet, not even with the others. She had been turning it over in her head ever since Jane had brought up the Barriers, but now she struggled to turn her abstract thoughts into words.Finally, she said “Have you ever seen any books about Auradon’s history?”“What?”“Or about its rocks, or trees, or oceans, or ancient creatures? I’ve seen them for other worlds, but there’s nothing on Auradon, not even in your mother’s library.”“Auradon hasn’t had a very long history, Mal. It’s mostly been the creation of the Isle –” Ben cut himself off when he saw Mal’s expression; she was biting her lip so hard that she was tearing off bits of skin. “Why does this have you so worried?”“There’s something rotten in Auradon, and we have no idea what’s causing it. And if there’s no way to research the past…It feels just like something’s being hidden.”“I’m not saying you’re wrong, but that’s not exactly solid evidence.”Mal stared out the window, her eyes gleaming in the moonlight. “I know. But I survived on the Isle by trusting my instincts, and they’re telling me that something’s gone wrong.”Ben fell silent, as he usually did whenever she mentioned the Isle. Mal held her breath; burrowed deep in her chest was the fear that she would reveal one secret too many, that Ben would discover the things she had done to survive and turn away in disgust.But Ben opened his arms, as he always did. Mal crossed to his side of the carriage and curled up on the cushion, resting her head on his chest and listening to the steady beat of his heart.
xiv.Carlos sat curled on the window seat, his head resting against the cool glass. Dawn was slipping its way through the sky even as his eyes were sliding shut. He was so tired that the world had begun to blur around him, but he pinched himself awake – It was his turn to watch for Mal, and he would be damned if he fell asleep before she arrived.Carlos forced his eyes open, studying the room in the pale morning light. Evie and Jay were lying on Mal’s bed, Evie’s dark hair strewn across the covers, her hands clutching her magic mirror so hard that the metal frame left bite marks in her palm. And Jay – Carlos blinked hard, refocusing his eyes – Jay was awake and watching him.Carlos stared back, too tired and fuzzy-headed to turn away. They had dropped Jane off at her room, and she had given Carlos a tight hug before she had snuck back into her dorm. It had been so nice to her have her arms around him – not quite as safe as with the others, but close – and over Jane’s shoulder he had seen Jay watching him, his golden eyes glowing hot in the darkness.Things had been so quiet between them as they walked back to Mal’s room, stealing across the wet grass as the stars began to fade away overhead. Evie had walked as if she was in a dream, her eyes half-shut and the map gathered carefully in her arms, and Jay kept a hand on her back to guide her along. Carlos had stayed behind them, had watched their dark heads bend close to each other, had tried to feel jealous of Jay’s hands on another person.And now Jay watched him again, and Carlos stared back. The space between the felt strange, buzzing with energy like the air before a storm. The distance between them seemed to waver and elongate – a small logical voice in the back of his head informed Carlos that it was just his tired mind playing tricks on him. It should have been so easy to listen to that voice, but Carlos could not read the expression on Jay’s face.That terrified him.Carlos opened his mouth to speak and then hesitated – what could he say? How could he fix things if he didn’t know what he had done wrong? Surely he must have done something, he could practically hear his mother’s shrill voice in his ears, shrieking that it was all his fault, was all his fault, all his fault –There was a soft click and rattle as the door opened; the strange daze that had possessed him dissipated as the silence broke. Carlos snapped his gaze to Mal as she stepped into the room, swaying slightly in her high-heeled shoes.Evie sat up in bed, blinking herself awake, her sleep broken by even the slightest noise. “Mal, you’ll never guess what we –”But Mal just shook her head. She was turned away from Carlos, but he could see her reflection in the nightstand’s grand mirror. Her face was wan under the makeup she had applied, and the spark that usually glinted in her eyes had dulled. “I’m sorry, Eves. I just…I need a night.”“Come on then,” Jay threw back the covers on the bed, shifting to the side so that there was more room for Mal.Mal let out a deep sigh, her shoulders slumping. “Thank you.”Evie slipped out of the bed and crossed to Mal, her bare feet silent on the wooden floor. Carlos shut his eyes, for privacy’s sake; when he opened them again, Mal was dressed in her well-worn pajamas, her hair hanging in loose waves around her shoulders, her face bare and pale.Evie turned away to hang up Mal’s ball gown; Mal passed by the window seat on her way to the bed, giving Carlos’s shoulder a gentle squeeze as she passed. He rose, obedient to her silent invitation, and followed her to the bed.Evie got in first, tucking herself up against Jay and immediately claiming his arm as a pillow; Carlos couldn’t help but feel a combination of gratitude and envy as he slid in next to her. He could feel the crown of Evie’s head rest against the space between his shoulder blades, and her breath was soft and even against his back. Mal got in next to Carlos, laying on her back and staring up at the bed’s canopy.Carlos reached out and found her hand in the darkness, an old and easy habit. Once upon a time, they would have pretended that she was comforting him – and maybe she still was, or maybe they were comforting each other. All Carlos cared that was that he could feel Mal’s fingers relax against his, bit by bit, until they both drifted off to sleep.
Carlos woke up with the sun in his eyes and bunch of Evie’s hair in his mouth. The beds in Auradon were far larger and more comfortable then they were used to, but they still managed to knot themselves up in their sleep. Evie still clutching Jay’s arm, her body twisted into a diagonal that took up a significant portion of the bed; Mal had glommed onto Carlos at some point in the night, pressing herself up against his back, one of her arms stretched out over his head towards Jay.Carlos spat out Evie’s hair and lifted his head as much as he could without disturbing the others, only to meet Jay’s open eyes. He froze for a moment, unsure of what to do, but Jay only tilted his head toward Evie and mouthed the words ‘my arm’s asleep’ at Carlos.“Oh,” Carlos said, reaching over and patting Evie’s shoulder. “Eves, time to get up.”She cracked one eye open for a moment, mumbled something unintelligible and snuggled further down under the blankets.“Come on, we need time before class.”That was enough to get her moving; although she wasn’t on the best terms with all her teachers, Evie hated to be late for class. She crawled over Jay and got off the bed, shaking the mattress enough to wake Mal.“We’re talking in a minute,” was all she said as she peeled herself out of bed and followed Evie to the bathroom.Carlos slumped back against the pillows with a sigh, peeking at Jay out of the corner of his eye, watching as he flexed his fingers, trying to work some sensation back into his limbs. They had all slept together before – there had even been times when only he and Jay had cuddled near for warmth – but now they were older and things were stranger and Carlos was afraid to get too close.Had he already ruined everything, without even realizing it? Why else would Jay have acted so strangely last night – or maybe Carlos had only imagined him acting strangely and it was all in his head. Maybe admitting out loud that he liked Jay had been some kind of curse, dooming him to a life of quiet longing and make-believe moments as soon as he spoke the words. Maybe –“Carlos, you with us?” Mal asked, her voice snapping him back to focus. She sat down on the side of the bed, watching him. Her face was set and determined once again; she had given herself a night of rest and would not allow herself anything longer.Carlos nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was sure that the words swirling around in his brain would try to escape, choking him on their way out his throat.“Good,” Mal said, glancing at the others in turn. “Evie, what exactly did you find last night?”Evie held up her magic mirror, its jagged edges flashing in the sunlight. Queen Grimhilde’s mirror had been smashed to pieces upon her capture; she had been able to rescue a single shard from the wreckage, but its magic was severely reduced. It had to steal some information from its user’s mind to operate properly. It could find objects, provided you knew exactly what you were looking for, or it could show you what was in a specific location, but it couldn’t handle two unknown variables at once.It also had the unfortunate habit of demanding blood from its users.Carlos watched as Evie gently slid a fingertip across the mirror frame’s razor sharp edge. Blood welled up in the small gash and she smeared it across the mirror’s surface; it sank down into the glass, into the mirror’s ever-thirsty maw. The blank surface fogged red.Evie placed her other hand on the map, right at the epicenter of Auradon’s crop failure. “Mirror, Mirror, in my hand,” she chanted, eyes shut tight in concentration. “Show us what corrupts this land.”
The four of them bent close to the mirror, watching as the red mist swirled across the mirror’s surface. Slowly, it faded away to reveal a lush green clearing, overgrown with wild grass and creeping vines. It was set in a triangular valley, carved out from the meeting point of two steep stone walls. A waterfall cascaded down the cliff, crashing into a white froth that filled the valley with a fine mist. If Carlos squinted closely at the image, he could almost make out strange engraved marks on the crumbling cliffs.Evie swiped her finger across the mirror, feeding it more of her blood. The image seemed to grow brighter and clearer. As Carlos leaned in closer, he could hear the faintest sound of rushing water and bird song. It felt almost as though he could fall through the mirror, right into that strange new scene.“More detail,” Evie murmured, dripping more blood onto the mirror before Mal caught her hand and moved it away. The image grew sharper, zooming in closer on the valley. It felt so close that Carlos could almost smell the dewy grass, could feel the damp mist on his skin.Jay took Evie’s hand, angling the mirror so that he could see it better. “What’s that behind the waterfall?”Mal leaned in until her nose almost touched the glass. “A cave?”“Maybe? I can’t make it out. I think that’s wood, it doesn’t look natural to me.”“We need more – Evie, will it work if we use my blood?” Mal had a knife drawn and held at her wrist before Evie could answer, ready to spill her lifeblood onto the mirror. Dude let out a sharp bark from the other side of the room, his lips drawn back to reveal sharp teeth.Carlos’s eyes went wide and he shook his head, jerking himself away from the enchanted image. “Evie, drop it!”Evie flinched, opening her hand and letting the mirror fall to the bed. The image faded away, leaving only a perfect silver surface in its wake. Carlos snatched up the mirror and deposited it into its box, slamming the lid shut and locking the catch.Evie shuddered, curling in on herself in a rare moment of bad posture. “I always forget how much I hate that thing,” She raised her finger to her lips, her tongue darting out to lap up the remaining blood.Mal took a deep steadying breath, handing her knife off to Jay. “I don’t know how Grimhilde could stand using for so long.”They were quiet for a moment, sharing a glance at Evie. They all knew that Queen Grimhilde hadn’t escaped unscathed from the mirror’s hunger.Jay cleared his throat. “So we’ve got to go check out this place, right? If this is where everything started, there’s got to be some clues there.”“We don’t even know what we’re heading into,” Mal said. “We’ve probably only got one shot at leaving school before everyone gets suspicious, and I want to know what we’re actually looking for.”Evie hunched over further, her hair hanging loose in her face and her lips twisted into a frown, perilously close to leaving wrinkles on her face. “I think I know what it is. And I know who we need to talk to.”
Evie sashayed down the corridor, her skirt swishing about her thighs, the click of her heels echoing off the stone floor. She didn’t falter, even though a group of princesses turned as a collective to glare at her, even though Chad Charming was leaning over a balcony, sneering down at them. Carlos stayed behind her; although everything else in his life seemed to be shifting out of control, the one thing that he was always sure of was the need to watch Evie’s back.Evie descended a steep flight of stairs, Carlos dogging her heels. They swung left down a quiet corridor, an offshoot from the library. It was cool and dark in this part of the school, where the sun shut away to prevent it from damaging the more delicate texts and tapestries.“You know, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. We can find the information someplace else,” Carlos said, watching Evie carefully. She was smiling, but there was something glassy behind her eyes that spoke to her discomfort. Her magic mirror was clenched tightly in her hand, the image of the clearing already shining from its surface.“Of course I want to do this. This disease is accelerating the further it spreads, and it’s only going to get faster. We need to fix this, and this is the fastest way to get started.” The archives twisted and turned like a rabbit warren, but Evie navigated it unerringly, pausing occasionally to peek through the glass windows set into each door.Carlos let himself fade into the background, staying silent as a shadow, watching Evie work. More questions would just distract her, make it harder for her to concentrate. She popped onto her tip-toes, checking one final room. She took a deep breath, steadying herself and squaring her shoulders before forcing her lips to curl into a smile.Evie threw the door open, not even bothering to knock, and swanned into the room. “Hi, Doug!”Carlos slipped in behind her, stepping into the darkened room. He leaned back against the door and crossed his arms, blocking the only exit. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, but soon he was able to pick out the series of stone panels lining the walls, each one carved with ornate runes and inlaid with precious stones – and the young man who was examining them.Doug jumped back from the tablets, startled by their sudden entrance. He tripped back over his own feet, catching himself hard against the desk at the center of the room. “E-Evie!” he yelped, fumbling to remove the magnifying lenses that were attached to his ordinary glasses. “You scared me,”“Oh, sorry about that,” Evie cooed, stepping further into Doug’s space. She twirled a strand of hair around her finger, and Carlos felt his stomach twist in response. She was acting like the perfect princess her mother had always wanted, acting in a way she hadn’t since they’d first arrived in Auradon. “I meant to surprise you!”“You-uh, you certainly accomplished that,” Doug said. With his glasses sorted out, he seemed to notice Carlos for the first time. “What are you doing down here?”Carlos gave him a blank stare and Doug quickly switched his attention back to Evie, drinking in the sight of her blood-red lips and fluttering eyelashes.“Just looking for you,” Evie said brightly. “What are you working on?”“Just trying to translate this dialect of Dwarfish – they just recovered these from a collapsed mine and brought them here for safekeeping. The depth that they was buried at is, frankly, impressive even for dwarfs, but they seem more focused on the ceremonial information rather than minecraft, but it’s also possible that I’m mistranslating things since those two concepts are pretty closely linked –”Carlos took in a few deep breaths, trying to focus on the single candle that lit the room and the flickering shadows it sent over the walls. If he let himself become distracted, the darkness would shift and twist and rise up, trapping him back in Hell Hall’s coat closets, where it wasn’t safe to move, wasn’t safe to breath – he could practically smell the cloying, alcoholic scent of Cruella’s perfume, the suffocating feeling of fur against his face –There was no light in the closet, he reminded himself. There was light here in Auradon, where everything gleamed and glowed, even if they were only hiding plain wood under the golden gilt. They were in Auradon, and he needed to watch out for Evie.The darkness didn’t seem to bother Doug as he chattered on about the intricacies of Dwarfish minecraft; apparently he had inherited dark-sight from his father. He took Evie by the hand, leading her closer to the wall, pointing out different runes and explaining the basics of Dwarfish grammar.Evie smiled and nodded and giggled, obligingly parroting the vocabulary words that he offered to teach her. Carlos folded his arms more tightly across his chest, holding himself and his growing irritation in check. Perhaps if Doug would only stop talking for a moment, he might discover that Evie had been taught Dwarfish since she was a child, at Grimhilde’s insistence that she know her enemies.
And the worst part, Carlos thought, the worst part was that Doug didn’t seem to notice how much Evie was acting.It was a sign of Evie’s talent, sure, she could be whoever she was expected to be. It would have made things much more difficult if Doug wasn’t so easily distracted. But he had hoped that Auradon boys would be different, and there would be someone who could appreciate her for who she truly was. “If only, if only” he had often heard Mal sigh to herself, and he couldn’t help but agree with her.“And if you look over here, you can see the directions for sealing the mine once the respects have been properly paid –”
“Oh, that’s perfect,” Evie said, squeezing his hand and bouncing on her toes in excitement. “That’s just what I wanted to ask you about. Could you tell me anything about this?” She held up the mirror. A drop of blood trailed down the side of her hand, but Doug seemed too fascinated by the mirror’s images to notice.“This doesn’t actually look like Dwarfish construction, we usually seal things over more thoroughly when we’re done. Look, there’s cracks between the boards and it looks like there’s some wood-rot going on, like they haven’t been properly weatherproofed. Is that a waterfall?”“But does it look safe?” Evie asked, her voice low and soothing. Doug leaned closer to the mirror, putting the magnifying lenses back down on his glasses.“Hard to tell, it’s shoddy human work. No way to tell what it looks like on the inside, or why it was abandoned. The outlying rock looks pretty solid, there’s no extensive erosion – can it get closer?”Doug reached out to take the mirror, but Evie jerked her hand back, letting the image fade to nothing. Doug rocked back on his heels, blinking away the glaze that had come over his eyes. His voice turned a little sharp. “Why do you want to know?”“Just a little research project, trying to learn more about our new home,” Evie said, pocketing the mirror. “Nothing important, really.”“No, no, it sounds very interesting.” Doug removed his glasses, polishing them on the hem of his shirt as he smiled at Evie. “Do I get a kiss, as a reward for helping?”Carlos saw a flash of hurt cross Evie’s face, there and gone again like a lightning strike. He felt a sullen rage explode in his chest, an animal anger that he might have inherited from his mother – how dare this spoiled Auradon boy hurt her? How dare he remind her of the dark corners of the Isle, where voices had hissed at her from the shadows? How dare he join the legions that had offered to trade her comfort for a kiss, for a touch, for a night in their bed?He saw Evie brace herself and start to take a step forward, but Carlos had always been the fastest of the four of them.Carlos lunged forward, twisting his fingers into Doug’s collar and yanking him around so that they were face to face. He pressed his lips to Doug’s, a quick, hard kiss. Doug’s lips were dry and chapped; he tasted of paper and ink and cold stone.Carlos released his collar and stepped back, turning sharply on his heels to face the door. A kiss for a reward, so their deal was done. He reached out for Evie and she found his hand in the darkness. They hurried for the door before Doug could shout or protest; when Carlos glanced over his shoulder, the boy was leaning back against the desk, pressing his fingertips to his lips.They hurried down the twisting corridors, up the grand stairs, until they were out of the library wing. Evie tugged them both into an alcove, where she stumbled to a stop, the sharp points of her heels grinding into the stone floor. Carlos itched to keep moving, wanted to outrun the fear and the anger and his own pounding heartbeat, but Evie held him fast.Her delicate fingers wrapped around his left wrist, and he adjust his grip to enclose her wrist in turn. He could feel the fine tremor in her hands, her pulse beating harsh against his fingers. She leaned forward resting her forehead against his, and spoke in a whisper that was barely louder than a breath. “Thank you.”
xvi.“I want to practice,” Carlos said to Jay, his words hard and clipped, and that was all he needed to say.
His body was still thrumming with nervous energy as they moved down to the courtyard. Carlos paced the edges of the grassy green square as they warmed up, eying each other from their opposite sides. A maypole had been set up in the center of the courtyard, its ribbons fluttering in the breeze; the bright colors flashing through the air filled Carlos with anxiety. He was restless, and he was angry, and he needed to move before he tried to scratch his way out of his own skin.Jay came at him without warning, with a neat straight punch that forced Carlos to dodge to the left. Immediately, Carlos felt his world narrow, all his focus and energy turned to dodging the flurry of blows that Jay unleashed on him. Their practice was always focused more on speed and precision than power, but bruises were bruises and Carlos would certainly end up wearing some if he let his attention drift.He could see a few Auradon students in his peripheral vision; they looked alarmed, huddled close and whispering to each other as they watched the sparring session taking place. Carlos felt a kind of vicious satisfaction at their fear, a vestigial sensation from the Isle – look at us, it seemed to say, we are strong enough to fight, strong enough to win, strong enough to beat you.In his worst moments, Carlos liked their fear. He liked that it kept people at a distance. He liked that it kept him safe. He liked that he was the terrifying one for a change, rather than the terrified.In his worst moments, he worried that he was turning into his mother.Jay’s hand clipped Carlos’s arm, an open-handed blow that landed just hard enough to string. Carlos spun away to create some space between them, shaking off his distracted thoughts. If he panicked now, if he broke down into fragments and shattered pieces, than he would surely lose the fight.Jay pressed him hard, putting Carlos on the defensive and demanding all his concentration in order to keep ahead of his strikes. They maneuvered in circles around the maypole, a fierce, dangerous dance. Carlos began pushing back rather than let himself be led, lashing out at Jay and then darting back to where he could defend himself more easily.It was just was Carlos needed – Jay always knew what he needed – and he felt himself begin to relax, the knotted tension in him easing.Carlos aimed a kick at Jay’s head, only for Jay to catch his ankle and hold it for a moment as they both caught their breath.“What do I always tell you about high kicks?” Jay hoisted Carlos’s foot a little higher, forcing him to balance on the toes of his other foot, until he was practically doing splits in midair.
Jay shoved his foot back and Carlos used the momentum of the push to kick into a back handspring, putting a good few feet of space between them so he could recover. “That I’m great at them?”Jay laughed, swiping a hand across his face to brush away some loose strands of hair. His skin was gleaming with sweat under the spring sunshine. The fight became more causal, their strikes growing playful and experimental as they tested the limits of what they could do. It was when Carlos was relaxed, distracted by the motions of his body that Jay said, “Evie said you kissed Doug?”Carlos felt another spark of anger in his chest, and he put a little more force into his next punch. “Didn’t want her to have to do it.”“What about Jane?”“What about her?”“Wouldn’t she mind?”Carlos darted to the side, using Jay’s moment of distraction to grapple with him, one leg behind his knees to knock him off balance, one arm barred across his chest to trip him over the leg. The decent food and rest that they’d received in Auradon must have been making some difference to Carlos’s strength, because he actually shoved hard enough to send Jay sprawling back on the grass.Jay laughed out loud, a whoop of pride that was just a little short of breath. Never one to let go of the advantage, Carlos sat down on his chest and pinned him to the ground.“Fine, you win,” Jay threw his hands into the air, mock-exasperated. “All hail Carlos, victor of the battle-ring –”“Please shut up,” Carlos clamped a hand over Jay’s mouth in a very gentle effort to smother him.Carlos felt Jay’s smile against his palm, and he moved his hand away quickly. Jay settled back against the ground, closing his eyes, suddenly lazy as a cat in the sunshine. He made no move to shift Carlos off his chest, and Carlos was entirely reluctant to remove himself. It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself to be this close. He suddenly had no idea what to do with his hands; they wanted to rest themselves against Jay’s broad chest, but surely that would only make things more awkward.“Why are you even asking about Jane, though? Do you like her all of a sudden?”Jay cracked open one eye, staring up at Carlos with abrupt incredulity. “Seriously?”“God, you’re strange,” they said at the same time and Carlos burst out laughing, his shoulders shaking and his head bowed low towards Jay’s.Jay looked pleased. His hands came up to rest on Carlos’s knees, fingers curled lightly across his thighs. “At least you’re finally talking to me again.”Carlos could feel the heat of Jay’s fingertips through the fabric of his trousers, and it distracted him so much that he barely heard the words that came out of Jay’s mouth. His mouth felt dry of a sudden, and he could only hope that Jay would mistake his heaving chest and thundering heart as the symptoms of exertion.“Those were some good moves, too,” Jay continued. “But if you ever try to high kick me again, I’m going to keep your foot and then you’ll have to get a peg-leg like one of Hook’s pirates –”The sun was shining and the breeze was light against his skin and Jay was underneath him, smiling and laughing and Carlos was struck with the overwhelming desire to lean down and kiss him, damn the consequences. The urge was so strong that it took his breath away.“You okay?” Jay tilted his head, squinting up at Carlos.Carlos nodded, too numb with emotion to speak, and he felt his body start to sway forward of its own accord –“Hey, boys!” Mal’s shout echoed across the courtyard like a thunderclap.Carlos snapped his head up so quickly that he heard his joints crack. He threw himself to the side, rolling off Jay and onto the grass. Mal and Evie crosssed the courtyard, both of them dressed in practical clothing. Mal threw herself down onto the grass next to them, but Evie sat down more carefully, wary of the grass staining her clothes.“We should leave tomorrow,” Mal said, her voice so calm and casual that she might have been commenting on the weather.Jay sat up, propping himself up on his elbows. “Are you serious?”“Look, I know it’s short notice, but it’s our best chance to get there without tipping anyone off.”“The school is having its own spring festival this weekend,” Evie said, nodding towards the maypole, and the other decorations that had been hung about the courtyard. “It’s three days of festivities and no classes on Friday, so everyone will be distracted.”“The site looks like it’s about a hundred out,” Mal said. “If we move fast, we can make it there in a day and a half, investigate, and head back before anyone gets suspicious.”“So, we need horses?”“I’ll have Ben sign out some for carriage use, so no one will be suspicious if they’re missing – they don’t check the records that carefully, and they’re too timid to question him. He might not be thrilled about it, but they’ll do it.”“Food? I’ll need time to get stuff, Mal.”“We don’t need that much,” Mal said. The unspoken meaning to her words: they had survived on less. “What if they notice us, though?” Carlos cleared his throat, forcing himself to speak up. “Shouldn’t someone stay behind, to cover?”Mal hesitated, but then shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want us splitting up so that they can use us against each other. We’ve always been safest together.”“True,” Carlos said. He rolled onto his back, staring up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, but he couldn’t shake the foreboding feeling that a storm was coming. “Tomorrow?”“At dawn.”
xvii.The moon was full overhead, painting everything in a faint silver light. Carlos leaned back against the stable wall, feeling the cool air on his face and listening to the faint croaks of faraway frogs. Everything was calm and everyone was dreaming, but Carlos himself felt so vibrantly alive that he could feel every beat of his heart, every twitch of his muscles urging him to move. This night felt so much more real than the daytime had – as though everything in Auradon was just a dream and he was only now waking up.Mal nudged her shoulder against his, and he knew she was feeling the same thing. Energy, barely contained magic, was crackling off her like sparks from a fire. Her smile was bright enough to outshine the moon. She tapped at his shoulder, hands light and excited, and whispered, “God, we’re almost out.”Before Carlos could respond, Evie and Jay emerged from the stable, each of them leading two horses. Carlos braced himself and tried not to fidget; any creatures larger than Dude still made him a bit wary.“Relax,” Jay said, passing the reins off to Carlos. “We got the friendliest ones.”Mal accepted a set of reins from Evie; the horse, an elegant steed imported from Agrahbah, had been a gift from Ben when he discovered that most horses wouldn’t tolerate the magical energy that would flare from Mal. This one, who Mal had yet to name, had grown up with the wild magic of the desert and didn’t bat an eye at anything.“Okay,” Mal said, holding very still as the horse nosed at her hair. “We’ll lead them until dawn, then as soon as there’s enough light we’ll start riding. Everyone good?”They all nodded their assent. Mal took a deep breath and grinned, her eyes glowing bright in the darkness. “Alright, let’s go.”
Carlos felt lighter the second the second they left the school grounds – maybe it the weight of all those judgmental eyes leaving him, maybe it was the familiarity of midnight escapades with his friends – and he practically leapt onto his horse as soon as there was enough light for them to ride.Mal left out a whoop as her horse flew into a canter and Carlos responded with one of his own, as though they were a pack of wolves singing to the fading moon.
They kept up a steady pace throughout the day, sticking to rough, rarely used roads in order to avoid strangers and their prying eyes. Jay and Evie, the ones most able to disguise themselves, rode out in front to keep an eye out for approaching people. Mal and Carlos hung back, riding hoods thrown over their heads to hide their dead-giveaway hair.Mal was breathing easier than Carlos had seen in ages, her gestures wild and uncontained by Auradon’s rigid formality. She sang out, her voice high and sweet, Isle songs about how gallows birds were always birds of a feather.Carlos hummed under his breath and, when he spoke to her, he found himself slipping back into the argot of the Isle.
The fire spat out sparks towards the star-lit sky, lighting up the copse of trees where they had made camp for the night. Carlos settled back in the branches of a tree, half his attention on the horses grazing nearby and the other half on his friends below.Mal was hunched over her sketchbook, scribbling out a series of tiny landscapes, each of them perfect down to the last detail. Evie was leaning over the fire, boiling off water from a nearby stream and rationing out the dried meat they had brought with them. And Jay –“Want some company?”Jay was clambering up the tree next to him.Carlos scooted further down the branch to make room for Jay, letting his feet dangle over thin air. The temperature was dropping now that the sun had vanished, and a pleasant heat seemed to roll off of Jay in waves.“I missed this,”“Me too,” Jay said. He shifted just a bit closer, until his shoulder was pressed up against Carlos’s.“I mean, there’s so much…watching in Auradon. All those grown-ups, and they want to know where you are all the time, and what you’re doing, and…and why you aren’t doing it right…” Carlos trailed off, trying to articulate how he felt. Anxiety was fluttering in his chest, ever-present as his heartbeat, but even it seemed dulled by freedom he found in the cool night air. “I miss it just being the four of us. I miss making my own decisions.”“What do you want to decide?” Jay leaned forward, trying to catch Carlos’s eyes, but Carlos tilted his head back and fixed his eyes on the stars.“Does it matter? No point in wishing for impossible things.” On the Isle, you could your life away wishing things would get better, killing yourself a little inside every day that things remained the same. Carlos had learned to manage his expectations early. It was why he had survived this far.“You’re an impossible thing,” Jay said, swinging his foot to the side so that it kicked lightly against Carlos’s feet. “Come on, one stupid wish.”“No.” Carlos said, but his lips started to twitch up into a smile.“Carlooos,”“Okay, okay, fine.” Carlos fixed his eyes on the brightest star in the sky, and thought for a long moment. They hadn’t been able to see the constellations properly on the Isle; the barrier had caused light to waver and refract, preventing them from seeing things clearly. But now they were here, in Auradon, with its beauty and awfulness and wonder. So maybe some things weren’t impossible after all.Carlos shut his eyes tight and wished.
They broke camp early the next morning, moving quickly and silently in the bright calm of the sunrise. Carlos swung himself into the saddle, eying the horizon that stretched out before them. They still had a lot of progress to make if they were going to have time to investigate the mine.As they rode out, dawn slipping into morning slipping into afternoon, Carlos began to notice something strange about the landscape. It was becoming…duller, somehow. The flowers still bloomed and the trees flourished their leaves, but colors weren’t as deep and the scents weren’t as lush. The birds and insects were quiet. The few houses they passed were abandoned, missing windows and doors and shingles where others had pillaged their materials.Carlos could feel unease building in his body, but it didn’t seem to bother Mal. She had taken the lead in the midmorning, not looking at the map but still finding her way unerringly through the brush and briars. When she would glance over her shoulder, checking that they were with her, Carlos could see her eyes glowing within the shadows of her riding hood.At high noon, they stopped by a river to refill their water supply. Carlos splashed water on his face, trying to rinse off the sweat and heat of the day, watching Mal from the corner of his eye. She was kneeling by the water, still as stone, staring into the rushing water.Suddenly, Mal leapt to her feet and hauled herself onto her horse. She broke off from them without a word, nudging her horse into a canter as she followed the path of the river.
“Mal!” Jay bellowed. He reached out, yanking Carlos to his feet before running to his horse and taking off after Mal.Carlos swung himself into the saddle and squeezed his thighs around the horse’s middle, sending him into a trot. Sensing his distress, the horse tossed her head, her eyes rolling as he urged her to go faster.In the distance, he saw Mal bring her horse to a halt, stopping just as suddenly as she had taken off. Carlos and Evie rode up just in time to see Jay yank the reins from Mal’s hands, trying to steer her horse away from the cliff’s edge they had arrived at.“Mal, what the hell were you thinking?” Jay said, shouting to be heard over the roar of the river’s rapids. He reached out towards Mal, ready to grab her shoulders and shake her.Mal’s hand whipped out, catching hold of Jay before he could touch her. Her eyes were glowing, brighter and hotter than Carlos had ever seen before. With her other hand, she pointed over the cliff, where the waterfall crashed and frothed below. Where a valley was formed by the meeting of two cliffs.They had arrived.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
xviii.The cliffs were made of a sheer white stone, covered all over with creeping vines that had anchored themselves into even the narrowest cracks and crevices. Chips of stone seemed to flake away with each step that Carlos took, his boots scuffing up a dust that was as pale and fine as chalk. Carlos tilted his head, trying to peer into the valley below – but the mist generated by the waterfall obscured the ground, making it impossible to judge how much further they had to go. He felt like a giant, trying to make out the shape of the earth through a thick cover of clouds.They had left the horses tied to trees and searched the tops of the cliffs carefully; they had found only one path that would lead them down to the valley. It was narrow enough that they had to walk single file, one hand trailing along the cliff wall, ready to seize the creeping vines should they lose their balance. Carlos wondered how the mine workers had managed it, having to drag themselves and their equipment down the trail, day after day – or perhaps the path had once been wider, and they had destroyed it once their work was finished in order to hide the mine.The more Carlos thought about it, the less sense the whole situation seemed to make. How could a mine affect farmland hundreds of miles away? Had some underground river become poisoned, or had the miners uncovered some metal that made others sick? Why had the mine been boarded up in the first place – why wasn’t it marked on any maps – why wasn’t there any record of the work or workers in Auradon’s painstaking census – why, why, why?They soon descended low enough that they were walking through the mist, and Carlos had to force himself to stop thinking and to focus on each step in front of him. The mist must have been a constant for the valley, because the stone became covered with a thick, damp moss. Carlos had to take care that the slippery surface didn’t send his feet sliding out from under him. Evie was just in front of him, her steps as delicate as a dancer’s. She moved slowly and kept turning her head back to check on him. It almost reminded Carlos of sneaking across the Isle rooftops when they were wet from the sea’s raging storms – except no one on the Isle had managed to build a house as high as this cliff.“We’re almost there!” Mal’s voice drifted back through the fog. Carlos squinted through the mist, but he couldn’t even make out her purple hair through the haze. The world had become still and white around him, the only people in his universe were himself and Evie, the only sounds their heavy breathing and the squish-squish-squish of moss under their shoes.But Mal was right; the mist slowly began to clear, revealing the valley floor below them. Carlos breathed a sigh of relief – high open places were soothing to him, but that didn’t make the thought of falling to his death any more pleasant. He could see Mal and Jay again as they scrambled down the last dozen feet of cliff-side, both of them as nimble as mountain goats.Once he was near enough to the valley, Carlos jumped off the path, eager to fix his feet on solid ground. The grass was slick with dew, and he would have slipped if Mal hadn’t been there to steady him, catching him by the elbow before he could go down.“Thanks,” Carlos said, but she didn’t reply. She seemed distant and distracted, her head tilted to the side, as though she was listening for a tune that no one else could hear. One hand, squeezed into a fist so tight that her knuckles turned white, was clutched to the center of her chest.“Alright, what now?” Evie asked, as she slowly made her way to the valley floor. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the ferocious roar of water that echoed against the stone walls.“The cave,” Mal said, turning to face the waterfall, her voice so soft that Carlos could barely hear her. For a moment, she seemed hypnotized by the shimmering sheets of water, the play of pale light against the cascade – then she shook her head hard, coming back to herself.“Double check the supplies and make sure everything is divided evenly,” she said, her voice strong and clear once again. “Find something sturdy to tie the rope to – I don’t know if this mine branches off at all, and we’re going to need some kind of system to make sure that we don’t get lost.”Carlos accepted the pack of supplies that Jay handed to him, taking care to catch Jay’s eye and tilt his head towards Mal. Jay shrugged in response – he didn’t know what was up with her – but he hovered closer to Mal anyway, once they had finished distributing their supplies.“Let’s go,” Mal said, approaching the pool at the base of the waterfall; her hair and face were instantly damp from the spray thrown up by the crashing water. The pool went right to the edges of the cliff walls, and for a moment Carlos was afraid they would have to swim to the other side – before he spotted a series of stepping stones, sunk just an inch or two below the rippling water.Jay stepped forward onto the first stone, testing it for stability. From a distance it looked a bit like magic, as though he was standing on the water itself.“Seems alright,” he called back to the others. He moved forward to make room for them on the rocks, moving faster when it became clear that they were all equally stable, until he disappeared through the heavy curtain of the waterfall.Carlos watched as Mal and Evie followed Jay, vanishing one after another. There was a fear building in his chest; a newer, stranger one than the anxiety that had always lived inside him. His steps slowed as he approached the waterfall; on the other side of the falls was the mine, with its suffocating darkness and its tombstone walls. He could almost hear the metallic snap-clang of bear traps slamming shut, could feel the cold sweat running down his back, could hear that voice in the back of his head screaming at him, don’t move, don’t move, don’tmovedon’tmovedon’tmove –
But his friends were on the other side of the waterfall, and although Carlos wasn’t sure how much help he would be in this state, they still needed him.Carlos took a deep breath, and stepped through the waterfall.
xix.The water thundered down on him, a tremendous weight that broke down over his shoulders and soaked him to the bone. The cold spray stung, waking him up as surely as one of his mother’s slaps, and Carlos had to stifle a gasp at the sensation.But then he was through to the other side, his feet on damp but solid stone, and sheltered by the overhanging mouth of the cave. He shook his head vigorously, like Dude after a bath, making Evie squeal when he showered her with a fresh spray of water.“How’s it look?” Mal asked Carlos, and he finally focused on the cave entrance. If he needed too, if his supplies had escaped being flooded by the waterfall, he could create an incendiary device that would break down the barriers for them – but it didn’t seem like it would be necessary. The wooden boards had been screwed to the cave wall by strong steel bolts, forming a thoroughly built blockade, but years of the waterfall’s spray had left the metal rusted and the wood half-rotted.“Let’s start with kicking it and see where that takes us.” If it was possible, he wanted to save his firebomb supplies for true emergencies.Jay stepped up to the wall, cracking his knuckles as he readied himself. Mal moved back a pace, spotting for him, ready to catch him if he lost his balance on the slippery rocks.“Try a high kick,” Carlos suggested.Jay flipped him off.“We are on a time limit,” Evie said, wringing the water from her bedraggled braid.“As her majesty commands,” Jay said, and unleashed a powerful kick that went straight through the rotted boards, sending bits of spongy wood flying. A strong smell filled the air, like mushrooms and bogs and other damp things – and, caught off balance by the lack of resistance, Jay’s foot got caught in the hole he had just made.“Nice,” Mal said.“Shut up,” Jay said, tugging his foot free and widening the hole in the process. “Here I am, the only one working around here, and all I get is mockery.”“It’s a new record, at least,” Carlos said. “That was definitely faster than twenty-three seconds.”“You know what, I’m just going to take a nap,” Jay said, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes. “Come on, Evie, let’s let the court jesters take this one.”“Fine, I’ll show you how it’s done,” Mal said, grabbing hold of the boards and tearing them from the wall, to very efficient and devastating effect. There was a gleeful smile on her face; it seemed as though Auradon hadn’t destroyed her appetite for good, old-fashioned demolition. Although, Carlos noted, she was breath heavily by the end of it, almost panting from the effort.“Come on, let’s go already,” Mal said, but her voice was almost a wheeze.“Mal…” Jay said, his eyes now wide and watchful.“I’m fine, shut up, let’s go,” Mal took three steps into the cave and promptly went into a coughing fit. She hacked and gasped, brought to her knees by the force of it.Evie pounced on her, seizing Mal by the arm and dragging her out of the cave and back through the waterfall before Carlos could even blink.Carlos charged after them, half-blind from the waterfall's spray and tumbling across the stepping stones in his eagerness to get to Mal. Evie had her lying down on the long grass and was handing her a water skein. Mal’s eyes were shut tight and tears were streaming down her cheeks, her chest jerking erratically as she tried to draw air into her lungs.“You said you were feeling better!” Jay shouted as he ran up to them, his hands clenched into fists, helpless to fight an enemy he could not touch.“I was!” Mal snapped, her voice rasping like metal being dragged across stone. She took a deep drink from the water skein, her throat working furiously as she swallowed. “See, look, it’s already stopped.”“You’re not going in there,” Evie said, taking Mal’s hand and measuring her pulse. “Not until we know more about what’s going on.”“We did not come all this way not to investigate,” Mal said. She tried to stand up, but Evie clung onto her hand and yanked her back to the ground with a thump. “Evie, who knows when we’re ever going to get away from that school again?”“No way,” Carlos said. “You’re outnumbered, Mal, and it’s not worth it right now.”“We can tell Ben what we found,” Evie added, “You know he’ll do his best to fix it.”“You started coughing the second you stepped into that cave, that can’t be a coincidence,” Carlos said. Mal’s eyes were starting to gleam with a contrary kind of determination; he was afraid she would march into the cave simply to prove that Auradon had not made her soft and reliant on strangers.“They’re already blaming us for all their troubles, I’m not going to let them blame this on –” Mal broke off mid-sentence, her shoulders shaking as she let out another great, racking cough.
“Look,” Jay said. His voice had gone smooth and friendly, the same voice he used on the sales floor to dissuade combative customers. “There’s an easy solution for this. You’ll stay out here, investigate this valley, and Evie can make sure that you don’t choke to death on your own spit. Carlos and I can go explore the cave, see if there’s anything strange and be back before high noon. Deal?”Mal narrowed her eyes, her mouth twisting in displeasure, but she nodded. “Fine. Get out of there if anything looks dangerous, and don’t try to bring anything back with you. This place is weird, and I won’t be there to read any magic for you.”“There, was that so hard?”Mal lobbed the water skein at his head, but Jay snatched it deftly out of the air and tied it to his belt. “Thanks. Come on, Carlos, let’s get this over with.”
xx.Carlos stood in the mouth of the cave, taking one last moment to consider it before they plunged down into its depths. Stalactites and stalagmites grew from the entrance, giving it the appearance of a sharp-fanged smile – like dog’s teeth, like bear traps, like his mother’s widest grin.
There was a sizzling hiss from behind him as Jay struck a match, lighting up the lanterns. The flickering light cast a warm golden glow into the cave, softening some of its sharp edges. Jay marched into the cave without a second’s hesitation; Carlos had to scramble to catch up with him before he disappeared too far down the tunnel. He kept glancing back over his shoulder, until the the cave entrance faded into a pinprick of light in the darkness, and then to nothing.The air grew cold and stale as they moved further down the tunnel; it tasted like dust in the back of Carlos’s throat. There was a sharp mineral smell in the air, and it only seemed to grow stronger as they descended further into the earth. Carlos reached up over his head and touched the smooth stone ceiling; he could just barely reach it with his fingertips.“Dwarves definitely didn’t dig this,” he said. His voice echoed through the cave, making him sound louder and braver than he really was. “Don’t they keep their tunnels short so humans can’t get in?”“Something like that. Ask Eves, she might know.”Carlos took the second lantern from Jay, raising it high so that he could examine the walls more closely. They were perfectly smooth, with no sign that they had ever been struck with a pickaxe or mattock. The entire tunnel was rounded overhead, as though some huge worm had been burrowing through the earth, and there was no sign of any scaffolding or support beams. “Actually, I don’t think this was dug by people at all.”
Mal sighed, deeply and loudly – it had the double purpose of demonstrating to Evie that her lungs were entirely clear, and also to indicate exactly how bored she was. She was lying on a flat stone that sloped up smoothly from the ground, basking in a patch of weak sunshine. It was the closest thing to being warm and dry that the mist-filled valley could offer, and the closest thing to bed-rest that Evie could actually enforce.Mal sighed again; she didn’t like leaving Jay and Carlos alone and she especially disliked that her weakness was the cause of it. They had never let anything like this slow them down on the Isle – but then, they had never really had the luxury of being able to slow down on the Isle.
“Maybe I’m allergic to Auradon,” she called out to Evie. She rolled onto her side and plucked a blade of long grass from the valley floor, twisting it around her fingers to see if it caused any reaction. “If I was just allergic to caves then I would have died a long time ago.”“I think Auradon’s allergic to us, if anything.” Evie tugged the grass from Mal’s fingers, popping it into a small glass vial. There were another half-dozen vials by her feet, each of them containing a different plant specimen or water sample. Evie’s voice was light, but there was something brittle about it, as though she was one wrong word away from cracking. “We can be very irritating, apparently.”Mal sat up, ignoring the sudden pain in her chest that the movement caused. “Has anyone been bothering you?”“It’s nothing – just, you know, some of the teachers still aren’t convinced that I’m not cheating.”“I’ll end them.”“No! I’ll handle it, I just need to do better, that’s all.” Evie hugged her vial close to her chest, folding in on herself like a wilting flower. “I just need to do better.”Mal frowned – but Evie was right, her hands were tied. If she took her revenge, she became the villain that they had always suspected and feared, but doing nothing would make them look weak and defenseless. She would just need to watch Evie, make sure she wasn’t exhausting herself, and come up with a new strategy for dealing with the citizens of Auradon. Ben had once told her about something called killing them with kindness –
“Wow,” Jay said, his voice as dry as desert sand. “I didn’t realize how much I missed hearing vague, ominous, threatening phrases until just now.”“Shut up,” Carlos said, but he was laughing as he said it. The Isle was full of villains who enjoyed a good monologue, and their time in prison had given them occasion to come up with plenty of dramatic speeches. Apparently it had worn off on their children as well.“Is this not-person something that’s going to eat us, or will it leave our mangled bodies as warnings for the next fools?” Jay made his voice rise into a witchy screech, a near perfect imitation of Madame Mim when she was warning off trespassers.
Carlos forced another laugh, but the voice was just a touch too close to his mother’s for him to find it amusing. He almost expected it to be followed by a screaming rant about how he hadn’t cleaned her car properly – or worse, her hands grabbing him from behind, her nails digging into his skin like she wanted to tear him apart – he could almost feel them now, reaching for him in the dark –Carlos shuddered, his mind conjuring up ghost-fingers that ran down the length of his spine, as though they were trying to unzip his skin. He spun around, lantern raised high to illuminate the darkness, knowing there was no-one behind him but still needing to make sure –And something brushed against the back of his hand, a soft whisper of a touch. Carlos gasped, his breath seizing in his lungs, and flinched so badly that he dropped his lantern. It hit the ground with a loud bang, the flame guttering wildly and sending strange, misshapen shadows cavorting across the cavern.From the corner of his eye, through the flickering light, Carlos a pair of hands reaching out for him through the darkness. He stumbled backwards, banging his head against the wall with a crack. Stars flared into life and filled his vision, disorienting him even further; Carlos squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block everything out.There was a long moment where he was aware of nothing but darkness and his own screaming heart. When his awareness returned, he was slumped back against the tunnel and curled into a ball, his knees tucked tight to his chest and his hands clenched in his hair. Jay was sitting across from him, keeping up a steady conversation with himself, until he noticed that Carlos had come back to himself.“You okay?” Jay asked. He extended his hand to help Carlos up, but Carlos flinched back hard.“Don’t,” he choked out, unable to stop the word from escaping. It had only been Jay and his light thief’s hands touching him, trying to help him, but it was still too much for him to handle.Jay let his hand drop, his mouth set into a grim line. He nudged the fallen lantern towards Carlos, the metal scraping harshly against the stone. “It’s not broken, just dented. You can fix it when we get back to school. Do you want to leave?”Carlos paused for a moment, forcing his breathing back under control, and shook his head. “Let’s keep going.”
“Hey, Evie, did you get those blue ones yet?” Mal pointed to a flowering shrub at the other side of the valley – although upon observation, she realized that the space wasn’t so much a valley as a deep-set quarry; there was no way to enter or exit except for the precarious path down the cliff wall.Evie glanced at the bush, perking up immediately. “Oh, thanks!” She picked up a glass vial and a pair of tiny hedge clippers before wandering over to the far wall.Mal rolled onto her back, squinting up into the mist. The cliffs soared up around her, the alternation of white stone and green ivy creating an elaborate pattern on the walls. In fact –Mal glanced over her shoulder, checking that Evie was still occupied with the plants, and stood up. She crossed over to the cliff walls, her hands stretched out in front of her as she read the air. The energy coming off the stone was strange, like a soft song humming in her ears, like a vibration that she could feel right in her bones. Like a throbbing pain in her chest.There was something magical here – or at least, there had been.“Mal, you really shouldn’t be messing around.” Evie’s voice carried all the way across the valley. She had an almost supernatural sense of when someone wasn’t obeying her instructions.“I’m fine!” Mal called back, taking another step towards the wall. The ivy had grown in such a strange way, the vines following unnatural spirals and sharp turns – patterns that just weren’t found in nature. “I just want to get a closer look!”
“Hey, look!” Jay called out, voice echoing across the distance Carlos had placed between them. He raised his lantern high, peering at something just above his eye level. “Finally, something interesting!”Carlos crept closer, skirting the cave wall. He wanted quite desperately to share in Jay’s excitement, but he couldn’t shake off the sick feeling in his chest, a worry so heavy that it nearly bent him double. Slowly, he raised his aching head, and saw what Jay was looking at.“That’s not from Agrabah, right?” There were a series of designs carved into the wall, made from fluid swirling lines – if it was a language, it wasn’t one that Carlos recognized. There were deep scratch marks through some of the symbols that didn’t appear to be part of the design, as though someone had tried their best to destroy the carvings.Jay shook his head. “Nah. It looks kind of similar, but I don’t recognize any words in it.” He set the lantern down and rummaged in his bag, pulling out a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal. “Here, I’m going to make a rubbing so that the girls can see it.”Carlos nodded, shuffling further down the tunnel, not wanting to get in the way. He felt so tired now that the adrenaline was gone, his thoughts disordered and his limbs uncoordinated. He tried to tell himself that his hands were shaking from the cold, not from fear. He tried to tell himself that he wasn’t a coward, that he wasn’t useless, that his friends wouldn’t be better off without him – but he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it.Carlos closed his eyes for a moment – when he opened them again, he realized that he had wandered further than he intended to. In front of him, the tunnel split into two separate passages, each one leading into unknowable darkness. They seemed to glare at him, staring him down like two empty eye sockets.Carlos stared back, swaying slightly on his feet, wavering back and forth between the passages. He could hardly see Jay behind him; he was only a silhouette in the distance, barely illuminated by the unsteady light of his lantern. Carlos suddenly wanted nothing more than to go and lean against him, to hold his hand and not fear the touch, to let Jay lead him out of the cave and back into the light.Pathetic, a poisonous little voice whispered in his ear. Can’t even pull your own weight. Mal turned her mother into a lizard, and you can’t even handle a little bit of darkness. Stupiduselesspatheticcoward –Carlos took a deep breath, stumbling towards the right-hand tunnel. He would just explore a little bit, see if he could find something useful –
Mal reached out and seized hold of the ivy. She yanked it hard; the vines were set deep into the wall, a hundred tiny roots anchoring it to the stone, but it eventually gave way. Mal stepped back, tugging yards and yards of vines from the wall. It was like pulling a loose thread from a tapestry and seeing the whole thing unravel.Evie darted up by her side, her mouth open to scold Mal, but she stopped short at the sight of the wall.There were carvings set deep into the stone; the vines had grown into them and following the swirls and spirals when they proved to be the path of least resistance. The carvings stretched high into the wall – five feet, ten feet, perhaps higher if Mal could clear the vines. They were large and elaborate, the lines twisting seamlessly into one another, a work of art that had Mal’s breath catching in her throat.“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Evie said, but Mal could hardly hear her. The magical vibrations coming from the wall seemed even stronger, she could feel it in her bones, in her teeth. Blood was rushing in her ears, her heart was beating so hard she feared that it might give out.Mal stepped forward, her hands outstretched –
“Carlos?” Jay’s voice echoed through the tunnels, distant and distorted. Carlos didn’t respond; he could see more symbols carved into the wall ahead of him. Perhaps these ones wouldn’t be destroyed, perhaps he could translate them, perhaps he could finally do something right, perhaps he would no longer be afraid of the dark, if only, if only, if only –
Mal pressed her palms to the bare stone. For a moment she felt an incredible sensation of floating, of far-sight, of a vibration that echoed back through the ages, the understanding that she was only a note in a song that had been sung since the beginning –
Carlos moved further down the tunnel, conscious enough to recognize that he was delirious, not conscious enough to stop himself, wanting only to stop being afraid –
And then there was a burst of repulsive magic, a sudden pain so sharp it felt like she had been struck by lightning – Mal dug her fingers into the stone – her body seizing – her mouth open in a soundless scream –
Carlos felt the rumbling under his feet, as though the entire earth was shuddering. He turned, aware that Jay was shouting for him, aware that it was probably too late –
Mal felt Evie’s fingers dig into her shoulders, dragging her back from the wall –
A shockwave burst through the earth, ringing in Carlos’s ears, stunning him still –
Mal tumbled back onto the grass, hearing the world around her –
Crack, and then the ceiling began to cave in –
And Evie was shouting –
And Jay was screaming –
And everything –
Went –
Black.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
xxi.Mal came back to consciousness slowly, taking stock of the various aches and pains in her body before she tried to move. There was blood in her mouth from where she had bitten her tongue – her jaw ached – a splitting headache – there were bruises all down her back – the world sounded wavering and distant, as though she was hearing it from underwater – her limbs were heavy and unresponsive, as if her whole body had gone to sleep.Overall, it felt like she had gone ten rounds with Uma – and not in the fun way.Evie had laid her on her side, and she could see the mouth of the waterfall from where she was lying. Jay and Evie were standing in front of it, both gesturing wildly – probably shouting, but their voices were lost to the ringing in Mal’s ears. Jay looked terrible, unnaturally pale; he was coated in white stone dust, and the waterfall’s spray had dampened it, making it cling to him like a second skin. There was a deep cut on his forehead and the trails of bright red blood were the only color on his face.She did not see Carlos.Mal exhaled slowly, blowing away the blades of grass that tickled her face. Carefully, achingly, she shifted onto her hands and knees, a rush of dizziness hitting her the second she lifted her head. She almost threw up what little food was in her stomach.She paused for a long moment, breathing until the nausea had passed. She had dealt with worse than this – hadn’t she? There must have been something worse than the white-hot pain that had coursed through her entire body, the sudden start-stop-start of her heartbeat, the agony in her chest as though she had been denied her deepest longing –None of that mattered anyway.She swallowed back the blood in her mouth.Her pain wasn’t important. She would recover.She curled her hands into fists, pushing herself up from the ground.The fae were hardy creatures, even if they were only half-fae like herself.She needed to find Carlos.Mal heaved herself to her feet, staggering towards Evie and Jay. Their voices became clearer as she approached; Jay’s was rasping and dust-choked, Evie’s high-pitched and frantic.“—can’t stop me, I’ve got to go get him –”“Jay, you can’t do it all by yourself, and we can’t leave Mal alone –”“He’s alone in there, you know he hates being alone,”“Jay, you’re not thinking straight!”Jay turned away, towards the waterfall. Evie reached out for him, grabbing him by the shoulders and dragging him to a halt. If anyone other than Evie had tried that, they would have found themselves on the floor, missing a few teeth. As it was, Jay went still, his fists clenched, his entire body tensed with the effort not to react.“Evie, let me go, or I swear –”“Someone,” Mal’s voice sounded funny and distant to her own ears. “is going to tell me what the hell is going on.”Their heads snapped towards her; they’d been so distracted they hadn’t even noticed her approach. Evie let go of Jay and flew to Mal’s side.“You both need to sit down before you hurt yourselves!”Mal’s body seemed to find Evie’s words incredibly sensible. Her knees went out from underneath her and she sank to the ground, her head reeling from the sudden movement. It seemed like the next logical step was to go to sleep, but Mal forced her eyes open, ignoring the darkness that was bleeding in at the corners of her vision.“Where’s Carlos?” She could hardly believe that she was asking the question. The entire situation seemed inconceivable, unreal, as though she was simply in a bad dream.“There was a cave-in,” Jay said. His voice had gone sharp and hard. His entire body seemed to be trembling with barely restrained energy. Mal noted, in a distant way, that his fingertips were raw and bloody. “He’d gone further up the tunnel than me. I couldn’t get to him in time. We were trapped on separate sides, and I couldn’t shift the rocks, and he wasn’t answering when I shouted – Mal, I’m going back in, don’t try to stop me!”“How bad does it look in there?” Mal could feel her heart starting to beat harder, like it was trying to bruise her rib cage. They had been in scrapes before, but they had always been together, and they had known the territory they were dealing with – and she had never been as helpless as she was now.“I don’t know, the whole ceiling just broke open. Evie said it was like an earthquake, we must have been under a fault in the rocks or something. Most of the tunnel was clear on the way back,” Jay’s eyes kept darting back to the cave entrance. Mal’s mind wasn’t entirely there at the moment, but she knew he was going to do something drastic if she didn’t find some way to use his energy.“Okay, so you and Evie can go in and start trying to clear the rocks, but you get out the second it starts to look bad.” Mal’s tongue felt thick and clumsy in her mouth, it was a struggle to order her words. “I’ll – I can’t go in there, but I’ll head back to Auradon, I’ll cover for us, I’ll get more supplies –”“No!” Evie shouted. Her voice rang out through the clearing, so loud and ragged that it startled Jay into stillness and Mal into silence. “I love Carlos just as much as you two, and don’t you dare act like this isn’t killing me, but neither of you are thinking straight! Mal, you can barely stand, let alone ride – your heart stopped, do you realize that? Jay can’t go in there alone and I can’t leave you alone – we just can’t do this by ourselves.” Evie swiped a hand across her eyes, but tears began to slide down her cheeks anyway. “We need help!”And at that moment, there was a sharp crack of displaced air and a very startled Jane appeared in a shower of sparks.
Jay started laughing – hysterical, unstoppable laughter that seemed to claw its way out of his throat, the kind of laughter that you could choke and gag on.Mal kind of wanted to join him. Sometimes you thought your day couldn’t get any stranger, and then it simply…did.“How did I do that?” Jane was staring down at her hands, as though she could read the secrets of the universe in her palms. Her eyes were wide and startled; her breath started to come fast and hard. “What’s going on – why aren’t you all at school?”Jay let out another howl of laughter. Tears had started streaming down his cheeks, but the laughter still kept coming.Jane glanced at Mal, opened her mouth, and then seemed to think the better of it. She turned to Evie, who, Mal had to admit, did seem to be the only sane one around.Mal’s addled mind was still trying to piece together the events of the day, trying to instill some logic to them – a cave, horrible magic, Carlos gone, Jane appearing. Things had seemed so simple only a few hours ago, when she had been following the pull of magic to the valley, finding the trail as surely as a homing pigeon finds its way to the nest.“—I felt this terrible feeling in my chest,” Jane was saying to Evie, and Mal forced herself to focus on the words. “And all I could think was something’s happened to Carlos, and then I was here – I don’t know what happened, my magic has never done anything on its own before –”“Oh my god,” Mal burst out, the pieces finally falling into place. “You went and fairy godmothered him!”“What are you talking about?” Jane spun around to look at Mal, her eyebrows furrowed together. Mal must have looked quite terrible, must have been showing every protective, possessive feeling on her face, because Jane took a quick step back from her.“He’s not yours,” The words had sharp edges in her mouth, and she spat them out like broken glass. If she had any more strength, she would have grabbed Jane’s shoulders and given her a good shake until she listened. “He was mine a long time before he was yours,”Jay finally stopped laughing, the sound trailing off into a rasping, retching noise.There was a brief flash of bright light in Mal’s eyes, distracting her into silence for a moment. When the glare died off, she could see Evie kneeling in front of her, a stern look on her face. She was holding the magic mirror, the conjured light rapidly fading from its surface.“Your eyes aren’t reacting normally to the light. There’s definitely something wrong with you, so unless you want me to send you back to Auradon right now, you’re going to calm down, stop threatening poor Jane, and explain what’s going on.”Mal had only heard Evie use that tone of voice once, when Harry Hook had refused to let her near the bleeding stump of his wrist. In the face of a wounded and snarling pirate, Evie had explained to him – very calmly, pleasantly, and accurately – all the painful ways he could die if he didn’t sit down and let her do her job.(Harry had let her do her job.)Mal blinked slowly, trying to put things in order. It felt as though all her thoughts were jumbled, floating in her mind with nothing to ground them. “It’s something that blue fairies do – sometimes you’ve got people that need your help, and you kind of…connect with them. Like…how your mother knew Cinderella needed help. That’s Carlos for you. It’s your magic. Didn’t she teach you?”“I don’t care if it’s magic, he’s my friend and he’s in trouble,” Jane said. “And he doesn’t belong to me, or you, or anyone. He should belong to himself.”Mal looked at Jane, forcing her eyes to focus. She was wearing a dress that was really too childish for her, and large bows in her hair. Her hands were shaking a little, but she stared down at Mal with a gaze as firm and steady as stone. There was something in her eyes, hard-won experience that made her look very different from the quavering, quailing girl they had first met. There were far worse people for Carlos to have on his side.“Sorry,” Mal said. Her words were becoming slurred, she had to concentrate hard to make her mouth shape them right. “For snapping…and for them not telling you things.”“It’s okay. It’s illegal, anyway.”“No. You’re fae. It’s yours by right.”“Then teach me how to help.” Jane sat down in the grass in front of Mal, heedless of the mud that stained her dancing shoes and party dress. “I’m here for a reason, so let me help.”Mal looked around at her friends – Evie, her heart pulled in so many directions that she might break under the strain. Jay, far braver than his father before him, so ready to risk his life to rescue their treasure from a cave. And now Jane, her eyes soft and her hands open, begging Mal to help her break the law.“Alright,” Mal said. “The first thing you’re going to need is a wand.”
xxii.The darkness around him was so absolute that Carlos was unsure if he was awake or still unconscious. He blinked – his eyes were open, his muscles were working, but there was only darkness yawning in front of him, swallowing everything, hungry as a pack of feral dogs.
He was back in the closet, he was back in the closet, hewasbackinthecloset—
Anxiety sprang to life inside him, taking hold of every muscle and nerve. He wanted to run, but he knew he had to stay absolutely still or he would disturb the coats, the traps would snap and mangle his fingers, chew up his ankles, spill his blood and stain the darkness even darker –Time was meaningless; he had no idea how long he lay there, muscles taut as whipcords, holding his breath until his lungs ached. There was no room in his head for thought, only sensation. He was floating in the darkness, with nothing but pain to ground him and stop him from drifting away. His back and shoulders ached terribly; he must have done something truly awful for Cruella to have beaten him so bad. She usually forced him to walk into the closet of his own free will, but this time she must have discarded his unconscious body when she was done with him.Carlos felt tears prick at the corners of his eyes. They itched as they trailed down his cheeks, but he didn’t dare move to brush them away. He had stopped crying for his mother and her love long ago, but he cried for his friends – he wanted Evie’s gentle laughter, Mal’s unshakable strength, and Jay –A sob tore itself from his throat, and his chest hitched before he could arrest his movement.Carlos froze instantly, bracing himself for whatever pain might come – but nothing came. There was only the clatter of pebbles rolling from his chest to the stone floor, and the weight of heavier stones still digging into his skin.Confusion overwhelmed his panic: this was not how things usually went. Carefully, experimentally, Carlos shifted his fingers the tiniest bit. They did not touch cold metal or soft furs, there was nothing but stone rubble surrounding him.Growing bolder, his fevered mind distracted now that it had new facts to turn over, Carlos felt around himself until he was sure there were no bear traps on the ground. And then he did it again, in case he had missed something the first time. And then once more, because he hardly dared trust his pain-addled body.“Alr—” he started to say to himself, but his body swallowed the words back. Mother hated when he talked to himself – it only led to him being locked up longer. As a child, he had quickly learned that if he screamed, she would simply leave him in the closet until he was too weak to cry at all.But he had learned other lessons too. He had listened as Evie read her books aloud, as she spoke up to every teacher in Auradon, and he had learned not to care what anyone else thought of him.He had listened as Mal sang under her breath, her voice low and gentle for them, and he had learned to keep part of his heart soft even as the world tried to turn it hard as stone.He had listened to Jay’s smooth chatter, the magician’s cant designed to distract and divert from reality, and he had learned that sometimes a voice can lead you out of the dark.His friends were not here, but he still carried them with him. Carlos took a deep breath, calming his heart, unlocking his jaw.“Alright,” he said. His voice trembled, crushed terribly small by the weight of the darkness, but he still spoke. “Alright, let’s get out of here.”
“Jay, I r-really hope you made it out of here.”Carlos nearly blinded himself as he struck a match, his eyes dazzled by the explosion of light. He only had a few seconds before the match had burned down to his fingertips, but it was enough time for him to blink the spots from his eyes and get his bearings of the tunnel – he was even able to spot the fallen lantern, tossed a dozen feet down the tunnel, before the light vanished.He navigated by touch until he found the lantern, unwilling to waste any more matches than necessary. He shuffled his feet along the floor, moving slowly, testing the ground with each step. Part of him was still braced for traps to snap shut on his toes, part of him was screaming that it wasn’t safe to move about in the darkness – but he forced himself to speak out loud, focusing on one difficult task in order to distract him from all the others.“I couldn’t hear you, which was really strange. I – I really didn’t like that.”There was a soft clang as his foot tapped against something metal. Carlos went still for a minute straight, bringing his breathing back under control before daring to bend down and pick up the lantern. He imagined that Jay was talking back to him, guiding him through each step.He struck a match and lit the lantern, inhaling the smoke-scent of the flame. Without the light, he had just been a voice hovering in the darkness, something vague and vaporous. He felt more like a person now, and his voice grew a bit steadier as he assessed his situation.“I don’t think it’s safe to shift the rocks.” They were piled from floor to ceiling, with no space left for him to crawl through. They seemed precarious – they had settled from the earthquake, but one good shove might be enough to bring them all down on top of him. Carlos’s torso protested at the very thought of it. He could already feel the bruises from the first rock-fall forming, blossoming all over his body like roses in spring.“I guess I should –” He almost began to stay stay here, but he was struck with several terrible thoughts at once. One: Jay might be injured on the other side of the rock wall. Two: If Jay was injured, there would be no one to warn Mal and Evie, and it would be hours before they realized anything was wrong. Three: they didn’t know which tunnel he had gone down, and they might spend ages clearing the wrong one and searching for him down that tunnel.Carlos felt his lips begin to quiver. He was exhausted and alone, his mind was hazy and uncooperative, throwing out more problems than solutions. He only had so much food, so much water, so much light, and no idea what to do. A tear slipped down Carlos’s cheek before he could stop it, and then another, faster and faster –And then there was a cold touch at his cheek – the soft caress of air, caught on the tracks of his tears. Carlos turned, following the feeling. There was a gentle current of air coming from further down the tunnel, so faint that he hadn’t been able to feel it before. It seemed to ebb and flow slightly, like the breath of some giant monster slumbering beneath the earth.And where there was air, there must be a way out.Carlos took a deep breath, and fought back the urge to wipe away his tears; he might need them to help him navigate again. He imagined Jay was walking beside him, keeping up half a conversation to distract him from his fears.“At least Mal and Evie are safe. I can’t imagine how anything else could go wrong.”He took a step, and then another, on and on as he talked himself into the darkness.
xxiii.Jay was pacing back and forth across the valley floor, wearing a path into the long grass. Mal kept her head very still to limit her nausea, and Jay passed through her field of vision every other minute, as regular as the pendulum of a clock. She used him to keep track of the time that was slipping away, counting every valuable minute as she tried to boil a lifetime of magical education down into the fewest possible sentences.All while her head ached so badly that it felt like her skull was about to crack open.“Yes, I promise you, anything can be a wand. Honestly, just grab a stick or something, it will work just as well.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Jane practically wailed. They had explained the situation to her, and now she was feeling the pressure of passing time just as acutely as Mal. “Why was there such a big fuss about mother’s wand if Maleficent could have just used a stick to break the barrier?”Mal bit back the frustrated words at the tip of her tongue, watching as Jay’s shoulders grew tenser and tenser. Magic required belief to work, and if Jane needed more information to help her believe, they would just need to take some more time.“Okay,” Mal sighed, trying to marshal her words. “Sit down. Close your eyes. There’s magic inside you. You were made from it. Can you see it?”Jane hesitated for a moment, and then nodded, her eyes squeezed shut. Mal could only hope that she was telling the truth and not pretending to move things along faster.“Describe it to me.”“It’s…um, it’s blue.” Jane’s eyes popped open. She was biting her lip, looking to Mal for approval.Mal shook her head. “It’s different for everyone. Just keep going.”Jane closed her eyes, but this time she seemed to relax, sinking further into herself. “It’s bright, and it feels all fizzy under my skin. Like fireworks,” Her voice grew more certain as she spoke. “It’s happy to see me.”“Good. It should miss you, if they had you ignore it for so long.” Jay had moved onto coin tricks to keep himself occupied. Mal could see faint flashes of gold and silver through the mist, vanishing and reappearing in Jay’s hands. “So it’s inside your skin, and you can move yourself places, and do things to yourself, but you can’t move it outside your skin, right?”Jane was quiet, her brows furrowed. Mal watched her fingers twitch as she tried to force the magic out of her body. “No.”“That’s why you need a wand, to make a connection to the world. It can be anything, as long as you think of it as a wand, but some things work better than others. Here,” Mal held up her hands, hiding a wince as the movement flexed her sore muscles. There were metal chains hooked to her leather gloves, a chain-link web embedded with rough chunks of crystal, amethyst and charoite and sugilite. Their raw facets gleamed in the dim light. “They’re not cut right, to release the most energy, but they help me channel and they’re always with me.”“So I can use anything?” Jane’s eyes were wide. Mal could read the warring expressions on her face – excitement and fear and curiosity – and how she tried to tamp them down into something more serious. It was good that she was excited, Mal thought. Magic was nothing more than a redirection of belief and willpower. You needed some emotion behind it, some energy, to make it work.
Mal watched her leap to her feet and rush to the other side of quarry, trying to pick a good material for her wand, and felt a flare of jealousy rise up inside her. Jealousy that Jane’s first magic would be tied to joy and excitement and helpfulness, that her magic felt like fireworks. Mal’s magic had always been like a searing fire in her veins, stealing her breath and burning her up from the inside out.Mal shut her eyes tight, trying to work a little belief of her own. She imagined all her hurt and anger as bright throbbing light inside her body – and then she imagined that light shrinking down, dimmer and dimmer, until she could contain it and deal with it later. Ignoring pain was a kind of magic in and of itself, one that Mal had mastered many years ago.
The angle of the tunnel had shifted under Carlos’s feet.It had been subtle at first, a tilt of a few degrees that he had barely noticed, but now he had to brace himself carefully if he didn’t want to tumble down the steep slope. He could feel the weight of the mountains pressing down upon him, the pressure growing greater the further he descended into the earth. It was only the faint breath of air against his skin that kept him going, kept him from collapsing under the weight of all the life above him.He continued talking to himself, the tunnel echoing his words and sending them back to him, as though it was questioning everything he said. It was only because he was listening, alert for anything unusual, that he heard the soft sobbing that came from further down the tunnel.His heart did a funny skip, warring between hope and despair – even if there was another person down here, they sounded just as lost as he was. But he walked as quickly as he could, until he came to a point where the tunnel split into two paths.From the right-hand tunnel, the flow of air was stronger. It smelled sweet and clean, and the sensation of fresh air on his face left Carlos feeling dizzy, as though he was drunk on it. That tunnel surely had to be the way out.Carlos took a step forward, and then hesitated. The left-hand tunnel slipped further down into the earth, and from inside it he could hear a distant wailing.Carlos closed his eyes, feeling his own tears well up against his eyelids. He wanted, so very badly, to leave this wretched cave. But he had also been the one to sob alone in the dark. He could not forgive himself if he abandoned someone to that fate.Carlos took the left-hand tunnel, descending even deeper underground, where the stone grew cold and the air grew stale.It did not take him long to find the source of the noise. The creature was curled in on itself against the tunnel wall, so small and grey that he almost mistook it for a rock. Carlos slowed down as he approached it, his feet dragging against the stone.The creature raised its head to look at Carlos – or not to look, exactly, for it had no eyes, just a smooth expanse of skin where eyes should have been. Its ears were huge and bat-like, its mouth full of snaggled teeth, its limbs many-jointed and gangling. Carlos felt his stomach lurch, revulsion rising in his throat. It reminded him of the goblins that had roamed the Isle, press-ganged into acting as Maleficent’s servants.
The creature uncurled itself, rising up onto eight spindly limbs. It scuttled towards him, a guttural sobbing noise coming from its throat. Carlos’s first instinct was to lash out, to stop this thing from approaching him, but he held himself still. Between the Isle and Auradon, he had learned that not every beautiful thing was good, and not every ugly thing was wicked.One of the creature’s legs brushed against his shoes; it reared back, balancing itself on six legs and using the front two to feel at Carlos’s legs. It opened its mouth, so wide that its jaw seemed to unhinge, and rasped out the word “Ffffood?”“I have food,” Carlos replied – and added, in case it got the wrong idea “But I am not food.”Looking closer, Carlos could see just how thin the creature was, how haggard it looked. Its skin was patchy and rough, like worn-out leather. It was no threat to him, or to anything. Carlos knelt down, opening up his backpack and pulling out scraps of dried meat.The creature fell on them, ravenous.Carlos took out his water skein and opened it, letting water puddle out on the floor.The creature drank from it, parched.Carlos counted the supplies he had left, tried to figure out how many days he could make it stretch, and felt fresh tears seep from his eyes.The creature raised a limb to feel his tears, curious.“The exit is that way,” Carlos said, gesturing to the tunnel behind him, unsure if the creature could even understand him.The creature brushed away his tears, first one cheek and then the other, its limb delicate and surprisingly gentle. “Kkkkind,” it hissed out, and it scurried down the tunnel in the direction Carlos had pointed.Carlos got to his feet and turned, set on following it. The creature disappeared into the darkness, but no matter how fast Carlos walked, he never caught up to it. No matter how far he walked, he never reached the junction of the tunnels again.There was some kind of magic at work here, and Carlos had precious little experience with magic. He had picked up some information from Mal and her raw talent, from helping Evie memorize her potions recipes, but he had no ability for spellcasting. Magic scared him, in a way. No one understood its true limits, and the most esoteric practitioners usually kept their research well hidden. There was no way for him to quantify it, to study it – Mal always spoke of it as a living thing, invisible and unpredictable as the wind.And now something was playing with him – but who, and why? Carlos turned to face the tunnel’s mouth once again, and felt the slightest of breezes against his face. He had no choice but to follow it, powerless as water swept along by the current, helpless as a leaf caught up in a storm.
xxiv.For her wand, Jane had woven together river reeds and bound them fast with iris flowers, and the flower buds bloomed to life in her hands. Light seemed to spark from her, creating rainbows in the mist, her magic flowing easily now that she had a proper conduit.“Now, you need to imagine exactly what you want to happen. Be as detailed as you can. Don’t get distracted, that’s how you lose control.” Mal ran her thumb along the crystals set into the gloves, feeling their jagged edges dig into her flesh. They did not glow or glitter at her touch, but they were good for putting a few extra cuts on someone’s face when she had to throw a punch.“Okay,” Jane pointed her wand at a few loose pebbles, her body tensing as she grew ready to cast her spell. She paused and looked over her shoulder, back towards Mal. “Do I need magic words?”Mal shrugged. “You can use them if you want, but you probably don’t need to. They can be a kind of conduit too, if you need something extra to help you focus.”Jane flicked her wand and the pebbles began to hover, rising high enough that they were level with Jane’s eyes. A bird shrieked in the distance and Jane started, losing her concentration. The pebbles fell to the ground with a clatter.“Oh,” Jane said, disappointment coloring her voice. “It was much easier with Mother’s wand.”“Of course it was,” Mal said. “That thing’s hundreds of years old, it’s got the magic of a dozen fairies stored up in it. Why else do you think Maleficent wanted it so bad?” Mal pressed her fingers harder against the crystals, willing her pain to seep into them and leave her be. Their surfaces grew black and clouded with negative energy – she would have to take it back into herself eventually, and it would probably sting twice as much when she did, but for now it allowed her enough strength to focus on Jane.“For…revenge?” Jane’s concentration wavered again and she sent a pebble zipping through the air. It would have hit Jay in the head if he hadn’t dodged.“Well, yes, but mostly for power. You leave a little bit of your magic in a wand every time you cast a spell, and that builds up eventually. Your mother’s wand, Maleficent’s staff – they’ve just been around for ages and they’ve got a lot of energy in them, they practically have minds of their own. No offense, but you didn’t break the barrier on your first try because you’ve got insanely powerful magic.”“I’m starting to see that,” Jane said, but she flicked her wand and sent a stone skipping across the waterfall’s pool. It skimmed over a dozen feet of water before Jane gestured and the stone flew back to her hand.“Not bad,” Mal said. Her crystals grew darker and darker until they took on an obsidian shine. Time was fleeing fast before them; she needed Carlos back by her side or she would surely go mad. “Think you’ll be okay in the tunnel? Jay is going to die if he doesn’t do something soon.”Jane glanced towards the waterfall, her mouth set in a solemn line. Her hand flexed as she tightened her grip on the makeshift wand. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”Mal watched as Jane and Jay disappeared beneath the waterfall; the sweet scent of iris blossoms trailing in Jane’s wake. Mal flexed her hand gently, not the slightest bit surprised when the pebbles didn’t move at her command. It would have been easier for Mal to pull out her own teeth than direct her magic. She had hoped it would work better in Auradon, but she’d only gained a marginal bit of control since leaving the Isle.To her shame and her mother’s disgust, every attempt to summon her magic burned her from the inside out.“Hey, Eves? Would you…?” Mal held out her hand in a silent plea. As Evie took her hand to support her, Mal shut her eyes and let the pain flood back in.
The tunnel begun to twist under his feet, spiraling like a corkscrew that had been driven into the earth. The walls were so smooth and uniform that Carlos could not count the number of loops he had descended. It seemed as though it would simply go on forever, until he reached the center of the earth.There was no way to tell how much time had passed. The monotony of the endless coiling path had dulled his senses; there were no markers that he could measure distance by, no sun or stars that would mark his direction. Time seemed to stretch and slow. He could have been walking for minutes or hours or days. The path was constant; the only change was only the growing ache in his legs, the burning thirst in his throat, and the wavering light in his lantern.Carlos raised the lantern to check the oil levels – there was enough to last him hours, perhaps more if he put the light out periodically. He switched the lantern from one hand to another, flexing his stiff fingers. Despite the flame burning inside, the metal was cold against his skin, so cold that it seemed to stick to his flesh. It had been growing colder for a while now, he realized, the temperature dropping so gently that he had scarcely noticed it.Once he realized what was happening, the chill seemed to grow faster, as though it had decided to give up on stealth and simply freeze him outright. Soon the walls began to glitter with frost, and Carlos’s breath began to mist in the air. His teeth chattered and his body shuddered, trying to warm itself back up. His tears froze to his face. It was only the winter wind billowing from the tunnel that convinced him that going forward was better than going backwards –And suddenly the floor was slick with ice and Carlos’s feet lost all their traction. It was all he could do to keep his balance, there was nothing he could use to steady himself. There was only the wind rushing in his ears as he slid down the tunnel, whipping him around each corner, picking up speed with every turn, faster and faster –Until the floor leveled out and he was spat into a sparkling cavern. His momentum threw him forward, his knees slamming down on the polished floor, and Carlos slid to the center of the cavern. He would have kept sliding, except that he ran into a stone podium that grew straight up from the floor. He took a moment to gather himself, his bones jarred from the harsh landing, before looking around.The room flared with cold light – ice coated the white stone floor and crystals bristled from every inch of the walls, each one tinged with the faintest sheen of blue, as though they held flames at their centers. The wall opposite him was a huge sheet of ice, so thick that it was opaque, so smooth that it could have been glass. There was no exit.Carlos felt his whole body shudder; he was dressed for spring sunshine and his clothes, damp from the ice, offered little protection against the cold. Carefully, he grabbed hold of the podium and hauled himself to his feet. The stone was so cold that he needed to peel his hands free, and it felt as though he had peeled off a layer of flesh as well. He had to skate his feet across the floor to keep his balance; climbing back up the icy tunnel would be impossible.He considered the ice wall for a long moment, his thoughts slow and dull from the cold. There was a chance that he could make a firebomb strong enough to break through it, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t cause another cave in, and no guarantee that there was anything beyond the wall. Carlos sniffled and swiped a hand across his eyes, brushing away the frost that had formed on his eyelashes. He set the lantern down on the podium, trying to free up both his hands – but as soon as the lantern landed on the stone, the entire room exploded into white light, each crystal refracting and reflecting the light tenfold.Carlos flung an arm across his face, but not before the light jumped right into his eyes as though it were trying to stab him. He fumbled with the lantern, his eyelids still seared with the afterimage of the light, and yanked the lantern off the podium. The room returned to normal immediately, the light dying as quickly as it had appeared.Carlos sighed and rubbed his forehead – the light had aggravated his aching head, like an icepick straight to his brain. He was beginning to see why this cave had been boarded up. Sometimes strange caverns were best left alone; Jay would be the first to tell you that caves of wonders weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Places like this had their own obscure rules, and it was all too easy to step into a trap – maybe he was being punished for some accidental slight, god knows he’d had enough experience with that growing up –Carlos broke off from his train of thought, caught up in a sudden realization. He sighed again, exhaling as heavily as he could, but the air did not fog in front of him. Somehow, in the space of a few seconds, the temperature had been raised. Carlos glanced down at lantern in his hand, then to the podium, then to the glinting crystals. Carlos skated across the floor, wobbling like a new-born colt, and examined the crystals more closely.Each one was perfectly smooth and faceted, as though they had emerged from the earth already cut. Carlos tapped one; it shifted slightly under his touch, sending the light bouncing in a new direction. Carlos looked back towards the podium, to the lantern, to the sparkling stones – and the solution finally crystallized in his mind.Carlos adjusted the shutters of the lantern, closing the iris until the lantern released a single, focused beam of light. The room grew dark around him; the gems lost their shine as soon as the light moved off of them. He set the lantern back on the podium, screwing his eyes up preemptively as he braced himself for the stunning strength of the light – but none came. With less light to work with, only a single crystal had begun to sparkle.Carlos allowed himself a brief smile as he skated across the room. The temperature had dropped again, leaving his fingers stiff and clumsy, but Carlos fought against the cold. He wiggled the crystal about in its perch, until the facets caught the light more strongly. He scrabbled at the wall, shifting the stone a few more centimeters, and the blue veins inside the crystal seemed to waver, like the flickering of a flame. A beam of light went zipping by his ear.Carlos let out a whoop of triumph, the sound echoing throughout the cave. The light bounced across the cavern, reflected so precisely that it landed squarely at another stone. Carlos crossed the room, almost tripping over his own feet in his haste, and set to work adjusting the next crystal.Soon the room was criss-crossed with rays of light jumping from crystal to crystal, the light growing hotter and stronger with each reflection. Carlos was sweating despite the cold, an irrepressible grin on his face as the puzzle slowly came together. With one final adjustment, he sent the light bouncing straight towards the ice wall.The wall lit up, the light creating veins of gold in every icy fissure. Within minutes, the wall was beginning to sweat and drip, beads of water sliding down its surface as the light drilled a hole through the ice. Carlos sat back against the stone podium and pulled his knees to his chest, the lines of light hanging overhead like a fiery spider’s web.He watched patiently as the hole grew bigger and bigger, until it was large enough that maybe – just maybe – one skinny boy might be able to fit through.Carlos stood up and lifted the lantern. The beams of light died immediately. Their golden afterimage sizzled in front of his eyes for a moment, before those too faded away, leaving him in the dark once again. Carlos rubbed some warmth back into his hands, eager to leave this strange cavern behind. He turned around, readying himself to dive through the hole – and stopped short.The hole had disappeared. The wall was slick and smooth once again; it was frozen over so cleanly that Carlos wondered if the last hour had been some kind of fever dream, if his desperate mind had conjured some way to escape.Then he glanced down at the lantern in his hand, and he knew that the truth was somehow worse.He set the lantern back down on the podium, watching as the beams of light bounced from crystal to crystal, tracing their way to the wall. He watched the light bore through the ice and into the darkness beyond. He removed his backpack, ate the last of his food and drank the last of his water. He braced himself for what was coming.Carlos lunged forward, as though decisive action would be enough to banish his fear. There was a sharp searing heat on his back as he stepped in front of the light, but it was immediately replaced by the chill of the ice as he clawed his way into the hole.Carlos had to press himself flat to fit through the opening, there wasn’t even enough room to crawl on his hands and knees. He had to pull himself along by his fingertips, his nails breaking as he scrambled to gain purchase on the ice. Water dripped down the sides of the tunnel, soaking into his clothes and hair, running down his face like tears. Only brief flashes of light managed to sneak past his body, and he couldn’t even see the end of the tunnel.He crawled for ages, the tunnel growing closer around him until he was sure he would suffocate. He left streaks of hot blood on the ice, his fingertips raw and broken from the cold. Frost and copper filled his lungs, the scent of winter-death so strong that he choked on it. Carlos closed his eyes and thought about resting, about letting go and letting the cold overwhelm him – until he was cold and still in the dark – as cold and still as his mother had always wanted him to be – and maybe then she would finally be satisfied –And then his fingertips touched open air. Carlos opened his eyes, but he could see nothing in the darkness beyond – but anything had to be better than this tunnel. He slithered out headfirst, palms open to break his landing on the harsh stone floor. His body hit the ground with a graceless crack, his bones jolted in their sockets.Carlos rolled onto his back, breathing hard. The beam of light shone through the tunnel, now that his body was no longer blocking it. It barely seemed to touch the dark around it; he could only see another a few feet in front of him before the light petered out. The floor was smooth black stone, glittering with faint chips of mica like stars in the night sky. Beyond that, there was only the obscurity of darkness.He had no food, no water, no lantern. What choice did he have but to go on?Carlos dragged himself to his feet, shuddering at the cold touch of his sodden clothes. He drank in the light for a moment, remembering warmth and spring sunshine and a world beyond this one, a world that he needed to find once again.And then he tore himself away before he could waste any more precious time.Carlos moved through the darkness carefully, arms extended, feet shuffled along the floor to search for obstacles – in fact, obstacles would have been a welcome relief. There was no sound but his breathing, nothing but an empty void in front of him. Obstacles, at least, would have let him know that he wasn’t alone, that he hadn’t been the only one to walk this path.It was impossible to tell how long he walked. He tried to count his footsteps, but soon the numbers grew too high for him to mark, useless as a measure of distance. He tried to count his breaths, but they came fast and irregular, useless as a measure of time. He tried to count his heartbeats, but his heart raced and skipped, useless as a measure of his life. There was only the darkness that swallowed him whole.And then there was the smallest point of light in the tunnel, burning like an ember in the darkness. Carlos felt his heart jump and he stumbled in his haste, moving so quickly towards the light that he forgot to be careful.It wasn’t until it was too late that he smelled the acrid scent of tobacco – that he recognized the amber glow of a cigarette – that he heard the rasp of her smoke-rough voice –“Hello there, pet,”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
xxv.The cigarette tip glowed brighter, glinting off the walls, filling the cavern with a hellish red glow, and Cruella de Vil swanned out from the shadows.Carlos felt his joints lock, freezing him in place. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but watch as his mother stalked across the cavern – her always the predator, him always her prey.She towered over Carlos, gaunt as a skeleton, swaying precariously on her spiked high heels. Her white mink coat billowed about her frame like a smoke cloud, the fur matted and bedraggled from all its years on the Isle. Cruella took a deep drag on her cigarette, her thin lips curling into a death’s-head smile. She opened her arms wide.“Darling, come here, give mummy a hug!”Carlos stepped forward automatically. This was how to stay safe – he had no will of his own, there was only her and whatever she wished, and the consequences she would set for him.Cruella flung her arms around him, her fur enveloping him, suffocating him. A foul, fetid stench came from the cloth; he could see tiny black fleas leaping about from hair to hair. Carlos stood stiff as a statue, his eyes open wide, meeting the blank gaze of her stuffed stoat stole. The stoat’s head was moth-eaten and worn from Cruella’s fondling hands, and its teeth were bared in a snarl.“Oh, darling, everything’s been perfectly wretched since you went away,” Cruella said, stroking a hand though his hair, petting him absently before shoving him away. “No one to take care of my furs, no one to look after the house. I’ve been miserable, darling, perfectly miserable.”Carlos stumbled back, watching as she gestured wildly, her cigarette trailing smoke through the air. Cold sweat dripped down his back, his breath grew so shallow that it was hardly there at all. A small part of his mind was screaming that this was impossible, but there was another part of him that believed his mother knew all things, that she controlled all things in his world, and that she would do as she liked with him.“Here, pet, let me look at you,” Cruella spun around and grabbed hold of his chin, jerking his head this way and that. Her red-lacquered nails dug into his flesh, sharp as claws. “Oh, look at those lovely spots!”His freckles. She had always loved his freckles, especially the way they stood out when he was pale with terror.She trailed a finger across his cheeks, across the bridge of his nose; she barely missed scratching his eyes. “I don’t know, pet, perhaps you need some more.”The red-hot tip of her cigarette hovered just above the pale skin of his throat. Carlos held his breath, waiting for the familiar sting of pain. The cigarette would leave a perfectly round burn on his skin, and it would join the other spots that littered his legs, his back, his chest – anywhere Cruella believed he needed more spots.
But the pain didn’t come. Cruella whirled away, her coat swinging, flicking the ash from her cigarette. She had always burned hot and cold, but Carlos was left scorched either way. “Maybe later, darling, when I’m feeling more myself. Now, did you bring me that miserable mutt of yours? Horrid, ratty little thing, but needs must, you know –”Dude. She was talking about Dude. Carlos blinked, feeling almost like a spell had been broken. A spark of anger flared to life in his chest, warming him from the inside out. Dude, who had loved him unconditionally, with no games and power plays. Dude, who proved that his mother was a liar.“No,” he said, cutting her off mid-sentence. He was afraid to say anything more than that, sure that his voice would shake and show every bit of his fear.Cruella froze, her back to him. She raised her hand, taking another drag from her cigarette. The smoke wreathed itself around her black-and-white hair, catching her in a red haze as she looked back over her shoulder. “No?”Carlos opened his mouth, but his throat was too dry to speak. Instead he only swallowed hard and shook his head, feeling just like a child again.Cruella swayed forward, bending down so she was eye-to-eye with him. Her lips twisted into a snarl as she blew a gust of smoke into his face. Her teeth were stained nicotine-yellow. “Did I hear you correctly, darling? Speak!”The smoke stung at Carlos’s eyes, itched at his throat. “He—he’s not yours,” he choked out.Cruella stared at him for a long moment. Carlos felt his heart beating faster and faster, waiting for her to slap him, to beat him, to seize him by the throat and shake him like a pup –And then Cruella relaxed. She smiled. She reached out and stroked his hair, pulling him close to her.“Oh, pet, it’s alright,” she cooed. Her sharp nails dragged across his scalp, scratching behind his ears. Carlos fought the urge to gag, feeling his whole body shudder in revulsion. “I see you’ve brought me something even better.”Carlos saw a glint of silver from the corner of his eye, and felt something cold press against his neck. The knife was so sharp that he could barely feel its edge. He didn’t even realize it had cut him until he felt a drop of blood roll down his skin, red on white skin and black bruises.“I much prefer fur to leather, you know,” Cruella said, idly stroking the knife up and down his neck, as though she was searching for the perfect place to start cutting. “But you’ll give me so much more material to work with – and those wonderful, wonderful spots.”Carlos closed his eyes, waiting for the pain to start. It was too much to hope that she would kill him first. Skinning him alive was much more her style.“Well, darling, are you going to tell me no? Any final whimpers from you?”The knife pressed against his neck – he had been dreading this moment for so long that it almost felt like relief, like a release, to have it over with. He would die by his mother’s hand, at his mother’s feet, as he always knew he would. She would wear him as a coat, and at least then he would be of some use to her.He wanted to laugh, and he wanted to cry – and most of all, he wanted his friends, because nothing had ever been able to hurt him when they were together.Carlos felt his mind stutter over that last thought. Hurt him.Nothing had been able to hurt him.The knife was pressing against his neck – pressing, not cutting.Nothing had been able to hurt him.His mind had played so many tricks on him before, he could recognize them. He couldn’t control them, but he could recognize them.Carlos forced his eyes open, forced himself to stare into Cruella’s face. Her eyes were dreadful and bloodshot, her face emaciated – and she was waiting for him.Carlos gathered all his strength, and all his fear, all the terrible things he’d survived and all the wonderful things he loved – and he spoke.“You’re not my mother.”Cruella cocked her head to the side, sneering down at him. “And what makes you say that, pet?”“My mother would have hurt me by now,” Carlos said, tasting the truth of the words as they left his mouth. It filled his heart with a kind of dreadful calm – even if he was wrong, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, so he might as well speak his mind. “So I don’t know what you are, but you’re not her, and you can’t hurt me.”Cruella froze, the knife going still against his skin. Ash fell from her cigarette, and then the cigarette itself dissolved, turning into gray dust before his eyes. Clumps of fur fell from Cruella’s coat
like the shedding of a sick animal, leaving it patchy and mangy. Her coat vanished in a white flurry, leaving her thin and unprotected before him, her skin ashen and criss-crossed with sickly green veins – she was just flesh and bone, just like him.Cruella stared at him, her eyes hot and full of hate, and then she collapsed into a pile of dust.
Carlos stayed still, watching as the breeze picked up the dust and swirled it away, scattering it until it was lost in the darkness. He began to cry.He cried until his face was smeared with snot and tears, until he was sobbing and screaming and retching, until he was hoarse from it all. He cried for everything Cruella had taken from him and all the love that she had never given him, for the childhoods they all had lost. He cried until there was nothing left, until he felt clean and raw and empty inside, rid of all the sadness that lived in him.And when Carlos looked up, a few last tears blurring his world, there was a man standing in front of him.
xxvi.“I’m very sorry about that,” the man said, his voice absurdly calm and polite. “Most people are just afraid of spiders.”Carlos scrambled back, trying to put some space between them. He kicked out at the stranger as he moved, but his foot went right thin air. The man was like a desert mirage, ephemeral and real at the same time. “Who the hell are you?” Carlos looked around, searching for a weapon, any weapon.“If you’re asking my name, it’s Cian. If you’re asking what I am, I’m a curse.” The man sat down across from Carlos, watching him intently. He had long dark hair tied back into a ponytail, and green eyes that seemed to flash and catch on every bit of light. He tilted his head in thought, and Carlos caught a glimpse of a pointed ear sticking up through his hair. “Or perhaps a spirit, or a guardian, or a memory? But ‘curse’ has such a nice ring to it.”“Well, as long as your sense of drama is satisfied,” Carlos hissed, dashing the last tears from his face, well and thoroughly fed up with the situation. He was tired and hurting and someone had been toying with him all day, and he couldn’t even kick the person who had been doing the toying. “That doesn’t answer my question.”“Sorry,” Cian waved a hand through the air, and he watched the movement like a cat fascinated by the twitching of its own tail. He wasn’t much older than Carlos, really, perhaps in his early twenties. A faint light seemed to radiate off him, as rich and warm as his dark skin. “I’m a little vague at the moment. I’ve been asleep for a very long time, no one’s tried to break in here in ages.”“Try being threatened by your worst fears, it wakes you up.”“But that’s why I’m here,” Cian said. His eyes were wide and distant, as though he was staring into the past. “Because our worst fears already happened.”Carlos let out a growl, and Cian’s eyes snapped back to him. He laughed, apparently at himself, and the situation was so strange that Carlos couldn’t even bring himself to be afraid.“You’re just straight to the point, aren’t you?” Cian placed his hands against the floor and the cave lit up, the shadows swept away in an instant. The light seemed to come from within the rock itself, pulsing gently like a heartbeat. “This was once a sacred place, and it was defiled by strangers. This world’s wellspring of magic, destroyed. I was a spell cast as…well, as I lay dying, with the last of my magic, meant to keep away more intruders.”“What happened?” Carlos asked, shifting a little bit closer, trying to examine the phantom more closely. His fears were fading – not entirely, but enough to let him focus on this new puzzle.Cian shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t know when I was dying, and I certainly don’t know now. You think I’m being vague on purpose?”“It always seems that way, in stories.”“Well, then let’s change the way the story’s told. Three challenges were created, so that the wellspring could only be reached by someone who was kind, and clever, and brave – not foolproof, but certainly a deterrent for strangers. Congratulations on passing those, by the way.”“Do you set a rockslide on everyone that comes through as well?”For the first time, Cian frowned, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “That wasn’t caused by me, I promise you.”Carlos chewed on his lip until he tasted blood, trying to make all the pieces connect. “So all magic comes from this place, and something happened to this place. And now the magic is dying,”Cian stayed quiet, watching him intently as Carlos talked himself through it.“And if the magic and the land are this connected, would the land die along with the magic?”“Certainly. It would take a long time for the magic stored in the land to erode, but it would eventually.”Carlos stared at Cian, seeing the sorrow in his eyes, the sudden slump of his shoulders. The light itself seemed to dim, like the sun slipping away below the horizon. “And you?”“And me. Some magic is trapped here, but eventually that will fade from its source as well, and I will pass away beyond reach or memory.”Carlos felt a pang of sadness in his heart, for this person he had never known. He had the answers he had come for, but he felt more lost than ever. “We’ll fix it – me and my friends will fix it. I promise.”Cian gave him a wane smile. He reached into his pocket and took something out, tossing it at Carlos. Carlos reached out to catch it automatically, surprised to feel two solid objects land in his hands.“Those might help you find your way out.” Cian said. Carlos looked down, finding two stones in his hands, worn perfectly smooth by time. Each one had a hole in its center, just large enough for an eye to see through. When Carlos looked up again, his mouth open to ask more questions, Cian was gone.
xxvii.The light faded away in Cian’s wake, and Carlos was left in the dark once again.Carlos turned the stones over in his hands, their surfaces as cool and smooth as still water. Slowly, he brought them up to his eyes, peeping through the holes, blinking rapidly as a whole new world appeared before him.Or rather – it was the same world as before, but everything was overlaid with a shifting, glittering light. Strands of light were embedded into the walls and floor, each one glowing a sharp, poisonous green. The strands twisted and writhed like snakes, like they were straining against something that held them back. The entire tunnel glowed with supernatural light.Carlos sighed, forcing himself to his feet. His body was coming down from all the adrenaline, and the wavering light was doing nothing to help with his dizziness. But the tunnel did not shift underneath him, and no more monsters leaped out from the shadows. Occasionally his heart would beat a little faster and his thoughts would grow a little frantic, but his anxiety seemed to be just as tired as he was.Soon the air was clouded with the scent of metal, sitting heavy on Carlos’s tongue. A clang ran out from underneath his boots, and when he looked down he realized that the corridor had been coated with iron. Carlos dragged his toe along the floor – the iron had been spread smooth and coated every bit of the tunnel, floor and walls and ceiling. There was no way it could be natural.The strands of light became darker, their color muffled by the metal. Their movement became more sluggish as he moved further down the tunnel, until they barely twitched at all.Carlos stepped into the next cavern, and the light grew entirely static. Carlos couldn’t say why, but the sight of it made him feel a little sick inside. It was like looking at the bones of some great beast, hunted and killed and hung up in a tasteless display. The entire room felt suffocating, as though all air and life had been sucked from it.And there, at the center of the cavern, was the wellspring.It couldn’t possibly have been anything – there was a great jagged lightning bolt traced onto the floor, glowing with frozen light. It would have cut a deep fissure through the cavern, if the whole thing hadn’t been paved over with cold iron. The strange, looping language had been carved into the metal, right over the wellspring, and the symbols glowed blood-red. Carlos got down on his knees, tracing his fingers over the metal, the scent of iron overwhelming all his senses. His fingers tingled as they brushed over the symbols, a shock that warned him away.Carlos removed the stones from his eyes, and the cavern went dark. He raised them again, experimentally, and the room lit up once again. The answer came to him in an instant: the light was magic, and the stones were allowing him to see it.For a second, Carlos considered coming down here with half a dozen firebombs and blasting the metal apart, but some instinct told him it wouldn’t work. With a frown, he raised a foot and stomped down hard on the symbols – and a shockwave shuddered all the way up his leg, sending him stumbling backwards and turning his bones to jelly.Carlos laid back on the floor, catching his breath and waiting for his leg to return to normal. So the floor returned exactly as much force as it was given, and the firebombs definitely wouldn’t work. Good to know.Carlos staggered to his feet, knowing he had to find his friends soon or his body would just give up. He leaped across the wellspring, muttering a quiet apology as he did so, and stepped into the tunnel at the other side of the cavern – and he was met with a sudden flash of daylight at the end of the tunnel.Carlos shoved the seeing stones into his pocket and darted forward, the sunlight filling him with a new burst of energy. The tunnel sloped steeply upward, growing narrower as it went, and Carlos clawed and scratched his way to the top with all the tenacity that his Isle-born body possessed.
The fresh air hit him like a revelation. Carlos dragged himself out from the tunnel, sinking his fingers deep into the soft dirt, relishing the feeling of mud between his fingers. Everything felt ultra-green and lush after his time underground. Carlos rolled onto his back, squirming about just to feel the soft touch of grass against his skin. The world opened up to him again, with nothing but the great aching sky above him.Carlos blinked hard, letting his eyes adjust to the sunlight, and realized that he was still in the valley. The white stone walls towered up above him, gleaming in the noonday sun – he had been gone for an hour or two, if he was reading the sun correctly through the mist. Carlos sat up, feeling about for the hole he had just crawled through, and found nothing but solid earth.Bloody unpredictable magic.“—Frau am Rhein, die war so schön – ein feenhaft’ Bild, ihr Haar war lang, ihr Gang war leicht, und ihr Blick wild –” Evie’s full-throated voice rang out through the fog, singing in her native German. And behind her song, there was the soft, hoarse sound of Mal mimicking her words.“Evie!” Carlos bellowed, staggering to his feet. The song cut off, the last notes echoing off the cliff walls – and the sound was replaced by Evie’s answering shriek.Carlos charged forward, half-running, half-stumbling through the fog. The mist was heavy on the ground, cool and soothing against the cuts on his skin. He could hear the slap of Evie’s feet against the wet grass, but he was still surprised when she sprinted through the mist, slamming into him with all the force of an ocean wave. Carlos would have tumbled over backwards, if not for Evie’s iron grip on the back of his shirt.“I thought you were gone!” she wailed, squeezing him so tightly that his ribs began to protest. Carlos could only cling onto her, breathing in the sweet scent of her perfume, feeling the soft brush of her hair against his skin. He hid his face in the crook of her neck, chanting “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay” until they both started to believe it.When Evie finally drew back, she was wiping tears from her cheeks. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but otherwise she looked perfectly put together, as if she had been attending a ball rather than a spelunking expedition. “Come on, the others need to see you, everyone’s gone absolutely mad,”She laced their fingers together, like she was never going to let go of his hand, and led him back through the mist. He had somehow come out on the far side of the valley, directly opposite from the waterfall. He caught sight of Mal’s purple hair through the fog; she was sitting with her back to him at the shore of the pool. He dropped Evie’s hand and ran towards her, slipping and skidding the last few feet. Mal stayed perfectly still, her bare feet dangling in the cold water.“Mal!” he called out, fearing that she hadn’t heard him. It was only when she turned, twisting her body carefully to face him, that he realized why she was reacting so slowly. Her skin was shock-white, except where bits of blood had dried to her face – she had been bleeding from her nose, her ears, her hard-bitten lips. Her eyes were dazed, fluttering and closing and fluttering open again as she struggled to stay awake.She stretched out a hand to him, her smile strange and strained. Carlos took her hand, almost afraid that he would squeeze too hard and shatter her. “Mal, what the hell happened to you?”She laughed, the sound little more than a huff of air. “You first,” she muttered, tracing her other hand over the fresh cut on his neck. The wound was still open and weeping, but the bleeding had slowed. The blood was crusting against his skin. “Go, get Jay.”“They’re still in there,” Evie said, nodding towards the cave entrance. Carlos nodded and squeezed Mal’s hand, just once and gently, before turning to face the waterfall. It felt as though he was caught in some strange loop – he crossed the stepping stones and ducked under the waterfall, just as he had done before, but he felt as though he was an entirely different person than he had been this morning. His body held no more hesitation, only the beating of his ever-hopeful heart that drove him forward.There was a rippling blue light emanating from the cave, shimmering across the walls like light seen from underwater. Carlos rushed inside, practically tripping over himself in his haste. As he moved further up the tunnel, the floor was littered with dust and debris. He could hear the clatter of stone against stone echoing down the tunnel, ringing in his ears.
As he passed the first set of symbols, a fist-sized stone hurtled into the wall and bounced off, so close that he could hear the air hiss as it went by. As he rounded the slight bend in the tunnel, he could see two silhouettes in the darkness, illuminated by a ball of blue light that hung in the air, revolving slowly as it threw out waves of light. He saw Jane flick her wand – a stone detached itself from the wall and floated down into Jay’s waiting hands. Their shoulders were slumped in exhaustion; Jane’s dress was torn and stained with dust. They had made a sizable dent in the wall of stone, but it seemed as though Jane’s magic was the only thing stopping more rocks from tumbling down to fill the gap.Jay heaved the stone away without looking over his shoulder; it banged into the floor by Carlos’s feet and rebounded, nearly taking him out at the shins. “Hey!” Carlos shouted – he was going to add “are you trying to kill me,” but then Jay turned around and all words deserted Carlos.“Hey,” was the only thing that came out of his mouth, so soft that it was nearly a whisper, hanging like a ghost in the space between them. And then he was running forward, body light with delirium, dizzy with relief, his heart so full that there was no room for fear.He crashed into Jay – or Jay crashed into him – or it didn’t matter, they were twisted so close together that they were like one person. Jay’s clever hands were shaking, knotted up in Carlos’s shirt. Carlos felt fever-hot; his knees finally gave out and they sank to the floor as one, foreheads pressed together. His entire world shrank down – there was nothing but Jay’s hands against his back, Jay’s flesh against his flesh – and Carlos leaned forward, pressing his lips to Jay’s lips.The kiss seared through him like an exploding star, a light so bright that it swallowed everything around it. They were here, among the dust and dirt and decay, but they were alive – and when Jay kissed him back, it was the kindest oblivion Carlos had ever known.
The five of them huddled in the center of the valley, listening to the roar of the waterfall and the whisper of the wind as they recovered. Carlos rested his head against Jay’s shoulder, his feet in Mal’s lap, his hands held out as Evie fussed over his torn skin. She had wrapped him in so many bandages that he felt like a mummy, but the support was a welcome belief on his bruised ribs. Evie could have done anything she liked to him, honestly – they were together again, and that was all Carlos needed to calm his aching heart.“So you met a…a ghost?” Jane said, her brow furrowed as she tried to straighten out the facts of Carlos’s story. She was lying down in the grass with the rest of them, all her proper Auradon posture gone. She looked different, in a way that Carlos couldn’t quite place – maybe it was the new confidence in her voice, or the sense of purpose that filled her movements. Maybe it was the energy that seemed to buzz from her skin, like lightning, like fireworks, like magic.“I don’t know. He said he was a curse, but he was kind, and he gave me these.” Carlos pulled the seeing stones out of his pocket, holding them up to his eyes. The valley lit up, a harsh light glowing from the stones, red and green mingling together like the warning colors on a poisonous animal. “Mal, there’s something wrong here. That entire cave was covered in cold iron.”He felt Mal go stiff, her hand clamping down on his ankle. Cold iron was poison and paralytic to fae and magic alike, its touch cruel and biting.“We need a plan. We need to fix this,” Mal said. Her words were slow and slurred, Carlos could feel the exhaustion seeping from her voice. “Evie?”“I want to get you back to school.” Evie replied. “We’re not going to fix anything with you like this, and we all need to rest.”“I think I could take you back,” Jane said. She was holding tight to her wand, turning it over in her hands. “I got myself over here, after all. I’m not sure if I could manage everyone, though.”“Okay.” Mal said. “Okay, Evie and I will go with you, and Jay and Carlos can come back later with the horses,” She was swaying slightly as she spoke, clearly on the last of her strength.“Are you sure?” Evie asked, glancing over at Carlos. “Jane, could we try to make two trips?”“That’s okay,” Carlos said; at the same time Jay said, “We’re good,”“Oh. Oh,” A small smile dawned on Evie’s face. “Alright then.”
Evie helped Mal to her feet, and both of them reached out to take Jane’s hands.“Try, ‘there’s no place like home’” Mal mumbled, leaning against Evie to keep her balance. “I swear I heard that one from somewhere,”Jane laughed, her face glowing with excitement. She took hold of their hands, squeezing them tight, and the three girls disappeared in a burst of light.Carlos removed the seeing stones from his eyes, slipping them back into his pocket, blinking at the space where the girls had once been. “Well. Today has been…something.”“Definitely something.” Jay reached out a hand and pulled Carlos to his feet; he didn’t let go even when they were both standing. “So, that kiss. Was that a one-time thing?”Carlos’s heart began to race, a sudden sick fear overwhelming him. “Do you want it to be?”“No!” Jay glanced away, raking his free hand through his hair. “Did you want it to be?”“I couldn’t kiss you only once,” Carlos said, the words escaping before he could stop them. There was an painful sincerity to them, he would never be able to play them off as a joke. “The only reason it took me so long to do it was because I knew I’d never want to stop.”Jay laughed, the sound only slightly hysterical. “Carlos, you are really good at hiding.”“Well, we already knew that!”“I thought you liked Jane!”“I do like her – as a friend.”“And then you kissed Doug –”“I told you, that was so Evie wouldn’t have to –”“Oh my god,” Jay glanced down at their joined hands, tracing his thumb back and forth across Carlos’s skin. “You’re really good at hiding things and really bad at noticing things.”“Excuse you, I’m great at noticing things, what the hell haven’t I noticed?”“That I liked you too?”Carlos felt himself freeze, replaying every single memory in his mind, putting a new context to every interaction he’d had with Jay. Every touch, every heated look, every word shared between them. Looking back, it felt painfully obvious. “Oh my god. No wonder Mal is in charge, we’re both idiots.”“Yeah, we are,” Jay laughed, and this time Carlos joined in. His body was light and trembling, exhausted from all the ups and downs he’d experienced in a day – had it only been a day? It seemed like so much longer.“Come on,” Jay said, tugging Carlos towards the cliffs. “Let’s get out of here before anything else can go wrong.”“You know you just jinxed it,” Carlos said, touching the seeing stones in his pocket. Despite the new lightness in his heart, there was one thing that bothered him. One thing he would need to bring up later, once they’d had time to rest. When he had looked through the seeing stones, Jay had a faint golden shimmer around his hands, and Jane’s whole body had an iridescent aura of blue light. There hadn’t been any light coming from Evie, and he had seen none on himself when he had glanced down at his own hands.
But Mal’s magic was a purple so dark that it was nearly black, the strands tangled and knotted together like thorny vines. They had a stranglehold on her heart, and they were growing tighter and more snarled with every breath.
xxviii.Ben stood at attention in the hallway, staring at the door as he braced himself to enter his father’s office. Once upon a time, he could have charged in without a second thought, a bold young thing who knew he was safe, who knew he was loved, who knew that the king would welcome him in.And now, suddenly, he wasn’t sure that he knew anything.Ben straightened his shoulders and set his jaw, shuffling the papers in his hand until they were perfectly arranged. All the evidence that Mal and the others had found had been carefully recorded, even if some of the details had been obscured to protect Carlos’s privacy. His father had been so dismissive of the Isle children at first, but now, surely, he would have to admit that they truly cared about Auradon.Scolding himself for stalling, he raised a fist and knocked on the door. There was no sound from inside.Slowly, Ben reached down and tested the doorknob, the door swinging open easily under his touch. The office was empty.Ben stepped inside, crossing the room and curling up on the window seat. He had spent so many hours there as a child, usually reading, but sometimes simply staring out the window and making plans for the future. His father had laughed at him, always teasing him about how a king should keep an eye on his kingdom, even though the window only looked down onto the family’s rose gardens.Ben pressed his forehead to the glass, straining his eyes to see the world beyond. Sometimes he fancied that he could further than he had before, that he could catch the light shimmering off the sea, and the grim shadow of the Isle beyond that.Ben sighed and turned to the office, feeling the sun warm his back. The room was filled with a rich sunset glow, the light playing with Ben’s shadow on the floor. He was gripping his papers so tightly that he was leaving crease marks in them, his pulse jumping in anticipation. He glanced over at the door, then to the bookshelves lining the office. They would be too obvious a hiding place…Ben turned to his father’s desk.It was a great dark beast of a thing, covered with elaborate carvings – a gift from the Queen Snow White and her husband. Ben knelt down, feeling just like a child again as he traced his fingers over the designs. There were dozens of twisted rose vines twining their way across the wood, and he followed them under the desk.There, carved on the underside of the desk, was a rose in full bloom. Its petals were scattered across the wood, drifting off one by one as though carried by a breeze. Ben laid down on his back and ran his hands across the rose, down its stem, his fingernails catching on each delicately carved thorn. He tapped each falling petal, and it was the last petal that gave way under his fingers.The secret compartment slid open silently, right next to Ben’s head. It was a small gap – it seemed so much bigger when he had discovered it as a child. That had been the first time his father had ever shouted at him, his roar echoing through the entire castle and sending the servants running. His mother had shouted back, the only person who could catch the king’s attention when he was having a fit. Ben had hid himself away in the library; he had curled up under the couch, where he wasn’t discovered until morning.But he was older now, and braver. It was the least he owed his friends, to investigate this memory he had tried to forget.Ben slipped his fingers into the compartment, feeling through the darkness until he touched a book’s leather binding. He had never gotten this far when he was younger. His heart beat faster and faster as he dragged the book into the light.It was small, about the size of his hand from wrist to fingertips. The leather cover had been worn by time, and the pages were whisper-thin. Ben flipped through the pages; they were covered with diagrams of plants and moon phases, every space inch of the page covered with spidery handwriting.There was a creak of floorboards in the hallway. Ben bolted back, scrambling out from underneath the desk, trying to close the secret compartment and hide the book among his papers at the same time. Somehow, he managed to make himself look presentable just as the door opened, forcing his face into a studied blankness.“You’re a bit old to be hiding out in my office, aren’t you?” The king shrugged off his coat, hardly even glancing at Ben.Ben clutched his papers to his chest, hiding the book behind them. He could feel his heart pounding against the soft leather cover. “Would you prefer I make an appointment, father?”His father glanced at him, raising his eyebrows but saying nothing. Ben swallowed back his instinct to apologize and charged ahead. “I have some new information about what may be causing the crop failure –”“Are you really worried about that? It’s been a hard growing season, that’s all. We’re lucky that we made it this long without any difficulties.” The king sat down at his desk, spreading a whole new strata of paper over its surface. “We’re negotiating with the other kingdoms to bring in crops for the year. It won’t be cheap, but no one will starve.”“But what about when this year is over? This isn’t going to stop just because you will it so.”“Son, it’s being taken care of. Focus on your studies and leave this to those who have some experience –”“You’re not listening to me!” Ben burst out. He yanked a sheet of paper from his pile of notes and slapped it down onto the desk. “Here is a map showing how the disease has spread exponentially over time.” Slap. Another paper. “Here is a description of the magical wellspring, which has been blocked off by unnatural causes.” Slap. “Here is a language that none of us can understand, because it’s been defaced. Something is wrong here!”The king looked down at the papers, paging through them carefully. Ben found himself holding his breath, silently pleading for his father to understand.The king looked up, the papers clenched tight in his fists. “All I can see from these is that you allowed those strays to leave school and sent them off to wreak havoc on the countryside. This is obviously some story they’ve made up so that they can force me to allow some measure of magic into Auradon.”“They’re not strays!”“Do you have anyone who can corroborate this? Did you see this for your own eyes?”Ben thought of mentioning Jane, but dismissed the idea as soon as it came into his head. Explaining Jane’s presence would mean explaining her use of magic, and he had a feeling that no one would very lenient to her after a second incident. “No,” he said softly.“I’m sorry, what was that? I couldn’t hear you.”“I said, ‘no’, sir.”“Then as far as I can tell, you have no evidence. This is all only so much heresy.” The king set the papers down on the desk, looking almost sympathetic. “Ben, you’re very much your mother’s son. I know you always want to see the best in people. But I have been on the other side of that perspective, and I know that some people are capable of terrible things.”“Capable of terrible things, but not capable of change?” Bitterness crept into Ben’s voice before he could catch himself. “Then how can we stand before these kingdoms and call ourselves righteous?”The King stood up abruptly, sending his chair screeching back against the floor. His eyes caught the light of the dying sun, flashing like a warning. “Ben, that’s enough.”Ben nodded, more to himself than anything else. “As you command, father.” He turned and stepped towards the door, yanking it open with far more force than necessary. Before he stepped through the doorway, he glanced back over his shoulder.The sun had just slipped over the horizon, cutting off all the light in the room. His father sat in the cold grey dark, Ben’s papers clutched in his hands, his eyes scanning them frantically.Ben shut the door quietly, releasing his breath in one huge gust. He was clutching the stolen book so tightly that his fingers burned. It felt as though the ground was sliding out from underneath his feet, leaving him teetering on a precipice. He and his father had had their disagreements, especially over the last few months, but he never thought that his father might be lying to him.Ben felt tears start to build in his eyes as he walked down the hallway, eager to be away from the office. He paused, breathing deeply and rolling his eyes to the ceiling until he felt the tears recede. The others had faced much worse than this; he couldn’t waste time crying about it.He needed to head back to school – and he needed to find some strawberries.
xxix.Dawn had only just broken across the sky by the time that Ben reached the school, the sunrise flooding across the horizon like one of Mal’s newest watercolors. Ben crept through the still and silent hallways, praying that no other students would be awake to catch him in the girls’ dormitory wing.He tapped on Mal’s door, so quietly that he could barely hear it himself. There was a moment’s pause and an equally soft ‘come in’ came from the other side of the door. Ben checked over his shoulder one last, but there was no one there to catch him. He elbowed open the door, trying to balance the two bowls in his hands, and tip-toed into the room.Mal was curled up in her bed, two heavy blankets thrown over her shoulders in spite of the spring warmth. Ben could see no obvious wounds on her, but when she lowered her book, he could tell that something was wrong. There were heavy shadows under her eyes, so dark that they looked like bruises, a stark contrast to her ashen skin. She was slumped back against a pile of pillows, as though she didn’t even have the energy to hold her head up.“Is it your turn to baby-sit me?” she said, her lips just barely twitching up at the corners.“I brought strawberries,” Ben replied, holding out the bowls as both an answer and a peace offering. “And whipped cream.”“Did Evie put you up to this?” Mal lifted her hands, wiggling her fingers in a give-it-to-me motion as she reached out for the food.“Actually, Jay told me to bribe you. Evie’s exact words were ‘sit on her if you have to’.”“Well, someone already beat you to that,”Ben opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but a lump under the blankets shifted and Carlos poked his head out from under the covers, holding out his hand until Mal passed him a strawberry. He waved at Ben with his other hand, relaxed but quiet, his eyes still half asleep.Ben blinked, a little bit startled. He knew that Mal considered Carlos to be family, but he sometimes forgot how close they kept to each other. “I’m sorry, am I interrupting? I can go –”Mal’s hand darted out, popping a strawberry into his mouth before he could keep babbling. “It’s fine, he’s just making sure I stay in bed – which neither of you really need to do. Honestly, I’m not that stubborn about resting.”Carlos pulled a face.“No, I agree with Carlos. You’re exactly that stubborn.”“Mutiny,” Mal said, although she sounded more fond than annoyed. “I am surrounded by mutiny and dissent.”Carlos nodded, straight-faced, and stole another three strawberries.Ben pulled a chair up next to the bed, taking a moment to look them over. Carlos was curled up to Mal, his head resting against her shoulder, and Mal was leaning back against him in turn. There was a new cut on Carlos’s neck, a thin red line that was on its way to becoming another scar. When his shirt sleeves slipped back, Ben could see bruises blotching his skin. His fingertips were shredded, the missing skin completely obliterating his fingerprints. But somehow, he looked more relaxed than Ben had ever seen him.Carlos tilted his head, catching Mal’s gaze. The two of them seemed to communicate in complete silence for a moment, and then Carlos rolled out of the bed. He landed silently on the wood floor, slipped on his shoes, and waved to Ben. Ben heard him let out a single sharp whistle as he left the room, followed by the jangling sound of Dude’s collar.“Is he doing alright?” Ben asked, watching the door swing shut. For all of Mal’s protests at their fussing, she kept her eyes on Carlos until he was gone, as if she was afraid he would disappear forever.Mal shrugged, switching her attention back to Ben. “He’s just all talked out. None of us were ready for that cave. He’s less shaken up than I expected, but still,” She collapsed back against the pillows, glaring up at the canopy. “I should have killed that bitch when I had the chance. She should never have been able to touch him.”“Why didn’t you?”
“Mother made it perfectly clear that if I hurt her allies, she would hurt mine. But I had plans for them.” Mal bit into another strawberry, the pulp clinging to her teeth like flesh, the juice spilling down her lips like blood. “I used to lie awake at night, dreaming of what I’d do. I was going to suffocate Cruella with her own furs and drag her body into the woods for the wild hogs to eat. I was going to feed Grimhilde shards of glass, shove her own magic mirror down her throat.”“And Jafar?” There was no judgement in Ben’s voice, only curiosity.“I was going to rip out his tongue, so he couldn’t talk his way out of things. Scoop out his eyes and feed them to that damned parrot. Set him on fire and scatter the ashes, so that no one could ever wish him back to life.” Mal clutched the blankets in her fists. “I am not a nice person, Ben.”“Maybe not,” Ben reached out and took her hand. “But I still think you’re a good one,”Mal was quiet for a long moment, blinking quickly, like she was trying to get her emotions under control. For a second Ben was worried that he’d said the wrong thing, but then –“Please don’t leave me,” Mal burst out, lunging forward, squeezing his hand so hard that he could feel his bones grind together. There was a sudden urgency to her voice, a pitch that bordered on panicked. “I can stand a lot of things, but I can’t lose any of you. I’d go mad, I’d –”“Mal – Mal, it’s okay,” He reached out, pressing his hand to her cheek, stroking his thumb across her skin. He felt a rush of devotion, so sudden and strong that it seemed to blank out every other thought, drowning out everything but the two of them. “I’m here as long as you want me, I promise.”Mal shut her eyes and took in a deep shuddering breath, composing herself. Ben stared at her – Mal, with all her fierceness and passion and absolute loyalty – and thought that maybe he was starting to understand what love felt like.“Are you okay?” Mal asked. Ben realized that he hadn’t blinked in quite some time.“Yeah – yeah, here, I have another surprise for you.” Ben turned away quickly, pawing through his jacket before she could catch him blushing. When he turned back to face her, he was holding the stolen book is his hands.“I don’t know if this will really help anything, but you wanted to know what kind of book my father would hide,” He pressed the book into her hands, watching her face light up as she rifled through the pages. “And this is it.”Mal swept her fingers across the page, tracing out some of the diagrams and instructions. “I’ve never even heard of some of these potions! Ben, this might tell us everything we need to know!”Ben forced a smile, nodding along as she flipped through the book, pointing out different details and snippets to him. But in his mind’s eye, all he could see was his father’s desperation, the papers clutched in his hands, the bestial glint in his eyes.And all Ben could think was that their troubles were just beginning.
xxx.Carlos tumbled down onto the grass beside Jay, letting Dude scramble up onto his stomach and lick his face. Jay fanned out a deck of cards with one hand before flicking them, one at a time, from one hand to the other. Carlos leaned against Jay’s shoulder, the hypnotic motion of the cards and the warmth of the sunshine almost sending him right back to sleep.“Hey,” Jay said, turning his head and pressing a quick kiss into Carlos’s hair. It had only been a few days, but Carlos was sure that he would never get used to that sensation. It sent wild shivers down his spine every time, setting off sparks like a lightning strike. “Mal’s doing okay?”Carlos nodded, flicking his fingers up near his head to indicate the shape of a crown. He felt all out of words, too filled up with all the experiences he’d had over the last few days. It wasn’t a bad feeling, for once – it seemed like he was floating above everything, feeling the world through a comforting layer of cotton fluff. He had been through the worst things he’d imagined, and the best things as well, and he had survived them all.He thought he deserved a bit of fluff, all things considered. “How’s Ben’s holding up?”Carlos pressed his lips together, trying to think of a satisfactory answer. Ben had seemed stressed in a regal kind of way, perhaps more than usual, his head buzzing with thoughts and plans – and desperate to see Mal, he was always desperate to see Mal. In the end Carlos just shrugged, passing Jay one of the strawberries he had stolen.“At least he’s willing to give bribes.” Jay tossed the strawberry into his mouth, letting the cards waterfall through the air. “Maybe he’ll survive us after all.”Carlos let out a content hum, snuggling closer to Jay and running his fingers through Dude’s fur. There was a light breeze rustling through the flowering trees, sending velvety petals raining down around them. He could see Jane and Evie sitting on the other side of the gardens, their heads bent low over a textbook – Jane had her hair pulled back from her face, all the usual frills and bows removed from her dress. Carlos wasn’t sure why she had ever thought of herself as plain, not when she was shining from inside out with magic, her eyes overflowing with kindness.Carlos relaxed back against the tree trunk, breathing in the sweet clean air. He had his friends, he had Dude, and he had Jay. Maybe this summer they would actually be able to rest –A deep hacking sound came from across the courtyard. Jay’s cards disappeared in a flash, both boys going alert at once. Carlos grabbed hold of Jay’s hand, feeling his breath speed up, feeling his heart start to pound. He pounced on his anxiety, trying to control it before it could control him. He let the sudden burst of adrenaline sharpen his senses, sending the world into perfect focus.Carlos held himself steady, poised to fight or flee, ready for anything that might come at them.Time seemed to slow down around him. He could feel Jay’s sudden tension by his side –He could feel Dude’s raised hackles under his hand –He could feel Evie bolting forward, with Jane right on her heels –And Carlos was violently aware of the center of the garden, where a prince was on his knees, coughing so hard that he splattered the grass with blood.