Chapter Six #2
Then a flash of something pale, there in the mirror above the basin. As I watch, it materializes softly into the shape of a hand—long fingers, bone-pale and slender.
They stretch out around my reflection to curl underneath my chin, though I feel nothing.
My Jewel.
He blurs into being like a conjuring, there within the glass.
Just behind my reflection. An aberration, limned by an absent moon.
He is colorless, even paler than I remembered, and just as beautiful.
There is a starkness to his gaze that sends a frisson of fear down my throat so fast, I almost choke.
Illian.
“How?” I breathe. Yet I already suspect. Sundar was right. He is no mere hallucination.
I died; I came back. Even Queen Sadira had wondered what effects that might have.
We are uniquely connected, Illian says. Perhaps because you did the honors.
“And what an honor it was,” I shoot back, though he seems unaffected.
He lets a knuckle slide down my shoulder, though I feel nothing. A shame you didn’t entertain me sooner, when I might have spared you this prison.
That calm, smooth tenor. The tone he always used when delivering word of my tasks, as if they were as inconsequential as breathing. Yet it’s almost as if his voice is confined to the depths of my mind.
“Here to mock me, are you?” My eyes move over him, taking in those strange, wavering contours. He shouldn’t look regal in those tattered, dark clothes as he moves beside me, and yet he does.
His eyes, once dark, now almost seem lit from within. He wraps his hand around my reflection’s waist. Oh, how I’ve missed that mouth.
I step backward, my fingers grasping for the candlestick holder, wrapping around it once more. “Leave me alone.”
His gaze slips to my hand. What, do you plan to shatter every bit of glass in this room?
“If it means not seeing you.” I raise it to strike—
Do that, he says, and you’ll never see my Fates-forsaken brother again.
I halt mid-swing, my breath caught in my chest.
His lips peel into an unsettling smirk. Ah yes. Your little king has escaped the custody of his friends. Don’t you want to know how to find him?
Anton…escaped?
“You’re lying.”
He rolls his eyes. I wish I was.
I watch him, note the distaste in his expression. The annoyance.
He is telling the truth. My pulse leaps into a harrowing flight, and despite how much I hate Illian, despite that I will never trust him, I can’t help but ask, “Where is he?”
Lounging about in Moranya’s Lair. Where else? I’d bet she came to collect him the moment you left. Probably made him an offer he could not refuse, which would explain why he’s lazing about like the king of the underworld, ruling in her stead.
“He wouldn’t.” He never took her hand, not even before he knew me. I turn my gaze about the room, only to find Illian in the window. I whirl, and there he is in the basin mirror. He is transposed across every reflective surface—
Wouldn’t he? Illian says. He seems to be rather enjoying himself, if you ask me. I’m sure she’ll make her realm so appealing that he can’t help but give in and stay.
Give in? Stay with her forever? “As in…among the dead?”
His lip curls. He is as alive as ever, much to my annoyance. For now, that is.
Alive, yet in the Realm of the Dead? But why? “You can’t mean to help him. Why tell me this?”
My reasons are my own, he says.
“Not good enough.”
A shrug. I merely thought you’d want to fetch him back, is all. His presence is not to my liking.
That, I don’t believe. But what he’s implying…“You aren’t making sense. Even if I weren’t trapped here, I have no way to get to him.” Gustav had told me what Anton did during his one day—that he’d entered Morta’s Lair through a portal Moranya had made only for him.
What if I told you that you can? What if I told you, Illian says, that ethereal gaze holding mine, as deadly as an icicle at my throat, that there is a way for you to enter Morta’s Lair, as he did? As a mortal?
The idea chills my very bones. Even my lungs seem to grow cold.
“I’d think you were trying to lure me to my death.”
For most, death is the only way, he says, fingers twisting a curl of mine in the mirror. Yet you are different.
Even as his words ring true, I say, “You’re a fool if you think I can’t sense the trap.”
Fine, then, he says with a shrug. I can see I’ve wasted your valuable time, being that you have so much of it these days.
Stay here—which surely you know ends in your soul being delivered to Morta’s Lair just like mine.
I will see you soon enough. Your death is coming, Vastianna, one way or another.
All at once, his image begins to fade from the mirror like the dissipation of breath.
Trap trap trap, my conscience repeats. But does it matter? If there’s even a smidgen of a chance to save Anton…“Wait!”
All at once, his reflection materializes in full.
“Tell me how. How do I get to Anton?”
You’ll need to get out of here first, don’t you think?
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” I say, my fingers curling tighter around the base of the candlestick holder, “but I am locked away in this tower.”
Are you, though? His smile returns. Eremis, Anton—both returned to the land of the living only after refusing her hand. But you are the only soul to come back after taking Morta’s hand. Do you not sense that something has changed? Can you not see it?
He jerks his head pointedly down. I follow his gaze to my feet, only to release a screech. I somehow manage to back up—not against the trunk but through it, as if my flesh is made of shadow.
My form flickers like a candle.
“I don’t understand,” I say, even as I think back to the strange happenings I’ve tried not to notice. The handle of the coach. The bedpost last night.
Have you never stopped to question what abilities your encounter with death might grant you?
Is it not obvious, Vastianna, the way your body and soul fight against each other?
The way you waver back and forth? When you died, the bond between soul and body was fractured.
I’m willing to bet that you can control it.
In fact, he says, licking his lips, I bet you could walk right through that door if you tried.
I glance down at my trembling hands. They are solid, and yet…as I stare, they begin to fade once more. Under my concentration—my panic. And I can feel it, I realize, as if I’m vibrating ever so slightly. Already it’s as if they are vanishing before my eyes.
As if I’m vanishing.
I suck in a lungful of air, my control slipping. It’s like holding my breath, the effort of it, and yet…I can do it.
I can shift into something akin to a spirit.
Call my name once you’re free from this place, and I will show you the way.
In a blink, he’s gone.
Again I tip my gaze down to my palms. I hate him more than I can say. I know that I can’t trust him, that this is likely to be my end. Except—
Anton is worth everything, and more.
But even if I find him, how can I save him? I have no way of returning his memories to him.
Unless I confront Moranya myself, perhaps. Offer up the pendant, if I have to. Something.
Pacing to the secret door, I ease the tapestry back. I have to be sure I can do this, even as I sense the truth of it beneath my skin. Time and again, I saw my flesh phase in and out. I need only control it.
I stretch out my fingers and place them against the door—to no avail.
Closing my eyes, I inhale, recalling all the times that I had seemed to fade.
It was when I was afraid. When my emotions were high, seized by terror. Anxiety. Perhaps that’s the link, unintentional as it may be. Or is it merely heightened emotion? Willpower?
I push myself back into time, then let it scroll forward before me, cataloging my trauma. The day Emilia died. The night Illian framed me for murder and imprisoned me. The day when he first pulled me out again and sent me to the Gathering as his spy. And all the while, I push—
I think of when I stood before the court and condemned Laurent.
When I witnessed Anton hanging from the chandelier.
Please, I breathe. I push harder.
Shivers pulse through me, even as my body rebels—
Anton, prostrate on the floor, the spokes of a chandelier impaled into his flesh.
The light fading from his eyes.
Him standing before Morta, his thought not of himself but of me…
I feel it then. A vibration, as if I’d been plucked like the strings of a harp. I hold tight to the shift as it settles into place once more, cold sweeping over me like a layer of ice—
I open my eyes.
And my hands slip through the door as if it were made of water.