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
I’m to be punished for the lives I took in the village.
“You must learn the consequences of your actions, Farin. It’s my responsibility as your mother,” says the queen as she leads me to the topmost tower.
My head is still pounding from my blood-soaked revelry, so it’s easier than it should be to spout off, “And what of your responsibility as queen? Your responsibility to your people? Shouldn’t you avenge their deaths? Administer justice?”
“Execution is quite a waste as a punishment, don’t you agree?” she says. “It never allows for the violator to change their ways.”
She means she doesn’t want to execute me, because somewhere, deep down, the worm that’s left of her son’s soul writhes inside of me.
We reach a set of doors. Intricate carvings of constellations decorate the facade, and when the queen places her palm against the wood, the stars begin to quake.
Then a lock clicks and the doors swing open, and when I behold what lies inside, I’m confused.
There’s a beautiful female laid out across a raised dais, her pale skin sparkling like a diamond in the playful specks that pass through the painted windows on the right side of the room.
“Go, have a look,” the queen says, jerking her head in the female’s direction.
I cross the glittering floor, and with each step, dread fills my chest.
