He frowned. “It’s unimaginable. There must’ve been something else.”
“Your memory is returning,” persisted Arienne, “so I’ll try asking again. That day, you tried to run to the catacombs. Do you remember exactly what you felt, what made you think the Host’s protection over the catacombs would protect you from that… accident?”
Noam’s features began to blur again. As before, this happenedwhen he tried to remember something he couldn’t. Arienne quickly grabbed his face and slapped him on both cheeks.
“Stay with me! You don’t have to remember now.”
But she had her theory. Noam wouldn’t have run to the protections of the catacombs if the accident didn’t remind him of Eldred in some way. Maybe Eldred, not the Empire, was behind the destruction of Mersia.
Leaving the tower in her mind and returning to the wasteland, she checked to see if Aron’s reins were still wound around her hand. There was even less grass here as they moved away from the city. She could easily count the number of Aron’s ribs now.
She returned to the room in the tower. This had been Yuma’s room, but the bed felt new. The cradle was new as well. It rocked from side to side, but there were no marks ground into the floor beneath it. Had Tychon ever even lain in this crib during his lifetime?
Noam still sat on the floor, looking dazed.
“You should go back to your room,” she said.
“There’s so much space; can’t I just sleep here?”
“Are you my lover? My child?”
“Then what about Tychon?”
“You are forcing me to consider violent alternatives,” Arienne growled, becoming frustrated.
“No, I mean, can I take Tychon with me? I can take the whole cradle with me.”
“… Why are you so afraid of being alone?”
Noam hesitated. Arienne frowned, waiting for his answer.
“I smell the Grim King… even more than before. Maybe because we’re so near his castle. And I can’t sleep.”
“You’re a ghost. You don’t need sleep.” Still, she gestured toward Tychon, giving him permission. Noam carefully lifted the cradle, baby and all. “Be careful so he doesn’t wake.”
Looking more cheerful than a moment before, Noam left the room. Arienne crawled underneath the covers. The bed was hard, and the sheets were rough. She still couldn’t believe she had imagined a whole building filled with materials she did not even know existed.
“Some memory the ghosts gave me,” she murmured. After making that first room in her mind and letting Eldred inside, she had a suspicion that her mind had never been wholly her own ever since. A book she had never read before—The Sorcerer of Mersia—once appeared in that room, after all. If her mind was occupied with things like that from outside her memory, would she eventually disappear? These were the thoughts that swirled in her head as she fell asleep.
The journey continued the next day. The red wasteland, the gray sky—nothing seemed to change no matter how long she walked, though the mountainous shadow did loom larger and larger.
Finally, the traces of the Imperial road led right up to the gates of the walls around the castle, which looked as if it had been carved out of a single slab of rock. The gate’s thick wooden gates had melted, hanging precariously on their hinges. Arienne tied Aron’s reins upon the corner of the gate’s iron ornament, a gigantic double-falcon insignia of the Empire.
“I won’t be long.”
Such words wouldn’t be necessary if there was a guarantee she would return. The smell of the Grim King that had unnervedNoam was so strong here that she could feel it in the air, as if it were grasping at her skin. There was danger here.
As soon as she set foot inside the walls of the castle, she felt Noam tremble in the tower in her mind. Tychon opened his eyes. The wind chimes hanging from the eaves made a barely perceptible sound.
Eldred’s castle had not been built by piling up stones. Rather, it was like a great slab of obsidian had decided one day to become a castle. Two identical thick towers rose high into the air in the middle, and three smaller towers surrounded them, forming a triangle.
“Where do we go from here?” whispered Arienne.
“What do you want to see?”
The memory of Yuma in Fractica’s dream had asked Arienne to go find the real Yuma in the Grim King’s castle, but that was the only bit of information she had.
“Is there a prison here? Or maybe a graveyard, or a crypt?”
