As I do, I check to see if there are any translucent parts of ice through which anyone could have witnessed what happened. If they did, it would have appeared like a violent shadow play, and therefore not entirely unusual in the Citadel. Still, if someone was searching for us, it might be a problem.
I notice nothing to give us away, so I stash the soiled fabric back in the room. Oak has pushed the bodies into a corner and covered them with a cloth.
“Is there any blood on me?” he asks, patting down the front of his woolen shirt.
It was a fine spatter, and though it struck his clothes, the pattern is nearly invisible in the dark fabric. I find a little in his hair and wipe it off. Rub his cheek and just above the corner of his mouth.
He gives me a guilty smile, as though expecting me to take him to task for the kiss or the murders. I cannot guess which.
“We’re almost to the stairs,” I tell him.
On the landing, we spot two more guards on the opposite end of a long hall. They are too far to make out our faces, and I hope too far off to see anything inauthentic in our costumes. I keep my gaze straight ahead. Oak nods to one, and the guard nods in return.
“Brazen,” I mutter under my breath, and the prince grins.
My hands are shaking.
We pass the library and the war room, then walk up another set of stairs. These spiral steeply for two floors until we come to Lady Nore’s bedroom, at the very top of the leftmost tower.
Her door is tall and pointed at its apex. It is made of some black metal, frosted over with cold. The handle is a deer hoof.
I reach out my fingers, turn it. The door opens.
Lady Nore’s bedroom is entirely new, the room washed in red. It takes me a moment to realize where the color is coming from. Viscera. The flayed-open bodies of Lady Nore’s victims on display all around her, frozen inside the walls so that light could filter through them and give the room its odd, ruddy tint.
Oak sees it, too, eyes wide as he takes in the awful space. “Well, a reliquary full of bones can’t be out of place among all this grotesque art.”
I give him a grateful glance. Yes. That’s right. All we need to do is find Mab’s remains. Then we can escape with his father. And perhaps I will no longer feel trapped by the Citadel, no longer be frozen in my past, as though I were one of the bodies in the wall.
A large bed sits in the middle of the floor, the headboard and footboard of carved onyx in sharp, spear-like shapes. Over the cushions rests a coverlet of ermine. A brazier burns in one corner of the room, warming the air.
Opposite hangs a mirror with a black frame in the shape of intertwining snakes. Beneath that is a dressing table, with jewels and hairpins strewn across its surface. I find an inkpot and a golden comb in its drawers.
I expect everything here to be perfectly arranged, as it was in the memory of my childhood, but when I turn to Lady Nore’s enormous wardrobe, built of ebony wood and inlaid with teeth from many beasts and beings, I see that several of her dresses lie on the floor. They are great, grand things in scarlet and shimmering silver, with droplets that appear like frozen tears. There are whole gowns of black swan feathers. But the closer I look, the more I notice the stains, the rips. They are as old as the broken towers of the castle.
The mess makes me suppose that Lady Nore readied herself quickly and without the help of servants. There is a desperation in all this that seems at odds with her sitting at the cusp of vast power.
Oak puts a hand on my arm. I startle.
“You all right?” he asks.
“When they first took me from the mortal world to the Court of Teeth, Lord Jarel and Lady Nore tried to be nice to me. They gave me good things to eat and dressed me in fancy dresses and told me that I was their princess and would be a beautiful and beloved queen,” I tell him, the words slipping from my lips before I can call them back. I occupy myself with searching deeper in the closet so I don’t have to see his face as I speak. “I cried constantly, ceaselessly. For a week, I wept and wept until they could bear it no more.”
Oak is silent. Though he knew me as a child, he never knew me as that child, the one who still believed the world could be kind.
But then, he had sisters who were stolen. Perhaps they had cried, too.
“Lord Jarel and Lady Nore told their servants to enchant me to sleep, and the servants did. But it never lasted. I kept weeping.”
He nods, just a little, as though more movement might break the spell of my speaking.
“Lord Jarel came to me with a beautiful glass dish in which there was flavored ice,” I tell him. “When I took a bite, the flavor was indescribably delicious. It was as though I were eating dreams.
“You will have this every day if you cease your crying, he said.
“But I couldn’t stop.
“Then he came to me with a necklace of diamonds, as cold and beautiful as ice. When I put it on, my eyes shone, my hair sparkled, and my skin shimmered as though glitter had been poured over it. I looked wondrously beautiful. But when he told me to stop crying, I couldn’t.
“Then he became angry, and he told me that if I didn’t stop, he would turn my tears to glass that would cut my cheeks. And that’s what he did.
“But I cried until it was hard to tell the difference between tears and blood. And after that, I began to teach myself how to break their curses. They didn’t like that.
“And so they told me I would be able to see the humans again— that’s what they called them, the humans—in a year, for a visit, but only if I was good.
“I tried. I choked back tears. And on the wall beside my bed, I scratched the number of days in the ice.
“One night I returned to my room to find that the scratches weren’t the way I remembered. I was sure it had been five months, but the scratches made it seem as though it had been only a little more than three.
“And that was when I realized I was never going home, but by then the tears wouldn’t come, no matter how much I willed them. And I never cried again.”
His eyes shine with horror. “I should never have asked you to come back here.”
“Just don’t leave me behind,” I say, feeling immensely vulnerable. “That’s what I want, for the game I won all those years ago.”
“I promise you,” he says. “If it is within my power, we leave together.”
I nod. “We will find the reliquary and ruin her,” I tell him. “And then I will never come back.”
But as we open drawers and comb through Lady Nore’s belongings, we find no bones, no magic.
“I don’t think it’s here,” Oak says, looking up from a box he’s poking through.
“She might keep it in the throne room,” I venture. Even though we must go down steps again and slip past guards, I will be glad to be out of this terrible room.
“My father might know where it’s kept,” he says. “I know you don’t think—”
“We can try the prisons,” I say reluctantly.
As I turn to give the chamber one last look, I notice something strange about her bed. The base of it is ice, and I am sure there’s something frozen in it. Not red but ivory and brown.
“Oak?” I say.
He turns, looking in the direction that I am. “Did you find something?”