“No, of course not. But if you’re going to write down the tale of what happened back then, you need to tell the whole of it.”

“I don’t think it’s going to make Mattie feel any better. It’s going to make her feel worse. You guys get to . . . do whatever it is you do, which I’m guessing is enjoyable because no one looks particularly ticked off. But all she got was my nightmares.”

He nods. “But if you don’t put our part of the tale in there, we might no longer have these lives of ours.”

Now I get it.

“You’re trying to get me to not make another mess of things,” I say.

He nods. “And if we’re still here, we can take care of Mattie when you’re finished setting the world a-right again.”

“You couldn’t before?”

He glances back at the house. “Not so long as the Conjurer was in power. I won’t say that we don’t want to live, as well. We do. But we are not like him. And if you don’t write us into the story, then the good you did when you were the child you were will be gone. Only the ugliness will remain.”

Now I totally understand what he meant when he first asked me, Do you really think that’s going to be enough?

“But I didn’t know I was doing it.”

“You didn’t know you were hurting Mattie, either.”

I look away from him and try to pick Mattie out in the crowd.

“I don’t see her,” I say.

He shakes his head. “She’s not here. She’s in the dark woods.”

He points to the left, to where the spruce and pine and cedar grow thick, climbing up into the hills.

Once upon a time, I think.

Because that’s how it is in fairy tales. You have to go through the dark woods before you can come out the other side again.

But what if you don’t ever get to come out?

I see Mattie’s face in my mind. The way she looked at me.

I look back at Tom. “I can’t just ‘once upon a time’ this better, can I?”

I don’t have to explain what I mean.

“In this place, you’re the Conjurer,” he tells me. “At least you are once more, now that you’ve defeated your brother.”

It’s funny. I never thought of it as defeating him. I just thought of it as surviving.

“You can do anything you want,” Tom adds.