How could I save her?
Even if they’d been permitted to visit, doctors couldn’t do anything for Lady Sarnai. The only person who could help her wasn’t here.
“Where are the Lord Enchanter’s chambers?” I asked.
Jun blinked at me, her wide-set eyes blank with confusion.
“In the Summer Palace, they were by the Great Temple,” I said impatiently, grabbing a spare sheet draped on one of Lady Sarnai’s chairs. “Where are they here?”
“But the Lord—”
“Yes, I know he’s away. This is urgent.”
They blurted their answer, and I was gone.
• • •
A palace-wide search for me had begun. At every turn, I heard the guards shouting my name, “Master Tamarin, reveal yourself! Master Tamarin!”
Under a somber veil of clouds, I quickly fashioned a disguise out of Lady Sarnai’s bedsheet. I pulled it over my head and hurried to the north end of the Autumn Palace.
The entire courtyard was empty. Shadows haunted the path to Edan’s residence, which boasted no celebratory lanterns or flowers or any sign of the earlier festivities. I slipped through the doors to his apartments and slid them shut.
His rooms had been ransacked. Books and scrolls lay sprawled across the floor, having been thrown without care from their shelves. His desk was a mess of inkpots and brushes, his bed an upheaval of feathers and sheets. Dust rose in clouds as I sidestepped a smashed bamboo birdcage and shuffled deeper into his chambers.
I wasn’t sure where to look for something that might heal Lady Sarnai, but Edan’s workspace seemed like the best place to start.
Maps littered his desk. Some pages were yellowed with age and smelled of spices I couldn’t name. There were journals in his careful handwriting, with illustrations of countries I’d never heard of. I thumbed through the top one, pausing over a drawing of a familiar Niwa spider. These must have been the notes Edan consulted before we’d left for the Halakmarat Desert. His writing was in a language I couldn’t read.
Nelrat, I supposed.
“Do you not write anything in A’landan, Edan?” I murmured, moving on to his cabinets. From the deep dents in the wood, it appeared the emperor’s men had tried to smash the locks open, but without success. They’d given up, maybe too frightened by what magic still lurked in the Lord Enchanter’s chambers.
Not long ago, I hadn’t been too different. Well, I’d never been frightened of Edan, but I remembered the air of mystery surrounding him during our early meetings. It had taken months before I saw the earnest boy beneath the enchanter’s cloak of arrogance and magic.
I touched the lacquered cabinet doors, tracing my fingers from the strange words inscribed on the surface down to the bronze lock in the middle. There was no keyhole, but the lock was shaped like a hawk, its two spread wings latching either side of the doors.
My curious fingers folded the wings together, not expecting anything to happen. But the metal warmed under my touch, the bronze melting into a black lacquer like the rest of the wood. The doors cracked open, as if they recognized me.
Inside, I found drawers containing glass vials, filled to the brim with liquids of every color imaginable. There were plants and flowers and herbs I did not recognize, most dried and still in their whole form; some were crushed or ground and stored in hemp pouches. I found seeds that bloomed into flowers when I touched them, feathers and scales and molted snakeskins. At the bottom of the cabinet, I found a tray of objects. Talisman boxes inlaid with iridescent shell, a teak comb with missing teeth, an hourglass, a tin cup, an empty inkpot. The bottomless leather pouch that allowed Edan to carry so many books with him during our trip. I quickly exchanged my satchel for it, then picked up a familiar-looking mirror.
A reflection of the truth, he’d called it. When I was pretending to be my brother, its glass had revealed my reflection as my true self. Maia, not Keton.
I swept the dust from its glass and looked at myself. Without powder caking my cheeks and rouge painting my lips, I could see the familiar constellation of freckles on my face, the tired eyes that looked older than I remembered, the chappedlips.
“Still Maia,” I murmured, relieved. For now.
Tucked beside his bed was the little flute he had brought on our journey. I raised it to my lips, but I could not coax a sound out. How forlorn it was, without its master. Longing for Edan flooded over me, and for those carefree days when I could sit by a campfire listening to him play.
You’re not here to relive memories of Edan,I chided myself sternly.
Setting down the flute, I rifled through the books on the ground. Most were in languages I could not read.
A loose page peeking out of one of his journals caught my eye. Edan had brought it with him on our journey. Sand from the desert still spilled from its pages.
With trembling fingers, I picked up the loose page.
Maia.My name jumped out at me in Edan’s elegant script—finally, something written in A’landan.
