“Ask me how long I’ve been gone,” she said.
I looked out the window. “You’ve been gone this night.”
She smiled and shook her head, and there it was again, just for a moment—the wild glint in her eye. “I’ve been gone over two months.”
She had hit her head, I thought, or been driven mad by fear. People would cross the road when they saw her, after what had happened to Angus’ son Blair. The curse that she’d uttered five years before was dredged up as a likely cause for the wildling.
I rubbed her hair with a towel, and she gasped in pain, pulling at something on her shoulder.
“What is it?” I said.
Slowly, I moved the blanket from the spot that was evidently causing her pain, squinting until I saw the cause—a burn that had caused the skin to rise up in a livid red circle.
“How did this happen?” I asked.
I saw something inside the wound and looked closer—someone had used a sharp blade to carve four small numbers into her skin, all in a row.
1
7
0
7
I knew what it meant, and what it would mean if anyone else were to see.
And I knew how I was meant to act, now that I had seen the mark.
I was to kill her.
I was to burn Amy alive.
LIV, 1998
I
“Isla!” I yelled, hammering on the door of her house.
“You’ve found them?” she said, mistaking my distress for joy.
I was hysterical. She told me to come inside and I stumbled forward, sinking to the floor. Luna was with me and I wanted to be composed for her sake, but as soon as I saw Isla, it felt as though everything I had been holding in spilled out in a tremendous rush.
“Rowan,” Isla called. “Can you take Luna here and show her what you’ve been baking?”
I saw Rowan appear. She took Luna by the hand and led her away. Patiently, Isla sat on the floor with me and laid a hand on my arm. “Easy now,” she said. “Whatever has happened?”
I told her about the night before. How I had awoken to find a child had come into the house. And no, it wasn’t Clover, and it wasn’t Saffy—it was a child who looked exactly like Luna.
She sat in complete silence as I told her, my words rambling and half-crazed. I was at the end of my rope, the end of my wits. And I was perfectly ready to accept that perhaps I was mad, and this was all a dream.
“She was filthy and there were some cuts and bruises,” I said. “But she is Luna. Her exact double.”
“And she had a mark on her?”
I nodded. “On the back of her knee. Four numbers. I checked.”
Isla gripped me by the upper arms and stared hard into my face. “Listen to me and listen well. The child with the mark is not your daughter.” She turned and nodded at the kitchen, where I could see Luna helping Rowan lay out cookie dough on a baking tray. “This is the one without the mark?”
“Yes.”
“That is Luna,” she said. “The other one isn’t.”
I nodded but I was barely taking in what she was saying. My mind was racing. Isla told me to come into the living room and sit down. “Now,” Isla said, pulling up a chair close to me. “Walk me through what happened. Step-by-step.”
“I put Luna to bed last night.”
“What time?”