Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
So I pat around for the keys. My fingers find dirt and the ridge of a small leaf, peeking through a crevice in the structure. I suck in a breath. How is it possible? In a dark place with no room to grow, no rich soil, and still, a little life has begun to flourish.
I find the keys. By feel, I eliminate several we’ve already tried. Lila and I determine that the sound of the snap isn’t worth so little light, so instead, I guide a new key into the lock. Something clicks.
Moving aside, I hear her grasp the key and whisper, “Etoles.”
The entrance creaks open, a high-pitched whine, as if a creature has been resurrected against its will. Lila grapples for my arm; her touch is damp with sweat, as is mine.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Never.”
Together, we wander into the abandoned bedroom.
The smell greets me first, musky and full. The scent of abandonment. Twinkling lights scatter across the floor like faerie lights. Not powerful, but plentiful, and it’s enough to illuminate the room.
I bend down, seeking to brush one with my finger. But my shadow descends, and that’s when I understand that the lights are not embedded in the floor. In fact, they’re not tangible at all.
“Look up,” Lila says.
When I do, my breath stops. The room itself is three levels tall, with no windows on any of the walls. Yet the entire ceiling is made of glass, displaying the brilliant, speckled night sky above us. It gives the illusion that we stand at the bottom of some giant well.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It always was,” my friend replies, gaze scanning the chambers.
I survey the space, a rectangular bedroom with tapestries, a four-poster bed in its center, a desk pushed up on the far wall, an empty weapon rack on the other. Across from where we entered is another egress, a passageway to another chamber.
“I was picturing a child’s bedroom,” I say.
“He was the child of Gregor and Elise, so technically, you’re correct.”
“Somehow I forgot he has only been king for a month.”
“He expands like that.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “He took over some of the governing years ago when his father started to decline, so it hasn’t been as big a transition as it seems on the outside.”
We wander to the weapon rack.
“He hasn’t spent time in this bedroom for years now?”
“No. King Gregor—may he wander well—moved to the royal chambers in the House of Healing, where he could receive the best care. He was there about a decade before he passed, and so Maxian moved into the Sun Salon.”
I do not comment on how strange that sounds—settling into his father’s space before he died. Running his father’s kingdom before he’s king.
Starlight washes the tapestry and its intricacies in a glittering waterfall.
A meadow of an apple orchard that extends to the horizon.
A little boy plays in a tree, an adult in a plain tunic looking up at him.
A nursemaid. Several paces away is the dark-haired queen, adorned in a rich red-and-gold gown, patched to add a train behind her.
My hand reaches up, strokes the fabric of a bronze-haired faerie nursemaid.
“They included her,” I utter. I have never seen a faerie captured in any art before, neither portrait nor sculpture nor official song. To see one of us up on a wall, even in an abandoned room, shifts the entire world. As if we are worth noting. As if we are worthy of preservation, of history.
“I’m sure the rumors have warped in the century since the fever took the queen, but…” My friend stops, glances at the royal.
I look at her. “But what?”
“Apparently, the queen adored her faerie. It’s why she was kind to all the servants. Supposedly they were friends.”
I laugh. “Were they truly friends or did the queen just think that?”
Lila tilts her head to the tapestry. “Enough to memorialize her.”
I look to the faerie again. “Perhaps they were lovers.”
Now Lila laughs.
We cross the chamber and enter a closet three times the size of my room, full of mismatched tunics and shoes of varying styles. Another key, another Etoles, and we enter the bathing chamber, the innermost part of the Pith.
Light still pours in from the sky above.
A looking glass lines one wall completely, doubling the image of the room. I catch my reflection and truly examine it for the first time in over a month.
The dark circles under my eyes have faded, and my irises—as the king observed—are brighter, like the color of sap.
The appearance of my collarbone has now softened with another layer of muscle and weight, and my chestnut waves shine thick and lush thanks to the soaps from Lila and Fern.
I stand a bit taller, skin clearer, like Lila’s.
It’s as if even in my grief and the games of the fae, the shorter hours, the fresher food, the higher pay, the better soaps, and the more rigorous exercises have performed some sort of magic on my body.
In the reflection, Lila comes up to me, leans her head on my good shoulder.
“You okay?”
The king was right. Kassandra was right. The stranger in the glass answers. “I look…different.”
Better.
“Rest, I have found, is the greatest resource of the fae.”
“Maybe there is another.”
Both of us glance at the large, empty bathing pool on the other side of the room. With no water, the floor slopes down, a large drain exposed at the bottom.
Lila’s account proves correct. The wall opposite the looking glass bows inward dramatically, cutting into the bathing pool, halving its potential.
She starts forward, feet padding down the slope of the bedrock, placing a hand on the wall. “On the other side, the king and queen’s bathing chamber also looks like this.”
Yet her words barely register. My muscles lock up, my mind reeling with a rush of a floral, warm scent, like inhaling a perfume that becomes a drug. It’s not the sickly sweetness of the fae wine, or the brightness of the stars. It is deeper, earthier—balanced and unknowable.
“Avery?”
But I cannot speak, cannot move or even stay with Lila, as my consciousness turns inward, to the genius that lies like a stunned moth at the bottom of a well.
When I inhale, the earthy scent pours down that well.
It is strong and rounded and natural, like the scent of a lover’s skin, like the damp earth dug to bury the dead.
This is life and this is death and the two suddenly seem the same, two halves of one circle, a current that flows into itself.
Hello again, say a thousand voices.
My genius twitches, its wings vibrating.
Then it’s snapping to life again, flapping and fluttering up and up and up, the surge of energy so powerful I feel the tingling spread to my limbs, to my fingers and toes, sparking outward, connecting once more to the plane.
Sounds and colors and smells flood my senses as I access the plane of magic once more.
“The magic is strange here,” I breathe.
My concentration falls to the floor, and I freeze. My sandal lies across the drain, a whispering blackness under the grate, like a sighing mouth. I step off it. The rush abates.
“There’s something down there.”
“Has something happened?” Lila asks, glancing at the drain, then startles when she looks back at me. “Your eyes—they’re glowing.”
“I…I’m not sure what happened.”
We ascend out of the pool, and I stop short at my reflection, again. Transformed into a creature brimming with power, I stare at the two flames that fill my gaze. An aftereffect of my genius reawakening, perhaps. A slip of control on my fire ability. Blinking only slightly dims the light.
She glances at the sky. “The hour is late. We can return another time.”
My friend takes my hand.
As we wind our way out of the Salon of Stars, I cannot shake the feeling of that magical exhale, that sighing creation that slumbers at the heart of the Pith, which was powerful enough to animate my hibernating genius and set my eyes aglow.
It is something other than Reign magic. Something ancient. Something alive.
As we close the door once more, cutting out the light, Lila struggles with the keys. My genius buzzes with the strength of a swarm. All I have to do is think, and a roaring flame erupts from my palm.
It’s as easy as breathing.