The Boy with the Hidden Name (27 page)

I can feel my hesitancy mirrored in Safford and Merrow and

Trow, all of us staring, unsure.

“What is happening?” I demand, thinking of what Ben just

said, of how Will couldn’t do what he was going to do, how

it would kill him. “What is he going to do?”

Ben is squirming in an attempt to throw the Erlking’s hand

off of him. “Let go of me,” he pleads. “Let go of me.”

“I can’t.” The Erlking doesn’t sound unkind. He sounds, in

fact, gentle, despite the fact that I can see his grip on Ben is iron. “I promised him I wouldn’t let you follow him.”

“Why would you make that promise?” Ben demands of

him, sounding horrified, and then he switches to fury. “If you

don’t let me go this instant, Erlking of Goblinopolis, I’ll— ”

There is a noise like a thunderclap, and all of us jump.

Then there is a furious, blinding flash of light. My eyes

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close involuntarily against the force of it, and when it fades

away, the tunnel is completely silent except for Ben’s heav-

ing breaths.

I open my eyes. Ben is staring toward the opening of the

tunnel. The Erlking has let go of him, but he’s not moving.

The silence is total. The sheet of water has disappeared. There

are no Seelie bells chiming.

“What happened?” Merrow whispers. It seems like any-

thing more than a whisper would be rude.

The Erlking answers in a low voice. “He took us off

the map.”

“What does that mean?” Kelsey asks. Her voice is also quiet.

Ben turns toward the Erlking abruptly. He is coiled with

fury. “He asked you to stop me.”

“Benedict— ” the Erlking begins, hands raised in placation.

“He was
planning
this!” Ben is shouting, and his voice

echoes off the cavern around us.

“He said he had a plan,” the Erlking begins in answer.

“That?
That?
He called
that
a plan?” Ben demands. “He never said
that
was his plan!”

“You wouldn’t have let him do it,” the Erlking says.

“Of course I wouldn’t have let him do it! What are we going

to do now?”

The Erlking reaches underneath his cloak and produces

a scroll of paper sealed in old- fashioned wax that he hands

across to Ben.

Ben takes the scroll but he doesn’t look at it. He stares at

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the Erlking for a very long moment, and then he turns and

marches out of the tunnel.

I have an inkling of what’s happening, but I don’t want to

be right. I want to be very, very wrong. “What’s going on?” I

ask the Erlking angrily. “Where’s Will?”

The Erlking hesitates and then says, “Do you know how a

wizard harnesses a great deal of magic, all in one place, all in one time?”

“No,” I retort. And then, just like that, I realize that that’s

not true. I
do
know what a wizard has to do to do that. I watched Gussie do it, when we were escaping Tir na nOg.

“He does it,” the Erlking continues slowly, even though I

now know exactly what’s coming, “by sacrificing himself.”

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B en is sitting on the edge of the cliff. Next to him the

scroll of paper, its wax seal broken, flutters slightly in

the breeze. Ben stares across the chasm to the land on the

other side, and he does not give any indication of knowing

that I’m there.

I don’t want to sit on the edge of the cliff, so I sit a little

bit behind him and try to think of what to say. I look at the

scroll of paper. I can just make out the first word on it, writ-

ten in an old- fashioned, curly- cue handwriting. The word is

Benedict
, followed by a dash. It’s a letter, I think.

“Do you know how I got involved in all of this?” Ben

asks abruptly.

It saves me the effort of coming up with something to say

to him. “How?” I respond and watch him as he speaks, never

taking his eyes off the horizon he’s looking at.

“It involved water,” he says, his tone flat and dry. “It was the only way he could get me to stay still long enough to listen

to him. So I listened to him. How he got me to
trust
him is another matter entirely. And I really should have known

better. All this time, I’ve been trying to teach you not to be

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so trusting, and I’m the one all along who should have been

taking the lessons.”

Silence falls, and I try to come up with something to fill it.

“Ben— ”

“Did you know about this?” he demands, turning swiftly

to look at him.

I shake my head and swallow and say, “Is he really dead?” I

need someone to say it, bluntly, so I can process it.

His eyes are the darkest gray I’ve ever seen them and as

unreadable as they usually are. “That’s a very human term

for it. But yes, a roughly accurate one.”

I think of the first time I met Will, at the Salem Which

Museum, and I think of how he had become, somehow,

the ally I trust the most. Ben I’m in love with, and that

can’t be helped, but Will made me feel safe, like no matter

how volatile Ben and our relationship might be, I would

have Will, and this whole prophecy would turn out okay,

because there was Will. Will who knew more than me, who

was a link to my aunts and the past of Boston, who knew

more than any of us, it seemed, about what Boston had

been designed to do. The absence of him is a cold hollow

of dread inside of me, and I realize it must be thousands of

times worse for Ben. Ben, I think, might not realize it, but

Will was his friend.

“I’m sorry,” I say, blinking my tears away to focus on Ben.

“For what? You didn’t know this was going to happen.”

“No, I’m sorry you lost him.”

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He looks away, back out to the horizon. “So am I,” he sighs.

“I don’t really want to be in charge of this whole thing.”

I pause. “I’m sorry you lost him because you liked him.”

Ben doesn’t respond for a moment. He squints at the hori-

zon and wrinkles his nose. “That,” he proclaims eventually,

“is another very human thing to say.”

And, I think, another roughly accurate one. I stand slowly

and take a cautious step on the rocky, uneven ground, until

I am standing next to him on the cliff. He looks up at me,

watching as I take a deep breath and sit next to him, my legs

dangling over the side into space. The height is dizzying, and

I try not to think of it.

“I don’t know what do next,” Ben says. “I’m hoping you do.”

I take a deep breath. “We should get back to Boston. And

we should fight. I’ll ask random people on the street for their

birthdays again. That seemed to work last time.”

Ben shakes his head and huffs out an amused sound that

isn’t quite a chuckle. He looks around and says, “Well, we’re

at Thingvellir. The only place in Iceland where I can jump us.

And Will’s brought us here and bought us the time, so we’d

better use it. Let’s get going.”

He takes a deep breath then stands easily, offering me his

hand to help me up. I brush the dust off of me and turn

toward the cave, but Ben doesn’t move away from the edge of

the cliff, and I turn back curiously.

He stands where he is, looking out into the immeasur-

able distance, and he cups his hands around his mouth and

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shouts out into the countryside, his voice bouncing off rock

and seemingly the sky itself, reverberating all around us. “I

give you William Blaxton,” he shouts, “known as Blackstone,

wizard and founder of the realm known as Parsymeon and

eventually as Boston. Here shall the force of his magic be felt

forevermore. So be it.” He sweeps his hands down sharply

with the last proclamation, and a sudden gale sends me stag-

gering a few steps in his direction. Leaves and twigs and

even small pebbles swirl around us, and across from us, with

a loud dramatic crack, a crevice appears in the cliff, from

which water bubbles in a steady trickling waterfall. The gale

dies down, and we watch the flow of the water over the cliff

opposite us.

Ben nods, and he looks at me and smiles. He seems much

better. His eyes are a clear, pale blue. “That was old magic,”

he tells me. “Old
wizard
magic. Not my style at all. I’ve never even tried that before. Will, I think, would be very pleased

with the result.”

Because Ben looks so happy with it, I agree with him. “I

think he would be too.”

And I think,
Benedict
Le
Fay
will
betray
you. And then he
will die
. Nowhere did anyone ever mention the loss we’ve actually suffered. I wonder if it’s true, what everyone has been telling me, that my mother was lying. And even if she wasn’t,

Will just sacrificed himself instead, to save Ben. It doesn’t

seem to me outside the realm of possibility.

We walk to the cave, Ben’s steps firm and purposeful.

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When we enter, everyone stops talking and looks at us

expectantly.

“We’re at Thingvellir,” Ben announces. “We can go.”

“Back to Boston?” says Safford.

“Yes. We’re going to drive the Seelies out of Parsymeon

once and for all, and out of the Otherworld as well. I hear

that it’s almost twelve o’clock.”

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a moment of silence follows Ben’s announcement.

Kelsey is the one who breaks it, saying, “I’m going to

need a bit of help.” She gestures to her ankle.

Ben frowns at it.

“Can you fix it?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “Not my kind of magic, unfortunately.”

“Right,” says Merrow. “But it is Trow’s.”

Ben looks at him in surprise. “Are you a caretaker?”

Trow looks uncertain. “That’s what they say, but I…Look,

I’m not
magic
.”

“You’re a fay,” Ben says. “You must be magic.”

“Right, but…I don’t know. What they seem to tell me is

magic is just something that kind of…
happens
. I don’t feel like I’m
doing
magic
.”

I think of my naming magic, and how I never really had to

know what to do— I just
did
it. “It just comes to you,” I say at the same time as Merrow says the exact same thing. We look

at each other for a moment of pleased solidarity.

Merrow turns to Trow. “At least try,” she says.

“Um,” says Kelsey nervously. “Don’t you think that
I
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have a say? I mean, no offense, but you don’t know what you’re

doing. What happens if you do it wrong?”

“I have no idea,” says Trow.

“Comforting,” says Kelsey after a beat.

“Look,” sighs Ben, “I don’t mean to be practical here, because

it’s not really my forte, but Will’s sacrifice is only going to help for so long, and then we’ll be back on the map and the Seelies

will find us in a pig’s whisper. If you’re going to do it, do it now.”

Kelsey licks her lips. Her breaths are labored and her face

is white with pain. “Do it,” she commands. “Before I change

my mind.”

“Just kind of let it happen,” Merrow tells Trow and squeezes

his hand comfortingly. “Like you did when I burned my hand

in Roger Williams’s kitchen.”

No, seriously
, I think. What are our
lives
?

Trow kind of
looks
very hard at Kelsey.

Kelsey gasps, and for a moment I’m worried that Trow has

actually made everything much worse, but then Kelsey says

in surprise, “Oh,” and she doesn’t sound like she’s in any pain

at all. Her ankle, in fact, looks back to normal. She moves it

around experimentally.

Then she looks at Trow in shock. “That was
amazing
.”

I am looking at him in shock too. “That was fantastic!”

His talent seems a lot better than my naming nonsense at

the moment.

“Yes, yes, it’s caretaker magic,” grumbles Ben. “It’s pretty

standard in the Otherworld.”

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“Not unique and showy,” says the Erlking, deadpan, “the

way a traveler is.”

Ben glowers and says, “We’ll meet you back in Boston?

We’re going to need your army.”

“It has been at your disposal.” The Erlking bows low with a

dramatic sweep of his cape. “I’ll meet you in Boston. I take it

you won’t be obscuring yourself?”

“I do not intend on keeping a low profile,” Ben says. “Hold

hands, everyone. Stay together. Next stop Boston.”