20. Lope
20
Lope
Give me monsters. Give me gaping wounds.
Flay my flesh. Steal the breath from my lungs.
A pain I can ask for. A pain I can anticipate.
King of the Underworld, reach into my ribs,
Tear out my heart.
Feed it to your Shadows.
I strode out of Ofelia’s bedroom and down the hall, my pulse like thunderclaps in my ears.
Ofelia. Ofelia. Ofelia.
The strange, delicate balance between us had been shattered, and now I was falling through open air.
I couldn’t be angry at her, not at so sweet and so lovely a girl, and yet I was. Rage pumped through my veins with each thrum of my aching heart. My body felt like it was buzzing, like I needed to run, run anywhere.
Had she always been like this? So na?ve, so willing to overlook all darkness in favor of ignorant happiness? All these years I thought she was like the sun, but now... my eyes burned and my vision blurred.
I’d leave this palace. I’d leave the excess and the complicity and the wickedness behind and never look back.
I staggered against a wall, collapsing onto a nearby settee.
Emotion strangled me. Sorrow. Betrayal. Bitterness. Fury. Fear. Loneliness. They each gripped my throat and dug their talons into my brain. Feel! they commanded. I clawed my fingers against my skull.
How could she toss me aside like that?
Did she ever care for me at all?
We were supposed to be together, always. Her hair blowing in the wind as we rode on horseback to a new adventure. Her heart pressed against me as we faced life’s troubles.
I wanted to be numb. I wanted to be a machine. I wanted to be a knight again.
My mind dug into the thought.
This was all Ofelia thought I could do. Being a knight. Destroying Shadows.
Perhaps it was.
So I’d do it. I’d fight these Shadows with every ounce of my being.
And the Shadows were in the gardens.
Ofelia and the king, they could carry on without looking at the monsters prowling outside.
I could not allow it. I could not leave Le Chateau until the connection to the Underworld had been severed for good. I had to find the Shadows; I had to follow them. Their nexus had to be hidden somewhere in the gardens. The king would never let such beasts sully his sacred palace.
I leapt to my feet and put on my tricorn and my greatcoat, armor in their own regard. My right hand wrapped against the hilt of Eglantine’s dagger, tucked safe in my pocket.
Instead of turning left toward the main palace gates, I turned right toward the gardens. Courtiers trickled back into the palace as the sun was starting to set. I pushed past them, ignoring their little cries of alarm.
I tore through the gardens. The sun was glowing merrily this late afternoon, almost mocking the misery within me.
My eyes roved about, snagging on any sign of a Shadow. A tree with claw marks. A patch of disturbed gravel. With Eglantine’s blade in my hand, I marched through the allées of the labyrinth.
If a guard caught me, I did not care.
If a courtier glared at me, it did not matter.
Whatever came next—if I found this door, if I destroyed it or if I failed trying—I was certain that I’d be thrown out of the palace. After I acted, my stay at Le Chateau would end. My time to find the tear between worlds, to stitch it up somehow or to barricade it, was running short.
The Shadows seeped into our kingdom and romped so freely through these gardens before slipping past the walls and off through our lands. Like wildfire moving too quickly to be contained. Consuming the breaths of hundreds, thousands, without a second thought.
The king had tossed a lit match into our world and turned his back as the flames devoured it.
My every footfall struck against the gravel. I ducked into bosquet after bosquet, looking for something, anything, that could possibly resemble a portal between worlds. All that I found were the wretched statues of the gods. They, too, were like the king, turning their faces from us and our problems.
Playthings of the gods , the Shadow King had called us.
I rocked to a halt in front of the Bosquet du Temple de l’Amour. I looked at the faceless goddess of love.
Misery seeped through the cracks of the stone growing around my heart.
How I longed for Ofelia. How I wanted her to bind up the very wounds that she had opened. I wanted to go to her for comfort, to tell her about the heartache she’d given me, and to feel her arms around me and hear her soothing words. An old instinct wanted me to defend her and call her blameless, but...
There was a fracture down the blank space where the goddess’s face should have been.
Ofelia had chosen riches over me. Had chosen a stranger over me.
Our five years together.
Her kind words. My desperate poems. Every gentle embrace.
Had they meant nothing?
What lay before me now, if not a life with her?
I turned away from the goddess of love. I walked down the path and tried to banish the memory of when Ofelia had been by my side.
We’d walked this way, and we had passed another grove, one that was locked away—
Locked and guarded. My heart tightened like a fist. My feet were moving before I could even think. It was as though my body was magnetized now in the direction of that sealed-off area.
I turned a corner and found the locked bosquet. The large grille covered the opening between the two hedgerows. A soldier in silver armor stood with his back to me.
And there—behind the grate, beyond the guard—was that marble rotunda. The black, isolated door at its center was guarded on either side. From so far away, it was difficult to see properly—but the door almost seemed to undulate in the sunlight. Like King Léo’s six silhouettes. Like the Shadows themselves.
Cold crept up the back of my neck, that old, familiar feeling. An instinct that had never let me down. Shadows were close by.
In the depths of my heart, I knew that this had to be the bosquet dedicated to the god of the Underworld. That Léo would keep it locked, hidden away, the barest gesture of respect to the god who blessed him with immortality.
And that strange, simple door.
All the evil in my life was because of that door.
I crept back from my view of the door, hiding in the shade of one of the hedges. My heart battered itself against my ribs. I was just a girl with a knife. What could be done?
My strategist’s mind was racing—I’d subdue the knight by the grate, climb over, battle the other two guards. And then what? Was I meant to destroy a door between worlds with a dagger? With my fist? There were torches in this garden, but I couldn’t carry one over the grate, and even if I did, could fire really be enough to rend asunder that which was made by the divine ?
I was so close.
I was mere paces away from the source of so much sorrow. The place where nightmares and agony and pain were born.
And I could do nothing.
I stared at that door, screaming within, my heart thrashing, wishing I could call down a bolt of lightning to turn it to ash.
This feeling of helplessness disgusted me. I felt like a mouse, pinned against a wall, while the king, a lion, crept closer and closer to me, baring his teeth. No matter how brave that mouse was, no matter how boldly she stared down her foe, she was bound to die.
This was not a fairy tale that would end happily. It was a song in an undying loop, and I was stuck listening to it forever.
“You there!” called a man—a guard standing by the door. “What are you doing here?”
The soldier standing behind the grate turned, glowering at me. With one hand, he planted his halberd in the gravel, and with the other, he grasped the grille dividing us. “On your way, girl,” he said in a low voice.
Another dismissal. But I would not hear it from him, this pawn of the king. I would not let him deny the monsters he guarded.
“Do you know what that door is?” I asked him coldly.
“I said on your way .”
I took a step nearer, fury coursing through my veins. If I could not direct it toward that door, toward the king, this guard would do just as well.
“Do you know that you serve the man who brought Shadows into our world?” I spat. “That they come from that very door?”
The guard narrowed his eyes. He grabbed a thin metal whistle from around his neck and blew it. The sharp sound rang out through the gardens, and footsteps began to thunder close by.
Reeling, I ran toward the metal grille and started to scale it, my dagger still in my grasp. As soon as I lunged at the gate, the guard behind it staggered back, his eyes wide in alarm. My thoughts were fragments, Run, fight, door, Shadows, escape—
Arms wrapped around my middle and ripped me from the partition I scaled. I shouted with fury. Before my next breath, as I was in the air, I reached back with the knife and stabbed at the soldier behind me. The blade clanked uselessly against his plate armor. The force made the knife bounce from my hand.
In a blink, two soldiers held my arms. I shouted and kicked off the metal barrier, using all of my weight to fall backward onto the two men. They grunted as they struck the gravel.
I swept up my dagger and jumped to my feet. In the second afforded me, I ran, with no direction in mind.
Onward I ran, as the high-pitched whistle continued to blow. From an allée to my left, another guard appeared out of nowhere, a sword drawn. When he saw the dagger in my hand, he lunged at me, but I parried the blow with the dagger. With the moment I’d gained, I leapt backward. Then something sharp pressed into my spine.
“Yield,” growled a stranger.
I didn’t want to. I’d rather die—no. No, not that. Even though she wasn’t here, even though she had told me to go, I knew Ofelia would weep, would plead for me to survive.
The blade dug a bit deeper into my coat. “Drop. Your. Blade,” said the man.
Across from me, the other soldier had his sword pointed at me, too.
Hatred and sadness boiled inside my heart. My hand shook as, finger by finger, I let the dagger fall into the dust.
They dragged me down the gravel path, the door to the Underworld shrinking out of sight as they pulled me away. No matter how I fought, no matter how I kicked or shouted, these men were stronger. Without a word, without any fanfare, they took me to a back gate and tossed me out of the gardens, out of the bounds of Le Chateau.
I scrambled to my feet and grasped the black bars of the iron fence hidden among the hedges that extended like the walls of a fortress. I looked into the garden I could no longer reach.
The guards walked away, and to their backs, I shouted, “You are knights! Your duty is to fight the Shadows! You must put an end to this!”
Gravel crunched beneath their boots as they marched on, unfeeling, unthinking.
“Forget the king!” I bellowed. “Destroy the door, please, please , it’s our last chance!”
But the soldiers disappeared within the twists and turns of the hedge maze. With a cry, I kicked the bars of the fence, which did little more than give a weak metallic bang .
It was as though my past, present, and future had slipped through my fingers all in one moment.
My entire life, I had fought and trained to be strong. To destroy the monsters that plagued our nightmares. To save everyone.
But I had not avenged Carlos. I had not ended the Shadows. I’d never see Ofelia again. A whole new life lay ahead of me, unknown and utterly blank.
And now the door, and any chance of stopping the Shadows, was firmly out of reach.
As anguish crept in around me like a dark haze, I clung once more to the bars of the fence, just to have something to grip tight to—even my dagger was gone. I watched my knuckles bulge against my pale skin. When tears threatened to rise, I swallowed them back like poison.
I had lost everything.
If I thought about it too much, I would crumble. I’d fall into a heap on the dirt. The strings around me, the ones I had twisted tighter and tighter over the course of my whole life... they’d snap if I contemplated for a second too long the gravity of all the ways I’d failed. And I’d collapse like a marionette, lifeless and bent wrong.
I could not think about the sorrow.
All that was left to do was survive.
I glanced to the heavens, not for divine aid but to follow the direction of the sun. I would go westward, back the way I’d come. I was just a body that needed to live. With heavy steps, I walked from the gate, from the palace. Shelter. Food. Water. That was all that mattered.
The sky was painted orange, a warning flame, reminding me that regardless of who I was, pauper or princess or knight, in a few hours, the Shadows would come.