A coldness hundreds of times worse than the cold of the wraiths filled Claire’s chest. What did you do when even magic couldn’t help?
There was no way out of this cell—and even if there had been, there was no unicorn following them. Or maybe, there was no unicorn at all.
There was, for the first time in Claire’s life, no hope.
CHAPTER
30
Time passed funny when your heart had broken. For Claire, it was as if her heart had been torn into a before—when Sophie might be annoying, stubborn, and bossy, but she had still always been a big sister, looking out for her—and after, when Sophie had entirely ceased to be who Claire had thought she was. With her heart in two pieces, it was like she’d lost the ability to count heartbeats, let alone seconds, minutes, or hours.
Sophie fell asleep, but Claire had no such luck. She wasn’t sure how long she’d cried, her knees tucked into her chest. Then she wasn’t sure how long she’d sat there, staring into the void of her kneecaps. Maybe she had even fallen asleep for a time, she wasn’t really sure.
It was Nett’s and Sena’s quiet whispers that hauled Claire away from the expanding hole in her chest. Lifting her head, she squinted through the darkness. She had no idea how long or little she’d been lost in her misery, and Sophie was still asleep.
Standing up, she went to go sit next to Nett and Sena, and their conversation immediately dropped off.
“Please,” Claire said, leaning her back against the damp wall. “Keep talking. I need … I need a distraction.”
Nett ducked his head. “I was telling Sena about the crystal flute you told me about.”
“Forgers craft magic flutes all the time,” Sena added, “but I’ve never heard of one being crystal before.”
The crystal flute’s story prodded a question in Claire that she’d forgotten she’d wondered about.
“Nett,” Claire said slowly. “There are so many legends about unicorns—The Unicorn Princess and Her Crystal Flute, the story about the moon’s tears turning into unicorns, the fact that there are new unicorns in the moontear necklace waiting to be released—but which story is right?”
Nett paused, considering. “I don’t think there is one right story, and that all the rest are wrong. Maybe they’re all wrong, even, but when they’re listened to together, you get the full truth.”
“What?” Claire asked, frustrated.
“I think I get it,” Sena said. “Think of a coloring page. You can give two people the exact same page with an outline of a unicorn. Each person can color in the unicorn any way they want, but at the end of the day, the picture is still a unicorn—no matter how you got there.”
For one split second, Claire thought she understood. Not in the same way she knew one plus one equals two, but from the side, as if she’d finally seen the 3-D image in a bunch of fuzzy dots and knew that if she looked at it square on, it’d disappear.
Nett bobbed his head. “There are some historians,” he added, “like Eliza the Ebullient, who try to link them all together. She thought that maybe unicorns didn’t come from the moon at all, but were shooting stars that had been wished upon and had fallen to earth.”
Sena tilted her head, looking thoughtfully at the small, contained fire. “That kind of makes sense. Wishing stars and wishing hearts can’t be all that different, can they? And,” she turned to look at Claire and said solemnly, “sometimes, they do come true.”
It was such an unexpected thing to hear from Sena that Claire almost believed her.
Almost.
“Maybe Sophie’s right, then,” Claire said. “She thought that the unicorn ran too far away. Or was hunted down. Or after three hundred years just, you know …” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.
Sena tilted her head as she considered. “There’s a good chance the unicorn’s still alive, especially if Thorn’s telling the truth about Queen Rock.”
Nett trailed his finger in some of the lake slime that had been allowed to grow in the cell. “There’s something I don’t get,” he said, looking up. “Even if Sophie was lying to you about the unicorn mane all along.”
“What?” Claire asked.
“The flute should have worked,” Nett said. “You’re a Gemmer, you’re related to Prince Martin, and there are no other direct relatives here, other than Sophie. By all accounts, you should be the heir of Arden—” He broke off, and Claire knew why.
An orange light bobbed toward them, and then there was the sound of a soft splash as someone anchored a boat. Two figures waded toward them.
“This way, Your Majesty,” Mira Fray said to another woman, who looked very familiar as the orange light glinted off her spectacles.
“Hello, children,” Scholar Terra said as she came to a halt. “It’s good to see you again.”
CHAPTER
31
It was a joke.
It had to be a joke. Scholar Terra … was Queen Estelle? It made no sense.
“What—what are you doing here?” Claire stared at Terra, dumbstruck. Everyone else—Nett, Sena, even Sophie—faded into the background as she took in her teacher.
“I do so wish you hadn’t run away,” Terra sighed. “Your princess training was coming along so well. Slowly, I admit, but well.”
Terra took another step closer, and for the first time, Claire noticed that the scholar now leaned on a cane. And not just any cane, a beautifully bejeweled one with a ram’s head for the handle. Grandmaster Carnelian’s cane.
“I don’t understand,” Claire said, desperation welling deep within. “How can you be Queen Estelle?” She remembered Terra’s study, full of unicorn paintings, rugs, and other decorations. “You love unicorns!”
Terra smiled, and pushed back her spectacles. It was the first time Claire had seen the woman without her many lenses of glass. If she had, maybe she would have realized sooner who Terra was. Because her uncovered eyes were not jet black. They were gray, and not just any gray. The same gray as Dad’s eyes. The same color as Claire’s.
“I am fascinated by them, true,” Terra said, her fingers playing with the ram’s horns. “They are powerful beyond imagining. They are pure magic. But love?” She shook her head. “How could anyone love such heartless creatures?”
“Scholar Terra,” Claire said, her chest tight, “please. I don’t understand! Why didn’t you tell us who you are?”
She was vaguely aware of Sena and Nett circling around Sophie, trying to shrink into the shadows.
Terra’s fingers lightly brushed the spectacles pushed up on her forehead. “I saw the Petrified Forest lingering on you. I had a sense of what you believed about me, and so I thought it best to remain concealed, and train you to a point where maybe, possibly, you could wake the moontears. But it wasn’t until you told me the unicorn, too, had returned that I began to think we could really get anywhere.”
“But … ” Claire could hardly speak. “You’re from Stonehaven. You’ve lived there your entire life, and the queen has been stone for at least three hundred years!”
Terra shook her head, and her jewelry that Claire once had thought was so pretty now seemed to glitter like predatory eyes. “Claire, you know better than that. You know Gemmers have ways of ensnaring the mind.”
Claire’s mouth went dry as she remembered the Identification Class when she’d stumbled upon a Mesmerizing Opal, and how surprised Scholar Pumus had been that one still existed within the Citadel. And she had just seen a tunnel full of carefully carved opals. With the Royalists aiding Terra, it would not have been hard for Terra to get her hands on one.
But then … had she been Mesmerized?
“Don’t worry,” Terra said, seeming to see the question in Claire’s thoughts. “I had no need to Mesmerize you. You needed no convincing, and I needed to keep your mind clear while we studied the moontears. And I admit, though I am the most powerful Gemmer to have ever lived, Mesmerizing an entire village was not easy. Jasper in particular was stubborn, so I had to l
ure him the old-fashioned way, with promises of power. But I really had no choice. Secrets weaken the more people who know. And in the last three hundred years, I have learned patience.”
Terra sighed, and Claire was surprised to hear it tinged with real emotion: with sadness. “There really are so few Gemmers left, but no matter. With your help, Princess Claire, we will return our guild to its former glory.”
But Claire would never forget how, before she found Sophie in Arden, she’d been trapped in the Petrified Forest, and had heard the screams and whinnies of hundreds of unicorns being hunted—and all of it led by the queen herself.
“No,” Claire squeaked. “You had your chance three hundred years ago. You killed unicorns. You drove the guilds apart! You don’t deserve to be queen!”
“Watch yourself,” Fray called from the shadows. An eerie rustle filled the cell as Fray’s fringe all shifted in Claire’s direction.
“Mira …,” Terra said warningly, and slowly the fringe fell flat. Terra’s eyes flashed as she turned her attention back to Claire. “I think you’ll soon change your mind. You see, I have a theory.”
And as Terra tilted her head, the movement was so achingly familiar Claire almost cried out. It was the same way Sophie moved when she was weighing new information.
“What … what kind of theory?” Claire asked.
Terra stepped toward the door, leaning on her bejeweled cane. “One that could explain your sister’s predicament.”
Sophie’s illness.
Terra had been able to Mesmerize an entire village.
And now she was offering what Claire wanted most in the world. Fear formed a lump of ice in her throat. She did not want to follow Terra. She did not trust the queen.
But Sophie was sick.
And Claire would rather face a hundred wraiths than lose what might be the only chance she’d have to heal Sophie once and for all. So in the end, there wasn’t really a choice.
“Claire,” Sophie whispered. “Don’t.”
But for once, Claire did not listen—she followed the queen.
Terra ushered Claire farther into the tunnels underneath the Drowning Fortress. The farther they went, the drier it became, until Claire sensed that they must have long since passed the boundaries of the lake. The walls were no longer polished smooth, but were instead roughly hewn, as if they’d been done in a hurry. Here and there, Claire spotted deep gashes in the rock, as if someone had run a rake through wet cement … or sharp claws.
Where was Terra taking her? Only the dim, red halo of Terra’s single ruby earring cast any light. Finally, Terra stopped outside the mouth of a wide, dark tunnel that made Claire feel as though she were standing before the mouth of a beast. A cool draft emanated from the darkness, and there was the low moan of air rushing by, similar to the sound of blowing into a glass bottle.
Terra stepped into the passageway, but Claire stopped short. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, not anymore, but still … the passage gave her a bad feeling. It felt like the sky before a thunderstorm, gathering wind and electricity and sound.
“Coming?” Terra’s voice arched back to her.
Trying to bide time, Claire asked, “What—what is this place?”
“Don’t be afraid, Claire.” Terra smiled at her, a comforting smile—but because of its comfort, it sent chills up her back. Still, Claire gritted her teeth and walked forward.
At first, there didn’t seem to be anything different about this tunnel. The dark was dark, and only that.
And then—a shift.
The murk began to roll and turn. It seemed almost as though a great beast were moving through the dark, and yet the beast seemed to be a part of the darkness, a shadow of shadows.
And Claire knew what kinds of creatures were forged of shadows.
Wraiths.
They were walking into a tunnel of a hundred of them—or maybe a hundred thousand. Wraiths, everywhere, surging and clawing and shifting. She could feel their restlessness. The cold wrapped around Claire, encasing every limb. She wanted to scream—she wanted to run. But she was mobile as stone; as sharp as a petal. And as the creatures prowled toward her, seeming no more substantial than thought—but just as dangerous—Claire felt herself unravel.
It had all come to this. This darkness. This terror. This intense feeling of being completely alone, of falling backward and away from everything she’d ever known.
Fear filled her. Fear tore at her. Fear was Claire.
And as Fear took hold of her, it pushed out reason. Then her senses. Until all that was left was a crumb of herself in a vast swell of emptiness.
“Enough!”
A cry streaked across the darkness, like a firework in the night. It burned its way to her, a sparkling lifeline, and Claire grabbed it.
She opened her eyes to find herself collapsed on the hard floor of the tunnel, Terra standing between her and the wraiths. Almost immediately, Claire wanted to shut her eyes again. But the wraiths stayed back—a shifting wall of black ice.
A smile twisted across Terra’s lips.
“Let us pass,” she said. And immediately, the darkness lightened. The wraiths parted like paper between scissors. In the light of Terra’s earring, Claire could now make out the vague outlines of an arched door.
Claire did not understand.
“You can control the wraiths?” she breathed as she scrambled to her feet. “How?”
“They listen to me,” Terra said simply. “They recognize that the strongest should lead. That the powerful deserve to rule. And in Arden, that person is me.”
She looked at Claire. “Only I can control the wraiths. Only I can command them to stay in the shadowed places, in the chambers of the earth that are so deep humans would never find them.”
Thoughts tumbled over one another in Claire’s mind. The Royalists said the wraiths would be gone when the queen returned. But they weren’t gone, exactly. Just subdued into submission. Still, the power—the magic—was incredible … Incredible enough to save Sophie?
Terra moved toward the door at the other end of the passageway, and though Claire was still afraid of her, she was more afraid of the wraiths, and hurried to stay by Terra’s side. By the glow of Terra’s ruby, Claire could see that unlike the other doors of this underground palace, which were built of worn wood, this one was entirely made of stone. It was carved in a pattern of leaves and flowers that her artist’s eyes recognized. Before she could nab onto the memory, the queen was speaking again.
“The unicorns did not deserve their magic,” Terra said, putting one hand on the center of the stone door. “They did not use it, or when they did, it was never quite what you expected. They are wild creatures. Untamable. They don’t listen to the desires of humans. They don’t care what we want or need. If you have the power to gift immortality to others … wouldn’t you? If you could cure illnesses, if you could stop death, wouldn’t you?”
Red light threw shadows onto the queen’s face, and Claire could not tell if she was sneering or grimacing in some internal pain.
“You, Claire Martinson,” Terra continued, “are a fool if you believe the unicorn would willingly help your sister. The only way a unicorn can help you is if it’s a dead unicorn.”
The queen pressed her hand and the stone door swung inward as if it had the weight of a few feathers. On the other side …
Claire gasped. She was staring at a chamber of treasures.
Jewels and gold and silk hangings lined the walls. Crowns glittered even in the dim light while a collection of golden scepters leaned against shelves. And in the center was a pedestal with four indentions in the middle.
And inside those indentations sparkled the moontears.
The stone door gritted shut with a loud boom, leaving Claire locked in the treasure chamber with only Terra. But though the queen had not increased the light of her ruby, the windowless room was far from dark. There was a pale, iridescent glow coming from one of the shelves that seemed to wash the room in moonlight,
even though Claire knew that many feet of dirt and rock lay between here and the sky.
At first glance, the glowing shelf did not seem to be organized in any particular manner. For next to a fine bone comb was a pearl necklace, a leather belt, and …
Claire breathed in deeply through her nose, trying to calm her roiling stomach. The next item a Royalist had added to the pile was a chalice—a chalice carved from the leg of a unicorn, its bone hollowed out to form the cup while its snow-white hoof formed the base. The leg still had hair on it, though it was yellowed with age.
She looked at the pile of treasure with new eyes.
Not a necklace of pearls, but a necklace of teeth—unicorn teeth. A comb of unicorn bone. A belt of unicorn hide.
Artifacts like these, Claire knew, strengthened guild magic, but Nett had said that the artifacts were only a fraction as powerful as a breathing unicorn. But then, you had to ask a unicorn to help you … you didn’t have to ask permission from a chalice.
Claire buried her face in her hands, trying to calm her stomach. These gruesome artifacts were all that was left of the star-kissed creatures that once roamed Arden. Now they were just bits of hair and bone and skin. How had she ever mistaken the dull silver threads of Sophie’s dress for precious unicorn mane?
“Now there, no need to despair,” Terra said, misreading Claire entirely. “I am sure the two of us can find a way to help each other.”
Peering between her fingers, Claire watched the queen walk over to the shelf and place the necklace of unicorn teeth around her neck and buckle the belt around her waist. Then the queen turned to Claire. “The flute, please.”
“What?” Claire asked, stalling for time, even though she could feel the weight of the instrument in her Lock-it Pocket.
“Do you want to save your sister?”
The answer was simple and yet … Claire’s heart hammered as she pulled the flute out from her pocket.
“What—what do you want me to do?” Claire asked.
“Call a unicorn, of course. Call one, and we shall use that unicorn to wake more unicorns. Your sister will be healed. Arden will be what it once was. That is what you want, is it not?”
Secret in the Stone Page 21