The carousel came to a stop and the music faded away into silence.

‘Ma?’

Rosa jerked at the sound and opened her eyes to see her small daughter clinging to the back of the horse with the golden ribbon. She wore her bonnet and cloak and was staring right at her, tears filling her eyes.

‘Ma!’ she exclaimed again – the only word she knew how to say.

‘Ada!’

Rosa ran across the snow, leapt onto the platform and scooped her straight from the horse.

‘Oh, my darling!’ She held the girl close. ‘There you are. We will never be parted again, I promise.’

Ada looked smaller and thinner than the last time Rosa had seen her, and she worried that her daughter might shrink away from her, that all her patient work spent building the bond between them might have been picked apart by the dowager duchess’s cruelty. But Ada immediately wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and held on tightly.

‘Don’t worry, honey,’ Rosa said. ‘We’re together now and all will be well.’

An angry sense of triumph mixed with a proud delight in her veins. She had really done it. Ada was back with her and it no longer mattered what she had had to do to get here, or what would happen next. For now, she was right where she wanted to be.

But then someone spoke her name, and when she looked up she saw no Spider Queen at the edge of the clearing, but Beatrice Sitwell instead. And she was surrounded by black apple trees.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Beatrice gave the order to the trees unthinkingly, forgetting, for a moment, that they were not her old childhood friends. Yet for some reason they obeyed her instantly and swarmed across the clearing and onto the carousel. Their spindly branches wound like nooses about the horses’ throats, their roots tangled up the icicle poles and the horses’ hooves, and their teeth snapped at Rosa, who shrank back from them and held Ada close as she hurried to climb down from the platform.

In that moment Beatrice did not care why the child was there, and she didn’t care if she was frightened by the trees. All she wanted was to tear Rosa’s creation limb from limb. The horses gave tinny shrieks of fear as the trees wrapped themselves tighter around the carousel. The fact that it was here in the garden told Beatrice that her old friend had won, even without seeing the plaque proclaiming it so. But then her eyes took in the sign above it and she called out for the trees to stop. They froze upon the platform, branches poised and teeth bared, ready to bite and tear at a word from Beatrice.

‘Is it t-true?’ Beatrice whispered. ‘C-Can the h-horse really ch-change a past m-moment?’