by Melissa Grey
“Every soul has its price,” Tanith said. She looked at the hand that she had used to strike him. It was still curled in a fist. Her fingers unfurled slowly, as if she had to fight to make them do so. “I know that better than most.”
Her moment of self-awareness was far too little, far too late. But her suggestion had merit, even if she didn’t know it. Yet. She had been the only person to darken Caius’s door since she had deposited him back in his bed at Wyvern’s Keep. If only he had an opportunity to see someone else, to talk to them…perhaps hope was not entirely lost.
“Fine,” Caius said. All he needed was a sympathetic ear, and there was no shortage of those in the fortress, even if Tanith was too blind to see them. Her cruelty had started to fray her already fragile support. All his people needed was a push in the right direction. He might not be in a fight at this particular moment, but even from the confines of his sickbed, he could still help the people to whom he’d sworn himself prince.
“I’ll be a good boy.” He hoped Tanith didn’t hear the lie in his voice. “But it had better be a good book.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The dream was never the same, not exactly, but it was similar, and it happened every night. It seemed to be the only dream Echo could remember. If her subconscious entertained other flights of fancy during her sleeping hours, her mind didn’t see fit to retain the details. She knew just what her dreams would serve her the moment she laid her head down on the pillow. Though she’d fought off sleep as long as possible, burying her growing exhaustion in the stack of books beside her bed, slumber won, as it always did, and pulled her into its wicked embrace.
Echo stood in a hall of mirrors. Not just any hall of mirrors. No, this was the Hall of Mirrors. The one that visitors to the Palace of Versailles had marveled at since Louis XIV, the Sun King, had commissioned its building during his reign.
Echo had been to Versailles once, on an ill-advised and illicit journey with Ivy when they’d both been far too young to navigate the in-between alone. But the Ala had forgotten all about Echo’s sticky fingers and left a pouch of shadow dust sitting on her desk, and, well…Echo had never been one to ignore an opportunity when it was so clearly (and carelessly) presented to her. And so she had absconded with the shadow dust—she never stole, she absconded—and she and Ivy had run away, entertaining the grand notion that they would be able to live in Versailles like Claudia and Jamie Kincaid had lived in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Echo’s favorite childhood novel, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. They’d barely set foot through the sloppily opened gateway in an abandoned subway tunnel when the Ala’s hands had clamped down on their shoulders like steel grips. But the Ala, though stern in her reprimands, had indulged their whimsy and escorted them to Versailles anyway. After hours, of course.
Now there was no comforting warmth of Ivy’s hand in Echo’s own, no steady swish of the Ala’s skirts over polished marble. There was only the velvet cloak of night, the silver spill of moonlight, and the whispers of the dead.
One side of the corridor—impossibly long, far longer than it was in reality—was dominated by a series of floor-to-ceiling arches, each inlaid with a mirror designed to reflect the windows on the wall opposite.
Echo ignored the mirrors for now. The mirrors were her least favorite part of the dream. Instead, she let her feet carry her to the bank of tall windows to gaze outside, hoping that for once, her mind would supply her with something beautiful to look at. She should have known better.
She knew from experience that the windows in the real palace looked out on the sea of manicured gardens of which Marie Antoinette had been so proud.
But there were no gloriously sculpted hedges or cheery, babbling fountains or verdant lime avenues. There was only darkness, a great and endless abyss. Echo pressed a palm to the glass and felt the darkness pulse, as if it could feel her heat through the window and it wanted—no, needed—to reach out for her, to claim her warmth and life for itself.
Echo snatched her hand away from the glass and clutched it against her chest. Her palm tingled with the memory of sensation.
Maybe the mirrors weren’t the worst part. Maybe looking within oneself wasn’t nearly half as bad as whatever lurked outside.
Her steps were unsteady as she stumbled back, away from the windows and the darkness begging to be let in.
It’s only a dream, she reminded herself. That was cold comfort. A dream was as good as a prison while one was trapped inside it, and Echo knew that the cage would open only when she faced her current self and all the selves that had come before.
She turned toward the bank of mirrors and gazed upon her reflection.
Brown eyes stared back at her. Smudges marred the skin beneath her eyes, evidence of the exhaustion built up by nights of restless sleep. Her complexion, once a healthy tan, almost the color of sand, was sallow and pale. The girl in the mirror wore what Echo had come to think of as her battle armor: Dark jeans. Sturdy boots. A leather jacket. A T-shirt bearing an image of Alice sitting down to tea with the Mad Hatter. After seeing the shirt at the Strand, Echo had actually paid for it, albeit with money pickpocketed from an investment banker she’d stood beside on a crowded subway platform. But she had paid. Echo didn’t steal books, and she didn’t steal from bookstores. Even a thief needed a code of honor.
The image of herself was not a surprise. The first thing Echo saw in the mirrors was always Echo.
A persistent itch tingled beneath her shirt, right over her heart. Echo’s hands curled into fists at her sides, but no matter how much she tried to resist, this part of the dream would not be denied. The itch evolved into a steady burn, as if her skin were peeling away to expose the rot beneath. Biting back a curse, Echo raised her hands to the collar of her shirt and pulled it down, exposing her collarbone and, directly beneath it, the black mark staining her skin. Darkened veins, more charcoal than black, branched from the center of the scar, reaching for the hollow of her neck, the ridges of her rib cage, any untainted skin it could get to.
As Echo watched, the scar grew, consuming the tan flesh around it, propelled by the beating of her heart. She placed her free hand over the mark to hide it from sight, but to no avail. The infection spread from her chest to her fingers, clinging to her skin as if she’d dipped her hand in oil.
She stopped fighting it and simply watched in morbid fascination as the darkened veins slithered up her wrist, along her arm, around the curve of her elbow.
If she didn’t fight it, it didn’t hurt.
It had taken Echo several sweat-soaked and sleepless nights to figure that out.
She walked down the hallway, the expanse stretching out before her as far as the eye could see and then, no doubt, farther.
Daylight spilled from the second mirror, as brightly as if it were a window. It was, in a way. To another world, another life.
Echo met the eyes in the mirror. Brown, but not the same brown as her own. Darker. Harder. Striated black-and-white feathers instead of chocolate-brown hair. Skin the color of pale sand, a shade lighter than Echo’s.
It was strange to see Rose so directly even now, after nights of the same dream, twisted and mutated, but always the same. Always herself. Before, Rose had appeared to Echo as fragments, the way people did when they existed only in memory.
Rose stared out at Echo, her gaze expectant. Echo raised her right hand and Rose mirrored the action, her own fingers approaching the glass at the same speed as Echo’s, as if she truly were a reflection.
“Echo,” said Rose, her hand inches from Echo’s. Her eyes narrowed. “Run.”
The mirror shattered the moment Echo’s fingertips touched its surface, fracturing Rose into a thousand scattered shards. The darkness beat against the windows, clamoring to be let in. A crash sounded from the hallway behind her. Echo glanced back. One of the windows had been smashed from the outside, and shadows were writhing through the jagged opening, spilling across the marble floor.
Echo ran.<
br />
Mirrors streamed past as she sailed by. In each, a vessel of the firebird, forgotten by time, but not by the firebird itself, called out to Echo. Some she remembered from dreams past; some were new. She recognized a Drakharin woman with white-blond hair in warrior braids who shouted, “Cha’laen”—the Drakhar word for sister—but Echo’s passage was too swift to make note of anything other than the woman’s distinctive scales and the bow and quiver full of arrows slung over her shoulders.
The vessels called to her in a hundred languages, half of them dead, but they all said the same thing.
Run.
And she did. But no matter how fast she ran or how far, she could never escape the darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
The garden had quickly become Ivy’s favorite place in Avalon Castle. It wasn’t quiet, not with its proximity to the rubble-strewn area of the courtyard that the surviving Warhawks used as a sparring ground, nor was it particularly beautiful, considering that two of the four walls surrounding it had crumbled during Tanith’s attack. In spite of all that, Ivy found a sort of peace when she was working there, snipping leaves to muddle for tea or pulling up roots to create poultices for minor wounds and burns. There was something about the feeling of dirt underneath her fingernails that made her feel accomplished. It sounded trite, even in her own head, but there was an honesty to working with her hands that Ivy found reassuring in a world filled with uncertainty and brutality. And it helped that the view was spectacular.
The object of her gaze turned, as if feeling her eyes grazing the side of his face. In the late-morning sun, Helios’s black hair shimmered in shades of midnight blue. The iridescent dusting of scales at his temples reminded Ivy of the clear glitter nail polish Echo had shoplifted from Sephora as a Christmas gift for her last year. The Avicen didn’t celebrate that particular holiday, but Ivy would never turn her nose up at presents. Thinking of Helios and glitter brought a small smile to Ivy’s lips, a rarity these days. Helios mirrored it with one of his own.
“Something funny?” His English was flawless, though his accent was slightly thicker than Dorian’s or Caius’s. Ivy assumed he had spent most of his time speaking in his native tongue with his fellow Firedrakes before he turned his back on them to help Ivy escape Wyvern’s Keep. The memory of her time there made her smile falter. She mentally batted the recollection away as if it were an annoyingly persistent mosquito.
Helios noticed the change in her demeanor. He leaned back on his heels, brushing the dirt from his hands onto his already stained jeans. “Are you all right?”
Ivy took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the herbs around her, finding solace even in the bitter aroma of the bloodweed roots she was planting. She pulled off her heavy gloves—a necessity when dealing with bloodweed, as its leaves had the tendency to sting—and sank her fingers into a patch of moist dirt. It had rained during the night, and the soil was ripe for gardening. She could feel the magic buried in the earth like a subtle vibration. The spell that Echo had worked in the heat of battle had seeped into the very foundations of the island, working its way through every inch of soil and stone, creating a protective barrier between the island and the rest of the world. The magic even felt like Echo, though if Ivy tried to verbalize how it felt like Echo, she would have found words to be too reductive, too simplistic to describe the magic’s familiarity. Every living thing had an aura about it. Not the kind that human new age books liked to talk about, not exactly. It was as if every person, every animal had a unique flavor—or perhaps a unique perfume—that was theirs and theirs alone, one that was created through an accumulation of all of life’s experiences, of all the people they had ever met, of all the places they had ever been. Part of Ivy’s training as a healer was learning to read auras, to understand them. One of the truths about medicine—human or Avicen—was that patients were unreliable narrators of their own condition. Some people would downplay their pain, either because they wanted to act tough or because they had grown so accustomed to its presence that it simply didn’t seem as big a deal as it was, while others oversold their symptoms. But auras were honest. Auras did not lie or exaggerate or understate. A person’s aura told the truth of their distress. Ivy could always tell when Echo was feeling unwell or frightened or elated, without needing Echo’s words to confirm the diagnosis. Ivy spent more time with Echo than she did with anyone else, and therefore she knew the feeling of Echo’s aura better than anyone else’s. She felt it now, coursing through the soil of Avalon island. It comforted her, as it did when Echo was present. Her friend was elsewhere, but a part of her remained.
“Ivy?” Helios prompted. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Ivy replied, pulling her fingers from the dirt. “I’m okay.”
She looked back at Helios to find him quirking a disbelieving eyebrow at her. “Is that an ‘I’m okay’ as in ‘I am actually okay,’ or is that an ‘I’m okay’ as in ‘I am not at all okay but I do not wish to discuss it at this time’?”
“I’m okay, truly,” Ivy insisted. “I was just…thinking.”
“Ah, yes,” Helios said, rubbing his chin as if deep in thought himself, and unintentionally smearing dirt on his face. “Thinking. A dangerous activity. I try to avoid it whenever possible.”
Ivy chucked one of her gardening gloves at him. He caught it with a smile. Instead of returning it to her, he plopped the glove down on top of his own, which he only wore when handling bloodweed. He reached into the basket of herbs Ivy had instructed him to pick and retrieved a small purple blossom that was often used to treat ailments of the head and stomach. He held the flower out to her and said, “Peony for your thoughts?”
Ivy groaned, but she accepted the flower, hoping the blush she felt rising in her cheeks wasn’t too violent a shade of red. “Two things,” she said. “One: that’s rosemary, not a peony. And two: that was a terrible pun and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Be that as it may,” said Helios, “my question still stands.”
Ivy wanted to insist that she wasn’t avoiding his question, but since she was, she grasped for a diversion. The clouds above shifted, strengthening the sunlight falling on the garden, and Ivy’s eyes alighted on a glint at Helios’s throat. A thin gold chain disappeared into the collar of his shirt, but the subtle form of what looked like a pendant showed beneath the fabric. “What’s with the necklace?” she asked. She’d noticed it weeks ago, and as far as she could tell, Helios hadn’t taken it off once.
Helios’s hand rose to lightly touch the pendant. “This? It’s just a locket. I’ve had it for so long, I don’t even feel its weight anymore.”
Something too close to jealousy for Ivy’s liking fluttered in her chest. “Did you leave a special someone back at the keep?”
Helios cut her a sideways glance, informing her without words that she was hiding nothing. “Yes,” he replied, “but not the way you’re imagining.”
Warmth suffused Ivy’s cheeks. “Oh?”
By way of explanation, Helios pulled the chain from beneath his shirt and placed the locket in his palm. It was a humble piece, its square, golden surface burnished to a reflective shine. He popped open the clasp to reveal two portraits, one of an older woman and the other of a young man who bore a striking resemblance to Helios. “My mother and my younger brother,” he said. “She passed away some years ago, but Hermes is still alive. As far as I know, anyway.” His fist closed around the locket, blocking the portraits from Ivy’s view.
“Where is he now?” Ivy asked.
“He works in the kitchens at Wyvern’s Keep,” Helios replied, snapping the locket shut and tucking it back into his shirt. “He was never much of a fighter, so he didn’t follow me into the Firedrakes, but he’s a genius in the kitchen. He made the almond cakes I brought you.” He sighed. “I hope Hermes is unimportant enough to escape Tanith’s notice. My leaving put him in danger, but he was always telling me I ought to do what’s right, no matter the cost.”
“I’m sure he’
s fine,” Ivy said, even though she was sure of no such thing. She wasn’t cruel enough to say anything else.
Helios scoffed softly. “I hope you’re right.” He blinked up at the sky, squinting against the light. “I want to make him proud. And I want to keep him safe. I’m not sure I can do both.” He looked back at her, his expression rearranging itself into one of curiosity rather than concern. “And don’t think I didn’t notice the redirect. You’re avoiding my question.” For good measure, he repeated it: “What’s on your mind?”
“I’m not avoiding the question,” Ivy said. “I honestly don’t know where to begin.”
Helios sat on the ground, legs crossed in front of him, supporting his weight on his elbows. He turned his face toward the sun, soaking up the rays like a contented cat. He rarely went outside. The Avicen distrusted him, and while the Ala had made it clear Helios was a defector and therefore on their side, he kept to his room, unhappy that he made them so uncomfortable. In the herb garden, with Ivy, he was safe, mostly because only the healers and kitchen staff were allowed there, and they were far too busy fixing and feeding a castle’s worth of refugees to grumble about one lone Drakharin. Ivy had overheard one of the senior healers say she didn’t care if Helios had scales so long as he made himself useful, which he was very good at doing.
“You might feel better if you talk about whatever it is,” Helios said, cracking open a single lemon-yellow eye to squint at Ivy. “Feelings are like wine: they need time to breathe.”
“That was unusually poetic,” Ivy said. She abandoned the bloodweed. They were running dangerously low on bloodweed, and so far, she and Helios had managed to cultivate only a tiny bit more. It was an astonishingly difficult herb to grow, as Ivy had discovered, which was not the least of her grievances.
She moved to sit next to Helios, close enough to touch him, even though she didn’t. “Where do I start? There’s the issue of the bloodweed. If that monster attacks again, we don’t have nearly enough to treat any victims. We barely had enough to help the people here. Not to mention the fact that there is a hospital full of people in Manhattan—human people—who are suffering from the same ailment, and I don’t know how or even if we can help them. Just because the bloodweed works on us doesn’t mean it’s compatible with human biology.”