I wake, gasping for air.
The perfume of the hedge witch’s home is cloying, but I drag it in, like I’ve been pulled up from deep water. The old woman across the table gapes at me. The blood has fled from Ina’s face, and Caro looks at me as if I’m a stranger. I see the whites all around the edges of her eyes.
Something drips into my lap—the bottle of potion, which I must have upended in my trance. A dark, scented stain is spreading over the tabletop.
My voice comes out raw. “What happened?”
The witch doesn’t respond. Seeming to recover herself a little, she reaches out and rights the bottle, stopping the liquid from glugging out over the table.
Ina is the one to break the silence. “You were talking,” she says, eyes wide. “We . . . we couldn’t understand all of it. Some didn’t sound like Semperan.”
A chill runs down my spine, and I push myself away from the table. “I’m sorry for making a mess.”
“It’s all right.” The old woman looks paler than before. After a long moment, she just nods and peels the stained cloth from the table. “Would either of you like to try?” she asks, looking at Caro and Ina, forgetting to put on the accent. She sounds like any old woman from the wrong part of town, voice scratchy and a little scared.
Caro shakes her head right away, but Ina looks at me, at the hedge witch, and back at me. I can see the desire in her wide eyes and trembling hands, the same as at the gates to the orphanage the other day. Maybe Ina can sense that we share this, this consuming, fatal desire to know ourselves, where we came from—even if the story turns out to be an ugly one.
Slowly, she nods. She comes over and takes my place at the table, across from the witch.
My legs still feel wobbly and uncertain beneath me, but I retreat to Caro’s side, where she’s leaning against the wall to watch, her arms crossed over her chest, the flickering candlelight making her eyes seem even bigger and darker. While Ina drinks from the bottle and the old woman reads from the book, I lean close to Caro’s ear.
“Do you think it’s real?” I ask softly. I’m not sure what I want anymore—to think that what I just saw was a figment of my imagination or the truth.
Caro’s eyes flick to me, her brows drawing together. “If you weren’t putting it on?” she whispers.
I shake my head vigorously.
“The drink might be drugged, and it was a hallucination.” She looks at Ina. “We’ll soon find out.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, and my skin crawls at the thought—and Caro’s terse words. We turn toward the table at the same time, where Ina has drunk from the green bottle.
But from the expression on the princess’s face—she’s frowning, her forehead creased in concentration—and her hands folded primly in her lap, it’s clear she experiences nothing. Caro watches intently, her gaze shifting between Ina and the old woman. The woman is watching too, periodically looking up to glance at Ina. The cadence of her voice rises and falls with the text, but Ina doesn’t seem to do anything out of the ordinary.
After a while, the woman lets the words peter out. Ina opens her eyes, looking both disappointed and relieved.
“Nothing, Ina?” Caro asks.
Ina looks down at her hands. “Nothing.”
For a moment, we all stand there in silence. The mood in the room is different now—even Caro and Ina seem to regard this as no longer a game. Then Caro gives herself a little shake and reaches for her belt. She withdraws three day-coins and hands them to the hedge witch. Outside the window, the sky has begun to lighten a little over Laista’s streets.
As we make our way out, the witch catches me by the arm, her bony fingers digging into my flesh. “Can you stay a moment and help me clean up that stain, dear?” Her eyes bore into mine, bloodshot and urgent.
Caro and Ina have stopped, looking back at me. I motion them toward the door. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
When the door closes behind them, I turn back to the hedge witch, the old woman. I have an odd, terrible feeling I know what she’s going to say. But I ask anyway: “What is it?”
She drops my arm—and when she speaks, she’s dropped, too, all traces of the affectation she put on for Caro and Ina. Her words to me are plain and direct, in the accent I’ve grown up hearing. “You’ve surely guessed this already: it’s all a show what I do, girl. There’s nothing special about that book, that poem I read.” She fingers the coins Caro gave her like good-luck charms.
My stomach plummets. I’d suspected as much, but it’s something else to hear it, to know for sure. “What about the drink?”
“Mava and honey and a little madel,” she says. “That’s all.”
I feel dizzy. “So, back there, that was . . .”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But it wasn’t my doing.”
Back at Everless, we cling to one another, still swaying a little as we make our way to Ina’s room, intending to collapse on her giant bed. My head is spinning with the visions from the hedge witch’s house, and her words after. Liam’s notebook, pressed into my skin beneath my cloak, seems trivial now.
But after Ina unlocks the door to her room, she stops short in the doorway. I slam into her back, and my blood turns to ice water as I look over her shoulder and see the Queen waiting there in the dark. Her frame stands tall, straight. Her hair, arranged in a simple braid down her back, is nothing like the knotted mess I saw earlier.
The Queen is resplendent and terrifying.
“Your Majesty,” Ina squeaks, and even she seems to tremble in terror at the apparition. “What are you doing here?”
“That is an impertinent question.” The Queen’s eyes seem to look straight through Ina, searing into me instead. Beside me, Caro looks as though she’s going to be sick. “Come with me,” she intones. “All of you.”
Helplessly, we follow the Queen into a sparsely decorated side chamber, just a table and a few chairs where Ina can take meals when she doesn’t feel like going down to the dining hall. But when the Queen sits in one of the chairs and levels her gaze up at us, she looks as regal and terrifying as if she were on the throne in the seaside palace. She directs her fiery gaze at Ina first.
“To atone for your nonsense, you and Lord Roan will travel with me to the statue of the Sorceress in Tilden tomorrow, and beg her forgiveness.” I shudder, reminded of the statue in my vision. “And you two”—I shrink back as her eyes land on me like two beams of fire—“you’ll not leave Everless tomorrow. I’ll deal with you when I return.”
Caro and Ina are bowing their heads, so I follow suit. “Yes, Your Majesty,” Caro says in her softest whisper.
“We’ll do better,” Ina adds. I can feel her tremble.
When the Queen has left us, we undress quietly, wash our faces, and change into nightgowns. Shame has burned away the last vestiges of drunkenness, leaving me hollow and wrung out, and looking at Caro and Ina, I can tell from their sallow faces and sunken eyes that they feel the same way.
Ina, between Caro and me, falls asleep almost as soon as her head hits the pillow, but I hear Caro’s shallow, wakeful breathing on the other side of the bed for what seems like a long time. I still have the notebook hidden beneath my nightgown, and despite my exhaustion, I’m aching to take it out and read more of the strange stories within. But for some reason the words on the page feel secret, too close even for Caro.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth about my father,” I say, soft as I can. She doesn’t answer right away, but her breathing changes slightly, so I know she hears.
“It’s all right,” she answers eventually. “It’s your secret to share. I shouldn’t have been so upset by it.” She trails into silence, and I almost think she’s fallen asleep, but then she speaks again.
“I’m sorry to get you wrapped up in this,” she says. In what, I want to ask, but don’t. “The guards will be relaxed tomorrow, with the Queen gone,” she continues. “We’ll go to the vault and look for your father’s things.”
“I’ve told you,” I protest softly. “We really mustn’t. I should never have said anything about it.”
“We’ll discuss it tomorrow, then. We have a long day ahead of us,” she says, her voice heavy with sleep. She reaches across Ina’s body, interlaces her fingers with mine. “Tomorrow, Jules.”
She turns over and pulls the blankets up. As soon as I’m sure of her deep breathing, I slide out the notebook and hold it in the scant moonlight that pours over the bed through a small window, trying to make out Liam’s words. But the first few pages I turn to are Everless business, figures and charts and mundane notes on the amount of taxes brought in or debts paid, and I feel my eyelids sliding earthward. Every few pages, I catch a snippet of something—a fox, a snake—before sleep closes in on me.
I wake to the sound of bells. It takes me a moment to remember where I am—alone in Ina’s huge bed, with late-morning sunlight pouring in through the window. The notes of the bells are sweet, but the melody sends a low thrum of alarm through me.
I sit upright, take in a sharp breath.
I’d heard it before—not in the past weeks, but as a child. It’s the group of tones played to summon the servants together for punishments.
I leap out of bed, ignoring the dull pain that clamors inside my skull, and strip off the nightdress. Quickly, I find the servants’ clothes I abandoned here last night, and stuff Liam’s notebook, which was tucked partway under my pillow, into my apron pocket.
In the refectory, an uneasy mood hangs over the servants. Although we fill the room, there is little chatter. I fall in with a group of kitchen servants in our kerchiefs and aprons, and for the first time wish I was still one of them.
My heart sinks as soon as I see who stands at the front of the room. Of course, there is Ivan, looking out over the gathering crowd with a leering smirk on his face. He’s in uniform, a dark green cloak swinging down over a leather tunic. Two more Everless guards flank him. And behind them is Liam Gerling, looking grim.
A few feet in front of me, Lora looks anxious—when I glance down, I can see her worrying at the hem of the apron she still wears.
When everyone seems accounted for, Ivan steps forward. “Good afternoon,” he calls, his jovial voice, as ever, making my skin crawl. “It’s my unfortunate duty this afternoon to announce a punishment of one of your own. One who was found to be tampering with, no less, the ancient vault of the Gerlings, the family who feeds and shelters you all.”
My body goes rigid. The vault. Ivan looks over us with a threatening scowl, but his voice is languid. He’s enjoying himself—savoring the terror in the room. I notice a handful of guards in royal maroon—but they are outnumbered and stand back from Ivan and the Everless guards. They have their arms crossed, and look unhappy.
Before I can think what this means, Ivan steps aside, and a door behind him opens. The two guards who enter haul in a crying girl by the arm, a girl with freckled skin and pale green eyes . . .
No.
“Caro Elysia was found in the hall outside the vault, tampering with the door.” Ivan says, reading off something in his hand. “As punishment for violating this most important of places, as an officer of the family Gerling, I impose the maximum penalty of forty years—to be withdrawn from the blood immediately.” He looks over his shoulder at Liam. And Liam—acting as representative of the Gerlings, I realize—gives a tight nod. An assent.
Caro struggles weakly against the guards holding her, tears streaming down her face. A soft no escapes my lips.
Forty years? Even from Ivan, it’s barbaric.
And it’s my fault.
I push my way through the crowd of servants. They stare and whisper as I pass, but I don’t let it slow my feet. I was the one who wanted to see inside the vault, and Caro is going to lose forty years of her life for it. She was only trying to help me regain something of my father’s. Because she cares.
“Wait!” Without knowing what I’m doing, I lunge forward as Ivan passes and catch at his cloak.
He looks at me, eyebrows raised in mild amusement, like I’m a pet that has done a new trick. “What do you want?”
“You . . . you can’t take forty years,” I say breathlessly, miserably. “It’s too much at once.” Horrible memories flood my mind of Papa coming home from the time lender in Crofton, pale and sick and staggering after having a few months withdrawn. Could a person even survive losing that much time, if she even has that much?
And that’s when the real weight of it sinks in. Because what are the chances that a servant girl has forty years at all?
This punishment may kill her.
Ivan plucks his cloak away from my hands. “That’s not my concern,” he drawls. “If you’re so worried, you can get yourself down to the time lender and withdraw some of your own time to give this thief.”
A hand appears on his shoulder. He turns, and I see that Liam has come up behind him, silent as a ghost.
“Move on, Ivan,” he growls, looking furious for some reason. “Do your job.”
Ivan scowls but obeys, striding off and gesturing to the guards holding Caro to follow him. The four of them disappear through the door they came in, and the last I see of them is a glimpse, in profile, of Caro’s tear-smeared face.
As the other servants start to file out, muttering sadly and shaking their heads, Liam reaches out as if to steady me. I stumble back. “Don’t touch me.” His earlier nod replays in my mind—such a tiny motion, but carrying such a weight of death and pain. “Where’s Roan?” Surely he would stop this.
Liam freezes, something folding in his face. Finally, he says, “I’m sorry, Jules,” and follows Ivan from the room.
I stand numbly, watching the closed door where they vanished. Every beat of my heart feels like a knife in me, twisting.
Ivan didn’t mean what he said about going to the time lender. It was a cruel joke. But now that the idea is there—
Surely Ina can save her; any one of her elegant gowns or glittering jewels must be worth many years. But Ina is away, along with the Queen, because of our foolishness. There may not be any time left to wait for her. Between the pouch on my belt and the stash under my mattress in the dormitory, I have almost three years of blood-iron to my name. I could run there now, and bring it to Caro. But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough—and if she had less than forty years to begin with, it wouldn’t even save her.
No. I know nothing else will stop the twisting knife, ease the guilt burrowing into my heart.
I have to find the time lender.