“What sort of lives does she live?” I can’t help but ask.

A faint smile overtakes the queen’s harsh features, almost softening them. “The good sort.”

A lump rises in my throat. “Like running through lavender fields on a sunny day kind of good? Or holding her child in her arms kind of good? Or having her mind washed of all independent thought as she serves her queen kind of good?”

The queen raises a brow. “Does it matter, so long as it’s good to her?”

“So she doesn’t suffer at all? You just keep her trapped in this dreamlike state, this eternal bliss?” The words are sharp as they leave my throat.

“You make it sound as though that would be cruel.”

The lump in my throat forces a scoff out. “Of course it’s cruel. It’s not real. What if…” I grasp the girl’s hand tighter. “What if she’s holding a child in her arms this very moment? What if she’s fallen in love with her little girl’s laugh, the way her curls never stay tidy in her braid? What if when she wakes up and discovers none of it was real? What if…”

The queen’s voice is a whisper. “What if the joy she tastes in her dreams turns reality all the more bitter?”

I nod, blinking with all my might to hold my tears back, even as my heart feels as though it’s being ripped out of my chest.

A baby. My baby, taken from my arms…

I wipe the tears away, my movement jolted and hasty so the queen won’t see.

“I don’t disagree with you, you know,” the queen says, but she doesn’t look at me. Instead, she gazes at the serene girl laying before us. The girl whose perfect life will come to a grinding halt as soon as Nox fulfills his bargain. “But I never said the lives she leads aren’t real. The girl faces obstacles she must strive to overcome, just as the rest of us do.”

A shudder snakes through me, warbles through my bones. “What did you do to her?”

“It wasn’t me as much as it was Gunter. His greatest accomplishment in his brief life, yet he kept it hidden. Kept his process for inserting her soul into the Fabric secret from me. I believe he might have been ashamed.”

“The tapestries,” I breathe, remembering the care with which Gunter worked at the loom. The regret with which he spoke of Zora.

These are the adventures she never got to have while she walked this side of the sun. I try to gift her the lives she would have wanted.

I can’t read her tone. There’s a stillness about her I can’t decipher. Is she angry with Gunter for not delighting in this atrocity, or does she empathize with his shame?

“There’s a Fabric—a veil, if you must—that lies between our realm and the others…”

“Others? Like the realm the fae abandoned before coming here?” I ask.

The queen’s throat bobs, but she holds the angle of her chin high. “Yes. That one, as well as others. The fae entered this world through a Rip in the Fabric, one that has since been sewn shut. But Gunter found a pattern in the Fabric. An embroidery almost. A path that could be traced.”

I think of the bundle of flax that was supposed to be delivered to Gunter. The flax that Nox explained was grown in the same location as the Rip, in the soil saturated with the magic that leaks from the Fabric itself.

“It was a delicate procedure,” the queen explains, “but the girl’s mind is extraordinarily open, and with the help of a little sleep and a little magic, she found a way to trace the pattern as well. To follow it not to Rips, but to Eyelets—holes left open by the Fates themselves. That’s the part Gunter couldn’t be incentivized to share with me. How he managed to weave her spirit directly into the Fabric itself.” She nods toward the left side of the room, and I notice for the first time the tapestries that decorate the wall. “I thought perhaps his secret lay in threading her likeness into the tapestries using the thread made from Rivrean flax, but when I had him match one to my likeness, alas—nothing.”

I’m hardly listening to the queen’s laments. My eyes are fixed upon the tapestry in the center of the wall. It’s similar to the one I watched Gunter weave in my cell. The color palette is the same, but the events unfolding within the phases of the moon differ.

The girl is still fair-haired, but it’s lighter this time, almost the color of freshly bloomed cotton. In the waxing phase, she starts off tiny, born into a family of small means, but in the next image, orange flames lick at her family’s home; the next is of a city burned to ash, the pale-haired girl’s face smudged with soot. I watch her as she’s found by a set of soldiers, then brought to a throne room and presented to a pair of men who look to be brothers. Through the passing of the phases, I can tell she loves the brothers, but there’s a wicked air about them, and as the images progress, a sinking feeling gnaws at my stomach.

Eventually, the king presents the girl before a council of eerie beings, and they bestow a gift of light upon her head.

I find I don’t wish to witness how the story ends, so I turn my gaze back to Zora, and my words to the queen. My throat is dry. “How do you know she’s not just asleep?”

“He woke her once.”

The words ring like a brass bell through the open chamber.

I cut my eyes to the side, to the queen’s thin-lipped expression. “And was she glad for what you’d done to her?”

The queen doesn’t answer for a long while, but then she says, “Her mind is vast, but she is a child in both demeanor and maturity. She does not yet understand how her life, her many lives, fit on the scale. How they swing the balance of the realms in the world’s favor.”

There’s a moment when the pure injustice of what the queen has done battles with that tiny part of me. The part that wonders.

The part that stares at the girl’s closed eyelids, watches as her eyes dart side to side underneath those tiny folds of skin, and longs to see what she sees.

To know what she knows.

To feel the suns of other worlds upon my skin, to drink from the rivers of other realms and discover whether their waters taste just as sweet.

To live a different life than my own. To be handed the opportunity to take another path.

The chance to cry out when Derek leads me into that pantry. The knowledge to take my baby and run. The opportunity to sneak out of Madame LeFleur’s shop while she’s busy preparing a potion behind that thick curtain.

There’s that part of me, but then there’s the other; it’s tired and worn and a little trampled. But it has learned to stand on weak knees, learned to love without expectation of return.

It survives, and it manages a laugh or two along the way.

“What sort of things are you hoping to learn?” I ask, but the question is two-fold. It’s about Zora, but the queen brought me here for a reason. She brought me here to show me what Nox stands to lose.

“I wish to know how to protect the world I’ve come to feel a responsibility toward. I wish to right my wrongs. But the sister is not the only means to that end. The parasite that dwells within you, if wielded by someone with greater understanding of the dangers to this realm—it could protect this realm in ways you could not possibly understand. It’s why I’m more than willing to give up the girl in exchange for the parasite.”

“That’s the bargain you made with Nox,” I whisper.

The queen nods. “If he extracts the parasite and delivers it to me, I will release his sister and allow him to take her wherever he wishes.”

The truth comes cascading down upon me like loose rubble, and there’s no escaping it. No pretending it away.

It’s why I can’t let him fail to meet his end of the bargain. It’s why, tomorrow, when he performs the ritual to extract the parasite from my body, the ritual that will end with my shredded mind unable to sustain life in my body—I’ll let him.

It’s why my dreams of running away with Nox are just that, dreams.

Because he has to save her.

I have to save her.

Even if, when it’s my eyes closed in an eternal slumber, there will be no dreams left for me.

CHAPTER 37

NOX: AGE TWENTY