Chapter 22
The voice was pushing Beatryce to get angry. Telling her Zephynia was a fool. That there had never been anything dark or sinister about her mother or grandmother. That there was nothing wrong with Bea, either.
Zephynia was clearly jealous.
“Yes,” Bea whispered to herself. “That old woman is jealous that I’ve become queen.”
Lysette appeared. She curtseyed. “Good evening, my lady. Are you ready to undress for the night?”
It took Bea a moment to gather her thoughts and remember what she was doing. “Yes. I want my dressing gown and slippers.”
Lysette’s brows rose. “No bath?”
Bea’s eyes narrowed. “Are you questioning me?” She stalked forward a few steps. “Am I not your queen?”
Fear entered Lysette’s gaze. She bowed her head. “Yes, your highness. Forgive me. I’ll fetch your gown and slippers.”
Bea followed her into the dressing room and let the young woman take off her jewels and gown, then uncoil her hair from its braids. As soon as Bea was in her evening attire, she shooed Lysette away. “Go. Sylvia, too, if she’s still here.”
“Yes, my lady.” Lysette backed out of the room and a few minutes later, Bea heard the outer door close.
She walked through the apartment, making sure both maids were gone. Once she was certain she was alone, she locked the door that led to the garden and the front door as well. She wanted no interruptions.
She reached for the key to the vault and realized that Lysette had taken Bea’s belt and pouch off when she’d undressed Bea for the evening. Frowning, Bea went back to the dressing room to get it.
She took the key, the ring, and the scroll out of the pouch. She would have to find another way to keep these things on her. The ring and the key, anyway. The scroll she would leave in the vault this evening.
Key firmly in hand, she went into the office. She locked that door behind her. The voice inside her seemed pleased with that.
She clutched the key gently in her wounded hand, using her other to press on the wainscoting and open the panel. She stepped through and unlocked the vault door.
“Lights,” she uttered, with greater joy than she had the first time.
The chandelier came to life, the candles casting their warm glow over the room and its contents.
She looked around, wondering if her eyes were playing a trick on her.
What dust had been present before was gone.
The fibers of the rug and draperies that had seemed faded now looked as vibrant as anything in the castle.
She walked around inspecting the space, touching things, being sure everything was as it should be.
She had yet to open the wardrobe. She’d had little time when she’d last been in here.
She turned and caught sight of herself in the enormous mirror opposite the wardrobe.
She studied herself. Hair down. Silk dressing gown making her as shapeless as a sack.
“You don’t look very much like a queen now, do you? ”
A face of smoke and shadows appeared in the mirror. “You are Leda Blackbryar,” it said with the faintest rasp of a voice that might have once been human. “You are queen regardless of what you wear.”
Bea stood frozen. Staring. Petrified.
The voice inside urged her forward. Told her not to be afraid. Told her to speak to the visage she saw.
She swallowed and managed one step forward. “I am not Leda Blackbryar. I am her granddaughter, Queen Beatryce Blackbryar.”
The face appeared again. “Forgive me, your highness. I see now that you are not Leda. I should have known. You bear a striking resemblance to her, but your youth and beauty are unmistakably unique. I bid you greetings, Queen Beatryce.”
“Who are you?”
The smoky face tilted, shadows writhing across its features like ink bleeding through water. The eyes looked too deep, too knowing, as if they had been watching this vault long before Leda ever set foot inside it. But that couldn’t be possible, could it?
“I am the Warden of this sanctum,” the voice said, low and smooth. “Your grandmother bound me here many decades ago. She tore me from the veil and sealed me into the glass so that her secrets would never be left unguarded. One day, she never returned. I have waited in silence ever since.”
Bea nodded. “She passed away.”
“I see.” The face studied Bea with unnerving patience, the edges of its form flickering like disappearing candle smoke.
“She named me Malzar. I am bound to serve the bloodline that commands this mirror. Forgive my previous error, Queen Beatryce. As I said, your resemblance to Leda is…unsettlingly strong. For a moment I thought the years had turned backward.”
Bea’s pulse steadied. The creature didn’t feel malevolent. Just old, trapped, and strangely courteous. There was power here, and it was acknowledging her as the one who now held the key. “Are you going to keep talking to me?”
Malzar’s shadowy lips curved in what might have been a smile. “You are not her, yet you carry her blood. That is enough. Ask what you will of me, young queen. I have kept every secret Leda entrusted to these walls. They are yours, if you choose to claim them.”
“Why didn’t you speak to me the first time I was in here?”
“You must look into the mirror if you require my help.”
She inched closer, her fear nearly gone. “You will tell me whatever I want to know?”
“You have only to ask.”
It was worth a shot. “Which book contains the most powerful magic?”
“That depends on what you wish to accomplish.”
“I want to…” She gathered her thoughts. “I want to make my mother stronger, so that she might withstand what needs to be done to her. She is injured. There is a blade through her body. Through her heart. She holds onto life right now only because of magic, but there’s a plan to heal her and free her from that blade.
To save her life. Unless you know of a spell or something that could take the blade out of her and make her whole? ”
“Can you take me to her?”
“No. There’s no way that can happen.”
“From your description and without seeing her myself, her current state sounds like something that would require more than a spell. The attentions of several skilled practitioners.”
“That’s what’s planned. So my best hope would be to find a way to strengthen her, to make sure she survives what’s going to be done to her.”
“I would agree with that, your highness.”
“Then show me the spell that will do that.”
Malzar nodded thoughtfully. “I can do that. Are you well versed in the magical arts, then?”
Bea bristled. “No. I’m learning, though.” Not entirely a lie. “But I can master the simple repetition of words, can’t I?”
“I should think so.”
“Then give me such a spell.”
Malzar’s shadowy features shifted, the smoke curling lazily through his hollow cheekbones. The mirror was silent. She worried that she’d overstepped. Spoken too forcefully.
“I have found such a thing,” he rasped at last. “It will bind flesh and spirit more tightly, lending unnatural resilience. Go to the third shelf of the left bookcase. There you will find a slender volume bound in black calfskin with silver runes on the spine, but no title. Your grandmother called the spell simply The Binding of Flesh and Shadow.”
Bea crossed the vault, heart hammering. She easily found the thin black book and pulled it free. Despite its small size, the book was oddly heavy. It wasn’t lost on her that the last person to touch this had been Leda.
Bea carried it to the table beneath the chandelier. The pages were brittle, the ink on them a deep, metallic crimson that seemed to absorb the candlelight.
She went through it page by page until her eyes caught on the spell Malzar had described.
The words were elegant, almost deceptively simple.
She read them once, twice, then a third time, committing every syllable to memory even as she tested different intonations.
The incantation felt strange on her tongue, but powerful. Exactly what she needed.
Malzar had gone silent, but she knew he was there if she required him again.
When Bea finally closed the book and replaced it on the shelf, she felt a quiet surge of triumph. She had what she needed. She could save her mother.
Bea slipped across the hall to her mother’s quarters, still feeling the black book’s weight in her hand. She went straight to the bedroom. The room was dim, lit only by a single low-burning lamp.
Anyka lay motionless beneath the linen sheets, her breathing shallow and ragged, the blade buried in her chest like a gruesome anchor, dragging her toward the inevitable.
Clary rose quickly from the chair beside the bed, her face etched with exhaustion. “Your Highness,” she whispered, offering a shallow curtsey. “There has been no change.”
“Leave us,” Bea said quietly, but with a new sense of command, perhaps born from the newfound power of the vault. “I wish to be alone with my mother.”
Clary nodded and went toward the door. “As you wish, your highness. I will only be a room away if you need anything.”
The door clicked shut behind her, leaving the room in heavy silence broken only by the faint scrape of Anyka’s breathing.
Bea moved around to the side of the bed and sank into the chair. She studied her mother’s pale, drawn face. The woman who had ruled with iron and shadow, now reduced to this fragile shell.
It nearly brought Bea to tears. She forced them back, strengthened her resolve, and leaned close, her lips almost brushing her mother’s ear. She began to whisper the spell she had memorized in the vault.
The words came easily, each syllable heavy and precise. As she spoke, a faint chill crawled across her skin, as though the air had cooled. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to deepen, stretching toward the bed like curious fingers.
Bea felt a strange surge of power ripple through her chest. The voice within her met it with a dark hunger that almost stopped her.
But she finished, saying the final line with a soft exhale. Bea sat back. She’d done all she could think to do.
She was about to get up when Anyka’s body gave a single, violent shudder. The blade in her chest pulsed once with a sickly violet light before darkening. Her breathing deepened, grew steadier, and some of the terrible pallor began to ease from her cheeks.
Bea stared in astonishment, her heart pounding with a mixture of triumph and surprise. It had worked. Her mother would survive the removal of the blade and the brutal healing that would follow.
And all because of her.