gotten everyone laughing and talking even louder than before. “If there’s any chance what he’s saying is true—”
“There isn’t.” Dag smiled indulgently. “I mean, he said you’d been doing bad magic, too. There wasn’t no truth in that, was there?”
“That’s not the same,” Emily whispered fiercely, pushing herself from his arms. Dag looked confused. He lifted his big hand in a gesture of dismissal.
“It’s all the same, all hooey.” Dag suddenly looked extremely tired, as if all the drink and dancing had caught up with him at once. “I wish some of these people would clear out so we could go for that walk.”
She chewed on her lip, nervousness making her stomach flutter. Finally, she took a deep breath and smiled.
“You’re right, Dag,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to go help wash up. I’ll come find you later, all right? And we’ll have a walk.”
“Yeah,” Dag said. And then, right there in the middle of everyone, he gave Emily a kiss on the cheek. She shivered, feeling eyes on them all around. She knew this should please her. If they weren’t engaged before, they were as good as now.
But she didn’t feel victorious. She felt nothing but dread, dark and sickening.
Retrieving Pap’s leather pouch from where she had stowed it, she slung it over her shoulder, clinging to the strap like a lifeline.
The fluttering nervousness in her stomach had congealed into sour apprehension. Besim hadn’t thrown a bunk Cassandra. She had been doing bad magic—or at least, he’d think it was bad magic. And if he was right about that …
She considered her options. She could tell Dag the truth, that she had bewitched someone, and that by “someone” she meant him. That’d be the end of her professional credibility. She and Pap could be horsewhipped out of Lost Pine, or Dag could bring law against her. Baugh’s Patent Magicks were bad for business, but a turn in the county jail would be an awful lot worse.
Or she could go up to Old China and sort the mess out for herself.
She walked away quickly, the cheerful notes of “Sweet, Sweet Spring” chasing her into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
The Corpse Switch
Emily walked briskly up to the Old China Mine, jumping from rock to rock along the narrow pony path that wound alongside the darkly rushing You Bet Creek. The night had grown bitterly cold, and patches of snow glowed blue in the moonlight. She pulled her buffalo coat tighter around herself, glad now that she hadn’t put her winter flannels away too soon.
Besim’s Cassandra puzzled her. How could the Corpse Switch have failed, and what was a blue star doing in a mine? But the part she kept coming back to was the part of least immediate interest: the name Lyakhov. The name seemed so familiar. Could Besim have stumbled across something useful? Something about her mother?
Of her mother, Emily remembered nothing. It was not that her memories were sketchy or vague—they simply did not exist. She remembered when she’d first come to Pap’s cabin. But before that, nothing. A clear demarcation—a horizon beyond which stretched only shadow.
All Emily’s efforts to find out more had been thwarted. Her mother had left so little behind. Emily reached up, feeling for her hair sticks, reassuring herself that they were still there.
She’d made Pap tell her the story a hundred times. How her mother had staggered into Lost Pine on an icy black night twenty years ago, just after the first snows had fallen in the highest passes, frostbit from her toes to her blue fingertips. Five-year-old Emily was clinging to her chest, a man’s woolen coat pulled tight around them both.
The timber camp workers had gotten her inside, bundled her up in front of a blazing fire. She had made only one impenetrable utterance before losing consciousness:
“We must get to the Cynic Mirror.”
Pap had been called. He’d piled counterpanes and quilts over the delirious woman, coaxed powerful herbal tisanes down her throat. He spoke spell-words over her, remonstrated with her departing spirit, but nothing was any use. She died within days.
Lyakhov. Could it have been her mother’s name? Then that would make her Emily Lyakhov, as Besim had called her. She’d heard names like that, names ending in -itch and -ov, among the thick-bearded Russians who drove cattle through the passes. They sometimes stopped to ask Pap for charms to ward against curses and the evil eye. They always asked for hot tea to drink, and jam to put in it.