“No. No, it’s an old Unesse belief.” My friend examines me. “Every living thing is connected through the plane of magic, a giant network of nerves. You just need to learn how to tap into that and…you did. But to access the tree the door was made from? How?”
I explain what happened as best I can, thinking of all the enchanted doors in the Pith. How many trees are not dead but trapped? The thought unnerves me, as if surrounded by taxidermy that is alive, the torture invisible and unending.
“We should come back another time.” Lila stands, offering a hand. “You look fatigued.”
It feels worse than that, like someone has carved my insides out and left the skin behind. The memories of the tree and my own flicker in a dance of two flames that seem as one.
I take her hand.
The door scrapes open, and I scramble back. Musk and darkness roll over the threshold.
“If the chambers are identical, then that must be the closet to the second Salon of Stars,” Lila says. “Stay here.”
“Wait—”
“I just want to take a peek is all.”
My friend lets the dark mouth swallow her whole. Blood roars in my ears, heart thumping against my ribs. I creep toward that shadowed entrance. “Lila?”
“It’s not empty,” my friend says.
My blood chills. “What…what do you mean?”
A pause. Then: “There are a child’s clothes in here.”
“Overflow from Maxian’s closet.”
No response. Just a rustling, a fumbling. A swearing. Lila rarely swears.
At the threshold, I snap my fingers. No light springs up; my genius is spent.
From the dark, my friend says, “Then why are all the clothes for a young child?”
“What?”
“If this is storage, then why are all the clothes in there one size? Nothing for the prince when he reached teenagehood? Early adulthood?” My friend melts from the dark, eyes wide, clutching something to her chest. “Why are all the clothes in there for a toddler?”
She holds out a tiny riding boot made of red leather.
“Maxian hates red leather.”
“He probably didn’t have much choice in how he was dressed.”
But my friend is shaking her head. She discards the red boot and stomps into Maxian’s closet, then reemerges with a black boot. Maxian’s. She crouches down beside me, holding the boots side by side.
“To this day, Maxian labels his clothes. I’ve always found it a strange habit,” she says. “Why would an only child do that?”
“A quirk of his. Sentimental reasons, maybe.”
Lila shakes her head again. She loosens the laces of the red boot, unpeeling the tongue. She holds the boot up to the moonlight, thumb stroking over a patch on the inside.
“Everything he receives in life is new and customized to him. And if it’s old, it is from his family. So why—”
My friend stops short, color leaching from her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She hands me the black boot, pointing to an ink scribbling on the inside of the tongue.
