Lura caught her breath and covered her mouth with her hand, and then she looked at me, eyes wide. The enchantment of the spring water would end soon. I guessed that it wasn’t vanity that made Lura fear the transformation, but the pain it would cause Quincy to know how long he’d really been away.

“You can both go back to Faerie,” I said. “The passage is still open.” I pointed to the still swirling water.

Lura and Quincy looked at each other. “I probably wouldn’t know how to live in this world anymore,” he said. “Would you mind?”

“No,” Lura said, “I wouldn’t mind at all. There’s nothing to keep me here, only …” She touched the bag beside her and looked at me.

“I’ll put them in the water,” I told her, “and watch after them …” I recalled that they wouldn’t hatch for one hundred years, “… as long as I can and then I’ll find someone else to watch them.”

Lura gave me a beatific smile of gratitude. I had been right. She had been beautiful. She was beautiful. She stood and held her hand out to Quincy. He took her hand and stood beside her. They looked as they might have on their wedding day. There were even flowers in Lura’s hair. The yarrow she’d stuck behind her ear had grown into a wreath. And he was wearing a tartan mantle of the same plaid as the shirt he’d worn eighty years ago – the same plaid that Lura had been wearing for eighty years in his memory.

They each said “I love you,” then stepped, hand in hand, into the spiral circle and vanished into the water.

Chapter Thirty

CHAPTER THIRTY

I PLACED THE undine eggs into the pool below the spring, along with the Aelvestone that would nourish them as they grew, in the shade of the willow beside a stand of wild irises. I didn’t know what would happen to them in a hundred years if the door was closed, but I couldn’t worry about that now. Every beat of my heart told me that I wasn’t going to let the door close.

I walked toward the door. The sun was rising, the sky pink at the tips of the treetops, the sky above a deep lilac. It was almost dawn. The Grove would be working their spells, but I was confident now that I could stop them. I’d just sent two people to Faerie through a ring of water. As I repeated the words of the heart binding spell, I felt my power thrumming through my body, from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, cleansing me of the wards. Only one link remained – a rusty broken link snagged in my chest – a nagging ache that was the last lingering grief over losing Liam forever.