Chapter Forty-Eight
The executioner brings me to the dark shadows of the servants’ corridors. Even after my body adjusts, the Pith vibrates with energy.
“The king,” he says.
“I’ll stay clear.”
He holds my forearm as a dense weight settles in the air around me, the smell of my genius smothered. “Meet back here in an hour,” he says, then puffs away.
I creep down the hallway, toward Lila’s room. It wasn’t a complete lie to want to collect her belongings, especially one. Murmurs whisper across the stones from the Mouth, and after the fading of footsteps, I round the corner barefoot.
In front of her door, I kneel and pick the lock, then slip inside.
They haven’t cleared her room yet, either.
In fact, they’ve added flowers, beads, anything bright and creative.
Scraps of parchment are grouped throughout the room in piles.
To Lila, love, Fern. Another pile reads To Lila, from Carter.
Over and over again, I pick up letters addressed to my wonderful friend, from all the friends she made in her time here, squirreling away the notes in my pockets to deliver to her.
Then I unpeel the putty that secures her art to the wall. Exposing the niche, I retrieve her father’s keys, securing the art in place.
The door clicks behind me. I whirl around. Fern steps through with a candle. She gasps, pulling back. My heart pounds, but I put a finger to my lips, pleading.
“What are you doing here?” she whispers, placing the candle holder on the floor.
“Collecting Lila’s belongings to bring to her,” I say. “Please, I’m not supposed to, but—”
“You’re alive.” The cook barrels toward me, wraps thick arms around me. “Oh my planes,” she hiccups. “You survived.”
I blink, tears filling my eyes once more.
“When we found Lila—” Her voice falters. “Lila was so—”
“I know.”
“My poor Lila. He had left her. He left her in the library after doing that to her.”
“I know,” I croak. “I know and I am so, so sorry.”
“No,” the cook rushes to say, shaking her head. “No, none of that.”
“But you don’t understand,” I say. “You don’t know me.”
“Lila does. She trusts you, and I trust her.” For the first time since I’ve known her, her eyes darken with fury. “I see her like that, in my nightmares. Blue.”
“She’s safe now.”
“I heard they took her hand.”
I nod. Fern plants hands on her hips, nodding, too. “You sure you two don’t need anything? How are you getting out of the Pith?”
I pause, debating if I should reveal it now. The truth of the matter was that I was never going to meet the executioner in our spot in an hour. I was going to wait until my task here was complete.
“Come on, lovely. Tell me.”
The more people who know of the plan, the more dangerous it becomes.
Do less on your own, Jeremee had said. Perhaps I need to be like Fern and trust the one who Lila trusts.
Perhaps community doesn’t need to come just from me.
Perhaps I have found an existing one, one that Lila invited me to join, and now Fern, too.
Friends are the only reason why and how I’ve survived lately.
They are here for me just as much as I am here for them. All I have to do is accept the help.
“It’s a bizarre request,” I start.
—
Light spills into the hallway from the Mouth. My breathing slows, ears pricking at the conversation within.
“And when do you think he’ll be stopping tonight?” Fern asks.
A heavy sigh. Carter. “Until he can’t fit any more in his body.”
“Maybe it would do him good to get some sleep. It would do us all some good.”
“His tolerance rises each night he binges.”
“Then give him the stronger stuff,” Fern suggests, then adds: “It’ll be a mercy, I think. To let him sleep through the grief this time. Especially without his usual company to cheer him up.”
“His own doing,” Carter grits out.
“Easy now,” the cook says. “You can never let him see that hatred.”
Holding my breath, I slide farther into the deep darkness of the Pith, down the halls, and to the Salon of Stars. There has been too much debt and death. While I wait, I may as well free those I can.
I return to the trees, place palms on their petrified wood, whisper my genius into their grain.
A linden tree.
Another oak. Then a chestnut again.
And so on and so forth.
For half an hour, I press against the wood and ask: What do you need?
Some choose to be let go; others wish to stay but to have the parasite abated. Some just wish to speak of what they have seen, what they know.
They know much.
And I so little. So I lean against them, and I listen. And with every freed tree, something frees in me, my genius expanding, crackling like lightning beneath my skin.
When the time draws near, I shake myself loose from the final hold, a door in the second Salon of Stars, the child’s bedroom that belonged to P.V. The doors in this space speak of a blast of energy, one hundred years old.
As I slip out of the Salon of Stars, my thoughts tangle with many lives.
Lila was right. Every enchanted object spoke of a creature at the very center of Versara, one they cannot reach.
Although I cannot see the living thing in my mind’s eye, I know its depth, the power that surges up from the drains.
Something remade, something unrelenting.
Something that will never submit.
It is not a monster; it is merely trapped. I promise that creature—whatever it may be—that I shall return and free it, too.
—
I hover outside the king’s bedroom door. Death will be here any minute, and still I strain for the sounds within—the snoring, the clink of bottles. The servants’ door swings open and I flatten myself against the wall as Carter pushes a cart out, turning his back to me as he moves toward the Mouth.
The snores tumble into the hall.
I have moments.
I slip inside the king’s bedroom. Only a few candles float this time, the space dark and moody.
It smells of sweat and alcohol and smoke.
The chambers have been destroyed—bits of broken glass, food strung about, the curtains ripped down.
Pausing, I watch the lump of covers on the bed shift and settle, followed by a snore.
I pick my way toward the grand desk to the left of the bed. Scattered with papers, an upturned wine goblet, and letters, requests. If this were any other time, if Death weren’t around the corner, I would snag a few papers, read them over. Instead, I scan the desk until I find it.
His royal letter opener, the Reign crest imprinted on its handle. A solid bar of gold, it is heavier than most platters I’ve carried. Still, it is not the diamond dagger.
I open the drawers, searching. Where is that damn thing?
It has to be here, somewhere.
Opening the bottom drawer, I spot it. Glimmering, translucent, deadly. Yet when I pick it up, it feels too light, dull. I flip it over and notice cracks along its blade. This, I realize, is made of glass. This is fake. I brush aside more paper, and they glitter up at me.
A dozen or so failed diamond daggers. Some have been shattered, others half formed. Still, a pile of loose diamonds rattle around the bottom. Carter and Lila were right.
But is it because he’s a halfling, or because Kassandra is so powerful?
A noise in the hall.
I close the drawer and retreat from the desk. Moonlight pools on the prone figure among silk sheets.
Maxian. Beautiful, powerful Maxian, with his sharp jawline and bulging shoulders, lying on his bare stomach.
My breath leaves me. A grotesque patchwork of bumpy, cross-stitched scars cover his entire back, gnarled flesh on top of gnarled flesh. I have never witnessed one before, but I know its aftermath, have heard of it from other faeries, know my own grandmother died of it.
A lashing. From the look of it, many.
Someone has whipped the king. Over and over again.
A deep terror trickles through me. Who would dare whip the king?
The letter opener feels heavy in my hands. The eagle clutches a branch from Lucan’s Tree in one claw, and the Golden Whip in the other. No, it couldn’t be—but it must.
The king was not whipped.
Prince Maxian was.
Brutality is in your blood, he said of my lineage, the glint in his eyes not curiosity but connection. This is the legacy of Amyria: led by monsters and murderers. I could end it all now—cut off the eagle’s beak and watch the kingdom plummet into chaos.
But that is vengeance, not venturing to something better. Jeremee was right. High Fae will issue orders, faeries will die, and someone worse will rise from the bloodshed. Someone sadistic. Someone like Dominik. So today I will not take the king’s life, if only to ensure a safer tomorrow.
If I am to fight the High Fae, it will have to be in their Houses, their bedrooms.
This is the logic I cling to as my eyes settle on a packet of black powder by the king’s bedside. An unnatural powder. There is no time—and still, I make it.
Opening a letter addressed to Lila, I drop the black powder between the folds. I take the empty packet to the fireplace and fill it with ash. Death is waiting, and suddenly I don’t want to be late. It is only then that I notice the silence.
The snoring has stopped.
Two violet irises glow in the dimness.
I do not move.
“Why?” he rasps.
My heart hammers, body locking up as he coughs.
“Why do you haunt me so?”
I do not dare breathe. My mind scrambles for a response, that I have returned to him to do what he bids, so long as he spares my friends.
Yet the leverage they need is in my hands right now; it must be returned to Illusion, and I am not ready.
Something tells me that once I give the king what he wants, I will never return.
“Tell me, when will I be free of your death? I know…” He trails off, eyes closing. Still, he mumbles, “I have wronged you, Mother. I have killed you both. But…”
His breathing slides into a deeper rhythm, and the king is snoring again. My heart doesn’t slow. With my genius dampened, he thought I was Death. He thought I was a ghost. I force myself to tread around the destruction. Reaching the servants’ door, I crack it open.
The moment it closes softly behind me, I am running again, sprinting down the servants’ hall, feet slapping against the cobblestones.
I do not care.
My legs work harder, sweat beading behind my neck.
Ahead of me, I see it—the spot where I shall meet Death. When he melts from the shadows, offering a gloved hand, I leap into his arms, despite his puff of surprise, and cling to his robes.
He laces us away.