Page 17 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Can I get up?” Livira asked.

Begrudgingly Carlotte got off Livira’s midsection and let her find her feet. Though Livira noted that the girl kept one hand clutching her librarian’s robe.

“So.” Livira brushed herself down. “You have questions.”

“Do I smell awful?”

It wasn’t the question Livira had been expecting.

“I do, don’t I? Gods, I must stink.” Carlotte buried her nose in her shoulder ruff and inhaled. “I’m a ghost. I can’t touch anything. Not even water. I haven’t washed in years!” She looked at her hand in sudden shock.“Wait! I can touch you!” She yanked on the material to prove her point, making Livira stagger. “I’m cured?” Without releasing her hold, she lashed out at the bed with one leg. Her foot passed effortlessly through the nearest of the four ornately carved posts. “I’mnotcured! What’s going on?”

Livira eyed Carlotte dubiously, waiting to see if another torrent of questions would follow, but it seemed she was being given leave to answer this time.

“We’re all ghosts. You came here through a pool that took you into the past. None of us truly exist here—”

“Though some of us have fifty-foot-tall statues in the main square.” Leetar found her voice at last, still raw with grief, her eyes red. Carlotte seemed too overwhelmed by their arrival to notice such details.

A shout rang out in the corridor they’d just come down. “Carlotte? Carlotte!”

“Speaking of your husband…” Livira shot Carlotte a speculative look.

“We should leave,” Yolanda said. “If we speak to him it will just make the damage worse!”

“Damage?” Carlotte looked at her bedroom door. The faint strains of the orchestra beyond stopped mid-flow.

“Come on!” Livira led off towards the bedchamber’s rear wall, trusting Carlotte’s death-grip on her robe to bring the queen with her.

All four of them passed through nearly a yard of stone and found themselves standing in an empty dining hall with great displays of swords and pikes on the walls, empty suits of plate armour standing sentinel in the corners and midpoints.

“Can anyone else see you?” Yolanda asked urgently.

“What? No.” Carlotte seemed surprised at the child taking over the conversation.

“How long have you been here?” Yolanda asked.

“In the palace?”

“With the man who can see you,” Yolanda clarified.

“Uh…” Carlotte counted on her fingers. “Plague, palace, good year, this year. Four. Four! You left me here four years, Livira!” She tugged accusingly on Livira’s robe. “Four!”

“How are you queen?” Livira looked around the room. She couldn’timagine that this palace was any less grand than the one King Oanold had been burned out of.

Carlotte released Livira, folding her arms. She mixed outrage, accusation, and pride into one stare that she swept across all of them. “I had to do something when you left me here. That was you. I know it was. Somehow that assistant was you.”

“In a way,” Livira admitted. “But the pool you escaped the canith by didn’t lead here. You must have gone to the Exchange. The forest with the doorways.”

“I did go to an orchard.” Carlotte nodded. “But it was very boring, and there are only so many apples you can eat. They’re terrible for the digestion. I mean if that’s all you eat. And then where do you go when you need to…I mean…Behind a tree? I did see a guinea pig once but—”

“How much have you interacted with this man?” Yolanda interrupted.

Carlotte peered down at her. “Whoisthis child? And why doesn’t she behave like one? Is something wrong with her?”

Livira stepped between them before Yolanda said anything that might start a fight. Carlotte had always enjoyed a good shouting match, and four years with only one person to talk to might have worn away at her self-restraint.

“How are you queen, Carlotte?”

Carlotte sniffed. “It turns out that I’m not as useless as Master Logaris used to say I was. I found Chertal could see me and hear me, and some of the things I know were not known here. They proved to be quite lucrative.”

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