not see.
She remembered being very young again, hiding between the shelves in the bookshop and pulling books out of place, leaving rough piles of them behind her on the floor. Artemis was there, but he had not seen her. He was too busy talking to a woman standing in the shop doorway. A small woman in a black hooded coat.
“It is unfortunate that it has come to this,” she said. “There was nothing anyone could do.”
The woman would have easily passed unnoticed in any crowd, but Kate remembered her eyes clearly enough. They were dark and strange, like black puddles of oil with rims of bright blue tracing around their edges.
“Then . . . it’s true?” Artemis looked at the woman, willing her not to give him the news he was dreading.
“I am sorry, Artemis. They are dead.”
“No.”
“You have my word. We did everything we could.”
“No! How? How could this happen?”
“Anna was carrying Wintercraft. She passed it to one of our people when the wardens moved her from the train, but she was seen. Da’ru Marr heard about what she had done and had her executed as a traitor. Jonathan tried to stop them. He stole a key and freed himself from his cell, but it was too late. Anna was already dead. He attacked the first two wardens that he saw, unarmed, and was killed that same night.”
Artemis walked blindly over to a chair by the bookshop fire and dropped down into it with his head in his hands.
“What do I tell Kate?” he said quietly. “How do I tell a five- year-old girl that her parents are gone?”
“Tell her that they did what they set out to do,” said the woman. “The book is safe. We will make a place for it in the ancient library, somewhere it will never be found.” She walked to Artemis and placed a broken silver chain with a gemstone pendant gently in his hand. “We found this afterward,” she said. “It belongs to Kate now.”
Artemis’s fingers closed around the chain, but he did not raise his head.
“It is not too late. You can still join us. We can protect you. Both of you.”
Artemis looked up, his eyes damp with tears. “Just like you protected Jonathan and Anna?” he said bitterly. “We do not need your kind of protection.”
“Artemis . . .”
“Get out,” he whispered.
“Perhaps, one day, you will change your mind,” said the woman. “You will see that it is for the best.”
Artemis laughed coldly, and the woman turned to leave.
“Tell Kate her parents carried the name of Winters well,” she said. “Da’ru only learned who they were after their deaths. If she had known whom she had captured, I believe their lives would have been a lot worse. Death may well be a blessing for both of them.”
“Get out!”
The woman nodded once, then swept out of the door as smoothly as the breeze, leaving Artemis hunched in front of the fire, weeping in the dark.
Kate was sure now of one thing. Her parents had died trying to protect Wintercraft. Artemis had warned them the book was dangerous, but they had protected it just the same.
“It’s gone,” said Kate. “The book is gone.”
“You are lying.”
“We kept a box . . . inside the cellar fireplace. Artemis hid the book in there when he heard the wardens coming. You destroyed the book. When you burned the bookshop, it burned too.”
The lie came easily to Kate, but Silas was not fooled. “There are two vital facts you should know before you lie to me again,” he said calmly. “First, I am a man of my word. I keep my promises and do not make them without fully intending to carry them out. And second, there is no secret you can keep from me, now that I know how to enter your mind.”
Kate felt the veil creeping around the very edges of her consciousness and she stepped back from Silas, trying to blink the feeling away.
“If the book could be destroyed so easily, do you not think someone would have rid the world of it long before now? And do you really believe I would have burned your shop if I had not been absolutely certain Wintercraft was not inside? If it was there, I would have known. I would have seized it, found you, and we would not be having this pleasant conversation. Your work would already be done.”
Silas’s growing anger smothered the room. Kate’s back reached the wall. There was nowhere else to