The Secret World of Briar Rose(12)
Corin pressed her palm to the bumps of paint, drawing a line between the stiff queen and the blond girl whose face was destroyed. She kept hearing her sister’s stories about the royal family, doomed by curses and wicked stepmothers, and how this fate had brought them to ruin.
“El,” Corin murmured, “what if you were right?”
Light shone through the door from where she’d come, followed by a crash. She jumped at the sudden noise then stomped out her torch and tossed it aside. Shouts echoed through crumbled walls, forcing her to scramble toward the opposite end of the hallway.
She burst open doors to an empty ballroom and scanned for a hiding place. Dusty chairs had broken down and lay crooked, bleeding beige filling and feathers over the cracked marble floor, but there was a long sofa that still stood on four legs. As footsteps came closer, she rolled to the ground and ducked behind the sofa’s tapestry.
A group barraged the ballroom, stumbling over the marble.
“Ezran! You need to sit down. You can’t move too quickly after a ritual.”
She peered behind the sofa’s tapestry. A limping man barreled forward, followed by three women dressed in satin robes and laced veils. Light sparked from one of the woman’s fingertips as an armchair mended itself together and stood upright, catching the man when his knees buckled over.
Corin held her breath, forcing her body to freeze like a statue so her shock wouldn’t give her away. There’d been rumors that faeries once existed in the forests surrounding Gyldan, some even holding positions of council among the royal family. But with the monarchy collapsed, no faeries had ever been witnessed by human eyes. To Corin, this meant they were never real. Now she couldn’t explain the sight before her. Chairs did not move on their own, and ordinary people could not create light from their hands.
If faeries were real, and they had chosen to leave behind a dying kingdom after it no longer served them, there appeared to be at least one human who had convinced these faeries into providing him aid. The man named Ezran struggled to keep balance over the chair, as if the room were spinning and he had just landed in it. He looked pale and sick, the color of his skin matching his steel-white armor and cape. A breath hissed from his lips.
“We need to visit the tower now. The moonflower’s going to bloom.”
“We still have time before midnight,” one of the women said. “You need to preserve your energy before you cross over. We don’t know what will be in her subconscious until we arrive.”
The others nodded. “You’ve waited a hundred years for this. What’s a few minutes more?”
Ezran looked at them, jaw clenched.
“It’s a hundred years and a few minutes more without her.”
A heavy silence hung in the air. One of the women placed a hand on his cheek. Color slowly filled his pale skin, as if fighting for its place.
“You protected her when she needed you. Tonight, she’ll need you more than ever,” she said. “We’ll bring her back. I promise.”
“You know how I feel about promises, Dahlia. I don’t break them.”
Corin strained to make sense of their conversation, but none of them mentioned seeing a child. Either they hadn’t crossed paths with Elly yet, or they already caught her. That fear paralyzed Corin, preventing her from escaping even as the strangers left for another room. Elly was always good at hiding, but Corin didn’t know what these people were capable of.
She waited a few minutes after the room cleared before following their path. The door where they exited opened onto a winding staircase. She pressed her back against the wall, allowing her to glance in both directions in case more people came, as she climbed sideways along the stairs. The next floor revealed a shorter hallway filled with bedchambers.
She rummaged through each one in a frenzied rush, tossing aside sheets, opening every wardrobe, checking beneath bed frames. Every turn, she found nothing but dust and disappointment.
“Damn it, El,” she hissed, “where are you?”
Footsteps came closer from the hallway. Corin cursed under her breath and swiped a sharp toothcomb from the vanity as protection before climbing inside a wardrobe. Her hand gripped the tool so tightly she could almost see the whites of her knuckles in the darkness cloaking her.
The door creaked open, and she held her breath. There only came silence. Yet, if Corin strained hard enough, she could sense a presence on the other side.
His voice spoke, a low sound made of lilting ink that seeped into her core. So smooth and calming that if she could taste it, she wouldn’t even realize it was poison leaking down her throat.
“Let me guess what you are,” he said. “A peasant hoping to wake up the princess so she can fix your miserable life. A thief scavenging for whatever treasure you can find in old ruins.”
The wardrobe felt too small, restricting Corin’s breath and closing in on her. His footsteps clacked louder, closer, and suddenly there was too much dust inside her space, too many cobwebs hanging from corners that itched her skin and taunted her to make a sound and betray her hidden fear.
“But I’ve lived in this castle longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve searched every crevice, every place, and still the treasure cannot be found. Which leads me to one conclusion: Amelia has hidden it in her dreams. And I made a promise that I would protect her treasure with my life.”
The sound of a sword being unsheathed sliced into Corin’s ears.