Either way,thinkingwasn’t required to do magic. Imagining was—which also came easier to me since I woke up in this part of the realm. My mind was incredibly vivid, the colors of my thoughts bright and the sound of them loud. Teeth and blood, grass and clocks, tea and sugar and the ground swallowing people whole—it was all so very clear in my head that I couldn’t forget it if I tried.
So, I ate, and I put my own clothes on—black pants and a black tunic to better fit with the night—and I sat on the bed to wait for the sun to unrise.
It was more time than I’d expected, and I must have been more tired, too, than I’d realized, because when my eyes opened at the next tick, the sky was dark, my neck was stiff, and I realized I’d fallen asleep leaning my head against the wall.
Panic woke me up all the way within seconds. The tray with the empty dishes was still there at the edge of the bed where I’d left it. The room was dark save for the light that slipped in from the moon outside. The clocks on my nightstand said it was just after five m.b.
I jumped to my feet, grabbed the backpack in the wardrobe—mine; I’d packed this with my things when I prepared to leave for Neverwhen. This time, though I only put two things in it: my sketchbook and the framed picture of Jinx.
Then I slipped out the door.
The Life Clock was in my tunic’s pocket and that was pretty much everything I was going to need. I didn’t look back, didn’t hesitate, just double-checked that the hallway outside was clear, and I moved.
The lanterns on the walls were on. The clocks on the stands between the doors ticked at the same second. I looked at the last door across the hallway and something in me stirred, almost like I knew it. Almost like if I were to look behind that door, I’d recognize everything in a way I hadn’t recognizedanythingin my own room.
I was never going to see March again, I realized. Such a strange sensation the thought sent over me, all the way to the tips of my toes.
When I made my way down the other side of the hallway in search of the stairs, I almost did it absentmindedly, half my mind still in that hallway.
Paying attention to the way to the main doors hadn’t seemed like a big deal when we were led out of the palace for the trial. Everything had looked the same, and I’d been sure I’d only need to follow hallways and find stairs to descend to get to the ground floor—we were on the third—but I was wrong.
Somehow, the turns I took and the doors I entered seemed to be woven together in a way that either brought me back to the same places, or there were areas in this palace that were identical to one another.
The only thing that changed was the view outside the windows.
I was sweating by the time I found a set of stairs, narrower, darker than the main ones. Three stories, and I slipped through the archway at the end of the stairwell, and into a quiet corridor. I felt like a villain as I walked along, thesound of my footsteps dragging behind me like a reluctant accomplice.
The walls were white, the paintings all elaborate, most with white and red as their main colors, portraying the queens, their crowns, gardens and clouds, all very beautiful. Clocks were everywhere, on intricate glass stands in the corners or mounted on the walls. Chandeliers hung on the ceiling like frozen stars, their crystals catching the thin threads of moonlight wherever there was a window, and scattering it in slow, twinkling pulses. If you stared too hard they might convince you they were alive and breathing.
Mirrors were here and there as well, some ordinary reflections of reality, some showing me backward, some upside down.
But most importantly, I didn’t run into anyone all the way to the other side.
The deeper I went, the stranger the palace felt—or maybe it was just me. A grandfather clock bigger than any I’d ever seen stood alone at a junction, its pendulum swinging backward, just like its golden hands. Not sure why I stopped in front of it or why I stared for as long as I did. Maybe I was trying to remember. Such a beautiful piece of work couldn’t justeraseitself from my mind if it had been there once, could it? No amount of magic or curses could take it away.
But…if they had, I would never even know.
Maids and soldiers moved slowly and quietly about the ground floor. It was easy to slip past them and hide and wait until they passed, so I made it all the way to the main doors without having to use any magic at all. Time spared.
The doors were unguarded. They were big, taller than twice my height, but the handle moved with ease, and the door pulled back with a weak cry at first try.
The night was colder than I expected. My tunic had shortsleeves, but I didn’t mind. I would probably be running soon, anyway, to wherever it was that I could find a carriage to take me out of Neverwhen. I didn’t have coins, but I did have magic. I’d make as many as I needed, even if it was illegal to do so.
Pretty sure it should have been illegal to kill an eighteen-year-old boy in a curse-ridden game, too, so there was no guilt or shame for what I planned to do. I just kept going.
Once again, the sight of the tower at the end of which hovered the Great Clock took my breath away. It was massive, the center of our very world, and I could have sworn that the Great Clock could see me. That it was watching. It could see my face from every angle, just like I could seeit.Its hands were still stuck at eight-thirteen.
It’s only Time,I told myself, and Time saw us everywhere, in all its seconds. Nothing new about it. And I could wonder about the Great Clock later.
I wasn’t entirely sure what the Labyrinth really entailed, other than the arena they’d taken us to, the palace I’d just snuck out of, and the large tower a couple of miles to its left. The way to the arena was through the side of the palace, deeper to its left, and while I hid in the shadows of the right side, I could just see the tips of the metal fence pointing at the sky beyond what could only be a garden.
It wasn’t. At least not like any garden I’d ever come across before.
When I got close, the air didn’t smell like soil or petals, but something else, something like ink and gear oil. Rows of tidy flowerbeds stretched before me when I stepped between the neatly trimmed hedges and the white tiles that replaced the grass. Two steps, and I realized theseflowershad metal spouts that were dripping dark ink into narrow channels cut through the soil. The hedges were not hedges, either—they were panels that someone had painted green, and theyshielded these thin pipes that rattled softly with whatever flowed beneath them.
The scent of oil grew more intense the deeper I went down the tiled pathway. How curious. The patch of daisies near my feet was actually a drain, swallowing the excess of the dark liquid like a hungry mouth.
No, this wasn’t a garden at all, but it must have been some kind of a maintenance yard dressed up as a garden—for the queens? For the guests?
