I think I hear the queen sigh, but it’s quiet enough that it might very well just be a draft leaking through the window.
“Tell me, child. Is it right to allow talent to wither? Is it right to find that which will benefit the world entire, yet allow such a gift to be buried?”
I ignore her, preferring not to entertain her excuses for why she feels justified in using people for her own devices. Instead, I slip my hand over the girl’s palm and interlock my fingers with hers.
She doesn’t stir, but I hope she can feel it. Know that someone sees her. That someone’s here with her.
That she’s not alone.
“You think me cruel,” says the queen.
“Now, why would you ever get that impression?” I ask, stroking the girl’s hand. There’s something about it that reminds me of Ellie, of Peck, Dwellen’s royal physician, griping at Evander for caressing her hand too much when she was recovering from her stab wounds. Peck claiming Evander would end up rubbing her skin raw.
My chest hurts.
“You took her,” I say, needles puncturing my throat. “You took her so you could hold something over Nox.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know who you’re referring to,” says the queen, to which I grit my teeth. I hate her. Hate how she’s erased him, down to erasing his twin. It all makes sense now. Why Nox does whatever the queen asks. Why he never fights back.
Why he doesn’t try to run.
He does it for her.
For his sister.
This is what he stands to gain if he succeeds in extracting the parasite from me. It’s his sister’s life. All this time, I’ve assumed he had a bargain with the queen that she would leave his parents alone, but he’s not just bartering for their safety.
He’s bartering for his sister’s freedom.
“She lives, you know,” says the queen.
I glance at Zora’s face, at the eyes closed in eternal slumber. “Doesn’t seem like much of a life to me.”
“The girl walks many worlds while she sleeps. In these few short years, she’s lived an abundance of lives. If she’d stayed in that provincial village I rescued them from, she would have lived out her immortal existence never having gotten to experience the realms and their wonders. But now she walks between them. It’s what the girl wanted, though it wasn’t her parents’ plan for her. Nor her brother’s.
“They are dreamers, she and her brother. They’re dreamers born into a little town saturated with little minds. Both deserved more. Needed more. I gave them that.”
The queen brushes the back of her hand over Zora’s relaxed forehead, like a mother checking for a fever.
“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.”
