Annalise, still on her knees, shuffled backward, trying to catch her runaway breath. She thought she knew who he was, but she needed to be sure. “Who are you?”
The man gasped in a breath, smiled brightly, and opened his eyes. “Once upon a time, I was a king, and a father to twin daughters—both different, both kind.”
Annalise brightened. “You are the Spinner King—the father of Kismet and Reverie.”
“I am,” he answered, blinking his golden eyes, wet with tears. “You freed me. I only hope my reward is payment enough.”
“The truth of the night I was born?”
“The truth of the night you were born.” The king offered Annalise the cockatrice’s pierced heart. “Take this into your hands, and I will show you much more than my daughter’s book ever could.”
Heart racing, great hand bursting with excited energy, Annalise cupped the heart. A rush of light exploded within her great hand—the same golden shine that glowed from her book. Annalise’s stomach dropped. Dizziness came next. She squeezed her eyes shut.
In the darkness, a light wind tickled her ear. “Goodbye,” the Spinner King whispered. And when Annalise opened her eyes, the shadowshine court and king were gone.
Chapter 26
The Memory Spell of a Dead King
Green hills rolled out before her to the horizon. Annalise sat on a white velour throne on a golden dais. A palace of polished white crystal quartz, tipped in spires of gold, rose at her back. A pathway of multicolored stones wound out from the dais to a great gilded archway at the base of a gentle hill. A canary-yellow sun shone from a lilac sky. Cottages and huts with smoking chimneys dotted the landscape. And far, far in the distance, the twisted labyrinth rolled on without her. This was not the Fate Spinner’s domain. This was the palace of the Spinner of Dreams: the Court of Dreamland.
She’d seen it sketched in The Book of Remembering, marveled at it from the sky when she fell from the train, and spied it through the door after she was poisoned. Annalise would’ve known it anywhere. Color burst from every direction. Creatures big and small made noise from land, sky, and trees. Everything shimmered—including her.
Annalise wore a luxurious gown of gold and white feathers, and a crown of golden horns and silver crows. She’d been so busy drinking in the sights she hadn’t noticed the white cat in a top hat and monocle in her lap.
Muse?
The cat nodded and angled his gaze northwest. She stroked his fur, thinking this a very strange dream, and followed his gaze. On the opposite side of the labyrinth rose the Fate Spinner’s palace of spiky red quartz. Annalise’s skin froze like she was chomping on ice. She was almost certain that even inside the king’s vision of truth, the Fate Spinner was watching her now.
“Stay very still,” Muse whispered to Annalise. “You’re seeing events as they happened in the Mazelands the night you were born. Remember, even when you can’t see me, I am here.” Muse faded, along with his final words. “You are not alone.”
The Fate Spinner appeared below. She glided through the golden gate at the end of the path, fire in her eyes, anger in her soul. “How dare you defy my wishes again, Reverie?” She climbed the pathway of rainbow stones in a fitted black jacket, vest, and leggings, hair half up in plaits, staring straight at Annalise, mirrored staff at her side.
Annalise glanced about in confusion.
Reverie?
Wait. Clothes, Dreamland, crown. Annalise stroked her hair—her hair was . . . wrong. Rather than long and blackberry, it was black and shoulder length.
Was Annalise seeing through the eyes of the Spinner of Dreams?
Black crows fluttered behind the Fate Spinner as she stopped at Reverie’s throne and glared. “Are you even listening to me, sister? Or are you lost in one of your worthless daydreams?”
White crows funneled from the lilac sky, a winged army that flocked to Annalise’s side.
Did they see the real her?
“So that’s it? You’re not going to speak to me anymore?” The Fate Spinner curled her hand tighter around her staff. When Reverie’s white crows dived at the Fate Spinner, Annalise—or rather, the Spinner of Dreams—raised her left hand, calling them off.
“I see how it is,” the Fate Spinner snapped. “So typical. Our people may love you, Reverie. But they don’t know you as I do—a selfish dreamer with a head full of nonsense.” Her voice thinned, fine as dust. “All I wanted was your help. For you to make our people love me, the same way they love you.” Tears she tried to hide rimmed her black eyes. Suddenly, the Fate Spinner didn’t sound vicious, but tortured, lost, and afraid. Annalise empathized. She knew those feelings well.
“You know the laws, dear sister,” the Spinner of Dreams finally replied. “You cannot change my fate. Nor can I alter your destiny or grant you your dreams, even if I wanted to.”
“Nonsense!” the Fate Spinner cried. The checkerboard of crows scattered and cawed. “We are enchantresses, aren’t we? We shouldn’t be subject to any laws—we should be the ones making them!”
Annalise’s heart pounded—a herd of gazelles on the upside down of her chest. Yet she didn’t move.
“Kismet, please,” the Spinner of Dreams said. “You must stop this. Mogul decreed these laws at the time of our births. The rules are set. It is done.”
Annalise wasn’t sure what was happening, or why she was inside the body of the Spinner of Dreams, but listening to the Spinners now, Annalise knew one thing for sure: she could love the Spinner of Dreams and still understand the Fate Spinner, too.
The Fate Spinner knelt at her sister’s feet, clasped her hands at her chest, and begged, black eyes glittering bright with hope. “We were friendly once, don’t you remember?”
The Spinner of Dreams leaned forward, radiating a mixture of sympathy, love, longing, and years of old pain. “I remember trying to be your friend, Kismet. I remember trusting you, loving you, wanting so badly for you to love me back, only to have you hurt me, trick me, and break my trust, again and again. I’ve tried being your friend, sister. But those days were through the moment you banished our parents to the labyrinth and turned them into monsters. I did love you. Even now, I love you still.”
The Fate Spinner squeezed her sister’s hand hard. “If you love me, then help me. I’m on my knees, begging like a servant. The people cannot stand me. They curse my name—even when I’m generous with blessings, bounty, and love, they can’t see past their hatred of me for the hardships I’m forced to give. Can’t they see I’m trapped in a cursed fate, too?” Her lips trembled. “Just once, let me trade places with you, sister. Break the rules for a day. Let me feel what it’s like to be loved, to be worshipped. Please, I beg you!” She wiped her cheeks, streaked with dampness and black kohl, then frowned. “If you are as kindhearted as our people say, have mercy.”
Annalise sensed the horned beast within her left hand breathing and growing. Felt the pulsing beat of her monster’s heart, like a ghost.
“I am sorry, Kismet, more sorry than you’ll ever know. But we are both bound by the laws of who we are—one born of fate, the other of dreams. This can never change.”
The Fate Spinner dropped her sister’s hand like it was infectious. She pushed herself up by her staff; every mirrored eye opened wide. “I thought you of all people were capable of thinking for yourself. But I see I was wrong.” The Fate Spinner wiped her eyes on her sleeve and spun her glare into a grin. “I, too, have a dream, did you know? Can you guess what it might be, Dream Spinner?”
A tingle of electricity hemmed the wind. White and black crows warred overhead. Night wolves sprinted toward them from the direction of the labyrinth. Reverie stayed seated on her throne and spoke as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “If you have a dream,” she said with warm grace, “I’d like to hear it.”
Annalise spotted Muse behind the Fate Spinner, sadder than she’d ever seen him. Still, he held his head high while peering out from behind the Fate Spinner’s legs.
“My
old dream was so simple,” the Fate Spinner said. “To be worshipped and loved by our people. But thanks to your selfishness, I have to conjure a new dream.” Four night wolves drew close to the Fate Spinner’s side, ears flat and snarling.
A flurry of crows took to the air.
“And what might that dream be, Kismet?” the Spinner of Dreams asked.
The Fate Spinner replied, “I wish to rule my own destiny and rid myself of this curse!”
Mercy, Annalise thought. That was her dream, too!
Then Reverie rose from her throne. And Annalise’s great hand flared in pain. Her vision exploded into black, and she fell through the bottom of the world.
Annalise opened her eyes in the courtyard of stone. The crimson moon shone overhead. Shadowshine trees surrounded her, but the Spinner King was gone, along with the dragon’s broken heart.
In the spot where the king’s body had been moments before was the most beautiful, intricately carved dagger Annalise had ever seen. The handle and cross guards were made of black dragon hide. The silver blade, inlaid down the middle with gold wolves, crows, and broken hearts, rested alongside a black scabbard wrapped in the same soft leather of The Book of Remembering.
It was the very dagger she’d seen in the mirror that led to the cockatrice—There Be Dragons (Honest).
A note was scrawled in black char across the courtyard stones:
This dagger, forged from a cockatrice’s heart, yields the power to shatter illusions on the path to one’s dreams. Use it to find the demon queen past the mirror of snow, a quest more painful even than this, and win the final reward. Thank you, Annalise. May the magic of dreams be yours.
The mirror of snow led to the next reward!
Annalise bowed her head. “Goodbye, Spinner King, and thank you. Wherever you are, may the magic of dreams be yours as well.”
Her great hand twisted and pulled toward the white mirror, which had shrunk considerably.
Mercy. Annalise jumped up, strapped on the scabbard and blade, and hurried to the glass, now two-by-two-feet square. A layer of ice coated the mirror. Behind it, snow swirled against a backdrop of night. Annalise got on hands and knees and readied herself to enter, when she heard tap-tap-tap-tap from behind the drifting white glass.
“Miss Meriwether?”
Annalise thrilled from head to toe. “Mister Edwards?”
She placed her small hand to the frosty mirror; it sank through to the frigid other side. Her fingers numbed instantly. Snowflakes whipped against her skin as she reached for her friend. But she couldn’t find him.
“Where are you?” She laughed with relief. “Are you okay?”
The mirror shrank even more. It was now or never.
Annalise made herself small and thrust both hands through the frame. A paw shoved her hands back. “You can’t come in here,” Mister Edwards snapped. “It’s a trap.” Beyond the glass, howling wind and high-pitched screams. “Find another w—” His paw and voice tore away in the gale.
“Mister Edwards!”
The mirror shrank around her arms. Panic kicked her heart into overdrive.
Right or wrong, trap or freedom, Annalise had to go.
This was the only way left.
“I’m coming, Mister Edwards!” Annalise squeezed through the small frame and plunked directly into a drift of snow.
Chapter 27
The Mirror of Snow
Before she left home, if someone had told Annalise that she’d battle a dragon that turned out to be a king who’d taken her inside the past and given her an magical dagger made from his enchanted heart, she’d have insisted, “That could never happen to someone like me. I’m not strong enough to handle such things.”
But as Annalise plopped face-first into a moonlit wonderland of falling snow, she thought maybe she was strong enough. Maybe the battle to prove herself worthy had readied her for this labyrinth all along.
Shivering, Annalise stood. Snow glittered and swirled. The heavens blinked with stars. A silvery moon shone through the flurries, casting the field surrounding her in a bath of arctic blue. On either side of the field were pine woods coated in white. The snow, already to her knees, was rising fast, and the mirror through which she’d entered, and all other signs of the labyrinth, had been erased the second she’d landed here.
Where am I? Her teeth had begun to chatter. Is this like the other illusions? Am I still in the labyrinth? She spotted no footprints; the snow and wind must have washed them away. Where was Mister Edwards?
Another fresh spear of pain sliced through her great palm. Annalise cradled it to her chest and scanned the woods for her friend—but she found no sign.
“Mister Edwards?” When Annalise called into the blizzard, the wind stole her voice. She peered into the dense thickets of trees. Her hair whipped and danced at her shoulders—wild blackberry in a sea of glistening silver. Tiny flurries of wind and ice bit her skin with sharp winter teeth. Annalise called again over the frozen gusts. “Mister Edwards, can you hear me?”
Winter winds howled in reply.
Mercy, she was cold. Annalise wrapped her charred cloak tighter around her and trudged deeper into the night. The dragon-heart dagger hummed at her side. She’d only gone a few feet when she spotted movement ahead.
Four pitch-black skeletons as tall as the trees emerged through the whirling snow, blocking her path. Their limbs were as long and slender as a spider’s, their bodies as dark as an endless void. Their eyes, tiny mounds of chipped ice, were backlit by the pale moon. They resembled four-legged daddy longlegs—but eviler by far.
Why do spiderlike creatures keep trying to defeat me?
She’d never seen anything so terrifying.
One-two-three-four—repeat.
Eyes wide and scared, her great hand contorting in pain, Annalise watched as the long-limbed humanoid monsters closed in on four sides. They leaned down and stared at Annalise so thoroughly, she felt observed by the darkest part of the world.
“Go away!” she shouted into the wind. But they kept coming. Annalise tried counting her quick, pounding breaths to calm her wild-beating heart, but none of her usual methods were working.
The skeletons’ burnt-looking skulls grew closer. And Annalise’s terror reflected back at her within their glossy black eyes.
“Hello, Annalise,” the first charred skeleton spoke in her grandma Frida’s kind voice. “You were always a disappointment to us, you know.” The impostor pushed its skull a foot from her face; Annalise smelled her grandma’s baby-powdery perfume. “We didn’t have the heart to tell you. But after you turned us into monsters, we don’t mind breaking your heart.” The midnight skeleton grinned with broken black teeth, and the others grinned, too.
Annalise looked away. These are the Fate Spinner’s lies—and I won’t listen!
“You were an embarrassment,” another said with Grandma Thessaly’s signature sass. “What with that hand and the devil inside it, and you being so depressing and strange, and too selfish to think of anyone else.” The other skeletons formed a tight circle around Annalise, their sharp limbs closing in. “We always knew you’d fail at whatever you tried to do.”
Annalise steeled her heart, and breathed, breathed, breathed—breathed. And when she’d calmed, the dagger heated at her side. The Spinner King’s message said the dagger had the power to shatter illusions.
If I strike them with its blade, maybe they’ll go away.
If I strike them down, maybe I’ll find the queen and the next reward.
Her frozen feet stung with cold, her heart galloped with fear, but she would do what she needed to anyway.
I wish to rule my own destiny and rid myself of this curse.
Annalise dug under her cloak and freed her blade from its scabbard. She held it before her, hand shaking. “You’re not real,” she told the dark skeleton wearing her grandma Thessaly’s face. Then she struck it in the ribs, where its heart should have been. Her dagger lodged deep into bone, but the dead thing just lau
ghed. “Oh, sweetheart.” It ran one icy finger along her cheek. “We are most definitely real. Sorry to disappoint you, but no enchanted dagger can kill us, and we hide no magical reward.”
So, this place was a trap, like Mister Edwards said?
Breath chugging fast and hot, Annalise pulled her dagger from the charred skeleton’s bones, pushed through the drifts past the darkly towering things, and searched for a way out. There’s always a way, her grandpa Jovie used to say. Keep your eyes open. Keep going. Eventually, you’ll find a way free.
“Aw, my beautiful granddaughter,” the blackened skeleton of Grandpa Hugo murmured into her ear. Its limbs bent at wrong angles. Its skull tilted like a curious bird. “So brave to keep going, even though you can’t leave.” The white moon shone through the impostor’s ice eyes as it focused on her great hand. “This is a prison. One way in, no way out.” It rose to its full height, bones popping as it stood, and bellowed over the treetops, “LONG LIVE THE FATE SPINNER!”
The skeletons shrieked—louder than the winds, louder than every noise anywhere. Annalise shoved past them, sheathed her dagger, and trudged quicker through the snow, cradling her great hand, still shooting with fire and pain. The horned creature behind her dark mark was growing steadily bigger in its attempt to break free.
Annalise had the startling realization that perhaps, like her, it had a dream, too.
“Now you’ve gone and done it,” Grandma Frida’s shadow skeleton said. Slinking up on her right, it unhinged its jaw and howled, “You’ve always been a disobedient and wicked girl, and nobody, not even your family, ever liked you!”
Snow and wind howled from the creature’s mouth. Annalise’s hair shot back in a torrent. Her grandparents would never say such things!
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