CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Arabella
DAY 2
Someone shook me. “Wake up, Arabella. Wake up. That’s a good girl. You need to get dressed.”
It sounded like Brave, but she’d gotten in trouble for being too close to me. It couldn’t be her.
The person nudged my shoulder again. “Wake up, please. You’ll be late if you don’t get moving,” she begged. I blinked and sat up, letting the blanket spill into my lap.
“Am I awake?”
“You are, Miss, but you won’t be for long if you don’t get dressed. It’s almost dawn. The game begins at sunrise.”
My heart pounded as I threw the covers back. I couldn’t be late. Carden would pay the price if I was. Brave helped me step into a sapphire dress made of light-weight, delicate material. It was going to tear so easily... “How are you here? I don’t understand.”
“Master Rule made it so,” she said tersely.
He helped me again. I wondered why and what he might want in return. “You don’t like him.”
“I…” she started. “The Queen insists that you wear your hair up today.”
“Why would that matter, and why do I have to wear a dress? I can run and climb and move easier in breeches.”
Brave exhaled loudly. “I’m not sure. It’s probably because today’s challenge won’t be a physical one.”
“What other kind could it be?”
She zipped the cobalt blue, gauzy gown and paused with her hand on my shoulder. Her fingers squeezed my skin gently. “The most excruciating pain is the kind that’s soul deep, and our Queen is very good at inflicting it. Keep your wits about you,” she advised, quickly brushing my hair, twisting and pinning it into a knot. “Just remember that the game only lasts until sundown.”
“Telling time in the game isn’t easy,” I shot back. “If the damned clocks in our eyes would actually give us the time instead of spinning nonsensically—”
“Nothing about the game is easy.”
She picked up the shard of mirror from my chest. “Good luck, Arabella.”
A pair of shoes appeared at my feet. I stepped around them defiantly and walked to the door, knocking on it once. The shoes floated in the air as Brave lifted them up. “Are you sure you want to rile her today?”
I wasn’t sure it was wise, but I’d be damned if I was wearing her shoes. I’d already complied with her dress and let Brave tie my hair up. That was as much as she was getting from me.
The azure-colored guards escorted me to the throne room, down hallways that seemed to bend the wrong way, some too short and others too long, along alternating tiles that seemed to stretch and bend and curl in on one another in swirling patterns that weren’t there the day before.
The second day of hell began with the loud chiming of the clock. Carden, as human as the day I’d met him in the alley, stood in front of the ticking monstrosity wearing a royal blue suit. For a moment, I wondered if I’d dreamed the entire evening… it seemed surreal, like it didn’t really happen. Maybe it didn’t.
His bare toes stuck out from his pant legs and he wiggled them at me in greeting. The Queen wasted no time. That tiny moment was all I could cling to when suddenly the clock’s ringing stopped, the floor fell away, and Coeur shouted, “The game begins!”
Down…
Down….
Down we fell.
Instead of air, we fell through water, bubbles rising around us as we were pulled through. I held my breath, fighting the urge to gulp in something, anything. My limbs tangled in the fabric of the stupid dress I wore. Carden thrashed about beneath the water and I reached for him, needing him to hold on just a little while longer.
Then the water darkened and I lost sight of him altogether.
Faster and faster, I was dragged down through the cool water. It wasn’t going to end. I was going to drown before the second day’s challenge even began. Or maybe Coeur wanted to show how weak humans really were. They couldn’t even hold their breath long enough to make it into the arena she built.
My lungs burned.
Bubbles flew out of my nose. Something sharp pierced my back just to the left of my spine. I gasped and sucked in the fresh water, closing my eyes and reaching out in case Carden was within arm’s reach.
My hands were empty.
My lungs were full.
And then everything slowed.
I stopped struggling and let the water take me.
The current slowed and I floated, the fabric floating up all around me like an ephemeral balloon. Brilliant light filtered in through the dark abyss; so serene and clear and warm, and I wanted it so badly. I wanted it to come get me. To take me away from all the pain.
I tried to reach out for it, but my arm wouldn’t work. My fingers wouldn’t even twitch.
And then it was gone. I was dry and coughing up air instead of water, with nothing but pale blue sky above me and Carden at my side. Wide-eyed, he rushed to me and patted my arms, shoulders and cheeks. “You’re okay.”
“Are you?”
“Of course I am.”
“Did you drown, too?”
“No, but I saw you… I saw you in a glass tank. It filled with water and you were struggling, trying not to breathe, until you…” His voice broke. “You couldn’t hold your breath anymore. You put your hand up to the glass and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry,” and then you inhaled and you were floating there, arms limp in the water. Your hair was floating all around you. Then I heard a roar behind me and you were here. The tank was gone and you… you’re here.”
Confused, I muttered, “I never saw the tank or you, but I was in water and fought until I couldn’t anymore. And then there was this beautiful light.”
“You died?” he breathed, clutching his chest and pulling me into a tight hug. I clung to him, too. “I watched someone very dear to me die and it was the same. He kept talking about the light and how beautiful, warm, and comforting it was.”
“I didn’t die,” I replied. “But I was as close to death as I’ve ever been.”
The blue sky faded away and the ground beneath my feet became smooth and cool to the touch. We were surrounded, top, bottom, and on all sides, by mirrors.
“She really did hate my necklace,” I breathed.
The mirrors tilted this way and that. “It’s a maze.” Carden reached out in front of him at the empty space and I looked beyond his hand at the thousands of reflections of him, each staring back at me.
Some of them began to move, swiveling left and right, shifting forward and back and then rearranging themselves again as if the maze were a living thing, adapting to us somehow.
“Carden, the mirrors… they’re changing.” It was a trap. If we went into that maze, we weren’t coming out alive.
“We should go this way,” he urged. “We have to find our way through. It could take all day, so we need to go fast. Step where your reflection isn’t.”
“Carden!”
“What?” he turned, but his eyes caught on something behind me. I looked over my shoulder and screamed.
It was Carden, not as he was, but as the beast. His fur was the same dark hue as his hair and his eyes, the same black with the golden seam I would recognize anywhere. He was stalking toward one of my reflections, blood dripping from his canines. The me in the mirror was holding her shoulder to staunch the blood flowing down her arm. “It’s me, Carden!” she pleaded, tears running down her dirt-smeared face.
He lunged and tore into her other shoulder. I cried out and fell to my knees, the flesh on my own body torn from his teeth. Carden dropped to the floor with me. “How do I stop it?”
“I don’t know! But he’s going to tear me to shreds if we don’t!” I screamed.
The real Carden in the blue suit placed himself in front of me and roared at the beast in the mirror, whose returning roar shattered the glass between them. And then suddenly, he and the mangled version of me were gone. Obliterated. Bits of glass, as fine as sand, covered the floor.
“If we break all the mirrors, will it be over?” I bantered, letting out a pent-up breath.
Carden looked like he’d seen a ghost. He knelt beside me, holding his blue jacket on my shoulder. The fabric soon became wet and the coppery scent of blood filled the air between us. “I thought it was a dream,” he whispered.
“All of this feels like a dream to me. Nothing feels real anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“You didn’t do this, Carden.”
“Didn’t I?” he asked, eyes flashing with anger. It was the look of self-hatred, a look I recognized all too well. “That beast just attacked you and that beast was part of me!”
“But it wasn’t you!” I argued. “You were beside me. That was the Queen’s doing. That was part of the game. Never forget that.”
“I called her a beast and that’s exactly what she turned me into.”
Placing my hand on his heart, I waited until his heartbeat calmed beneath my palm. “She can turn you into a monster, but don’t let her have this part of you. This is what she wants to ruin.”
He inhaled deeply and pulled the jacket away from my shoulder. The wound was gone. Carden’s eyes widened. “Did you do this?” he asked.
“If I did, I don’t know how.”
He stood and pulled me to my feet, finger tugging at the shredded, icy fabric flopping down from my shoulder. “I ruined your dress.”
“That wasn’t you,” I argued.
He pursed his mouth together. If he was like me, he didn’t know who he was in this place. He didn’t know who or what was real and what was safe, because everything seemed desperate and dangerous.
A gust blew over us and the shards of mirror that lay all over the ground turned to dust and floated away on the breeze. The blackness beneath our feet turned to shining checkerboard marble. The darkness beside us turned to walls of blue that felt like satin under my fingertips. All along the wall hung large, gilded mirrors.
“Could it be sunset already?” I asked. We were back in Coeur’s castle.
Carden slowly turned in a circle. “I don’t think so.”
Behind us was nothing. Ahead of us, a corridor stretched as far as the eye could see. Carden threw the soiled jacket on the floor and rolled his shirt sleeves up to his elbow. I couldn’t help but picture the crown he wore yesterday upon his brow. It was like seeing him in it changed my perception of him and made me all too aware of how ridiculous it was of me to think of him as I lay in bed last night, hoping he was safe, hoping he really was my heartmate and that somehow, we could end this game and Queen Coeur forever.
Because even though he was a prince and I was just a piece of trash girl from the woods outside of Brookhaven, I wanted him beside me. Win or lose, I’d fight for and with this boy.
He offered me his elbow. “We stay together.”
I nodded and wrapped my hand around his arm. In that moment, with his dark eyes burning into mine, part of me thought Coeur was mild in her punishment, in placing us in her twisted game. It was fate who was the cruelest of all, allowing me to meet him, my heartmate, at exactly the wrong moment in time. One that would damn us both.
But if he and I were damned, at least we were damned to the same fate. And at least we could have each other for a short time before it all ended.
Walking down the hallway, twin mirrors sat on either side of us. I looked to the left and Carden turned to the right.
A child with dark, wavy hair ran through a field full of flowers and butterflies, pausing every so often to pluck a bloom and tuck it into her chubby palm. A woman with the same hair and eyes sat on a quilt beneath a shade tree, watching the girl. Tiny wrinkles fanned out from the corners of the woman’s eyes as she stared at the girl. “Arabella, come sit with me.”
The woman patted a spot on the quilt beside her. The girl – me – ran to her and held a hand out for her. She took the half-wilted flowers from me and thanked me for them. “They’re beautiful, darling.” And then she hugged me, rocking back and forth for a moment, closing her eyes and inhaling the scent from my hair.
I remembered the smell of her jasmine soap. The way she rocked me and how safe I felt in her arms. And how I felt loved.
It hurt to see her like that, so I tore my eyes from the mirror. That was the mother I remembered, not the one who left us. Not the one who built a new life and begged me not to ruin it by making myself known to her new family.
“Carden?”
His eyes were fixed on the mirror behind us.
A boy with dark hair and eyes sat at a table with a small crown perched on his head. An imposing man with a matching crown sat beside him. “This kingdom, this responsibility, will all be yours one day, son.”
“What about William?” the boy asked innocently, fussing with his crown.
“William is not heir to the throne. You are. You are my firstborn. My heir. And I am proud of the man you will one day become.”
“How do you know who I’ll be, Father?”
“Because I’ll mold you into that man,” he answered, draining a goblet and sitting it down on the table. “You want to make me proud, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy answered dutifully. The boy looked empty and sad and alone, despite his father sitting next to him. The boy looked like he didn’t like wearing a crown at all.
“Then pay attention and keep quiet throughout the day.”
“Carden,” I voiced quietly, giving him a nudge. He blinked rapidly, the clock in his pupils appearing and disappearing just as quickly, a reminder that we were on Coeur’s time and completely at her will.
She wanted our pasts laid bare to one another; pasts best left where they lay.
CARDEN
Arabella pulled me into the space between mirror pairs and let me catch my breath.
“I didn’t see yours.”
She waved it off. “Wasn’t much to see. Just me picking flowers.”
“For who?” I asked.
She clutched her chest. “For my mother. I was only a child.”
“Did you have a happy childhood?” I asked.
“Until she left, I did. Afterward, everything crumbled.”
“Mine was filled with expectations I couldn’t possibly live up to, and heavy disappointment when I didn’t.”
“I know how that feels,” she admitted quietly, picking at her dress. The wounds on her shoulder had disappeared, but somehow, I could still sense them. I remembered the feel of her skin as it broke under the weight of my teeth and knew the taste of her blood.
I shook my head to get rid of those thoughts. I didn’t bite her, the beast in the mirror did.
But aren’t we one and the same?
“We should keep going,” she declared reluctantly. “There’s only one way out of this game, and it’s down this hallway.” I didn’t want to keep going. Didn’t want to see what the next mirror would hold. “Carden, we should look at each mirror together.”
“Why?”
“Because you were in a trance back there. I had to wake you up. I don’t want to risk losing you, or one of us getting stuck in there, thinking the memories were real and giving Coeur any more of an upper hand than she already has,” she urged.
But that was part of the game. We had no upper hand. We never would. Slowly, we would lose the game. We would lose ourselves, and I would lose her in the end.
“It felt real,” I confessed.
“It did. I… for a moment, I thought I was there with her,” she confessed.
I exhaled a shaky breath. Taking her hand in mine, I offered, “Together?”
“Together,” she repeated, and together we walked forward. “Yours or mine first?” she asked, but I had already looked toward her mirror and was watching the scene unfold, because I was too big of a coward to see what mine held.
Arabella’s mother stood in the doorway of a bedroom. Arabella was asleep under the covers, her face buried in them, but her hair spilled over the white pillow beneath her head. There were flowers all over the room. On the fabric that canopied her bed, on her blankets, painted onto the head and footboards and chest of drawers. Even sketched on the walls and carved into the wooden trunk beneath her window.
The woman held her fingers to her mouth, tears falling from her eyes as she backed into the shadows and disappeared into the darkness.
Beside me, Arabella cried. I put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. She blinked as if waking and turned to me. “I didn’t know she even looked back.”
“She didn’t want to leave you.” That much was obvious.
“Then why did she?” she yelled, quickly swiping away a tear.
“I don’t know.”
I opened my arms and she fell into my chest as I pulled her in close, holding her tight and letting her cry. It was torture to know she was in pain and not be able to stop it.
She pulled away from me, eyes fixed on the mirror over my shoulder. I turned to watch.
William and I sat in front of Father. He paced back and forth, the soles of his boots slapping the heavy stone floor with each step. It echoed over the room, the only noise allowed in it. “You will tell me the truth if we have to sit here all night. If I have to beat it out of you. I will not have my own sons, my own flesh and blood, lie to me!” Father roared.
William cowered beside me. I didn’t know what he’d done or what he was lying about, but William was to blame. He was always getting into mischief. His face always turned pink when he lied, like the lie was leaking out of his pores just to defy him. But tonight, his face was cherry-red. Whatever it was, it must have been big.
William shook beside me. He was terrified of our father, but I learned a long time ago that if you showed fear, the punishment would be worse, and I’d be damned if I let him hurt my brother again. The last time, he couldn’t walk for four days.
“I am to blame.” The words spilled out of my mouth. Barely a teenager, I stood as my father approached. My stomach ached with the blow he dealt, knocking me to the ground. I gasped for air, wincing and knowing he hadn’t even gotten started yet. Father wasn’t a man who dealt punishments for those who didn’t deserve them. But if you did deserve one, he wasn’t about to let someone else do the dirty work.
He spoke to my brother, but kept his angry eyes fixed on me. “William, you are to return to your room.”
A war raged on my brother’s face. He didn’t want me to take the blame, but he wasn’t brave enough to accept it, either. “Go,” I mouthed.
William didn’t need much coaxing. He ran from the room, leaving me alone with our father. The door slammed closed in his wake.
She pulled me back to reality, her hands on either side of my face. “Carden. Look at me. It’s not real.”
“I know it isn’t. I’m here,” I told her. But it was only half true. I was still there, too. Still wishing my brother would behave, yet knowing he wouldn’t. Still wanting to protect him when I knew I shouldn’t. Knowing he’d never do the same for me. He was a spoiled brat, but I loved him too much. Much more than he ever loved me.
“My father never struck me,” she admitted. “Even when he was drunk out of his mind, he didn’t do that.”
“Good. I’d hate to have to kill him,” I joked, only half teasing.
“I’m sorry yours did.”
“I asked for it. I lied for my brother.”
She nodded. “I know you did.”
“How do you know?”
“He hesitated. If he hadn’t felt guilty about it, he would have run out of that room, but William paused. He was probably considering telling your father the truth.”
I laughed. “That would have meant both of us would’ve been in trouble. He for hiding the truth, and me for lying for him.”
“I wonder how much longer until sunset?” she asked, looking down the long hallway. We’d barely gotten started. If we had to make our way through each of these mirrors, I wasn’t sure we’d still be ourselves at the end of the hallway. Reliving the past was like scratching an old wound and expecting it not to bleed.
“I’ll go first this time,” I offered.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”
We strolled to the next pair of mirrors and paused in front of mine. “It doesn’t matter who goes first or last, we both have to take a turn, right?”
Father clapped a hand on my shoulder and bent to whisper in my ear. The nobility had gathered to celebrate Tierney’s victory over Aelawyn and the end of their tyrant king. But the girl that sat across the table from me was a puzzle I didn’t understand. I’d heard stories of how barbaric even the royals were in Aelawyn, but she seemed delicate and feminine, not wild at all. “Don’t stare too long. She’ll be gone before dawn.”
Would he have her killed? I glanced back at Father, who just winked at me before descending the dais. The people loved him. They showered him with attention and compliments for a job well done, on his saving them from the oppression Aelawyn dealt our people. As if Father himself had ridden to our neighboring kingdom, slain their king, and saved the day. As if our soldiers hadn’t slaughtered anyone they could find inside the kingdom and castle—man, woman, and child alike—because he ordered it.
This girl was the only thing they hadn’t gutted. Piers told his wife they spared her because the battle was over. They found her cowering in her room, and he could neither ask his men to kill her, nor bring himself to raise his own sword against the girl. She was young. She was innocent. And it would’ve sent him over the edge of conscience he barely teetered on already.
Ella Carina of Aelawyn would be better off dead. And she would be soon, unless she proved to hold some value to him. Father would end her, and he would make a spectacle of it.
She glanced up at me like she could read my thoughts. Like she knew I was right. And I hated myself for it. I looked away from her and kept my eyes on my plate the rest of the night.
I was standing in the corridor again, the scene gone, and only mine and Arabella’s reflections staring back at me.
She was lost in her own mirror.
The scene made my stomach turn.