When?When had she first come?
Another page. Another entry. This one insisted she’d arrived only last week, that I’d sent for her specifically after the wyrmling’s condition worsened. But the ink looked old, faded, the paper yellowed at the edges.
None of it aligned. Dates contradicted dates. Symptoms I’d recorded as improving appeared three pages later as catastrophically worse. One entry described a conversation with Kelda about the ley-line; the following entry claimed I’d never discussed the ley-line with anyone.
Pain lanced through my skull, concentrated behind my left eye like a hot needle. I dropped the journal and pressed the heels of my hands against my eye sockets until starbursts bloomed in the darkness.
“You will treat her as a tool.” My voice cracked on the last word, pathetically thin. “Nothing more.”
“Kelda said this was for the best.” I dropped my hands, stared at the scattered pages on my desk. “Didn’t she?”
Who had first suggested bringing Lysa here? Had I written that letter, or had someone written it for me? I could picture my hand moving across the paper, could almost feel the pen between my fingers, but the memory felt borrowed. I couldn’t remember asking for her, and the not-knowing terrified me more than all the horns and the dragon wings I’d seen.
I kept the music room locked. In the last five years I seldom went there. The key still hung on my chatelaine, nestled among the others I never used. The manor had kept the room as I’d left it. Moonlight spilled through the tall windows, illuminating the shrouded furniture, the covered mirrors, the grand piano standing at the room’s heart. The cloth came away from the piano and beneath it, the ebony wood gleamed as though freshly polished. Mrs. Crane’s doing, perhaps, or the house’s own stubborn devotion. I ran my fingertips along the fallboard, and it lifted at my touch, revealing keys yellowed with age but still tuned.
One song,I told myself,one.
I sat. The bench creaked beneath my weight. My hands hovered above the ivory, trembling, and for a long moment I couldn’t make myself begin. Music required feeling. Music required surrender. Music was everything I’d trained myself notto do. The shadow-veins pulsed beneath my sleeves. The wrong heartbeat stuttered, waiting.
I pressed the first chord. My fingers remembered the tune, finding the opening bars of a nocturne I’d composed the year my parents died, before the curse. The melody spilled out mournful. The nocturne shifted. Deepened. Minor chords bleeding into something more desperate, the kind of music I’d locked away with the room itself.
The thing inside me went still. It was bloodylistening.The pain behind my skull receded. My shoulders dropped from their permanent hunch. I played on. The manor sighed around me, its timbers settling with a sound almost like contentment. I played, and for one hour, I was almost human again.
nine
Lysa
Hunger gnawed at my stomach, and pulled me from a restless sleep before the sun had fully crested. I lay there for a moment, staring at the unfamiliar canopy of the bed, the heavy curtains pooling on the floor. The silence of the manor was absolute. I needed tea. Strong tea, and something to eat.
I dressed quickly, my fingers fumbling with the buttons of my blouse. My hands still felt stiff from the quieting seizing yesterday, a residual ache in the joints that I ignored as I pulled on my boots. I knew the way to the kitchen. Fenrik had pointed it out:Left at the landing, down the servants’ stairs, through the green baize door.Simple.
I slipped into the corridor and I turned left. The shadows here were deep, clinging to the corners where the sconces had burned low. I reached the end of the hall, turned the corner expecting the wide sweep of the grand staircase, and stoppeddead. A dark oak door stood in front of me. A door with a distinctive, jagged scratch near the handle. My door.
I blinked, looking behind me. The corridor stretched back the way I’d come. I turned around, retraced my steps to the intersection, and frowned. I must have turned right instead of left in my sleep-fogged state.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s pay attention, shall we?”
I took the opposite turn this time. The architecture here seemed sharper, the angles more aggressive. The carpet ended abruptly, replaced by flagstones that leeched the warmth through my soles. I walked for two minutes, counting my steps, waiting for the stairs. Instead, the walls fell away into a gallery I hadn’t seen before.
Rows of faces stared down from their gilded frames. Stormgarde ancestors, all of them possessing the same sharp cheekbones and grey eyes as Fenrik. I walked faster. A woman in a stiff lace collar seemed to sneer at my trousers. I passed a portrait of a man with a hawk on his wrist, and the hawk’s head snapped toward me. I froze. The painted bird blinked. Its obsidian eye tracked me as I took a hesitant step backward.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I hissed, though the hair on my arms stood up. “It’s a spell. A cheap parlor trick.” But the malice in the painted eyes felt real. The house felt awake. And it felt like it was watching me like a cat watches a mouse before the pounce.
I spun on my heel and marched back the way I came. I walked until I reached the spot where the archway to the bedroom corridor should be. It wasn’t there. Solid stone greeted me. Greyblocks, mortared together as if they had stood there for centuries. I touched the wall, my heart hammering against my ribs. This wasn’t possible. I had walked through here three minutes ago.
“Is this a game?” I asked the empty air. “Are you trying to scare me off?”
The house offered no answer, only the creak of a floorboard somewhere above, sounding suspiciously like a chuckle. I was trapped in a maze of stone that recreated itself at will. What if there was no kitchen? What if Fenrik had locked me in a wing designed to madden intruders? The stories in town said the manor ate people. I had assumed it was a metaphor.
My stomach growled loud in the silence. I wasn’t going to die in a hallway. I was going to get a cup of tea, and if I had to blast a hole in the wall with my own dangerous magic to do it, I would. I stepped up to the dead end. I flattened my palm against the masonry, right where the archway should have been. I closed my eyes, refusing to let the shifting shadows intimidate me.
“I don’t care about your games,” I told the wall. “I am hungry. I am tired. And I just want breakfast. Please.”
Silence. Then, a vibration hummed against my skin. The stone warmed beneath my palm. The blocks didn’t slide away, but vanished. The wall dissolved into a shimmer of air, and a heavy wooden door appeared in its place, standing slightly ajar.
Through the crack, the smells of baking bread, frying bacon, and brewing tea drifted out. I stared at the door. The house hadn’t trapped me. It had ... routed me? Or maybe it was laughingat me. I pushed the door open and found a narrow set of spiral stairs winding downward.
“Thank you,” I said, eyeing the stone suspiciously.
