There had been a time when this had felt like home—the dysfunctional sort. When Blaise and I had worked to the tune of Gunter’s whistling… There had been moments when I’d felt like I could have gone on like that forever.
That had been a moment of betrayal. A moment I’d forgotten my duties to my family. To my sister.
I won’t forget again.
Gunter is dead because of that sort of lapse in judgment. That sort of complacency.
“Wake my sister and return her to my family. Unless you wish to face the consequences of a failed bargain.” There’s a part of me, the part of me that’s wretched and bathes in shadows and blood, that hopes she’ll deny me. That hopes I’ll get to witness as she’s suffocated to death by her own pride.
That part of me cares nothing for Zora. Not in comparison to the vengeance I’d love to enact upon the queen.
But I’m used to quashing that side of myself, to locking him away, so I do.
“Very well,” the queen says. “I return your sister to you. Do with her as you wish.”
My heart stutters a bit, and I find myself reworking the carefully worded bargain, searching for loopholes I might have missed, but I find none. “The bargain requires that you wake her first.”
The queen shakes her head. “No. The bargain requires that the girl be released from sleep.”
I allow her a generously patient swallow before I hiss at her through my teeth. “Then release her from her sleep.”
The queen doesn’t look at me. Instead, she traces her finger against the saber-toothed fangs carved into the armrests of her throne. “The girl is free to wake and leave when she wishes. I’ve certainly done nothing to stop her.”
I frown, my irritation mounting. “That’s it? You command it, and it’s done? I know you well enough to know it has to be more complicated than that, my queen. A ritual. An element. A talisman. A full moon, perhaps?”
The queen flicks her blue eyes toward me and stares at me through her thick white eyelashes. “I was never the one who lulled your sister into her slumber. It was never me who kept her under the influence of the Fabric.”
I frown, and that strange smile returns to her lips, the kind that’s self-afflicting and derives no satisfaction from what she’s about to tell me.
“My child, it was Gunter who kept her submerged. Didn’t you know?”
The words coalesce in the air between her lips in my ears, and it’s as if it takes even my pointed ears immense effort to decipher them.
“Gunter?” It’s a question I don’t give permission to slip from my lips, but it does.
The queen strokes her silver armrest. “His invention. His contraption. His brilliance to access the Fabric, to sew your sister into its story.”
Gunter working at the spinning wheel, weaving thread. Gunter’s loom. The brilliant tapestries that decorate the halls.
All these years, I thought he was crafting them for me as a gift, a means to see my sister as what she might have become.
Gunter, begging for my forgiveness as he died at my hands. I thought he was apologizing for leaving me.
But…
“How?” I whisper, my mind not quite comprehending it.
The queen shakes her head. “I do not know. That male’s mind was not like ours, Farin. Where we see prisms, he sees worlds. Where we see darkness, he sees color. Saw color, I suppose.”
I’m suddenly overcome with the urge to sit down, but of course, there’s no place to sit but the throne. My knees don’t know the difference though, and they shake, threatening to buckle all the same.
The flax shipment from Rivre.
He hadn’t ordered it for Blaise, to assist in extracting the parasite.
It was the same flax he’d been ordering for years, ever since Abra took my sister captive, ever since Gunter forced my sister into a wakeless dream.
“His last tapestry,” I say. “It’s still in his room. He never finished it.”
The queen nods. “He told me long ago that if he died, the girl would be released. Gunter never did trust me, it seems, and I suppose he thought that knowledge would keep me from harming him should he fail me. I believed her sleep was tied to his life somehow. I watched her for hours after it happened, sure she would wake any minute. But hours passed, then days, and still she does not wake. I do not understand why. Perhaps she isn’t ready. Perhaps she has not fulfilled her purpose in whatever life Gunter weaved her into. Perhaps she must make her way to the end of the last tapestry. Perhaps she simply does not wish to return. Either way, in being indirectly involved in Gunter’s death, I fulfilled my part in releasing your sister, even if that was not my intention. I cannot help it if she chooses to remain bound.”
Anger guts me, slicing through my fingertips like needle pricks, and I can’t distinguish who it’s directed at. Gunter for lying to me all these years, for claiming he hurt for me with the loss of my sister, when he was the one imprisoning her; the queen for neglecting to inform me that our bargain had become null, for allowing me to experiment on Blaise for her own gain; Zora for not waking up.
Zora for not waking up.
It’s that thought that has me running.
I burst through the throne room doors into the corridor and sprint up three flights of stairs into the abandoned hall. The door is left ajar and I don’t think about why I don’t need the queen’s handprint to unlock its seal.
When I cross the room to my sister and wipe her golden hair from her forehead, I whisper to her that it’s time to wake up.
Zora doesn’t stir, and now I’m shaking at her shoulders, and her head is bobbing against the table, and I’m screaming at her to wake up. To come back. Not to leave me.
I’m not thinking when hours later, I let my grief lull me asleep next to her, my knees against the ground as I rest my head on the corner of the dais.
I’m certainly not thinking when I wake in the center of the room, a flurry of white runes scattered on the floor all around me like snowflakes.
I’m not thinking when the moonlight bathes the floor in a river of scattered white flecks.
