37
Adream,I told myself. It had been a dream.
When I fell asleep in March’s arms, when my eyes opened throughout the night to find him sitting at the edge of the bed with my sketchbook on his lap, going over the pages; then when I found him standing in front of my open wardrobe, going through my clothes; and when he paced around the room, shirtless, with the heartlock in his hand, looking at it intently.
It must have been a dream.
Ithadto be—otherwise, I didn’t know what to think. That he’d put me to sleep, had doneall of that,had saidall of that,only because he wanted to snoop around my room and search for…whatexactly? What had he been looking for?
Time’s Teeth, I was going to be sick.
I risked a glance to the side, to where March stood in line with the rest of the Hands in front of the palace doors, but his eyes were ahead. His hands were fisted, his jaws clenched.
Why did you search my room while I slept?
I’d been too tired, too confused, too disoriented to wake up, I figured. When my eyes had opened and I’d caughtglimpses of him like that, part of me had felt it was…normal.Nothing to worry about. Nothing unusual.
Which unfortunately meant I couldn’t trust my own self anymore, at least not around March.
He still refused to look at me since we’d been called by Elida to come out of our rooms. Dinner had been brought to our rooms, so we all ate alone. Lida had come to help me put on the brand-new suit she insisted was only washed, and then we were outside. All of us, terrified, wide-eyed, on the verge of tears.
Well, most of us, I’d say. March just looked his usual, pissed off self.
Then Elida waved at us from where she was standing a few feet outside, speaking to the two soldiers who’d come from the right side of the palace.
“Come, come! They’re ready!”
It was dark outside, the night old, waiting to return to day again. My Life Clock said it was just after eight m.b. The trial was about to start soon, and none of us had a clue what it would be.
Still, we walked.
We couldn’t stop it if we tried. I did try—simply to stand back andnotmove for a moment, but my feet did anyway. As if there were magnets underneath the ground, and they were pushing us to move regardless of what we wanted. The message was clear, as it had been since the first trial. We were going to be part of these games whether we wanted to or not. That was already decided.
But this time, Elida didn’t take us to the arena. This time we weren’t surrounded by tiered seats full of people screaming and cheering, and projectors showing the symbols of each court, and the glass box where the queens sat to watch the trials, isolated.
No—this time they took us to a forest, which wouldhave been just at the other side of the floor of the Backward Banquet from the night before, except the white and red tiles were now gone. Disappeared as if they’d never been there before, and now Ireallywanted to know exactly what I’d find if I were to peel off the ground of the Labyrinth. How could one make such a massive thing disappear?
But the better question might be, how could one make such massive thingsappearout of thin air, because the forest ended with a large tower that was built around an even larger tree—or maybe it was the other way around?
People all around us, but there were red and white velvet ropes everywhere so that they stayed a good distance back into the trees. Meanwhile we were just outside the last row, looking up at the monstrous structure, half tower and half gigantic tree, possibly higher than we had been the day before at the banquet.
This hadn’t been here before, that much was certain. My bedroom windows looked out on this side of the Labyrinth, and this hadn’t been standing here the day before. I hadn’t checked when I woke up tonight, but now here it was. Dark and menacing and with fire burning here and there, lanterns, torches, magic trapped in glass balls.
The branches, the large leaves were indeed monstrous.
Trees did not grow this big. They didn’t grow into half towers made of gray bricks, either. It was like two halves had merged, the tower and the tree, and it just looked plain wrong. Unnatural.
My stomach twisted harder. Wasthiswhere I was going to finally get sick from Time?
Lida said it wouldn’t happen.
Lida also refused to answer me when I asked her if she really didn’t remember me from before.
I did not trust her.
And I did not trust that I’d dreamed the night before. I did not trust March, and I most definitely did not trust my body.
Yet that didn’t stop anything from happening. I was still standing there with all the others, dressed in white suede, boots on my feet, no weapons or toolkits on my person this time. Questions kept adding up, never lessening, and there was so much to say but no real way of saying it. No real way that would make any sense, that is.
