“You’re my friend and I am yours,” she says, rubbing my back. “The first day you started, we laced to the Pith together. Do you remember what you said when you realized the rings let us borrow Reign magic?”
I rack my brain. Though it was just over a moon ago, it feels like much longer—so much has happened in that time, so much has changed.
“What did I say?” I ask.
“You said, ‘How lonely it must be to carry this knowledge around, unable to share it with anyone.’ Every faerie before you commented on feeling powerful, scared, excited, confused. But you…you saw me. Even when you didn’t know me, even when you were lost, you saw me.”
“I see you now, too,” I say, then pause. “Well, not truly because it’s so dark in here.”
Lila laughs and so do I. It strikes me then that if I had perished after Jeremee’s death, by my own hand or another’s, I would not get to experience this. I would not have stumbled into the warmth of Lila’s friendship, the kindness of her character. The waters of my grief subside, revealing more solid ground to stand on. Rather than replacing Jeremee as I feared, my heart has expanded to hold them both.
“Well,” Lila says. “Shall we wander under the stars once more?”
“Where you wander, I will follow.”
“No, you’re going first into the strange, abandoned bedchambers.”
I roll my eyes, smiling. My smile doesn’t last long.
The bathing chamber is silent and cold when we enter, a primordial stillness like a grave despite the moonlight pouring through the glass ceiling.
Lila grabs my arm. “Look!”
Something small and shiny flickers across the far wall. A glintof metal, of brass. We creep forward, the glow of my flame falling on a door. How did we miss it before?
“This must be a door to the second Salon of Stars,” she says.
“Did you ever venture into it with your father?”
She shakes her head. “There was no need to clean fireplaces that were never lit. Perhaps, if Maxian had had a sibling, it would’ve eventually been used.”
Lila places a hand on the brass and tries each key. Nothing clicks—until the last one, a small, rusted thing.
“Etoles,” she whispers.
Nothing.
“Etoles.” She takes a breath. “Etoles.”
“Maybe the issue isn’t the word, but the key?” I suggest.
“The key definitely fits.”
She triesSolilandLuneto no avail. Finally my friend steps back, wiping her forehead. “It’s no use.”
“We could try breaking the door in, but…”
“We aren’t destroying anything.”
My genius twitches with a pulsing energy that is not my own, exuding from the door itself.
“Perhaps we can speak to the wood in the door and request it to move,” I wonder.
“Once the tree was cut down, it would’ve died.”
“Let me try something,” I say, pressing my palms to the grain.
A ripple of energy.
