Chapter Thirty-Two
Legs buckling, I slide down the door to the ground.
Magic spills away from me, returning to the plane, my muscles and genius depleted.
Chest burning, eyes watering, I hang my head between my knees.
It’s as if I’ve emerged from a long dream where I lived another life and loved and hurt but have no proof of any of it.
Lila’s face enters my vision, and it is jarring and grating, this faerie whom I know, and I’m not sure why.
“Avery?”
I pant. “Where—”
“You were in a trance. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“The tree—”
“What’s in your hand?”
I glance down at my clenched fist. Something palpitates in its grasp, stinking of decay. Reign magic. Old, ancient, corruptive Reign magic, though I don’t understand how I know this, only that it doesn’t feel like the power that whooshed up from the drain days ago.
I release the magic, and it sizzles back into the plane, the return of something that had stayed away too long. As it evaporates, I can almost hear the word. Almost. But it is muffled and in a tongue I cannot recognize.
“You—” Lila looks at me, then the door. “You removed the magic that unlocks the door.”
“I did?”
“How?”
“I…” I cringe, the sensation of being stripped down, sanded. “The tree spoke to me.”
Lila’s eyes widened. “Spoke to you?”
“It sounds moonstruck, but—”
“No. No, it’s an old Unesse belief.” My friend examines me. “Every living thing is connected through the plane of magic, a giant network of nerves. You just need to learn how to tap into that and…you did. But to access the tree the door was made from? How?”
I explain what happened as best I can, thinking of all the enchanted doors in the Pith. How many trees are not dead but trapped? The thought unnerves me, as if surrounded by taxidermy that is alive, the torture invisible and unending.
“We should come back another time.” Lila stands, offering a hand. “You look fatigued.”
It feels worse than that, like someone has carved my insides out and left the skin behind. The memories of the tree and my own flicker in a dance of two flames that seem as one.
I take her hand.
The door scrapes open, and I scramble back. Musk and darkness roll over the threshold.
“If the chambers are identical, then that must be the closet to the second Salon of Stars,” Lila says. “Stay here.”
“Wait—”
“I just want to take a peek is all.”
My friend lets the dark mouth swallow her whole. Blood roars in my ears, heart thumping against my ribs. I creep toward that shadowed entrance. “Lila?”
“It’s not empty,” my friend says.
My blood chills. “What…what do you mean?”
A pause. Then: “There are a child’s clothes in here.”
“Overflow from Maxian’s closet.”
No response. Just a rustling, a fumbling. A swearing. Lila rarely swears.
At the threshold, I snap my fingers. No light springs up; my genius is spent.
From the dark, my friend says, “Then why are all the clothes for a young child?”
“What?”
“If this is storage, then why are all the clothes in there one size? Nothing for the prince when he reached teenagehood? Early adulthood?” My friend melts from the dark, eyes wide, clutching something to her chest. “Why are all the clothes in there for a toddler?”
She holds out a tiny riding boot made of red leather.
“Maxian hates red leather.”
“He probably didn’t have much choice in how he was dressed.”
But my friend is shaking her head. She discards the red boot and stomps into Maxian’s closet, then reemerges with a black boot. Maxian’s. She crouches down beside me, holding the boots side by side.
“To this day, Maxian labels his clothes. I’ve always found it a strange habit,” she says. “Why would an only child do that?”
“A quirk of his. Sentimental reasons, maybe.”
Lila shakes her head again. She loosens the laces of the red boot, unpeeling the tongue. She holds the boot up to the moonlight, thumb stroking over a patch on the inside.
“Everything he receives in life is new and customized to him. And if it’s old, it is from his family. So why—”
My friend stops short, color leaching from her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She hands me the black boot, pointing to an ink scribbling on the inside of the tongue.
M.V.
“Maxian Vandorne,” I state.
“Like a child claiming their possession around other children.”
“He grew up with Dominik and Kassandra. Eli joined them in the summers.”
“Then who is P.V.?” Lila holds up the small red boot.
I see the initials inked into the top.
P.V.
“A cousin,” I supply, voice shaking. “Like Daisy. The one who died in the snow.”
Lila shakes her head. “Not even Daisy stayed in the royal apartments. Not Hector and his family. Only the king and queen and…their children.”
“You think there was another Vandorne child?”
“It might be why the salon was always locked, why this closet is fuller than Maxian’s. It could be why all the clothes are for a child of one age.”
“But where…” My voice falters. “Where is…”
We exchange a look, an unspoken conversation, my shock reflected in her visage. As we sit in the starlight, as we hold a small red boot, and a much larger black one, we try to comprehend the unknowable.
“All the royal portraits only show three figures,” Lila whispers. “But if the child had died…”
Wouldn’t they still be featured?
“And Maxian’s first betrothed, you know the rhyme?”
Lila nods. “Daisy, Daisy—in the springtime you grow, in the summer you glow. Daisy, Daisy—winter is here, beware the snow! Daisy, Daisy—why did you go? Poor, poor Daisy—don’t you know flowers freeze in the snow?”
“So surely there would be some record of a royal child,” I reason. “Even if the death was too painful to commemorate—there would’ve been a funeral, a small one. Or a portrait? An engraving? Conversations among nobles about P.V.?”
We sit in stunned silence, attention falling to the red boot.
“Perhaps it’s all here,” Lila says. “Maybe this is what’s left of them.”
Something sparks in my memory, the smallest detail from our first visit. Why did the royal family repair, when they could replace? They have wealth, time, magic. Yet they kept the imperfection. Why?
We only repair by hand what is sentimental to us, Maxian said the night he stepped from the ripped portrait of his grandfather. Before I can speak, I am moving through the space, clutching the red boot, a baby’s boot, really. It fits in the palm of my hand.
“What are you doing?” my friend asks, following, as we enter the main chamber once more and walk toward the tapestry on the wall, the child in the tree, the queen watching.
I stand close, feel along its edges, squint in the moonlight. My fingers snag on it, the extra layer, the cloth used to patch up the weaving. To cover what is too painful to remove entirely.
I pull.
The fabric rips, and Lila gasps.
“What the planes—”
My breath leaves me, and we stumble back.
Before me is a child clinging to the queen’s skirts, baby fist grasping two of her fingers. A male with black hair and violet eyes, dressed in a white tunic and wearing a pair of little red boots. My heart plummets, hands dropping the boot. Lila shakes beside me, breath hitching.
“The king has a sibling,” she whispers.
“Or had.”
We lock eyes.
“But that’s not all, is it?” Lila turns back to the tapestry, fingers tracing Maxian’s bronze waves, then those of the faerie standing beneath the boughs.
Her hand drifts to the dark-haired toddler with violet eyes, so very much like the portraits of Wilhelm the Uniter and Gregor the Great. Chills rip up and down my arms.
“If I were the artist commissioned by royalty,” she starts, “I would not cut corners on the colors used to dye the wool.”
“What do you mean?” I breathe.
She looks at me, throat bobbing, voice dropping.
“There are different shades of yellow in this tapestry, in the leaves here and the sun there. Look at the array of browns, too, for the trunks of the trees. So why would an artist use the same color for the hair of the future king of Amyria and a lowly servant? Would that not be considered an insult, that type of association?”
“Maybe their hair was the same color,” I whisper, a roaring in my ears, the conclusion on the horizon I do not want to look into directly—like a burning, bloody sunset.
“But why choose truth for a royal rendering? The artists always stylize the subjects, and besides, a true artist is intentional in everything she does.”
My gaze darts between the dark-haired queen and the toddler patched behind her skirts, then to the bronze-haired Maxian and servant, both boys sharing the violet eyes so signature to the Vandorne line.
“Perhaps it was the truth,” I whisper. “Not that the fae queen and the faerie were lovers, but that perhaps they shared one.”
Lila sucks in a breath. “But—that would mean—”
“Please,” I beg, terror clanking through me. “Surely we are moonstruck.”
“That is someone else’s thought, planted in your mind. We should trust ourselves, what we have seen. Look at it!” She points to the tapestry. “Why do she and Maxian look alike? Why include a faerie in a piece of royal art at all?”
“The royals include their pets in portraits!” I hiss back.
“She could’ve still been a pet. She could’ve been King Gregor’s.”
A shiver tears through me. “But if Maxian is the result of…that,” I whisper. “Then that means he’s a half—”
Lila covers my mouth, her face stricken with fear. A halfling bastard.
She sways with the realization, and so do I. After a moment, her palm drops away.
“It can’t be true,” she says. “The king is always the strongest fae in the land. And the strongest fae always come from the Vandorne line.”
“It can’t be true,” I echo. “Or else Maxian would not be alive today.”
But Hector’s words come thundering back to me like a storm over mountains. We are a dying breed, we Reign fae. The High Fae birth so few children in general, the Vandornes the least of them. Faeries, on the other hand, are more fertile and populous.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lila says, and I can’t agree more.
As we cross the chambers, I glance one last time at the tapestry, the two boys, the queen, and the maid. Whether the toddler died or was removed, his existence is only carried on in the few scraps we clutch, hidden away in this forgotten place. It’s a finality deeper than death.
At the heart of Versara is a secret so great, it could unravel all of Amyria.