He turned away from me, which was a relief, and spoke to Clarissa. “We must begin the council meeting,” he said. The sorceresses moved as one, graceful and united as blades of grass bowing to the same wind, and filed out. The king followed, and then Clarissa, who cast one last, triumphant glance at me.
Despite myself, I felt the melancholy of their absence. Their color and brightness had filled the room, heady and golden as wine in a glass, and I was left alone and depleted.
A shadow flickered. I stiffened, but it was Cornelius this time, popping out of the thin air, it seemed, and trotting over to me.
“Cornelius!”
He gave a brief nudge of his head against my calf, but then was all business.
“You have to get out of here,” he said.
“Well, I knowthat.”
“They’re going to cut you open. I heard them talking about it.”
My heart, I supposed, although if that were the case, I didn’t know why they hadn’t done it already. “Any ideas?” I asked, a bit snappishly.
“Think sideways,” suggested Cornelius. He twitched his tail and vanished, then reappeared. “See?”
“That would work here?” I felt a swelling of hope, which I quickly tamped down. There was no room for hope, only surety.
“Of course,” he said. “I just did it. This is a sorcerer’s house, like any other. And because it’s theabsenceof magic, none of them can see it.”
“Not even the king?”
“Not even him.”
I took a deep breath, trying to clear away any remnants of the fog and confusion from the night before, and tried to push away my fear, exhaustion, and hunger. I didn’t succeed.
It took several deep breaths, and Cornelius sitting in my lap and purring vigorously, before I was able to clear my mind enough to do the requisite twists and turns to enter that Other place.
Thinking sideways here felt entirely different. Stepping into the Other House had felt like stepping into an abandoned, but still living, place. Whatever was left under the king’s palace was dead. There was a building there of some kind—I feel a floor under my feet—but the air felt stale and poisonous at once.
It reminded me of the time Da and I had helped lay out Goodwife Tilly’s husband when he died, helping her wash the body, wrap it, and position it on the kitchen table. He had been a drunkard and a violent man in life, although Tilly would never admit it, and to hear her now, you would think she had married a saint on earth (although she was notably plumper and happier since he had gone).
As I had helped Da sponge his yellowing skin and thumbed his eyelids closed, I had still felt a sense of malice about him. Even in death, the husk of his body seemed imbued with a poison, a stench of who he had been in life. The Other Palace felt like that—a husk, a dead thing, but one with a lingering and wicked animus. I felt like I was feeling sick, just sitting there.
I clutched at a wall to steady myself, and it was so cold, it burned. In doing so, however, I realized that my shackles didn’t hold me here, and I was free. I took some satisfaction in imagining the sorceresses coming back to see the shackles emptied, as if by magic.
“Now let’s go,” urged Cornelius, appearing beside me. His fur rose along his spine, and his tail turned into a bottlebrush. Clearly this place was as comfortable for him as it was for me.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Are you mad?”
“I have to find a heart,” I said, “to take to the Weftwitch, the person Basil said could mend my heart.”
“They’ll be back soon. They’ll see that you’ve gone,” mewed Cornelius, his tail puffing out even more.
“If I don’t find a heart, I’ll be just as badly off when I get out of here. I have to break the spell somehow, or I’ll turn around and come right back.”
Cornelius huffed out an irritated breath. “Fine,” he relented.
“Can you help me find one?” I asked.
“I can help you find hundreds. They’re stinking up the whole place.”
“What?”
