Corin dragged her match across a rock and lit the torch brighter, raising it to the ceiling to illuminate the rest of the path only to discover she was no longer alone. Skeletons lined the narrow passage, draped in yellowed bones and ragged clothes. Her nostrils flared at the foul stench thickening the air, as if death had been sealed in a jar for years and she had twisted the lid open.
She buried the back of her hand against her teeth and muffled the urge to scream, letting it die in her chest. None of these people had made it. They could have been her. Or Elly—
No. Corin’s eyes scanned the dead, searching for details to identify her sister. The shape of her body, the jut of her bones, the fabric of her clothes. They did not match the bodies here.
“C’mon. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” Harlow said dryly. “Oh, wait. You weren’t there.”
Corin fought the urge to vomit as her imagination brought forth familiar bodies strewn across the rocks. She had not been there, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t picture it. Their hands tied behind their backs. Maggie howling like a feral animal whenever she was threatened. Rowan using his broad torso to shield the women. And Harlow, that damn stubborn rebel had who planned everything, shouting at the soldiers until gunshots silenced her forever.
Corin knew, logically, that this was not the same passageway where her friends died. The army had sealed the tunnels after their capture. She didn’t know what was worse: if she had been a rebel foolish enough to believe she could join her friends and stay alive, or being the coward who abandoned them to save herself.
She paced quickly in the tunnels, frantic eyes searching for familiar relics to identify her sister. Dehydration and hunger overshadowed her senses, turning her vision dizzy as darkness closed in. She kept seeing it: the wet mess of Harlow’s open skull. Thewhite sheet of Maggie’s sunken face. Rowan’s stiff limbs, unable to shield everyone from the bullets. She stopped at someone’s foot, cursed the memories that kept flooding to her mind, warping the bodies in front of her. The tunnels shrank, the walls caving in from the corners. She couldn’t breathe. Faces blurred together, strange and familiar. Blue lips, sallow skin, maggots crawling beneath eyelids, digging into her skin.
Corin had told Harlow not to go to the tunnels. It wasn’t enough. She had warned Elly not to chase after fairy tales. Now she would lose her sister too.
The weight of her grief became too heavy. It forced her to her knees and made her give in to her hallucinations. Crying, she bent over a body and let the small shape fit itself in her arms. She kept saying she was sorry, so sorry, as she rocked back and forth, despair consuming her like a tidal wave. Her head pulled back too far, and then she felt the wet patch of rock, the hardthudof her skull against the low ceiling, the loss of gravity in her limbs.
Her body tumbled backward. Darkness took her like the bite of teeth. Even as she disappeared, she was still screaming.
CHAPTER 4
103 YEARS AGO
ASCREAM CAME FROM the library. Amelia burst through the doors to find her stepmother, Lilith, standing on a table. Their eyes met, and Lilith pointed a trembling finger toward the bookshelves. Yellow scales covered a thick length, three lines of dark brown spots running down its body. A common garter snake, Amelia recognized, likely one that had wandered in from the greenhouse.
Amelia picked up the snake and cracked open a window, letting the animal slither outside. Meanwhile, Lilith’s legs continued trembling atop the table. Amelia reached a hand to help her down. In their grip, she felt warm skin, lean fingers, and a sweaty palm that, surprisingly, had calluses. Their proximity made her notice the freckles on Lilith’s sun-kissed cheeks, the birthmark on her chin, and the gleam in her wide brown eyes, one slightly smaller than the other whenever the woman winced or smiled.
Amelia became aware, then, how her presence had its ownabsence. She herself had no crooked features or unusual birthmarks. Her gift of beauty was a blank slate. She didn’t shine the way Lilith did.
“Thank goodness,” Lilith sighed with relief. “I was about to whack it with a book, but that would’ve been a waste of good literature.”
Amelia examined the array of tomes splayed over the table. Handmaids dusted each shelf to keep the books pristine, but she had never actually seen anyone read a single page. EvenThe Book of Samael, rumored to have been a journal left behind by the late king, was just for show, its contents completely illegible.
Lilith’s collection looked different. There were cracked spines, pages flipped open, scribbles of ink across dense notebooks. All bookmarked and carefully curated even amid chaos.
“What are you doing?” Amelia asked, following Lilith as the woman pushed a rolling ladder down the aisle. Books wrapped in leather and cloth spilled from floor-to-ceiling cherrywood shelves.
Lilith fiddled with her pearl necklace, her eyes scanning the room before they stopped to light up. her eyes lit up. She climbed the ladder, plucked a book from the top shelf, and tossed the tome to Amelia to catch. “I’m drafting a proposal to open Gyldan’s borders and establish resettlement programs. I figure the king will listen if I dress it up in more formal language. People in higher positions love to use lengthy words for such simple things, don’t they?”
Amelia pictured her godmothers’ disapproving faces. In council meetings with her father, they had stressed the importance of maintaining the kingdom’s borders and protecting Gyldan from invasion. It didn’t matter that their neighbors in Zilar were fleeing persecution. Foreigners brought diseases, stole jobs, and tookresources away from natural-born citizens. When a nobleman was caught having an affair with a migrant woman from Zilar, Lilith was the babe who had been born from scandal. Amelia assumed Lilith would distance herself from her family’s reputation when she married the king. Instead, she was doing the opposite.
“Why should we welcome outsiders? Is it not better to take care of ourselves before risking our safety for strangers?” Amelia parroted her godmothers’ words, for this was the code that the faeries followed. If Gyldan had not offered them wealth and status, the Fae never would have mingled with human affairs at all. Sometimes she wondered how quickly they would disappear from the human eye if they no longer had such enticements.
Lilith pursed her lips, which were no longer painted dark like her portrait. She looked more vibrant than her own portrait now that her face was stripped to more natural colors. This, Amelia thought, was what the artist should have drawn.
“When I was a child, my mother told me about how Gyldan used to be nothing more than sand. Before it turned to gold, the land was a barren desert that stretched for miles. I liked that idea: that something can be made from nothing.”
Lilith’s heels clacked against the patterned wood as she slid down the ladder. The momentum made her rush to Amelia with such smooth speed, it was almost as if she was floating.
“I think people can do the same,” Lilith said, “and we start with each other.”
Up close, Amelia could see how the dark hues of her eyes flickered under the sunlight like wine. She was not pretty in the delicate way in which the godmothers had blessed Amelia to be. Yet there was something radiant about her: the strength in her jaw, the sharp point of her nose.
Perhaps this was supposed to be what beauty looked like, Amelia thought. To care so deeply about something, it brought life in you.
• • •
SUNFLOWERS BLOOMED WHEN summer arrived. Amelia kept a fistful of seeds in her pocket. She liked to pluck them from the greenhouse and replant the flowers in glass jars around the library. When sunlight hit the windows and spilled through the jars, the flowers turned their heads and looked up at the sky, following the sun like admiring children.
