Chapter 15 Lysa
fifteen
Lysa
Istumbled away from the scene in the dungeon.
The image of Fenrik, what Fenrik had become, was burned onto the back of my eyes.
It hadn’t been merely a man losing his mind.
He turned into a beast. I’d seen the shadow of wings, vast and membranous, unfurling from his shoulders, and scales the colour of polished haematite rupturing the skin of his forearms.
It should have been grotesque. It should have been the stuff of nightmares I’d silence with a heavy dose of valerian root.
But it wasn’t. It was terrifyingly, brutally majestic.
Like seeing a storm break over a mountain peak, destruction and awe wrapped in the same thunderclap.
I needed to get out and breathe some fresh air.
I could quiet the corruption, slow it, even cage it, but without Fenrik’s own magic pushing back, it would always return.
I reached the landing that split the manor’s wings, turning toward the East corridor where the guest quarters lay. I took a step, and my stomach dropped. The hallway was looking unusually long, and it stretched.
I watched, blinking rapidly, as the familiar carpet runner elongated, the patterns distorting. The door at the far end, the sanctuary of my room, seemed to rush backward, miles away.
“No,” I said, gripping the banister. “Stop it.”
I turned on my heel, aiming for the library instead. The heavy double doors slammed shut. I reached for the handle, rattling the brass. Locked. The click of the latch echoed with a smug finality.
A draft, cold and purposeful, shoved against my shoulders.
The floorboards beneath my boots groaned and tilted enough to make staying still a muscular effort.
Every path I tried was blocked, sealed, or warped, except one.
To my left, the entrance to the forbidden West Wing stood open.
The air drifting from that dark mouth smelled moldy.
“You are incredibly pushy,” I hissed at the ceiling.
“It is less a matter of personality and more one of utility, miss Emberlin.”
I jumped, spinning around. Standing in the shadow of a suit of armour was Mrs. Crane. One could think she would be dusting or something, but the woman was standing there, her hands clasped over her apron, watching the house contort around me.
“The manor,” I said. “It’s... it won’t let me go to my room and it won’t let me go outside.”
“It appears not.” Mrs. Crane stepped forward. “As you already know, the architecture here suffers from an excess of opinion and a lack of manners.”
She glanced down the forbidden corridor where the house was trying to herd me. “Lord Corvus Stormgarde, the fourth of his line, built the Hall of Whispers in that wing. He was a man who believed that stone could hold a memory better than a mind could. He designed the foundation to be... porous.”
“Porous to what?”
“Intent.” She looked at the ceiling, where a chandelier was swaying. “The manor is a reservoir. Think of water filling a vessel. If the water is agitated, the vessel shakes. Fenrik’s distraction down below has disturbed the equilibrium. The house is trying to rebalance the pressure.”
“By trapping me?”
“By directing you.” Mrs. Crane’s gaze was sharp, uncomfortably intelligent. “You quiet things, Miss Emberlin. The house is in pain because its master is in pain. It is moving the remedy to the source of the infection.”
“Fenrik is downstairs,” I said, though the draft was nudging me toward the West Wing again. “Why send me there?”
“Perhaps the source isn’t the man, but what the man has forgotten.
” She shrugged her shoulders. “Buildings obey bloodlines not out of loyalty, but out of resonance. Like a tuning fork. Fenrik is the frequency this house vibrates to. When he unravels, the mortar cracks. If it is sending you to the West Wing, it is because there is something there that vibrates with the same frequency as his curse.”
She stepped back into the shadows, offering no help, only a grim sort of permission.
“Some rooms refuse entry to those who aren’t ready,” she said. “And some rooms refuse to let you leave until you know the truth. I suggest you stop fighting the current, miss. The house is much older than you, and far more stubborn.”
I might have followed Fenrik’s rules and stayed away from the West Wing, but apparently I didn’t have much of a choice.
The corridor behind me had practically inhaled itself and Mrs. Crane with it, leaving only the forward path through the arched doorway.
The shadows that huddled in the corners of the main house didn’t exist here.
They were scoured away by a rich, honey-gold light that seemed to come from the mortar of the stones.
It was the same colour Fenrik had claimed my magic was.
Sunlight through honey. I’d never believed him, magic had always been frost in my veins, a necessary numbness to stifle the screams of dying things.
I reached out, pressing my palm against the rough-hewn stone of the wall.
I gasped, jerking my hand back, then slowly pressing it flat again.
The wall was vibrating. It was the hum of my own gift.
“You’re copying me,” I whispered to the empty air.
A low, grinding snarl tore through the golden haze ahead.
I rounded the corner and froze. Blocking the hallway was one of the sentinel beasts, the Leonine.
Besides the time it tried to eat me in the hallway, I’d seen it now and then perched frozen on the roof eaves, like a gargoyle.
But right now, the thing looked terrified.
Its shoulder height reached my chest. Fissures ran along its flanks, and from inside the cracks, that same brilliant gold light poured out, blindingly bright. It paced frantically, claws gouging deep furrows into the floorboards, its stone tail lashing.
Every time it moved, sparks of gold flew.
“Oh,” I said, the realization hitting me. It was trembling with the strain of holding the light in. It was fighting its own nature, trying to remain cold and silent stone when everything inside it wanted to burn.
“You’re hurting yourself,” I said, my voice dropping into the rhythmic cadence I reserved for the infirmary’s worst cases. “You’re holding it so tight you’re breaking.”
The Leonine Sentinel whipped its head toward me. Its eyes were pools of molten gold. It roared and bunched its muscles to spring.
I didn’t flinch. I let my instincts take the reins, my fear dissolving into the work. I stepped forward, my hands raised and my palms open.
“I know,” I said softly. “I know it burns. I know you think you have to be stone. You think if you let it go, you’ll destroy everything.”
It was what I had told myself since I was twelve years old. Be cold. Be quiet. Clamp it down or people get hurt.
The beast hesitated, a whine escaping its stone throat. The vibration in the walls spiked.
“Let it flow,” I said, stepping into the creature’s reach. I laid my hands on its nose. My Quieting gift felt like dousing a fire with ice water, but this time, surrounded by the manor’s golden mimicry, I didn’t push the energy down. I pulled it through.
“Easy,” I said, stroking its mane. “Do not fight the light. Be the lantern, not the cage.”
My magic surged, beautifully warm. The cracks in the lion’s flank didn’t close, but the violent, spilling energy settled into a steady glow and the frantic scratching stopped.
The Sentinel leaned into my touch, its heavy stone eyelids drooping, a rumble starting in its chest that sounded like a colossal cat’s purr.
I stared at my hands against the glowing stone.
They weren’t numb. They weren’t blue with cold.
They were flushed with heat, shining with the same gold that lit the hallway.
The house had led me here to show me another kind of mirror this time.
All this time, I thought the coldness of my magic was its nature, but the cold was just the strain of suppression.
“Thank you,” I whispered to the beast, and to the walls around us.
The Sentinel nudged my shoulder, gentle despite its weight, and stepped aside. It sat on its haunches, glowing steadily now, watching me with intelligent eyes. The path behind it was clear.
I pressed deeper into the corridor. The golden light that had poured from the Sentinel didn’t fade; instead, it seemed to seep into the walls, illuminating the path forward.
As I walked, the shadows retreated, revealing that the grey stone of the West Wing wasn’t bare.
The walls on my left were a canvas. A mural, faded by time, stretched along the length of the hall.
It wasn’t the stiff, martial portraiture I had seen in the Great Hall, grim men and women holding swords or gazing imperiously over their lands.
This was something much older. I reached out, my fingers hovering over a flake of lapis lazuli pigment.
The painting depicted the manor. It was painted as a living heart, situated at the convergence of silver rivers that weren’t water, but light.
Ley-lines. They pulsed in the painting, depicted as silver roots feeding the estate from the deep earth.
And the figures. The lords and ladies of Stormgarde weren’t depicted conquering the beasts of the valley.
One panel showed a woman in robes the colour of storm clouds kneeling before a massive, wounded drake, her hands glowing with the same golden light I had just seen on my own palms. Another showed a man with the Stormgarde jawline, sharp and severe, like Fenrik’s, playing a lute for a circle of timber-wolves that watched him with rapt intelligence.
“So you were meant to be a sanctuary,” I said.