Caro didn’t enter the vault. She didn’t have her time drained at all.
It’s still night. I pass the dormitories, where I hear the women—those who have the earliest chores, such as tending the fires in the Gerling hearths so the nobles never feel the pinch of morning air—getting out of bed and dressing. The sounds come to me as if from miles away. My mind and heart are racing, the adrenaline of the dream coursing through my body as if I were still asleep, though my eyes are wide-open.
I hurry toward the wing that contains the vault, sticking to the servants’ corridors when I can, keeping my head down and my eyes on the floor when I cannot. I’ve no idea where Liam Gerling lurks, if he’s awake.
When I reach the door to the vault at last, the hall is empty and silent, specks of dust floating in the light that floods in through the tall windows from the lawn. I stand before the door and look up, its shining mass reminding me how little power I have. The door bears an inlay of bronze panels in a long strip down the middle, carved with strange shapes—birds and snakes and jewels spilling from cups; but these transform farther down the panel into the shapes of people, women dancing in silk gowns, clasping hands. If I step back and squint, the entire effect is of a face with a jewel in the shape of a heart falling from its lips. It makes me think of Ina, and I wonder what she will think when she returns from her journey with the Queen and Roan, to learn of Caro’s punishment . . . and everything that followed.
Cautiously, I put my hands on the wood. It feels as solid as stone beneath my palms. When I give a push, nothing happens, not even a creak. My hands come away clean.
I bend down and see that a series of tiny gears are woven throughout the carvings, trailing down the door like buttons. I follow them upward, until I realize that running alongside them is a thin, red-stained channel, hardly deep enough to fit a wire. A trickle of cold goes down my spine.
Liam told me that the door took blood to open, took time, and you never knew how much. Before today, I never would have taken such a risk. But now I don’t even hesitate before raising my fingers to the panel, carefully exploring its design.
The walls of the little channel are stained reddish-brown, not with age. At the top is a little handle in the shape of a scorpion tail emerging from a fruit, sharp-edged as a razor. Its purpose is clear. Just a blood payment, but a payment no one but a Gerling could risk. Cruel, elegant. Just like the Gerlings.
I trace the channel with my fingertip. Is any of this Papa’s blood? Anger, fear, grief—they course through me together, and I double over with nausea. I lean my head against the door, allow myself to let the emotion escape in one choked sob. Papa would have known how the door worked—and he knew how close to death he was—but he thought it was worth the risk.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I reach up and press my finger onto the scorpion’s blade. Heat blooms, and I feel the peculiarly unpleasant sensation of time being drained from my blood. For a moment, I’m dizzy, but less so than when Wick took ten years.
Then something behind the door clicks. When I push on the wood, it opens without resistance, and my hands come away purple. For a moment, I’m in awe of the mechanism and its creator—before the awe curdles to anger. I step into darkness, leaving the door cracked just the slightest bit so I’m not locked in.
Gradually, my eyes adjust to reveal a narrow stone staircase lit by torches, just like the one leading to Lady Sida’s chambers. I climb and climb until the top of the stairs opens up into darkness. Doubling back, I take one of the torches from its sconce, holding it high over my head.
For a long moment, I don’t comprehend what I see. A room of dark stone, windowless, with a shining, tiled floor. Its walls curve with the tower, only maybe twenty paces in diameter, though it stretches into shadow over my head.
And it’s not tiles on the floor. The ground beneath my feet is blanketed with blood-irons of every size and color, mixed in with other treasures—cups of gold and silver, pearls and rings, raw jewels tossed on the ground like refuse. Rusted-looking ceremonial swords hang on the wall, blades dulled with age. But money means almost nothing to me now that Papa’s gone. I don’t have the urge to bend down and pile month-and year-coins into my skirt, as once I might have. I scan the room for something, anything that calls out to me, anything that reminds me of Papa, and why he’d come here, what he’d die for—and I come up with nothing.
Disappointment gathers in my throat, thick and bitter and suffocating.
But then something catches my eye on one of the shelves—an ancient-looking book. I draw closer, kicking blood-irons out of my way. There’s no reason for a book to be here, sitting among several hundred lifetimes of coins and treasure. My heart pounding, I open the cover, and a familiar scent washes over me—straw and metal and woodsmoke. The inside page bears no type, just words scribbled in an unfamiliar slanting handwriting: Antonia Ivera.
I don’t know the name, but it tugs at something deep inside me.
Next to it, small bits of torn paper peek out from the binding. Transfixed, I take my mother’s portrait out of my pocket—where I always keep it—and fit it perfectly into the space.
And then, I know. My father died for this book.
Surrounding the words—surrounding the text on every page, I realize as I flip through—are little drawings, doodles of spirals and trees and forest animals. And I do know where those came from.
Me.
The memories are flooding back: of sitting in my father’s lap—before any darkness touched our lives, before the accident—while he read of the snake and the fox in his deep, lilting voice, and of stealing the book away to my cot to make my mark on the pages, which for some reason my father never seemed to mind. Holding this book is like having a piece of Papa back again—and even myself, another Jules who had never told a lie, known hunger, missed her parents, or struck a terrible bargain.
I turn back to the first page to read the stories, but as I read down the lines—still in Antonia Ivera’s handwriting—the ink seems to flood off the page and rise up around me. Darkness floods my vision. I can’t pinpoint the moment when reality gives way to dreams, but after my experience with the hedge witch I know what to expect, and though I’m frightened, I force myself not to close off. I hold still, my mind wide-open, and let the visions—memories—cascade through me.
Before my eyes is the girl, but much younger, dark hair hiding her face. She’s sitting against a wall, half lit by candlelight, her arms wrapped around her knees. Heavy iron chains link her wrists. She drops her head in her hands.
“We’re never going to get out of here, are we?” Her voice is as familiar to me as my own heartbeat.