The Boy with the Hidden Name (33 page)

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The Boy wiTh The hidden name

it ought to have been. Try to avoid the same mistake twice,

my dear.”

Ben springs into action with an energy that I can tell star-

tles all of us. He skids into my father and me. “Hold your

father’s hand,” he gasps at me. “Don’t let go of it.”

“Ben, what— ”

“Kiss me,” he says.

“
What?
”

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” I answer without hesitation. Because it’s true. I can’t

help it. I do. And it takes that moment, that split- second

decision in a castle in Avalon, after all of the other agoniz-

ing decisions I’ve had to make today, to make it so abruptly,

blindingly
true
to me.

“Good. Hold your father’s hand, and kiss me.”

I do. I let Benedict Le Fay kiss me into oblivion.

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w hen I say I let him kiss me into oblivion, that is not

just a figure of speech. I kiss him, and the world

seems to explode around us, lightning bright. His hands close

into my hair, clench into fists, and he kisses me like I am the

only thing left in the universe. For a second there, I think that maybe I am.

We are still kissing when we collide, hard, with something

that knocks us apart. My hand still clinging to my father’s, I

look up into a sky of roiling gray clouds. There is a moment

of silence so complete all around me that I think it’s pos-

sible I went deaf. Then the sound rushes up and captures me,

a cacophony of shouting and pounding and clanging and

more shouting.

I sit up. We are in the middle of the Common, with the

battle raging all around us. The light is uncertain, diamond

bright and then pitch black. It is dizzying and disorienting.

The Erlking comes running past, sword drawn, then stops

and backtracks, frowning at us. “How many times do I have

to get you troublesome fays off the field of battle?”

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An arrow lands beside me before I can answer, a bit too

close for comfort, quivering with the force of its landing.

Someone grabs my hand. Ben, with the blanket shrugged

off one shoulder. “The battle’s going to turn,” he says to the

Erlking. “Night’s going to fall. Have your army ready.”

“How do you know that?” the Erlking asks and slides his

eyes up and down Ben. “And what are you wearing? Or…

not wearing?”

“Would you turn off your seductive superpower?” Ben

responds impatiently. “We don’t have time for this. Let’s go,”

he says to me.

I take Ben’s hand, letting him pull me up, and I pull my

father up beside me.

“Did we get the prophecy back on track?” I ask as he pulls

me up the Common in a mad dash.

“Yes, and I know who the fourth fay is.”

“What?” I want to ask more questions, but we reach

Beacon Street, which is a rutted mess of towering crags

of pavement and deep valleys at the bottom of which sit

destroyed cars. And sometimes people. I look away, swal-

lowing back nausea.

Ben says under his breath, “Oh, I haven’t got time for
this
,”

and just like that, we are on my front step.

I stare at him in astonishment. “You were just a mess,”

I point out, because he had just been a crumpled heap on

Avalon. “And how do you know who the fourth fay is?”

“Because my mother gave it to me. She gave me
all
of it.”

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He pats his pocket, where he’s put whatever it was his mother

threw to him. Then he touches the front door of my house,

which opens for him.

Everyone piles into the doorway to the living room, staring

at us.

And then all hell breaks loose. Kelsey flings herself onto

me, while Merrow and Trow and Safford all start exclaiming.

“What
happened
?” Kelsey demands.

“It’s a long story,” I manage.

“And you.” She turns to Ben and shoves him.

Ben hadn’t been paying attention to her, so she catches him

entirely by surprise, staggering him. “Ow,” he says and rubs

at his shoulder.

“You can’t just run off and not tell any of us what you’re

doing,” Kelsey snaps. “You scared us. Both of you.”

Ben looks confused, and I can tell the idea he would be

worried about never even crossed his mind. “I…oh,” he says

and crinkles his nose as if this is too much to deal with.

“And what are you wearing?” she demands after a second.

“It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. Where’s the box?”

Merrow is looking at us curiously. “It’s here in the living

room.” She turns to me. “You came back from Avalon.”

“That was the wrong prophecy,” I tell her. “That’s not the

prophecy I want to succeed. We have to win.”

“But we need the fourth fay, don’t we?” asks Aunt Virtue,

sounding confused.

I hug both of my aunts on my way into the living room.

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“Ben knows who it is,” I say and then turn to Ben, who has

dragged the box out into the center of the room. “What do

we have to do to get him? Or her, I guess?”

“We have to do this.
Kelpie
.”

Kelsey utters a little cry, wheeling backward. My eyes widen

in surprise, and I start to demand what Ben’s done to her, and

then it hits me.

I turn to him in shock. “Wait.
What?
”

“Fourth fay.” Ben points to her. “Hidden. Hidden so deep

that her
name
was hidden. A special talent my mother’s perfected. But what did she tell you, my mother? She gave us the

clue all along. You have a habit of collecting the most impor-

tant things you need. And you collected
Kelsey
.”

“You’re insane,” Kelsey tells him. “I’m not a
fay
. Selkie, tell him. I haven’t been able to do
anything
this whole time.”

“Kelpie,” he says again, and Kelsey cries out in pain again.

“What are you
doing
?”

“I’m naming you.”

“Yeah, stop it,” I frown at him.

“Selkie, I wouldn’t be able to name her if she wasn’t a fay.

She’s a fay. And now the four of you need to open this box

and see what’s inside it.”

“But I don’t have a secret power like— ”

“You do,” I realize suddenly. “Your secret power is
being

here
.” I kept saying that we should step onto the street and ask the birthdays of random people. I should have started

with Kelsey. Because it sweeps over me suddenly, and I should

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The Boy wiTh The hidden name

have seen it so much sooner:
I
don’t know when her birthday
is
. “Kelsey,” I say. “When is your birthday?”

“It’s March 21,” she answers readily, and then her mouth

drops open.

“Exactly,” I say smugly. Then I take the key out of my

pocket, go over to the box, and insert it in the lock.

“All of you, help me.” Trow, Merrow, Kelsey, and I all grab

the key. It turns easily, as if it hadn’t given us all sorts of

trouble in Iceland. And we’d had the four fays all along. If

only we’d known, if only we’d
realized
, if only we’d said the right words then, Will would never have had to—

I don’t let myself finish the thought. We have no time to

get caught up in what- ifs right now. We haven’t had time in

a while.

Time to find out what this all- important thing we sacri-

ficed Will to get actually is.

We open the box.

And pull out four old books, the leather binding them

cracking with age. Each of them has a symbol stamped on it

in flaking gold: a snowflake, a sun, a leaf, and a flower.

I hand them out, corresponding to our season, and then I

flip mine open. Nothing. Completely blank.

“Because we have to
rewrite
the
story
,” Merrow says.

I think of my mother on Avalon.
Your
story
is
the
most
important
thing.
My story, I think.
The
stories
we
tell. The
words we use.

“We have to tell our stories,” I hear myself say. “Words

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have power. They’re the most powerful things— it’s why

Seelies don’t allow histories to be written down. We need to

use our words to tell our stories.” And I suddenly realize that

everyone has been telling me this all along. I didn’t need any

special powers. What I needed was just to be
me
. That was what I needed.

And then the windows blow in, the lavender windowpanes

exploding all over us.

There is an entire Seelie army outside my house, and for a

moment, we all look at each other, and then chaos happens.

“Get them out, get them out, get them
out
!” Safford shouts, and for a moment, I think he is talking about the Seelies, but

then I realize he’s talking about
us
. The fays.

“Upstairs!” Ben shouts at me as one of the Seelies must

name him, because he doubles over in pain.

“We can hold them off!” Safford gives me a shove. “Get up

the stairs and
write
your
stories
.”

I try to protest, and then Safford, right in front of me, fades

into dust.

I scream. I can’t help it.

Someone names me, one of the Seelies, because I feel the

pain, but it feels like it is far away, because I am covered in

the dust that was Safford, who ferried me across Mag Mell

when this whole journey was still so new. Safford, who tagged

along because he was expendable, and because he wanted, so

badly, for us to defeat the Seelies.

Ben shoves at me, and I turn and run up the stairs, pulling

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Kelsey in my wake, Merrow and Trow on our heels. We pile

into my bedroom, and I slam the door shut and lock it.

“Locking it!” Trow exclaims, as down below us I hear what

is unmistakably my aunts screaming. “You think that’s going

to stop them?”

I don’t let myself think about the war going on downstairs.

Ben has all of his mother’s power apparently, and he’ll hold

them off as long as he can, and we need to write our stories.

We need to fix this.

“Write,” Merrow commands Trow. “We need to rewrite the

story. Just like my mom said, remember?”

“Write our stories,” I say. “The story we
want
. We can fix this. We need to find the words.”

I find pens on my desk, throw some to everyone else, and I

sit on my bed. For the first time since the whole thing started, I know exactly what to do. Because now that I have to write

my story, I know exactly where it begins.

One
day
my
father
walked
into
his
Back
Bay
apartment
to
find
a
blond
woman
asleep
on
his
couch.

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w hen spring comes to Boston, the populace always

seems dazed. They wander out to the greening

spaces, as if they can’t quite figure out what happened. Where

did the snow go? Where did the sun come from? What is this

strange sweetness in the air?

The seasons shift and tumble, and we never question it. We

wake up one day and the world is different, the day is longer

or the night is shorter, and we move forward, until the time

when the day is shorter or the night is longer. It is its own

kind of magic, the march of time in this fashion.

I notice it now because, for me, spring really does come out

of nowhere, even more than it usually does. One minute I am

writing down my story in my bedroom while underneath me

a war rages, and the next minute the clock on the landing is

chiming one o’clock and I am waking from a doze. My aunts

are hunting for gnomes in the conservatory and pretend not

to know what I’m talking about when I ask what happened.

I know they are pretending, and I know they think this is

what they should do, that maybe everything will go back to

normal if they don’t acknowledge everything that happened.

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This is the special talent of my ogre aunts, I think: the ability to only recognize the reality they want. And frustrating as it

is, I am so relieved to have them back that I can’t help but

love them for it.

And in this world I have wakened into, it is spring.

I stand with the door open, looking out at the traffic on