I was confused. “Jade Mountain? The Chinese fairy realm?”
She nodded.
“No—I don’t think so.”
Nix looked relieved, and I wondered what that was about—why she would be so concerned if there were encantos from Jade Mountain in Biringan.
Lucas pushed through the only closed doors we’d seen so far—to the tearoom. There, we found a crowd of guards and nobles, and a few palace staffers crouched in a circle, surrounding something.
“Can someone tell me what exactly is going on here?” I shouted. All heads turned to me. A few people in the crowd stepped aside, revealing what everybody was staring down at.
There, on the floor, was a body.
17
A woman wascrouched over the body, rocking back and forth. Judging by her face, she was my mother’s age; she had dark-gray hair, long, in two thick braids, one over each shoulder, and she wore a yellow scarf on her head. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“That’s the healer,” Nix whispered to me. I looked at her quizzically. “Remember, the healer from the market? Althea? My friend?”
“Oh! Yes.” I remembered her kindness when I wasn’t feeling well. Her warm, soft hands on my brow.
More people were pushing into the room by the second.
All I could see was the other person’s legs and the green ballet flats they wore on their feet; their upper body was obscured by the healer. The shoes looked really familiar—I couldn’t quite place them, though I knew I’d seen them somewhere before.
“Don’t come any closer, Your Highness,” one of the guards warned me.
I opened my mouth to ask what was going on. Lucas beat me to it. “Someone needs to inform the princess about what’s going on, immediately,” he insisted.
No one answered. They all looked at one another, waiting tosee who was going to talk. The healer, Althea, rose from the floor. She stood and looked down at the body, wiped her eyes. “It’s useless to ask them,” she said, gesturing at everyone else gathered in the room. “They have not the answers you seek.”
I stared at the body on the floor. I recognized her right away—it was Marikit Baluyot, one of the page girls I saw almost every day. She delivered letters and packages from town throughout the palace. The image would never leave me. Her mouth was set in a silent scream, bloodshot eyes staring off into nowhere. Her hands were up near her face, as if she’d been trying to shield it.
I did everything I could to avoid looking by the healer’s feet, to the face of the girl who just days before I’d seen running around the palace, perfectly healthy, with no idea of the horrible fate that was about to befall her. “What happened?” I asked.
“It’s not the what, so much as the why. And the who,” Althea replied. I was getting tired of opaque answers and was about to say so when she began speaking again, this time with actual information. “She’s been taking lessons from me to become a healer in her own right. Everything was fine. Then she started to convulse.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before opening them again. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen that.”
“Seen what, exactly?” I nudged. I felt for her; I did. But if the girl had been assaulted somehow or poisoned, we needed to know and quickly. There could be a murderer in the palace. Maybe in this very room.
“Darkness,” she whispered. “A darkness that comes for us all.”
My stomach lurched. I could tell Lucas and Nix exchanged a look.
“What do you mean?” I demanded. Why was this girl dead? Why was Althea so spooked? What had she seen?
“The darkness is all around us.” Althea shuddered. “It comes out of the walls.”
Lucas stepped forward. “All right, the princess has heard enough. Let’s not upset her any more.” Then he looked to one of the guards. “Please escort Althea to the library so an investigator can speak with her.”
The healer nodded and allowed the guard to take her arm and lead her out of the room.
I wondered whether Lucas was trying to be helpful or to control the situation. I looked over at him. Handsome, self-assured, calm. Innocent? Nix said she believed him, that he didn’t mean any harm to me. I believed that, too, but just because he didn’t meanmeany harm didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. I wondered if, before swimming in the gardens, Lucas could’ve killed the girl. He knew his way around the palace, after all. But why would he do something like that? He’d said it himself—he wasn’t a killer. Or was he?
The guard commander stepped over to me. “Your Highness,” she said with a curt bow. “Can I speak to you privately?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. I looked around. There were people everywhere. One of the adjoining rooms would probably be emptier. We went in there, and she closed the door behind us. She was in charge, since Elias had left that morning, still bent on rooting out the leader of the insurgents. Another lead had taken him all the way to the Paulanan Mountains, on the far reaches of the island.
“We are preparing to arrest the healer Althea,” the commander said solemnly.
