Page 51 of Fractured
The door didn’t budge.
“Help me!” I told Vair, like I forgot for a moment that he was a lynx, not a man. He had no hands to pull with.
“It won’t open,” he said instead, but I shook my head.
“Maybe it will. Maybe it opens on the other side. C’mon, push with me!”
I pressed my shoulder against the cold, pale wood and I pushed with every ounce of strength in me. Vair did, too. Putting his back legs on the door, he pushed as hard as he could, and the door didn’t budge. I could have been pushing against the stone walls and it would have had the same outcome.
Still, I didn’t stop until I was breathless and I had sweat beads lining my forehead.
“Fuck!”
I sat on the floor then, racing to catch my breath, angry, terrified, but most of all hopeless. Vair watched me curiously, ears twitching at the word.
“You have not found what the palace wants you to find yet, Nilah,” he told me, and he wasn’t breathing heavily at all.
In fact, hewasn’t breathing,period. Hedidn’tbreathe. He didn’t eat. I bet he didn’t sleep, either, even though he sometimes closed his eyes. Even though he thought he did.
It hit me in that very moment—Vair wasn’t reallyalive.He wasn’t a real creature, even though he wasn’t an illusion, either. He was…something else.
“How do you know that?” I asked eventually.
“Frostfire,” he said. “I am almost certain that you will need to learn about your magic before you can walk out of this palace. Or at leastproveto it that you can own it. Use it.” He lowered his head. “You have to prove to it that you have it.”
I shook my head, and when I looked up and saw the trayfull of foodin front of the open door to the bedroom, I laughed a little.
It looked like dinner was already fucking served.
“This place is going to drive me insane, you know that?”
The lynx stood up and went back to the room slowly. “Sanity is only an illusion. Come.”
And just like that, he hopped over the tray and went into the room, leaving me alone in the hallway.
fifteen
The day ended,and night came.
The starlight-colored flames atop the torches danced tirelessly, sometimes slower, sometimes faster while I talked to myself, and sometimes to Vair, too. About the absurdity of this entire situation, about the fact that I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone who actually knew anything about this place or the queen, but mostly about how the queen could havecheated her fate.
Sleep took me, and this time I sat at the corner of the bed, so when I woke in the morning to a bit of snow falling from the sky, I was lying at the very edge of it. Not entirely sure why I hadn’t just lied down properly. The sheets were clean and soft, silky, and they smelled faintly of roses, and the bed looked really comfortable, yet I hadn’t dared to even pull the cover down.
It wasn’t cold in the room, though. Even if the walls sometimes looked like they were made of ice and frost, they weren’t. The stone was warm against my skin anytime I touched it.Moonstone,Vair called it. It was stone that couldonly be found in the Frozen Court soil, and it was infused with moon magic as well.
Of course, I asked how, but he didn’t know. Just like most important things, Vair had no clue how to answer my questions, which sometimes made me wonder if his memory was purposely erased. By someone else, someone who knew that he knew too much. Someone who was cruel enough to pull it off—like the Midnight King, or even Lyall, if he’d had reason.
Yeah, all fae seemed to have a knack for doing evil shit. Maera had been right all along when she told me to watch out for them.
But the day started and I continued to search every book and every crack on the walls, under the bed and in the bathroom. The palace let me go back to the room I’d woken up in, too. I searched all the books in there again all day, hoping to catch a break. A glimpse of something that might help me piece this together, but there was nothing there.
I grew angrier by the hour. I saw the world outside those windows, and I slammed my fists against the glass a few times, hoping to break it, but it wouldn’t budge. Life went on out there.Timecontinued, except within these moonstone walls. It was stuck here, I believed, even though the white sand in the hourglass I found in the first room moved each time I turned it.
When night fell, I sat in the middle of the bed, hugged my knees to my chest, and I thought of Rune as I looked up at the sky. As I cried in silence.
Vair asked, just like he had the night before: “Are you ready to learn magic now, Nilah?”
I’d saidnolast night, simply because the magic I did have was borrowed. It wasn’t mine and I was not meant to know how to use it. I was a human being, for fuck’s sake!Whatever the hell this was, it was all a mistake, a misunderstanding, and soon this fucking palace would realize it and let me leave.
