“It might be a trick of some kind,” said Yvlle.
She sampled the rest of them. First she went for the lustreel bottle. One sniff had her rolling her eyes. With the ozorald apple, she laughed, but put it away. The topaz rose made her scowl. When she reached for the icicle vial, she went still… and then she nearly retched.
“Well this one is clearly poisoned and designed to make one’s heart skip. No doubt it is intended to simulate terror.”
“Nonsense,” said Arris. “It’s a distillation of each of the contestants… I just don’t know which one.”
Well, he didn’t know… but he was beginning to suspect something. But he did not dare articulate his suspicion aloud, for the moment he did, he would have no choice but to confront it. Already the very idea seemed vast and impossible.
“I need you to find out who this vial belongs to,” said Arris, holding up the spherical mirror. “She’s the one. I know it.”
29Secrets Upon Secrets Upon Secrets
Yvlle rarely meant to walk down the pathway of the Grove of Ancestors, but somehow she almost always ended up there. Slung over her shoulder, the satchel of perfume vials jangled angrily. Despite being carefully sealed off, she imagined she could still smell that frost-blue vial…
Yvlle was not given to fanciful imaginings. That was the provenance of her brother. But when she thought of that blue vial, she thought that if dreams could possess a fragrance then it would smell like whatever was in that blue vial.
Night painted a sinister pall on the trees.Come find me, come find me, they seemed to say. Perhaps they missed her, she mused.
Nearly every night since she was fourteen, Yvlle had walked and walked and walked through the Grove of Ancestors. She had gone as far back as Ongus “The Half an Hour” King and Yessemina, whose tomb of glass was rumored to reflect the face of one’s true love. Yvlle had foundthis to be a downright lie, for when she had stood before it, she saw nothing but frost.
But she had never found her most famous ancestor, Enzo the Fool. Nor had she ever found any sign of the sea witch who had loved him and cursed him and doomed her descendants. There was a rumor that if one could only find Enzo, then he would grant them a boon. For as long as she had known about the curse, Yvlle knew exactly what she would ask for…
Yvlle had walked through the woods until she had run out of food, of water, of strength. She had walked until her feet blistered and her head swam. She walked until she was certain that weeks, if not more, had passed in Rathe Castle. But always, always, she was forced to give up her search. The moment she turned, she was once more at the entrance of the Grove of Ancestors, all the miles she had crossed vanishing in a mere blink. The hours she had been gone turned out to be mere minutes.
Sometimes she wondered if the Grove took pity on her, for all her cuts and bruises tended to disappear no matter what she had endured trying to find Enzo. All that remained was an intense fatigue that seemed to go straight to her bones. But it was an exhaustion that was invisible to everyone but her.
Yvlle was not one to admit defeat, but even she had to acknowledge that she had run out of time. Perhaps, however, she was more like her brother than she would ever admit. For even though she had run out of time, she had not run out of hope.
Hope was the only reason why she agreed to try and match these infernal fragrances to their contestants. Though how she would do that, Yvlle wasn’t sure. Maybe she could bribe the guardian of the vines…
Frankly, it would be a great deal easier if she could ask the contestants up front, but at this hour, who in the world would be awake—
“You have got to be joking.”
Standing in Yvlle’s path was Talvi. The Aatosian ice doll was clutching a book to her chest and wearing a long dressing gown over a nightdress that Yvlle thought was ridiculously short.
“How do you manage to procure clothes that are literally made for dolls?”
Talvi remained nonplussed.
“What are you doing skulking about at night? As a necromancer, I assumed you already had a wall of corpses ready for your reanimation experiments.”
“I do,” said Yvlle. “But one could always use more.”
Both of these things were true. But the corpses of the Isle of Malys were odd. The bodies of those who chose not to live a second life as a rock or tree or whatever other piece of nature were little more than palimpsests. There was a time when Yvlle thought that if she was able to dig up the oldest body on the Isle then she might find the answers she sought about Enzo the Fool’s final resting place or the unknown whereabouts of the witch he married. But corpses weren’t much for conversation. A miller who had been beheaded during a magic show gone terribly wrong was onlycapable of mumbling about “bread burnt in the oven!” and after a week of this, Yvlle sewed his lips shut. An apothecary’s daughter who died of a broken heart spent days writing the same words over and over again: have you forgotten me, have you forgotten me, have you forgotten me.
Reanimating a corpse for information on their life was not a way to get answers, though they provided very useful and otherwise hard to find ingredients for darker magics. Contrary to Talvi’s opinion, however, Yvlle rarely had to skulk about in the night for a body. The coastline of the Famishing was deadly enough that walking it once or twice in the summertime—which is when the squalls were the deadliest—gave her enough supplies for a year.
“Don’t fret, little doll, you are not what I’m looking for,” said Yvlle.
“You certainly are not what I’m looking for either,” said Talvi.
Yvlle tilted her head. “What were you looking for?”
“I hardly see how that’s your business.”
It was said amongst her family that Yvlle spent too much time with the undead and that was why she had no idea how to speak to the living. This couldn’t be further from the truth; it was simply that so often the living were more predictable than the dead. Their wants, needs, aches, wounds… all of it had always seemed the same.
