Chapter Eleven
LOLA
I fling my arms around Estelle, squealing.
“Look at you and your sassy thief moves!” she cries, crushing me against her. “You could have killed me!”
When we finally break apart, Estelle pulls her hood fully back, letting her dark brown coils bounce free. Her ochre eyes glimmer golden in the morning sunlight, and she is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in months.
“What are you doing here?” I ask breathlessly, perching on the edge of Nic’s bed and grasping her hands.
“I could ask you the same question.” She squeezes my palms, settling onto the sheets facing me and crossing her legs.
“Well, I never left Aethera,” I say with a pointed grin.
She laughs, glancing past me to the orchids I’ve kept watered since Nic left. “Where did the Liar go? Why did he shut down his casino?”
My joy deflates as though pricked with a needle. Why is she sidestepping?
“I’m not sure,” I say, defenses rising. “Why do you ask?”
“I saw you won the tournament!” Her eyes dance, but my stomach sinks.
This feels like when Enzo maneuvers around my questions to withhold information. I let it slide for years, a mistake I swore to myself I’d never make again.
“I did,” I say through a throat stuffed with cotton. “I won.”
“The Liar listened to you? He’s your ally now?” Her words pull me back to when she helped me sneak into the casino.
“No, actually. He . . .” I swallow, tugging my hands out of hers and mopping them across my face. The last thing I want to do is relive the painful conversation Nic and I had after that. “How did you get inside the casino? There are a million wards up to keep people out . . .”
She shrugs. “Does it matter? The point is that we’re here. And now we can help each other!”
“Help each other do what, exactly?”
“I’m looking for the brothers. You have to have some idea where they are.”
I recoil as though slapped. Of course this is about the brothers. Everything always is. “Why?”
She seems to realize my smile has gone, because her own cheery demeanor fades. She chews on her lip.
“Look, Estelle.” I push off the bed. “I am happy to see you. I’ve been hoping we’d cross paths again, but .
. .” I sigh, dragging my gaze away from her to the multicolor light refracting through the windows.
“I’ve spent my whole life begging for people to be up front with me and trusting them even when they weren’t, and after everything that happened with the tournament, I just .
. . I can’t be friends—or even careful allies—with someone who is actively keeping secrets from me. I just can’t.”
I feel her eyes on me, and every instinct in my body begs to flee. Tears sting at the corners of my vision, and a lump rises thick in my throat.
“I’m so glad you’re well, and I wish I could help you. Truly, I do.” Sniffing, I turn and make my way for the door. “Good luck.”
“Lola.” Her voice comes out pained. Quiet. Almost like she’s scared. I glance back as she crosses to me, linking her arm through mine. “Come with me.”
She leads me down one level. We pass the suite where I stayed and slow in front of her door.
It swings open on well-oiled hinges, revealing wardrobe doors still open from when she unloaded its contents into her suitcases, trash bins full of the remnants of whatever snacks she ate that day, and a single earring I remember her wearing abandoned on the floor like it must have fallen on her way out.
Our feet kick up dust as she leads me to the wall and presses my hand to the metal threading in the plaster.
Only instead of the cold slick of voratium, the metal seems almost . . . soft.
Frowning, I pull back to inspect a smear of gray across my palm. “What is this?”
“When I was here during the tournament, I removed the voratium strips in the walls. I didn’t feel safe knowing the Liar could cast glamours or manipulate me anytime he wished. I put cinders from the fire-place in the gaps to hide what I’d done.”
I dust at the ash with my fingers. “How did you get the voratium out?”
She shrugs. “The metal didn’t go very deep. It was just kind of . . . pressed into the wall texture, so when I dug a knife under it, it came out pretty easily. I stowed it in a closet I found downstairs.”
It’s just the sort of genius thing Estelle would figure out to do. And it would be the perfect way to enter the casino now, because there would be a big enough break in the wards for her to get through.
“You climbed all the way up here?” I cross to the balcony and peer over the edge.
“What, like it’s hard?” She laughs, coming beside me. “You did it at least twice that I’m aware of.”
“Yeah, but I used magic.”
“Oh. Well, I guess I am better than you after all.” She winks.
I snort. “All right. You win.” I lean against the railing, letting the warmth of the sun heat the backs of my shoulders.
“So, you got in here being forty-seven different kinds of crafty, but why did you go to Moraille in the first place? Why did you come back? And why were you going through Nic’s things? ”
Her eyes snap to mine at the sound of the Liar’s name and consider me for several long moments. Finally, she sighs.
“All right. I’ll tell you. But you have to swear—”
I hold up my hand. “I swear never to tell anyone anything. I’m the world’s best secret keeper. Maybe even the goddess of secrets.”
“Pretty sure there already is one of those.”
“Not the point.” I drop my hand, grinning. “I won’t speak a word to a soul.”
Estelle yanks me back into the suite, closing the door behind us and locking it. Then she steers me into the wardrobe, which she also pulls shut behind us.
“Really?” I whisper in the dark.
“What I’m about to tell you could risk the life of someone I care about,” she shoots back. “I’m not supposed to share this with anyone.”
I settle into a seated position facing her, and she shifts to mirror me so our knees meet in the middle of the wardrobe. “All right,” I say. “I’m ready.”
She takes a deep breath. “You remember the theater troupe I was in?”
“Of course. You quit because you found somewhere you wanted to stay.”
“Yes. I found Laurel.”
The name punches through me, bringing with it the sting of jealousy, the prick of curiosity, and the weight of Nic’s sadness when he spoke of her.
The first girl he loved, whose name was engraved on a ring he kept on a necklace in his nightstand.
Who stood by him as he tried to put a bullet in my head.
“Laurel,” I repeat like I’ve never heard of her.
“The theater troupe stopped in one of those tiny villages on the outskirts of Moraille. One night, after the show, I decided to go exploring. I stopped near a dumpster, and a girl around my age climbed out.” The strip of light coming from between the wardrobe doors slants across Estelle’s smile.
“She scared me half to death. Thought she was a ghost.” Her mirth fades. “She glowed.”
“Glowed?” I repeat, confused.
“Her hands were covered in slivers of voratium. But that wasn’t the only thing. You remember the Liar’s scar?”
I wish I could stop remembering it. I nod.
“She had the same thing on her arms. A spiderweb of glowing light like his.”
I pull on my lower lip. “What was it?”
“She didn’t tell me right away. In fact, she was terrified at first. Sprinted away from me like she was afraid I’d hurt her. So the next night, I gathered up some rolls and fruit from our supply and wandered the streets again until I found her.”
I try to imagine the ethereal village as she describes the nights that followed, how she would bring out food for Laurel every evening, and how, as time passed, they became friends.
“It wasn’t long before the troupe was ready to move on. But I wasn’t,” she goes on. “I knew once I left, Laurel would go back to scrounging for scraps.”
“So you stayed in Moraille when the troupe left?”
“I got a job in town working for a seamstress. It was something Laurel couldn’t do because of the voratium on her hands. People asked too many questions.”
“Why did she have that voratium on her hands?”
Estelle’s eyes dart up to mine in the dark. “It was the moonshard.”
“The moonshard?” I gape. “Like . . . the moonshard?”
“The very one. She was there the night the Liar and the Thief tried to steal it.”
“No,” I say, my voice distant and wobbly. “It was just Enzo and Nic . . .” But I don’t say more. Because I already know the story Enzo told me wasn’t entirely true, though he seemed to believe it. Something happened that I don’t know. Something Enzo doesn’t know, either.
Estelle shakes her head. “Laurel tried to stop them. Nic dropped the shard, and it broke on her hands.”
It broke.
It broke.
My mind whirs. Is that why the brothers are cursed? Why their magic comes at such a steep cost?
“What did that do to Laurel?” I ask, my voice a squeak.
“Gave her powers, just like the Devious.” Estelle licks her lips. “She can control people’s bodies.”
I stare at her, suddenly faint. “Oh, that’s all?”
She gives a feeble laugh. “In the beginning, it was this cool trick she could use to get people to do things for us. But then she started to . . . change.” Estelle takes a deep breath, shuddering.
“She struggled for a long time with the fact that the moonshard existed and that magic was real. She tried to dig the power out of her, convinced it was something from the Deep, that the Gods Below were trying to drag her away. But the more shame she felt, the more her magic seemed to . . . feed on her emotions. Her pride. Her anger.” Estelle pauses, dropping her voice to a whisper.
“One day, when I was out getting food, she tried coming back here to Aethera. To look for her father.”
“What happened?”
Estelle shakes her head. “All she told me when she returned was that he’d died. She wouldn’t say how.”
“Stars,” I curse under my breath.
Estelle’s eyes gleam with tears as she stares somewhere past me.
“No matter how many times I reassured her that whatever happened to him wasn’t her fault, she was never the same after that.
Soon, she started talking about how the gods must have sent her this magic for a purpose.
And perhaps what happened with her father had been the gods channeling their will through her. ”
“That . . . almost makes sense.”
Estelle nods. “It was the only way she could live with her guilt, I think. But the more she dwelled on it, the more she became convinced the gods had called her to cleanse the world of wickedness in their name. That’s why I decided to compete in the tournament last year.
I wanted to use the Unbreakable Lie to make her believe whatever happened with her father hadn’t been her fault.
My idea was that if she no longer carried the guilt, she wouldn’t be so trapped trying to absolve herself of it. ”
“But . . . ?”
“In taking away the guilt, she stopped feeling remorse. She became even more adamant that she needed to exterminate people. So the next year, when the Liar’s Dice Tournament started up again, I returned to observe the Liar.”
“Why?”
She holds my gaze. “To see if it was happening to him, too.”