Chapter 27
WHAT DO YOU SEEK?
“Wait.” Something on the last page of the diary caught my eye. “He said he was working to destroy the treaty. Where is it?”
Elden shook his head. “No one has seen it for centuries.”
“Elayna,” I muttered as I stared at the human queen in the painting on the wall before me.
A warmth filled me. A tender knowing I had begun to associate with my magic burned in my heart.
Was my magic leading me to an answer? One only another human woman would look toward?
Toward another human woman who had somehow earned the love of the Elf King?
“Elayna?” Elden asked, his white eyebrows knit in confusion. “She’s the key.” I nodded, that same warmth filling me. “I know it.”
I stood and ran to the mural.
The human queen had looked familiar upon my first glance, but I hadn’t taken the time to study her.
It was now that I recognized where I’d seen her before.
Queen Elayna, first human queen to the realm of Ravensong, was the same woman from the scrolls from the library back in Elkhaven.
She was the painter. The artist with magic.
Her signature was an “E” with a sword passing through it.
I’d seen it spoken of in the scroll about magic humans.
It was the same signature I saw on this great Christmas mural.
She’d decorated the walls of her castle in the story of her people, and of the elves.
Her love brought both human and elf together. Then her death had sent the Elf King on a mission of destruction.
She was the key to the blight. The shadow curse. Everything.
“Alright Queen Elayna, what is it you want me to find?” I asked the ancient woman.
Her eyes stared straight into my soul, a knowing look across her full lips, as if she saw me through her magic.
With one hand she held a steaming cup of a hot drink, with the other, she pointed outward toward a large arched door.
“Go through the doorway,” I said to myself. “Got it.”
I took a few steps toward the door, then turned to Elden, knelt down beside him and pressed my forehead to his. Warmth filled my heart again, as if this, whatever it was between the Elf King and me, was right. Good.
Though his face winced in pain.
“I have an idea, but I have to leave you for just a moment.” Guilt spiraled down my back, but the only way to help him was to work to find his cure. “Will you be alright?”
“I will be fine. You must go but…please, be safe, Noelle. You take my heart with you.” Elden’s gold eyes pleaded as he held me in them.
“I will.” My heart squeezed.
Sweat gathered on Elden’s temples and he was as pale as death. I had to hurry. I fumbled with my leather satchel and withdrew my own glowing gemstone.
“Be strong. Fight it. I will be back soon with the cure.” I steeled myself and made for the doorway, golden gemstone in hand and satchel across my chest, head held high.
The gemstone cast brilliant yellow light on everything it touched, sending shadows out in every direction like specters. The walls and ceilings closed in, offering a cozier feel in these chambers than the majesty of the throne room and Christmas room.
I must be entering the royal residential portion of Winterthorn.
A mural caught my eyes, along with Elayna’s signature.
Tall trees reached toward blue heavens with white fluffy clouds.
A beautiful brown-haired human woman followed after a little white-haired elf child through green enchanted woods.
The boy chased a firefly delightedly. Toadstools and frogs, squirrels and moose surrounded the image in a beautiful scene straight out of a fairytale.
The immaculate castle of Winterthorn glowed like a brilliant icicle among the gorgeous greenery, hewn from the mountain beyond.
The human woman, Elayna, held her hands out as if to catch the young elf child, but one of her fingers pointed left.
“Go left,” I muttered to myself as I turn down the hallway.
My boots pounded on the white stone floor.
Jel’s potion had worn off in the throne room.
But what of mine? My baking magic? I hadn’t worked any magic on this entire journey.
I was searching alone, blindly through a mystical palace as Elden laid close to death.
No.
A fierceness filled my heart. A determination. Elden will not die tonight. I will save him.
I entered an intimate sitting chamber with little murals of robins in flight decorating the space. The walls were an enchanting sage green. But where was the queen? Her signature was scrawled in the bottom right corner, but there was no sign of her pointing the right way to follow.
Did I make a wrong turn? Was this an insane idea to begin with? The robins soared flightily, as if mocking me. All but one. This singular robin stared into my eyes as if it saw me. It sat perched on a branch; its claw extended.
“Right.” I ran in the direction of the robin’s claw through the sitting room and toward a pair of intricately carved doors. I didn’t need to read the elvish carved above the creaking doors to know this was the grand bedchamber of the queen.
Blue fabrics and flowers covered every available surface. Murals of wildflowers peppered the walls in all varieties from peonies to gardenias to bluebells. My favorite flower.
I stood in the queen’s chambers. My mouth popped open as I took in the large fourposter bed, the rich fabrics and tapestries, the tufted velvet chaise, and rich wooden furniture as if awaiting their queen.
But I didn’t have time to appreciate the true beauty of this room.
Elden didn’t have long. I pulled back the draperies on a large window by the bed, and noon daylight flooded into the room.
The brilliance of the light blinded me momentarily as I allowed my eyes to adjust.
I spotted a fat robin perched upon a dogwood branch, its beak pointing toward the right. I spotted another robin, then another on each wall. I followed the birds through a tall door that I assumed led to a bathing chamber, but no.
It was a grand art studio. Paints and canvases lined tall shelves in varying states of readiness as if the artist had just stepped out for a moment.
Glass jars filled with turpentines and oils lined the shelves and table.
Some with various colored powders and distilled liquids, all with labels long-unreadable.
A great window to the left did not have any draperies, leaving the light available to spill in.
The full light of day. A bleak and blackened landscape stretched out from the window, reminding me of what we were losing every moment the curse was allowed to flourish.
I could almost smell the rot, hear the crunching of the charcoal-like ground beneath my boots.
How was Elden? Did his chest now resemble the blackened landscape of this ground beyond the castle?
I plopped down on Queen Elayna’s spinning artist chair and exhaled long and slow.
What was I looking for? I’d just stumbled across the long-dead queen’s most prized room.
I expected it was a room very few had ever laid eyes on.
It wasn’t tidy, nor was it messy. It was very like my kitchen back home.
Much like my kitchen back in Elkhaven. Loved, used, and well worn. A place of creativity and solace.
Across from where I sat, a human woman gazed at me through knowing eyes, brown braids curling down one shoulder. I jumped, until I realized, hand over my heart, that it was only a painting. It was a lovely portrait of the queen and her husband, the king, and their son—Elden’s father.
They were a beautiful family. The king and son, both with piercing gold eyes, the eyes Elden had inherited.
Their faces were all so smooth, so luminescent, so youthful and beautiful.
Elayna’s human eyes pierced me as well as any of the elves’ eyes.
They seemed to say—why have you come? What do you seek?
I stood and walked toward the painting.
“I seek a cure,” I said aloud to the woman’s painted portrait. I didn’t know what I expected, but I did have hope that some kind of magic would exist, and would present itself right now in my most desperate time of need.
“Please,” I said into the silence. “I need to save Elden.”
Nothing followed in the wake of my forceful words but deathly quiet…
and a pair of brown eyes? The umber eyes of the queen shifted ever so slightly.
Instead of penetrating me with her gaze, she now looked past me to something beyond.
I turned about and looked in the same direction, my heart in my throat.
The words “Hope, Peace, and Love” were painted above a beautiful mural of the castle.
The castle of Winterthorn. In the mural, the grounds sprawled with giant green trees, and the lake shone with an effervescent glow.
An elf child played near the water and a human queen and her Elf King strode along a winding path.
Their hearts all glowed with a bright golden light.
It was the same kind of mural I’d seen dotted about the palace.
Here, Elayna had painted her vision of what hope, peace, and love looked like for her.
What did it look like to me?
I thought on the question as a warmth filled me.
It looked like a beautiful Christmas spent gathered around the hearth with Daisy and mother.
But now I could no longer deny the ache I felt in my heart. My family no longer felt complete. Someone was missing from the picture.
Elden.
I thought of him then. Had I ever stopped thinking of him?
Of how he and I had danced among the fair folk of Spindlewood.
Of how he’d held me that night when I’d been freezing cold.
He’d protected me through the storm. He’d befriended and saved each of the maidens, giving them true purpose.
He’d transformed into a mighty beast and fought off a monster, just to give me a chance to live.
“You have warmed my heart little by little every day until I no longer know myself. I no longer see myself alone, but with you…forever.”
A warm fire spread through my heart. The light of hope. The hope I’d wished into that first pastry I’d given the king back in my own kitchen. The calm of peace. The peace I’d wished the king when I’d made the magic tarts with Aldaar. Those were the magic spells I’d woven through my baking.
I felt it as strongly as I felt my warm fire grow hot. Felt it roar through me at last. The true warmth of…love.
I reached out and touched the glowing gold surrounding Queen Elayna’s heart and, to my shock, the entire mural dripped from the surface, as if I’d thrown a bucket of water on it.
I jumped back in horror, but the painting was not destroyed.
No, it morphed and changed reflecting me back at myself.
I looked in wonder at my likeness. This was not anything like a reflection in a mirror, this was as if I was one of Elayna’s magic moving murals.
In the painting, I smiled and held a glass jar of dark brown nibs and a large scroll as if I could reach out and pluck them from my painted grasp.
I was so astonished by the magic that I did as I was bidden. I reached out, and to my utter amazement, I felt cool smooth glass and dry paper beneath my fingers. Curious brown nibs sat in the jar in my hands. I did not know what was in the jar, but I did have an idea of what the scroll contained.
The treaty.
The king had found a way to weaponize the treaty, to falsify it and plunge the elf and human worlds into distrust and ruin. With both the treaty and the brown nibs, did I now hold the two keys to the cure in my hands?
“Thank you!” I gushed as my own portrait morphed back into the happy smile of the king and queen strolling down a dirt path, following their white-haired elf child on the castle grounds.
I turned from the mural, jar and scroll in hand, and ran to Elden. I had the cure to this disease. And what was more? I knew exactly what I needed to do.