Seven identical doors surrounded her, including the one through which she’d entered. Despair swelled within her. Which way?
The sky was filling with smoke. As she knelt, closing her eyes, she heard more fire erupt behind her—to the left, then the right. Sparks scattered across the ground.
She dug her fingers into the dirt, imagined that every bead of sweat sliding down her body could seep into the earth, race off through the veins of rock in the ground like buzzing beacons.
She saw it in her mind’s eye: Gold knots zipping lightning-quick through the deep dense dark, seeking fire. Seeking Tal.
Warmth suffused her, but not from the fire.
From the empirium.
She felt it rise from the ground, called by her desperation. Heat bloomed up her arms and legs, unfurled in her belly, raced up her spine, and burrowed into the base of her skull.
When she opened her eyes, the world blazed gold. One door—second to her right—shone brighter than the rest. From down that golden path came the faraway sound of a man calling her name.
She blinked. The gold faded, and the world was itself again.
She launched herself off the ground, ran through the door, followed the path to the right, then right again, then left. Climbing flames surrounded her on all sides. Above the roar of fire and the crashes of the collapsing maze, she heard the crowd cheering and pushed herself faster. Flames chased her over a caved-in wall. She dropped and rolled, leapt up, kept running.
Another fork. She took the left path. Not fifty yards later, she hit a wall of stone.
The horn blasted; the fire arced overhead.
Then, three crashes. Very near. The wall just beside Rielle rumbled and groaned.
She whirled to follow the sound, then raced back to the fork, took the right path instead. Ran for a full minute at top speed, her side cramping. Dodged a buckling wall, shielded her face from a cascade of sparks. She could hear it now—a larger, roaring fire, straight ahead past a pile of smoking rubble that had once been a wall.
She climbed through it, kicking aside planks of charred wood, then emerged into a circular yard pockmarked with blackened craters. From the craters snapped trails of fire, and in the center of the yard, surrounded by rubble and walls of flame, stood a familiar building.
It was a narrow, three-storied house, not as grand as one might expect for the commander of the royal army. Painted gray in honor of his metalmaster heritage and forest-green in honor of the family he served.
So he had said. But Rielle’s mother had told Rielle the truth—no-nonsense Armand Dardenne had ordered his house painted green because that was the color of his daughter’s eyes.
All clarity left Rielle in a flood of dread.
It was her parents’ house, re-created in the center of the maze. And it was on fire.
Rielle, what did you do?
She’s dead! Oh, God! Help us! Someone help us!
But then Armand Dardenne had come to his senses. He had stared at Rielle over the red, ruined wreck of his wife’s body, watched her frantic sobs with an expression of abject contempt until everything Rielle had known about her father had disappeared. His face had closed to her, never to be opened again. He had lowered Marise Dardenne’s body to the ground, picked up his shivering daughter, and hurried her through the tunnels below the castle to the Pyre and Tal’s bedroom.
Tal, sleep-rumpled and only nineteen years old, had opened his door, taken one look at Rielle’s face, and held out his arms to her.
Help us, her father had said, his voice carved hollow. Help her. Don’t let them take her from me.
“Rielle!”
Tal’s distant shout shook her. She took two halting steps forward, gazing up at the burning house.
“I can’t,” she whispered, a sharp, ill heat flaring throughout her body. “No, no, no.”
Then, with a groan, the front face of the house began to collapse.
A choked scream rang out—her own name, quickly silenced.
Rielle ran around the house, searching through the smoke for the back door. It was there, just as she remembered it. She kicked the blackened wood; it gave way easily. She raced over the threshold into a world of black smoke and leaping orange flames. How strange it was to see the rooms just as they should have been—but empty now. No furniture, no art on the walls. Only flames and a noxious smell that coated her every breath with darkness.
She hid her face. “Tal? Where are you?”
“Here!” His voice was faint. “In the parlor!”
She stumbled down the main hallway and to the door of her mother’s parlor. The wall was buckling; overhead, the rafters creaked and groaned.