But the clues were for Midnight, not the Yellows. They were for him alone.
The jasmine. I filled the dip of each candle with the oil, and then, when I lit the wick, the heat spread the smell throughout the room, easy, easy, easy.
I climbed through Midnight’s window every day and sprinkled the oil over his bed, easy, easy, easy.
Playing Poppy . . . that was easy too. I’d watched her. I knew her inside and out. I’d read her cover to cover, like The Thing in the Deep.
I SPENT THE day with Poppy.
I listened to her.
She listened to me.
I aged about twenty years.
Afterward, I found Wink in the hayloft. Just standing there at the edge of the opening, waiting for me, like she knew.
“You lied,” I said, the words out of my mouth before my feet left the ladder. “You plotted with the one person I wanted to leave behind. You manipulated me . . .”
Wink backed up, one step, two.
“You dangled Leaf in front of Poppy and then pushed her over the edge. You let people think she’d killed herself. And she almost did. How could you do it? How could you do it, Wink?” I put my hands on the floor and pulled myself inside. I stood. I towered over her, but she didn’t flinch this time, didn’t turn away. “Did you think that if you created a fairy tale and made all of us play along, made me defeat a monster and become a hero . . . you’d have a happy ending, like a princess in a hayloft story?”
Her red hair hugged her cheeks, long curls covering all the freckles, and the only thing I could see was her damn green eyes, beaming at me, innocent as ever.
She still didn’t move. Didn’t apologize.
I’d expected lies from Poppy.
But not Wink.
I put my hand to my heart, closed my eyes, tilted my head back . . .
I’d never yelled in my whole life. Never yelled at Alabama, or my parents, not even Mom when she said she was taking my brother and moving to France. Never raised my voice in anger. But I felt it building now. I was going to yell. I was going to yell until my heart burst open, blood spraying everywhere. I was going to yell until there was nothing left inside me, not one damn thing. The sound came, up my throat, buzzing at the back of my teeth . . .
I opened my mouth— And roared.
It was shaky, and hoarse, and raw.
But it was a roar.
Three seconds and I was done. Spent. I sunk down to the hayloft floor and stayed there.
Wink came over to me after a while. She sat in the hay, knees tucked under her chin, red hair everywhere.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked.
I shrugged, and didn’t look at her.
The yelling had left me dark inside.
Empty.
Hollow.
“Pa was tall and lean, with deep brown hair and eyes,” she said.
I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything.
“He was beautiful. I knew this even when I was little. I used to weave my fingers through his hair when he read to me. I’d marvel at the smooth, olive skin of his cheeks next to my own pale, freckled hands. I remember running my thumb over his long eyelashes and liking how they tickled my skin.”
She paused.
I sighed.
She kept going.
“Pa first read The Thing in the Deep to me when I was Bee Lee’s age. Mim was doing someone’s cards and Felix was sleeping next to her and Leaf was off wandering in the woods, which he started doing as soon as he could walk. Some people are like that, Pa said. They have the roaming in their blood. He was a roamer at heart too, and came from a long line of them. Bee Lee is the only one of us that looks like him, though Leaf takes after him in all else. There’s no keeping a roamer, Pa used to whisper in my ear, long before I knew how much he meant it. You can tie them down, cage them up like a bird, and it will work for a while, but eventually they will break free. And then they’ll run until they die.
“I thought he was the hero. I pictured him in my head when he read the fairy stories to me. He was the adventurer, the explorer, the swashbuckler, the champion. He was Calvino, King of the Thirteenth, and Paolo, the lost heir of World’s End. He was Redmayne, singer to the gods, and he was Gabriel the shepherd, and Nathaniel, the builder of cities.”
She stopped talking for a long time and just stared at the hay.
Wink was telling the truth. I could feel it.
No fairy tales this time. No lies.
And I was back in, just like that, hook, line, sinker.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He left the morning Peach was born. I remember . . . I remember how the mists drifted down from the mountaintops and gave the sun an eerie light. Leaf called it a fairy kind of day and I thought so too. Mim checked herself out of the hospital early and picked us up from Beatrice Comb, who lived off by herself at the foot of Three Death Jack. She watched us sometimes, before she died in her sleep a few winters ago. We got home, and he was gone.”