Chapter 31
thirty-one
When I reached the very end of the tunnel, there were two benches to the sides between the paintings, and they were both empty.
I sat down to rest my legs and to take in deep breath, to think about how I could tell Lyall that I wanted to go rest. A headache would be a good excuse.
Or maybe just tell him that I was hungry—which I really was.
He’d let me go back to my room, no doubt, except I knew that the moment I was alone I would regret it.
This palace was gorgeous, but it was no less a prison than a barred jail cell.
And there was no way for me to send a message to Rune, to ask if he’d gotten word back from my family—though he probably hadn’t so soon—and to beg him to let me go see him somehow.
I missed him.
I was going crazy all by myself in this place, even if I refused to admit it just yet.
Then wind blew against my legs.
I raised my head and looked up, confused for a moment, all my thoughts coming to a halt. I could have sworn that cold wind blew on my legs just now, like someone had suddenly opened a door or a window close to me, when there were no doors or windows anywhere that I could see.
Masked fae in the distance, slowly coming toward me as they looked at the paintings on the walls and whispered in one another’s ears. They weren’t even glancing my way, and they were too far away to feel any kind of magic coming off them. Some had a very intense aura, but…
Then the wind came again—or just the cold air, impossible to miss against my naked ankles.
I stood up, eyes wide open, ready to return to the ballroom at once—but then I saw the opening on the other side of the large painting of a Seelie king standing near a white horse.
The shadow that the frame, which was thicker than my arm, cast on the wall made it impossible to miss it from this angle—the painting wasn’t resting against the wall as it should, and that’s where the cold air was coming from.
I went to it, thinking someone had broken it, had pulled the frame from its place accidentally or something, but that wasn’t it at all. The painting wasn’t against the wall because there was no wall behind it.
Instead, there was an opening, and golden light was coming from the other side.
I probably should have left well enough alone, gone back to the ballroom, and told Lyall about it or something.
He was probably looking for me right now, anyway, but talk to my curiosity.
It had reared its ugly head, and the kid in me was excited to have found a secret passage behind a painting, and so before I knew it, I was pulling the frame farther away from the wall.
It was heavy, and I had to actually put my back into it, grab it with both hands and pull hard. The frame moved without making a single sound, like the magic of this ball extended to objects as well .
I looked back with my heart in my throat, certain someone had seen me, that they would stop me, or at least be looking at me or something, but nobody had.
The five fae were still far enough away, walking slowly as they analyzed the paintings on the walls, none of them glancing my way that I could see.
Taking in a deep breath, I stepped through the wide opening in the wall and to the other side.
The air was indeed colder, and the sound of the music that you could barely hear so deep in the Gallery of Time didn’t reach here at all.
Golden balls of light floated in the air, not trapped in glass but free to move about from one side of the corridor to the other.
It was the same space as in the Gallery, the same width and the same tall ceiling—except the paintings that were mounted here were full of dust, and most were ruined.
Not just the frames but the canvases were torn on most of them as well.
Fear made my heart gallop in my chest. Add in my curiosity, and my hands were shaking, and there was sweat on my brow before I’d taken the second step in. The mask was awfully itchy against my face because of it.
Though I didn’t pull the painting closed behind me—didn’t dare trap myself in whatever room this was—I still felt completely alone. Like nobody could find me here. Nothing could reach me in this place.
It was both liberating and terrifying at the same time.
The paintings didn’t move here. My footsteps echoed against the floor made of the same marble, except covered in a thick layer of dust, especially in the corners where the light barely reached.
I stopped moving for a second, ears strained, though my heart beat like a drum in my head.
The air was thick with dust, too. Cobwebs stretched between empty candle sconces and from pieces of metal that were mounted above almost every painting.
I only managed to read one when one of those floating lights went close enough— The Cursed.
The words were written in a beautiful cursive and the plaques didn’t even look golden anymore from the heavy dust that layered them. But those words still echoed in my mind as I went in deeper.
The portraits were still, indeed. No blinks or smiles or flutters of fabric. Just frozen royalty staring out from cracked, dim canvases. Most bore faint plaques beneath them, names half-erased by age, and the images were disturbing to say the least.
A queen with her mouth sewn shut. A child with antlers curling through his skull, a golden crown hanging in one of them. A king mid-roar, his eyes burning black—all these with tears on the canvases, faded colors, and ruined frames.
Thoughts rushed through my mind as I went deeper, reading the plaques that were still not completely destroyed: Queen Redina the Hollowed with her eyes ripped from the painting; Prince Vael with thorns wrapped around his neck, most piercing his skin as blood dripped down to his collarbone; King Morvane the Still, which was basically a dark cloaked figure with eyes wide open like he could actually see me and the inside of my mind, the lower half of the painting completely ripped off.
There were more—the Weeping Lady of Midnight, and a general whose name had been scratched off the plaque; a teenager with skin that shimmered like mercury, the canvas cut right below his chin.
The Silver Child was all the plaque said.
Next to him was Queen of Mirrors , and it was a painting within a painting, like she was holding the mirror cracked at the corner, or… the mirror was holding her?
No idea, but it was strange as hell, and I was half convinced to get the hell out of here already—I must have gone deep because barely any light pulsated over me here.
But then I looked.
At the next painting, I looked, like a damn fool, and I stopped, my entire body frozen in place.
The left half of the canvas was torn, and only one side of the woman’s face remained painted in colors that somehow looked much more vibrant than the rest.
God, I was shaking so badly a second in, sweating so much the mask became unbearable. I took it off without even realizing it because I wouldn’t be able to breathe with it on.
Because no way was this painting real. No way, no way, no way…
Yet there she was, half her face perfectly visible to me. White-blonde hair, lips a pale pink, and she wore silver around her shoulders—a dress or a shirt or a jacket, I couldn’t be sure.
But the shape of her face. The blue of her eye. The arch of her pale eyebrow…
Impossible, my mind insisted, yet my eyes refused to even blink, because she was there. Only half, but she was there, and she looked almost exactly like me.
An older me, a sadder me, a colder me—but a me nonetheless.
My knees shook, but I leaned in as much as I could anyway to see the plaque below the ruined frame— clean, like someone had wiped off the dust very recently. Clean, so that I could read the engraving perfectly: Queen Veyra of the Frozen Court, the Last Sovereign of Ice.
“No,” I said but my ears heard only silence.
I said it again and again anyway, my lips moving, my heart pounding, my legs taking me back slowly. Even the mask didn’t make a sound when it fell from my hand and hit the floor.
I didn’t even look at it, though, my eyes on half the face of that woman, the painting so terribly real, the color of her eyes so bright and vivid I could have sworn she was looking at me. She could see me.
The urge to turn around and run all the way back to Earth right this second to make sure she could never find me again took hold of me all at once.
So, I turned with my breath held and my hands pulled up in fists.
And I realized I was not alone.