22. Lope
22
Lope
Misery, why do you follow behind me,
A Shadow,
A carrion bird?
Wait, wait still.
Your turn will come.
I am not yet done.
W ith the last pearl earring I had, I purchased a night and a meal in an inn, and sunshine spilling across my face woke me—something that was once a rarity for me. I used to spend my time sleeping through the best hours of the day. Now, I was able to see all the beauty of daytime. To feel warmth upon my skin.
Everything, even sunshine, made me think of her. My heart was heavy as a stone within my ribs.
I sat up in the bed, weary but grateful for its lumpy mattress and itchy blanket. This was the inn’s finest room, and I luxuriated in it: its dingy walls, its shutters that did not close all the way, the armoire with a crack down one of its doors. From below gently wafted the smells of eggs and bacon and warm bread. As quick as I could, I plaited my hair, dressed, leapt into a pair of boots, and barreled downstairs.
The common room was cheerful and sunny, with men and women chatting at round tables and playing cards. A true warmth, unlike Le Chateau’s constructed merriment. I settled onto a barstool, my fingers drumming against the swirling grain of the wooden bar. As I was trained to do, I listened.
“The Deschamps just had a baby, have you heard?” asked a woman to her friend behind me.
“Oh, how lovely! Cynthia is healthy, I hope...”
“My husband and I just returned from a trip to the mountains,” said a man. “The air is so clean there, and the blossoming trees at this time of year... it was delightful.”
“I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“Mademoiselle? Senorita?”
I winced, my fist clenching tight, and glanced up.
A pretty girl stood behind the counter, her skin freckled and glowing with health, her eyes bright and hopeful, her smile beautiful and genuine. My heart skipped.
“Something to drink?” asked the girl. “Or eat?” When I did not answer, she leaned close, frowning. “Are you all right?”
There was no malice in her eyes. No secret intent. This was not the court, with its whispering and careful insults and deceit. Nor was it the battlefield, where a monster could creep behind me and take me by the throat if I did not listen carefully enough.
This was the world now. My world. One where strangers didn’t know who I was, that I was a knight, that I was a poet. I was someone worthy of dignity and kindness simply as I was.
“I—I’m fine,” I mumbled. “I am hungry, though. I’ll take anything you have.”
“Right away, senorita.” She dipped in a curtsey—a curtsey for me —and vanished into an adjacent room that smelled of smoke, herbs, and salt.
I folded my fingers on the bar and tried to ignore the constant wish to talk to Ofelia. That I could untangle my thoughts with her help. That she could have awoken by my side and would be sitting beside me, bouncing with energy and rambling about the day she would plan for us.
No. I’d never see her again. If I’d been brave enough to declare my love for her sooner, maybe things would have been different, but... that wasn’t my present. I had no one to guide my future.
No one but me. Nameless, with no connections, no family.
The world was open to me.
I could take my horse and go southwest. I could see those mountains the man had spoken of. I could see foreign cities. Lands I’d only seen in books.
Without Ofelia, those places would be less bright. Less beautiful. Hollower.
But I’d still get to see them. And I had a heart full of words that could finally be put to use, describing more than just the moonlight on the fields beyond the manor’s walls. The more I imagined it, the more it felt right; the more it seemed true.
The young barmaid set a cup of tea before me, as well as a plate covered in a thick piece of bread, cured ham, and slices of cheese. I ate with fervor.
“You must be off to Le Chateau,” said the girl.
I stopped eating. Those words, that place, would always be a throbbing wound in my heart. “I just left, actually.”
Her brows raised. “Really? Gods. Nobody wants to leave that place.”
My hands shook as I reached for my teacup. Despite the delicacy, despite the baths I’d taken at the palace, somehow, there was always dirt under my fingernails. “I think I’m immune to its charms,” I muttered as I drank my tea.
The barmaid laughed, and I lifted my head again. She smirked—not like she found my comment foolish, but like there was some common joke between us.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The people in these parts,” she said, “we’re more like you. We see the palace for what it is. Gold, painted over refuse.”
My eyes grew round. “You don’t... you don’t call it blessed?”
She quickly glanced over my shoulder, looking at the other guests, perhaps deciding if there was anyone she’d mind overhearing. But she leaned closer to me across the bar. “The king crows about how the gods built that palace for him,” she whispered. “But my grandfather was one of the builders.”
I blinked. “I—human builders?”
She nodded, her face turning grave. “Thousands of them. The king wanted the palace built quickly. He hired as many men as he could. They worked hard, too hard. Hundreds died. Some were crushed under stones and their bodies were just left there.”
“Gods,” I hissed. This was worse than I could have dreamed—and yet, it was exactly what I would have thought. The Shadow King had blessed the king with immortality. He had not mentioned the palace at all.
Of course. What was called a gift from the gods was only a veneer over more darkness and death.
“The water channeled for his fountains brought a drought in our village for months,” she continued. “We had to craft a new waterway.”
“And—and decades have passed, and nobody has spoken up?” I asked.
“The king claims that the gods are on his side. That he was chosen by them.” She carefully drew back. “Those who challenge the king challenge the very gods themselves. It is not so simple. And His Majesty... he holds so much power.” She glanced out the sunlit window. “The king provides our villages with knights to vanquish the Shadows that come at night. He handsomely paid those left behind from the palace’s construction. We are not fooled. But we will accept his bribe, even so.”
Someone hollered, “Marie!” from the kitchen.
She showed me an apologetic smile. “I have to go tend to some baguettes.” Marie curtsied. “I’m glad you were able to get away from that place, senorita.”
She slipped into the kitchen, leaving me there at the bar.
I was right.
I was right.
The king did not care for any life but his own. For a palace, for his image, he’d let hundreds die and waved off the idea with a few gold coins and a flick of his hand. He was so powerful that decades had passed, and this had been kept secret.
Hundreds had vanished. No wonder three women were so easy for him to disappear.
And Ofelia—
How could she be safe within the king’s grasp?
I dragged myself back up the stairs. With a click, I locked the door to my room behind me and slumped onto the bed, unmoored once again.
For a time, I had fooled myself into thinking I was a hero. Into thinking that I could save Ofelia or at least save someone from the Shadows that plagued our world.
But who was I? A lone girl without even a sword.
My stomach lurched. No matter my determination, the world would turn just the same. Kings would rule. Wicked men would be rewarded. Shadows would fester through the kingdom and kill children. Make orphans. And necessitate the creation of more and more knights like me.
I considered it again. Breaking back into those gardens, once again wrestling my way to that door. Perhaps some guards would fall to my prowess. A cost to save the lives of many. But how, how , could I keep the beasts from entering this world? A door created by a god could not be so easily sealed.
I sat up in bed.
I knew of one being who could close such a door. I knew of one more powerful than a king .
In a blink, I had leapt out of bed and placed a candle on the vanity with its small metal mirror. With my tinderbox, I lit the flame, then I closed the shutters, covering them with a blanket until the only light in the room came from the flickering candlelight. From within my satchel of all my worldly possessions, I found my journal and flipped past poems.
My last one for her. I had compared her kindness to the caress of petals against my fingertips.
I would write another one. Just for her—someday.
All the breath in my lungs was trapped within me, heavy as a breastplate. I sat in front of the mirror and looked my reflection in the eyes.
We have survived so much, you and I , I thought. I was grateful for the scar on my face; proof that I’d escaped death. Proud of my lips, capable of speaking sharply and sweetly. The eyes that had seen horrors and beauty and had wept and endured all of it.
I set the poem into the flame.
“King of Shadows,” I whispered among the crackling of the flames. “God of darkness and the Underworld.”
Once again, the flame bloomed into a white column; I drew my hand back just in time. When the strange, heatless fire shrank again, the flame turned black as ink. The long shadow it cast spread and twisted until it splayed upon the nearest wall. The tip of the Shadow King’s horns touched the ceiling.
The creature—the god—bowed its head like a tree snapping in a strong wind. It steepled its long fingers together. “Lope de la Rosa,” he said, his voice just as soft as before but strangely... warm .
“How did you know it was me?” I asked.
“I have come to know you by your poems. Their longing and their desperation and their beauty. You have sent me many. I thank you. I am a great admirer of your art.”
The whole conversation felt so odd, so impossible, halfway between a nightmare and a dream. “You—I never sent you other poems, just one—”
“‘To any god who will listen.’” It was my own voice he echoed back at me, cracked and fervent. It was my same prayer, night after night after night, a cry into the darkness. Will anybody listen?
“Oh,” I whispered.
He laughed, a low, rattling sound. “I was not what you expected, was I?”
Certainly not a giant Shadow with a taste for poetry.
“Well, I—I am grateful that you like my words—”
“The girl you wrote those lovely words for”—the voice interrupted, his silhouette creeping across the floor, as if the god was standing behind me—“who was she? Did she never receive any of your poems?”
My heart shuddered.
“She read some. She read them too soon. I wanted to share them with her someday, but...” My words faded off into nothingness. I folded my arms around my middle, gazing into the flame. “Her name is Ofelia de Bouchillon—or Ofelia de Forestier.”
“Ofelia?”
The recognition in his voice made ice pool in my veins. “Do you know her, sire?”
He curled in on himself and then, in a blink, the silhouette on the wall before me—it was hers . Her short, full figure, her curly hair, her hand reaching out. I knocked the chair backward, pressing my palm against the shadow of her hand upon the wall.
“Ofelia!” I cried, tears leaping into my eyes. “Ofelia, I don’t understand—”
Her silhouette flickered and then grew, unfolding like the wings of a butterfly until the former appearance of the Shadow King returned. Without thinking, I swept a hairbrush off the vanity, throwing it at his shadow. “Bring her back !”
“My dear poet,” said the king, his voice pitying and mournful. “Why are you unhappy? It was only her image. I thought you would like to see her. I did not intend to upset you.”
“Have—have you seen her?” I asked, angry tears spilling down my cheeks. “Please speak true to me—I fear for her. You are a god; you know more than I do. Please tell me if she is well.”
“She is safe here. If she asks for anything, I will provide it to her. She will not die or grow old—”
“‘Here,’” I repeated, my heart louder than musket fire. “ Where in the thousandfold names is here ?”
“In my kingdom. The realm below.”
I sank onto the floor, my hands over my mouth. The Underworld. The Underworld.
“That’s impossible,” I breathed. “How could she have entered—”
But I remembered. The reason I had called upon the Shadow King in the first place.
If there was a door in the garden that let Shadows out ... surely it could let mortals in .
And I had left her there .
“How can she return to our world?” I begged.
“She cannot. She was given to me as a part of your king’s bargain. Regardless, I cannot form doors from my realm. Only your kind can. And only the god-favored one, Sagesse, was ever able to.”
Sagesse. Eglantine’s mother.
“She’s alive?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking. Time does not pass here.”
That was all I needed to hear. “What can I do to bring Ofelia back? I will bargain for her. I will give you anything.”
The Shadow King touched a spindly finger to where his chin would be. “Would you take her place?”
“Yes,” I said. Despite her unkindness, despite our quarrel, despite her stubbornness, nothing made her deserving of a life drenched in darkness. She belonged in the sun.
“What a marvelous ballad that would be,” said the Shadow King with a sigh. He soundlessly clapped his hands together, and the candle wavered with the movement. “Sagesse knows how to perform the rite that will bring you here. You may speak to her in the Hall of Mirrors.”
“Hall of Mirrors?”
The god tipped his head like he’d misheard. “I created it recently. A punishment for your foolish king. A room where he can see the faces and hear the screams of those he sacrificed.”
A Hall of Mirrors. A room where the king could see Sagesse and—and Ofelia’s mother.
Ofelia had spoken of a place in our last words together. About the Hall of Illusions and a vision of her mother... that hall that the king kept hidden away, as if it was full of his shame—
“Your candle is dying, Lope de la Rosa,” said the Shadow King, his form flickering.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait—I need to know. Is there a way I can stop your Shadows from coming into our world?”
The Shadow King seemed to loom larger. “No. I have my reasons for their existence.”
Chills erupted across my back. I wanted to rage at him, to beg it all to end—but he held Ofelia’s life and her freedom in his hand. My fists clenched at my sides.
The Shadow King touched his hand to his head and swept in an impossibly low bow, nearly bending in two. “Until we meet again.”
I swept my coat off the end of the bed. My world had been turned inside out. I was heeding the words of a Shadow. I longed to return to that horrible golden palace. I was disobeying Ofelia’s orders. I was commanding myself .
Come storms, come crowns, come gods themselves. With all my blood and all my strength, I would bring her home.
“King of Shadows,” I said, my voice confident and firm, “tell Ofelia to wait for me.”