to the boring farmers market they always spend hours and hours at, since apparently looking at stalls of avocados and tomatoes and fresh-churned butter is super exciting when you get old. But I don’t really know when they’ll be back.”
“Then we should get started,” Mr. Forkle said gently, turning to Flori and asking her and Nubiti to keep watch for the parents’ return.
Amy and Sophie shared a long look—and Amy seemed every bit as nervous as Sophie felt. But her determination was clear.
“We’re doing this?” she asked Sophie.
Sophie fought the urge to tug on her eyelashes. “Yeah, I guess we are.”
Amy nodded, taking Sophie’s hand.
And they clung to each other as Amy opened the front door wider and they stepped aside to let Mr. Forkle take the lead.
SIXTEEN
I SHOULD WARN YOU THAT THIS process will be painful,” Mr. Forkle said, his wheezy voice slicing through the silence of Amy’s dim bedroom.
Sophie jolted off the bed, where she’d been lying beside her sister, attempting to relax. “Why? It didn’t hurt when you gave my other memory back.”
“Yes, but that moment didn’t involve this level of pain,” Mr. Forkle reminded her. “And I can’t separate the visuals from the sensations that go with them. It all comes back together—though you’ll only experience a shadow of what you endured the first time, since our brains have a way of filtering trauma to help us move past it. And the pain will fade once the memory settles into the correct place in your mental timeline and no longer feels present. But you both need to prepare yourselves for some intense discomfort. Especially you, Amy.”
“Oh good,” Amy mumbled. “You know, you left that part out when you explained this to me.”
“Same,” Sophie said, narrowing her eyes at Mr. Forkle.
Sandor added a goblin death glare from the doorway.
Mr. Forkle raised his hands, giving them all the universal What? gesture. “Does it change anything?”
Sophie and Sandor said “yes” at the same time that Amy said “no.”
“Seriously?” Sophie asked her.
Amy looked just as stunned by Sophie’s answer. “You really don’t want your memory back anymore?”
“I didn’t mean it changed anything for me,” Sophie clarified, earning a snort of protest from Sandor. “I still need to know what happened. But you don’t—and if it’s going to cause intense pain, why would you put yourself through that?”
Amy sat up to face her, probably trying to look strong and confident as she told Sophie, “We’ve been over this already.”
But the way she’d bent her legs crisscross-applesauce style made her look very, very young.
“Please, Amy,” Sophie whispered. “Don’t be so stubborn. Just let me go and—”
“No!” Amy caught Sophie’s wrist before Sophie could grab her home crystal, throw open the curtains they’d drawn to make the room feel more private, and leap far, far away. “I can handle a few minutes of pain, Sophie.”
“How do you know?” Sophie countered.
Amy shrugged. “I got through it the first time, didn’t I?”
“Not necessarily,” Sandor argued. “The Black Swan took this memory away for a reason.”
“The pain had nothing to do with that,” Mr. Forkle insisted. “Sparing you both the trauma was a bonus—not the necessity.”
“And what was the ‘necessity’?” Sandor demanded.
“That will be obvious once I return the memory,” Mr. Forkle told him, earning himself another vicious goblin glare.
“See?” Amy said to Sophie, as if they’d somehow solved everything.
Sophie shook her head, trying—and failing—to pull her wrist free from Amy’s death grip. “I don’t understand why you want to remember me hurting you.”
“Because that part doesn’t matter. It was an accident,” Amy reminded her.
“Not completely.” Fresh tears stung Sophie’s eyes as she scraped together the words for her confession. “I’ve had one flashback from that moment, and… it was of you begging me to stop whatever I was doing. I’m assuming that means I had some control over what was happening.”
“Wrong,” Mr. Forkle told her. “It was… an unanticipated chain reaction.”
“Yeah, well, that chain reaction had me make a six-year-old scream in pain,” Sophie snapped back, twisting her arm a different way and wondering if her sister had figured out how to channel strength when she lived with the elves because seriously—how was she so strong? “Everyone realizes that, right? Amy was just a kid.”
“So were you,” Mr. Forkle noted. “You were a terrified nine-year-old with no idea what was going on or how to stop it. In fact, you couldn’t stop it. So there was no fault in the situation. Just unfortunate happenstance that I wish I’d anticipated. Truthfully, if anyone’s to blame, it’s