Then we’re inside again, walking through cloisters. I swallow hard. I’m here. I think. But not like I’d hoped.
More stairs. At least three flights. I’m hauled past door after door until finally we stop and the guard to my left knocks.
When there’s no answer, he knocks again, harder. “Your Highness, we found an intruder.”
Silence. And then—
“For the love of the Ancient Ones, come in.”
They swing the door open and shove me inside toward a man standing barefoot at a large, stone hearth in a silken robe. There’s no fire tonight, but the hearth is filled with candles.
“Elias, send them away,” another male voice says.
I glance around the room to find the owner of that voice sprawled across a fine bed, a sheet draped across his middle.
Clothes are discarded across the floor, and a crimson sash hangs haphazardly around the neck of a bust nearby. Not a sash like the one from a robe, but the kind royalty sometimes wears around their neck. I can just make out the golden embroidery shimmering in the low light glowing across the room. A raven.
I would think this the chambers of the prince, but the man with his back to me at the hearth has dark hair down to his shoulders, very much unlike the Prince of the East. I just saw him. This is not him. And his waiting lover called him Elias, and the prince has no name.
The guards at my sides clamp their hands on my shoulders and press me to my knees. Though I wish it were otherwise, I don’t fight. I don’t have the strength to do much of anything in the way of magick, it seems.
“Found her snooping in the ruins, Your Highness. She killed Lucius.”
Elias pulls the top off a crystal decanter and pours himself a glass of liquor. A moment later, he’s back before the massive hearth, swirling the liquid in his goblet as it reflects amber from the soft candlelight.
Even though I can’t see his face, I feel the weight of his heavy gaze. Silent as death, he watches me from the shadows.
As he walks toward me, I find I can’t look at him. I don’t know who it can be, but it’s best to keep my head down. Eye contact creates a connection. I don’t need that.
The man’s feet stop before me. He squats in his robe, the smell of musk and liquor in my face. He touches the burned sleeve of my dress, rolling his fingertip over one of the stars.
Finally, he speaks.
“My, my. Aren’t you a lovely little thing. Even though you smell like smoke and starlight and have a bloody face.” He touches the stream of blood running from my temple and wipes it away.
A chill chases across my skin, and a bolt of fear shoots up my spine. This is impossible. I bet you taste like smoke and starlight the prince had said to me in the Shadow World.
Slowly, I lift my eyes and meet the gaze of the Prince of the East. He looks different. So much different. But I would know that face anywhere.
“Lovely though she might be,” he says to his men as though he doesn’t recognize me, as though we weren’t just in the grove, “I don’t want to deal with a trespassing murderer tonight. Tomorrow maybe. For now—” he laughs “—take her to the library.”
The library?
The guards heave me to my feet, drag me across the room, and shove me out the door before I can so much as attempt a glance over my shoulder.
They seem sick of me, not even careful of my burned arm, all but dragging me downstairs and back outside, back through the cloisters and courtyard, back to another part of the temple I don’t know if I recall seeing on the way in.
I look up at the night sky, shining through a dome of glass, but it’s smaller than I ever imagined the dome at Min-Thuret to be.
Suddenly, we’re facing two massive wooden doors, and I’m being hauled inside an actual library. Something inside me twists.
I know this place.
We pass at least a dozen rows of shelves on either side of the main aisle, but my attention locks on the back of the library where a winding staircase leading to another level looms over rows of worktables littered with all manner of books and scrolls and ink pots and quills. Unlit candles and rush lights are strewn here and there, waiting for the lick of a flame to illuminate this entire hall.
This is… This is straight out of Alexus’s dreams of the School of Night and Dawn, a smaller version of Min-Thuret. It’s so similar to the image in my mind’s eye, as though time stands still here.
The guards drag me past the worktables and under the stairs. There’s another door, and at the sight of it, everything in me tenses. I don’t know this door, though I feel like I should. Like maybe I dreamed about it once, but it was a dream forgotten.
