by Alyssa Wees
“The whole world did not wait for you, Princess,” says Shay as others join the crowd, sighing sylphs with dragonfly eyes and wet-haired nymphs and sphinxes with scarlet-stained paws. Winged wyverns with slick, thick scales, and gray gorgons wearing black veils over their faces so that they can see us but we can’t see them. So, so many creatures, some with two legs or four legs or no legs or wings. Creatures that laugh and creatures that lie, creatures with hearts small and strange, hearts that spill magic and others that don’t.
I can hear every one of them, every heart, and all of them sound like hope, quiet and hungry and trembling and divine.
“But those who waited are now the world,” Shay says. “They are everything that is left, everything that matters.”
Gabrielle takes my hand, and Raisa takes hers, and Renata takes Raisa’s, forming an unbreakable chain. I swallow, lick my lips, and stare, and now is not the time for crying but I want to anyway. I don’t cry, though. I don’t.
Can’t.
Won’t.
They seem to be waiting. Waiting for me to say something.
“I promise only that I will try my best,” I say. “I promise I won’t leave you again.”
They say nothing.
But they’re not waiting for me to say something, I realize as I resume our trek toward the castle, still holding Gabrielle’s hand, my other palm pressed to Shay’s furry flank. They’re waiting for me to do something.
So I walk.
And.
They follow.
Through the narrow streets, silence skulking in front of and behind us, stretching from side to side. More people slip out of their houses to join us, and the sun fully opens its eyes after a long, restless night.
Soon the palace is right there, right in front of us. Rising up and up and up, glimmering steel, sparkling windows. My feet ache, my head aches, but adrenaline or love or fear or maybe all three have their jaws clamped in me, and I know I couldn’t lie down and sleep just now even if I tried.
“Witch?” Gabrielle says, her voice low. “What now?”
They’re all waiting for me, everyone who has followed me to this vacant, quiet place. Why is it so vacant, so quiet?
I set my hands on the heavy iron doors in the place where the knobs should be. At my touch, curlicues of dark green and violet light spiral swiftly along the surface of the metal, spreading until the entire double doorway is illuminated in loops and whorls. The doors then slide apart without a sound.
I step inside. Into the castle, into the palace where I grew up. But though I have lived here for the entirety of one of my lives, it does not feel like home.
The others squeeze in around me, Raisa and Renata and Gabrielle and Shay the closest, with the three hundred or so others clustered behind. Once everyone has passed through the doors, they slide closed on their own.
Empty, empty, empty. And cold, so cold that braids of goose bumps quiver all across my skin. The walls, the floor, the ceiling—everything is made of the same smooth, opaque material. We call it crystal, but it’s not; it’s magic, in its pure and solid form. An emerald sunburst pattern in the floor at the center of the cavernous foyer shoots out to form a single stripe down the center of each of the four hallways. The windows set at even intervals along the corridors let in only frail light—they’ve been charmed to obscure the harshest rays of the sun and the moons, rendering the interior permanently dreary.
I turn to those who followed me here. I put on my princess face.
“Search the castle. Disarm any guards you come across. Find anyone who might be hiding or in need of help. Once you’ve found them, get them out. I’ll join you once I’ve found my family.” And the staircase, I think. “Okay?”
No verbal reply, only the soft shuffle of eager footfalls as they steal away, prowling together through the shadowed halls. Except my closest companions, all waiting for me to announce our next move.
“Gabrielle, go to the dungeons and look for a boy with black hair and—”
“Varon.” Gabrielle scowls, crossing her arms over her chest. “I met him in the Woods, remember? And the attic too.”
“Oh, right.” I give her a stern look. “Be nice, okay? I would go myself, but I need to find my parents. Please release him and bring him to the rooftop temple. Shay, will you go with her?”
Shay lifts her head and locks her knees. “Princess, I will not leave your side.”
“But—”
“I’ll be fine on my own,” Gabrielle says, already turning and running down the hall. “Don’t worry about me!”
“Be careful!” Raisa calls as Gabrielle disappears. Then she snatches a piece of her silvery hair and nervously chomps it between her teeth. When Renata giggles and playfully pinches her shoulder, Raisa smacks her hand away.
“The rooftop temple,” I say, reaching again for Shay’s mane, curling my fingers into her hair. “That’s where Mom and Dad will be. I’m sure of it.”
“This is so creepy,” Raisa whispers as I pull them along, treading carefully down the corridor straight ahead.
At every moment I expect someone—the king, his guards, anyone—to come crashing around the corner, weapons held high and voices raised. The hallways are dotted with doorways leading to various rooms, but none of them open, and no one springs out at us. “Where is everyone?” I say. “I don’t like this at all.”
“Shhh,” Renata says. “Someone broke their own heart here. Can you feel it?”
“Kind of,” Raisa admits.
“You should really free your hands, my sweet,” says Shay as I lead them down another hallway, identical to the first, letting my memory guide me to the spiral stairs that will take us to the roof of the keep. She gently shakes her head, trying to get me to let go. “Just in case.”
I tighten my grip.
On and on and on we go, through the clinically clean corridors with the eerie echo of our footsteps and our scrambled heartbeats, with sweat dripping down our spines.
We finally reach the temple stairs, tucked on the other side of an open archway. I’m forced to relinquish my grasp on Shay’s hair, moving forward, with Raisa just behind, and Renata behind her, cradling the mirror to her chest. Shay is in the rear, her warm breath fogging up the passage with a mess of sharp scents. I try to breathe through my mouth.
As the crystalline windows light up the stairwell, I know this isn’t the stairwell from my visions. Except, I see something skim quickly into and out of view, an errant shadow on the high ceiling. And I hear a voice, saying my name. But the voice is all wrong, not the voice I’ve been longing to hear. It’s like flaking rust, unraveling at the edges, instead of smooth and solid and certain.
“Rhea Ravenna…”
Before I can think it through, I lift my hands and hiss, “Forla!”
An iridescent ball of crystal blasts through the wall above Raisa and Renata, a ball made of the same substance as the castle, solid magic. The fracture-snap of splintering glass echoes through the stairwell, and even Rose flinches, safe inside her unbreakable frame.
Raisa clasps her hands over her ears until the ringing fades. “What was that? Are you trying to kill us?”
The wall is covered in contorted cracks that have turned wine red. With the hard knot of magic lodged at the center, it looks like a bloodshot eye, unblinking.
“I thought I saw something,” I gasp, wrapping my trembling arms around my waist. “I thought—but I guess it was just a shadow.”
“Leave strange shadows to me, Your Highness,” Raisa snaps. “I’m the shadow expert here.”
She folds her arms over her chest, while I look apologetically at the others.
“Someone lost their patience on these stairs,” Renata says gravely, and a laugh boils in my chest but never quite makes it out of my mouth; it scalds my ribs, trapped inside.
“Come on,” I say, and the others follow me as I start to run, hastening to reach my parents. My calves throb, and I’m so dizzy that I stumble a dozen times, but I do not stop or slow, my hands raised and tingling.
But we come across no one. Not even a shadow.
Why is this so easy? I think. It should not be so easy.
Finally we come to the temple’s door with its big, iron filigrees, and when I press my hands against it, it shudders and slides sideways into the wall, just like before.
The sun—it’s everywhere, everywhere. I shield my eyes and step out onto the open roof.
“We’re here,” I breathe.
Steel columns soar on all sides, and overhead are several arched iron beams, between which slices of sky are visible, bright, bright blue. I see the Wandering One, the god with two faces whose golden hood is peeled back, revealing its horns, hands stretched out, carrying life in its left hand and death in the right. I wonder which palm he will press to my chest today.
The last time I was up here, Mom was dead. The time before, I pricked one of the fingers on my left hand, knowingly letting blood from the wrong hand dribble onto the altar for death. I had been working myself up to it for a while, for years, telling myself that it was silly to be afraid, because if I had been performing this ritual all my life under the guise of normalcy and had yet to be cleansed of the “taint” of magic, then it was all empty anyway. It meant nothing. The Wandering One was just a man in a fancy cloak with white and black smoke stuck between his fingers. What was he compared to me? I had magic, and kindness, and cruelty, and a heart that reflected sunshine at night, so bright that the ocean answered my call.
Nothing happened.
Little did I know what would happen two weeks later—it was not just Mom but the reveal of my magic that followed, which weighs heavily upon me now.
I turn away from the altar, and suddenly the open sky, the metal, the intensity of the light—none of this is as magnificent and distracting as the glass casket in the center of the temple, one that was not there the last time I was here. A casket with a sleeping woman inside, curled on her side with her knees to her chest and her hands under her cheek, her skirts twisted around her legs. A starburst-bloom of black hair spread over a white pillow, bare feet with long toenails curling like dried leaves. And a man hunched over her, a man with his sleeves rolled up to reveal a tattoo on his forearm in silver ink—silver, not black like they once were in a dream. Here, silver is considered the color of the soul.
“Dad?”
He looks up. “Rhea?”
I rush across the temple and around the bier to where he stands, and I tumble into his arms. After several long seconds he releases me and reaches out to embrace Renata, who carefully sets the gilded mirror on the ground before tossing her arms around his neck. If he is surprised by her blue-tinged skin and her scales and her wet hair, he doesn’t show it.
“My girls, my girls, you’re here.” He lets go of Renata to reach for Raisa, who balks, scrunching her lips and staying very still, like a confused but polite pet who does not understand this human inclination to squeeze to death the things we love.
“I know you’re not technically my dad here,” Raisa says when he finally relinquishes Renata, “but I’m still basically your daughter, and I, you know—I love you or whatever.”
Dad laughs, and it makes my knees go squishy with relief. Relief that we are all here now, together. Dad is laughing, and that means everything will be fine, everything will be fixed.
“Oh, Ray, I love you—or whatever—too,” he says. “Our time in the beach house was the happiest I’ve been in a long while. Not because we were living in a dream but because I was there with all of you, being a father instead of a prince.” But then his smile slides sideways and my knees stiffen again. “But wait—where is Rose?”
Renata picks up the mirror and holds it high for him to see.
Rose says nothing, only angles her chin to the side, as if there is something more interesting there, just out of sight, than our reunion. But she doesn’t fool me, not for a second.
“Rose?” Dad peers into the mirror, touching his fingertips to her reflection. As soon as he does, swirls of ice crystals bubble and blister on the surface, and he snatches his hand back. “What’s going on?”
“She says—” I begin, but while we stand here, the sun that should be warm isn’t anymore. I have a sudden thought that I’m standing in someone else’s shadow, someone standing just behind me, but when I check over my shoulder, no one is actually there. My magic recoils from it, from the shadow that is no shadow, reversing in my veins, and it feels like a fingernail bent backward. “She’ll come out when she’s ready.”
“Uh, all right.” Dad looks up from the mirror, and over his shoulder to Shay. She smiles, displaying her blood-speckled teeth, and I know he probably smells roses, roses and lilacs and lavender. His eyes jump to me. “Rhea, what’s all this?”
“If by ‘all this’ you mean the manticore, her name is Shay and she won’t eat you,” I add, giving her a pointed look as I leave Dad’s side to pace around the coffin. I’m still in the sunlight, but I don’t feel it. Something is there, something is saturating the air, absorbing the warmth before it reaches me. “And what we need to do right now is wake Mom up and get out of here.”
The wind changes direction abruptly—first it comes from the east, and then from the west, as if driving the sun across the sky, impatient for night.
“What’s happening?” Renata says, and we all look up. “Why’s the sun going away?”
And I realize: the wind really is pushing the sun, shoving it back below the horizon, stuffing it down, the world receding back into night.
On its way to jostle the sun, the wind delivers a whisper, another one, same as the first except louder, insistent, a voice that could be coming from a thousand miles away or, just as easily, from right behind me.
“Rhea Ravenna,” says the unseen someone, and it is like a prophecy, a promise: You were, you are, you always will be.
Something is here, something sticky and stale and slithery, and I don’t want it anywhere near me. Near us. I have found my family, and nothing is going to take them away from me again.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I say, and since no one reacted to the strange voice saying my name, I’m fairly certain I’m the only one who heard it. “But I know we need to leave.”
“Slow down,” Dad says. “We should—”
“No.” I press my hands to the coffin, looking in at Mom. I knock a few times, open-palmed, as if the sound might jar her back to life. “How do we get her out?”
“Don’t bang on the glass like that!” Raisa rushes over and pushes my hands away. I flit out of her grasp, around to the other side. “You’ll disturb her. You’ll deafen her!”
“Ray, she’s not a fish.”
“I don’t like it here.” Renata hugs the mirror to her chest again. “I don’t like it here.”
Shay walks over to the open edge of the temple and lifts her front paws onto the ledge so she can look down. “There are people gathered on the ground, and more are pouring out the front door,” she tells us. “It might be wise, Your Highnesses, to adopt a sense of urgency.”
I run my hands over the casket, searching for a clasp, a hinge. “How do you open this?”
“I want Mom out of there,” Renata says, nearly shouting. “I want her out now.”
Leaving the ledge to rejoin us, Shay huffs and coils her stinger more tightly over her back. The shadows from the steel columns are slanted now, the sun pushed lower and lower. In the west, a few sleepy stars blink their eyes, confused. “I don’t know what to do,” Dad says quietly. “She’s not under a spell, as far as I know. It’s more like she’s in a coma.”
“Let me think.” I turn to the altar of life to my left, then swing my gaze to the r
ight. Offerings of flowers and wine, of silk and blood. Death, the ultimate riddle. And there is only one person I know who knows the answer. Who knows how to reverse it, to stall it, to trick it.
What was it that the Fox Who Is No Fox said, when he told me how the necromancer—how he—had brought my mother back from death? That her magic—that her veins had been scraped clean of it, and that—that there was little hope of reviving her entirely without injecting her with more.
I close my eyes and whisper, “Varon?”
Nothing.
“Darkness?” I try.
I open my eyes. Still nothing. The sun is nearly sunken, and is splashing us with rosy golden light. Bright and sharp and wrong, wrong, wrong.
Please, I think. Where are you? I need you.
I stamp my foot. Aren’t you supposed to come when I call?
Then, finally, an answer: “Rhea Ravenna,” says the wind, the walls, the other side of the world, and though it has his cadence, this voice does not belong to the boy I seek.
But neither is it entirely unfamiliar.
“Mom needs magic,” I say, everything in me shivering, clattering, everywhere aching. Slowly, so slowly that I didn’t notice until now, the others have been creeping forward, so that we’re all gathered close around the casket, a private vigil of restless mourners.
Dad sighs, rubbing his eyes, both relieved that the problem has been identified and stymied by the solution. “How does she get some, then?”
“It has to be given to her.” I am not afraid. “I’ll give her mine.”
“Rhea, you can’t!” Renata cries. Shay, startled, blows a cloying cinnamon breath across the coffin and into my face. Raisa combs her fingers through Renata’s long wet hair to calm her. “We need your magic. We need you!”