“Grim,” says Blackthorn, quiet-like, “if I do it, I do it. If I don’t, I don’t. The only one who can make that decision is me.” She turns to Geiléis, who’s hardly said a word since Flannan told us the story. “This tale raises quite a few questions. What happened to the girl, Lily? If the document’s so old, she couldn’t still be living. But it says she’ll live to see her lover freed. And, curses being what they are, unless we get every detail right, our attempt to undo the thing may fail.” She’s got that look she gets when she’s trying to work out a puzzle in her head. Staring at Geiléis, waiting for an answer.

“I don’t believe there’s a Lily in my ancestry,” Geiléis says. “The name seems very unlikely. I cannot check it. This all happened such a long time ago, and there are no family records. If Flannan’s rendition of this document is accurate, it does not state that Lily must be present for the spell to be broken. Indeed, it’s indicated quite clearly that another woman must perform the deed, and that nobody else can go into the tower with her when she does it. So even if Lily has lingered on far beyond her years—implausible, but maybe possible by magic—she cannot be present when her sweetheart is freed. We should not let thoughts of her distract us from the business in hand. Do you have further questions, Blackthorn?”

“Even if she herself is long gone,” says Senach, “Lily would surely have wanted her man released from his suffering. The two were cruelly punished for what was, on her part, a quite innocent action.”

“But would she want it at such a cost?” Blackthorn’s still thinking hard. “If I cut off his head, he’ll be dead.”

“Think how you’d feel,” I say. I’m remembering that picture scratched on the stone, the one the creature threw down. I’m seeing the stick figure crouched against a box, and the other one with an ax. That’s what it means. Head on the block. Ax ready to chop. “Someone you love, turned into a monster and shut up in a tower for two hundred years. Screaming all summer, so you can’t forget even for an instant. If you were Lily, wouldn’t you decide he might be better off dead than having that go on and on forever?”

Blackthorn nods. She knows what it’s like to watch someone suffer and not be able to help, same as I do. “But she was only a young girl,” she says. “She might not have thought it through. And since the curse is magical in nature, he might not die. He might spring back to life, head and all, as young and handsome as he was two hundred years ago.”

I catch Geiléis’s smile, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve seen in a long time. “I had forgotten,” she said. “A happy ending. A fairy-tale ending. I asked you once if you believed they were possible, Blackthorn. Your answer, I recall, was ‘sometimes yes and sometimes no.’ Which is it for Lily and Ash?”