He winced but nodded.
He didn’t move as she tested the integrity of the wall around her. She built it up higher still, even though her heart was breaking, even though she was filled with rage. She felt dizzy from the effort. Her latest dose of cocaine was wearing off.
Augustine watched the whole while, patient, pained, and far too real. He didn’t plead with her, didn’t argue that there was no need to cast a spell, or that magic was impossible, and when she felt the wall go up, he seemed to feel it, too. His lips curved into the faintest, proudest smile.
“There,” she said, rising to her feet. “If you are a spirit, you can no longer reach me.”
And if he were a man, if he had somehow freed himself without her help, if she was wrong and he still lived, he could walk across and hold her.
There was an old thought experiment, proof of the impossibility of the infinite. A soldier ran at twice the speed of the prisoner he pursued, but the prisoner had a head start of one hundred yards. By the time the soldier crossed that first one hundred yards, the prisoner had run another fifty. The soldier plunged ahead, but when he’d covered those fifty yards, the prisoner was twenty-five ahead. And so on, and on, and the numbers alone would never allow the soldier to reach the prisoner.
But the world did not function on such mathematics; the soldier would eventually be close enough to the prisoner to reach out and seize his quarry. The prisoner would flag, too exhausted by privation to continue fleeing. Reality proved mathematics wrong, and proved infinity impossible, because eventually a step became too small, a space too narrow, for anybody to move and not collide.
Augustine approached, slowly, as if afraid to startle her. He came to the edge of the circle. She could feel his breath on her face. She could see the smallest pore on his cheek.
He lifted his foot.
He stepped across the line.
He was real. He was alive. All her resolve, all the armor she had carefully cultivated over a lifetime, dissolved the instant he reached out and touched her elbow. It was the lightest touch, but the first gentle one she had felt in what seemed like years. Her exhaustion and desperation and loneliness came crashing down upon her, and she threw her arms around him, hiding her face against his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Beneath her hands, Augustine was solid, and he was breathing, and he clasped her tight against him. Her knees weakened, gave out, and she was so heavy, so tired, aching for relief.
“I should never have brought you here,” he murmured, taking her weight in his arms. His voice thrummed through her, a plucked note on a harp’s string.
It was over.
She had won.
She could sleep, and in the morning, her life would make sense again. A whole world rolled out before her, and she realized, trembling, that until that moment it had all fallen away. She’d been floating on her little island of stone and iron and glass, Lindridge Hall set apart from all the rest. But now she could leave. They could leave, together.
And yet …
And yet she did not want to.
Augustine lifted a hand and cupped her cheek, turning her face to his, seeing her exhaustion and sickness. “The surgery,” he said. “You need the surgery, and I as well.”
Jane shook her head. “We have no carriage. It is late.”
“How long since you slept? You’re growing thin.” It wasn’t so different from how he’d looked for signs of yellow fever in her, and yet it felt far more like the night he had bandaged her feet. He was solicitous, apologetic, wholly focused on her. Not distracted, not bewitched. He was not strong yet, and he had not proven his safety again, but it was a start. A perfect start.
She did not want to go back into the world with him, not yet.
“You should not leave, not tonight,” she argued. “I’ll prepare dinner. We can rest here. And I can find a way to fix it, Augustine. I have learned the impossible, and I know I can free you. Magic is real, and I can work it.”
“They will come for us tonight,” he murmured. His breath ghosted over her lips. Her heart fluttered, her belly twisted. “I fear what I will do. What they will do. Let us leave this place.”
Again she shook her head. “The magistrate, Mr. Lowell, they think I am responsible for your disappearance.”
“Then we will prove them wrong with my return. Jane, why won’t you leave with me?”
Magic. Intoxication. She did not want to break the ritual, did not want to give up what four more days might teach her. Or even just two, if she followed her accelerated schedule!