“I’m just leaving.” I start toward the doors, but Ann blocks my way.
“Stay.” It’s an order. The smile that follows is false. “Tell me, how is my old friend?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I try, just because that’s what’s expected. I’m supposed to lie and Ann’s supposed to sneer and neither of us is supposed to give a single inch.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t know that you ran out of the palace earlier in a rather dramatic fashion? Did you think I wouldn’t know who you were following? I don’t want you to see her, Grace. She’s too dangerous and you’re too important.”
“I’m leaving,” I tell her. I’m almost to the door when Ann speaks again.
“The authorities know she’s here, Grace. And I’m beginning to think it’s time for Karina Volkov to go back where she came from.”
“Why?” I snap. “Hasn’t she suffered enough?”
“You’ve seen her. You’ve spoken with her. Does she seem stable to you?”
“There was never anything wrong with her. You did that. Being in that place did that. Spending ten years in a place like that would make anyone crazy!”
The calm smile that Ann gives me is enough to make me scream. “And you would know, wouldn’t you, Grace?” She cocks an eyebrow but doesn’t really wait for an answer. “Besides, what I’ve done I’ve done for Adria. I’ve done for peace.”
“Yeah. When I hear peace I always think hunt my friends down like rabid dogs.”
Ann’s anger is rising. It’s like she’s tired of having to explain this to me time and time again. “The Society agrees with me, you know. Adria needs peace and stability. Our plan—our bargain—assures that. Amelia’s kingdom was taken from her. Righting that wrong has been my life’s work. It was your mother’s work! Having the heir marry the prince was her idea. But you still fight it.”
“And the king …”
“The king’s death is a tragedy.” Ann sounds sincere. “My husband and son and I will mourn him fiercely.”
“But he had to die,” I fill in.
Ann just shrugs.
I want to slap her. I want to claw her eyes out. I want to hang her from that window and let the whole world see how ugly she really is.
But I can’t do any of that. Because even without Ann, the Society would still want me here, and the Society is too powerful to fight. Like it or not, I’m the solution to a two-hundred-year-old problem, and no amount of rage on my part is going to change that any time soon.
“Good night, Grace,” Ann tells me, heading for the door. “Do get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a trying day. We will need to prepare to bury our king, after all.”
It’s not an observation. It’s a threat. And I stay, shaking, long after she’s gone.
I should find my room, my bed. I should do something to make this right, but I just look out the big windows, wishing I could go back in time.
To save the king.
And my mother.
And the people who cut those bodies down and dragged them who-knows-where.
But that’s not true, I realize. My mother knew where the bodies were buried, and she came here—into the belly of the beast—and told the one person she thought she could trust. Someone she thought would help.
My mom trusted Princess Ann, I remember. It makes me want to cry, the realization that bad decisions must run in my family.
My breath fogs against the thick glass windows, blocking out the city and the walls. They could be anywhere out there, beyond those gates, and …
Karina’s voice comes back to me. I can almost hear my mother sing.
“‘The truth is locked behind the gates …’”
And I know.
My mother didn’t come to the palace to tell Ann about the bodies.
My mother came to the palace to find them.
When morning comes, the king’s still dead, but it takes Thomas a moment to remember. I can actually see the grief pass over him, watch as reality seeps in. And I know the moment he realizes that it wasn’t all a dream.
“Get up,” I tell him, and he bolts a little, afraid. In spite of everything, I manage to smile. This must be what Noah felt like on my first night here when he dragged me from the safety of the embassy to Lila’s party on the cliffs. That was a lifetime ago, I think as I plop down on the edge of Thomas’s bed. I’ve changed out of my pretty blue ball gown, and I no doubt look like what I am—a worried, guilt-ridden girl who might never sleep again.
“What are you doing here?” Thomas rubs his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Get dressed.” I throw him a T-shirt. “It’s two hundred years ago, and I need your help.”
Thomas doesn’t call me crazy. He doesn’t even tell me that we’re wasting our time. But that doesn’t mean he understands.
“Tell me again,” he says when we reach the sitting room where Ann served me tea last summer and explained that these were the windows where, two hundred years ago, everything started.
“My mom found the lost tomb,” I tell him. “Which was bad because tomb means bodies. And bodies mean DNA. And DNA means proof. And so that’s why your mom wanted her dead,” I say so matter-of-factly that I have to stop and make myself remember who I’m talking to. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” the prince tells me. “I always knew, you know? Not that she’d done … this. But that she could. I think a part of me always knew.”
“I never knew,” I tell him.
“About what?”
“About any of it,” I have to admit. “I thought my mom was an antiques dealer, a collector who had been raised in Adria. I had no idea that this”—I gesture at the ornate room before us—“was even possible. People don’t live like this.”
The prince eyes me. “I live like this.”
And it’s true. This is the only life he has ever known—will ever know. For the first time, I realize I’m not the only one whose destiny is completely out of my hands, and a part of me kind of feels sorry for the prince. But that’s not the reason why we’re here.
“I always thought my mom came here to tell your mom she found the bodies, but last night I realized … what if my mom actually came here to find them?”
“Grace—”
“If my mom came here to find the bodies, then we can find the bodies.”
“Grace, they’re gone. They were smuggled out of the palace centuries ago. Everybody knows that.”
“Do they?” I have to ask. “I mean, think about it. Some people snuck into the palace and cut the bodies down, yes. That we know. But looters were everywhere that night. The whole city was filled with mobs. War was raging.”
“Yeah. And the bodies got lost in the chaos.”
“Have you ever tried to carry someone who’s unconscious? Well, I have—”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Alexei’s heavier than he looks,” I add quickly. “And carrying him was hard. I could barely drag him twenty feet. Think about it. Why drag four dead bodies across the city when you have a whole palace to hide them in? Especially if you know that you can always come back once the dust settles and give them a proper burial?”
I know my theory makes sense, but the prince doesn’t quite believe me, I can tell. He’s looking at me like I’m confused or naïve. But not crazy. Never crazy. And I kind of love him for it.
He’s still shaking his head, though. He’s still trying to make me see.
“You don’t get it, Grace. The palace is huge, yes, but every inch of it has been remodeled and modernized and refurbished in the last two centuries. I mean, two hundred years have gone by. If the bodies were here, don’t you think someone would have found them before now?”
Sometimes I really hate common sense. That’s why I go to such great lengths to avoid it.
There’s a desk in the room with an old-fashioned pen set and really fancy paper. I rush toward it and draw the Society’s symbol the best I can, then hold it up for Thomas to see.
“Look at this,” I say.
“Okay.”
“Have you seen it anywhere in the palace?”
“No. Why?”
“I think it might mark the hiding place or be some kind of clue. Think hard. Maybe it’s carved into some wood or etched into stone or … something.”
“Grace, the palace is huge. There’s no way—”
“The truth is locked behind the gates!” I practically scream.
There’s a look that people get when they don’t want to give a crazy person bad news. We need our delusions, or so it seems. The prince just met me, and already he knows how fragile I am, how breakable. And he doesn’t want to be responsible for my final, fatal crack.
“Grace—”
“You said you saw my mother here. You said you saw her wandering around the palace. When was that?”
“I don’t know.” Thomas runs a hand through his messy hair. “Years ago.”
“Was it three—almost four—years ago? Think.”
Thomas looks down at his feet, as if trying to remember. After a moment, he nods, certain. “Yes. We talked about how I’d just gotten my braces, so yeah. That would be right.”
It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for years. For centuries. But I can finally exhale when I say, “That was when she found them.”
I can tell by the look in Thomas’s eyes he doesn’t quite believe me. That’s okay, I think. I probably shouldn’t believe me, either.
“Think about it, Thomas. That day, when she was wandering around, she wasn’t lost. She was looking. And she found them.”
“Grace, that’s—”
“Where was she?”
“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago, and—”
“Thomas, think!”
I don’t mean to shout.
I don’t mean to rant and rave. Thomas is a good guy. He’s on my side. He didn’t choose to be a part of this, but neither did I. When he nods and leads me down the hall, I have to tell myself that we’re not looking for bodies.
We’re looking for a way out.
All around us, Adria is in mourning. Heads of state are paying their respects. Palace officials are running to and fro, getting ready for the official funeral. Thomas’s grandfather is dead and his father is now king, but the prince is here with me.
I have to wonder if maybe we aren’t both crazy.
But as soon as Thomas leads us down the south corridor I know in my gut we’re almost there.
“The gates,” I say as the old palace gates come into sight up ahead. I can’t keep from singing.
“‘Hush, little princess, it’s too late. The truth is locked behind the … gates.’”
They’re open now, and nothing stands between the south corridor and the atrium-like room that probably used to be a courtyard. The floor is cobblestone. In the center of the room there is a fountain.
More hallways and corridors and staircases diverge from this space and I turn around, suddenly lost.
“This used to be the outside, right?” I ask, but I think Thomas knows I’m really talking to myself. “So did they mean behind, like coming out of the castle, or behind, like you’re coming in?”
Thomas shakes his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t know it meant anything until now.”
Together we move toward the high iron gates that used to stand between the palace and the world but now stand open for all to see.
Thomas and I each take a gate and try to pull them closed, to move them in any way, but they don’t budge.
“They’re stuck,” Thomas says. “They probably haven’t moved in two hundred years, remember.”
I push harder. I pull with all my might. But then I stop and look closer at the gate before me, the old scrollwork and handles and the way the gate has swung back to perfectly block a tiny alcove in the wall. The bolt is extended, keeping the gate in place.
“They’re not stuck,” I tell him. “They’re locked.”
I opened the puzzle box this morning and pulled out the key that the king had been searching for almost his entire life. It hangs around my neck now, tucked beneath my T-shirt. When I bend down to examine the gate more closely, I can feel the cold metal against my skin, swinging on its chain and rubbing against me. Suddenly, I have to wonder.
“Could it be this easy?”
I pull the key from my shirt and hold it to the keyhole and give Thomas a look that says wish me luck.
Then I insert the key into the lock.
And turn.
And the gate swings.
The alcove beyond is shallow and damp. It was probably something of a guardhouse once upon a time, just room enough to keep a few provisions.
There’s a brazier where they probably kept a fire in winter, some hooks on the wall.
There’s a long, narrow window in the wall, and the sun is shining bright outside. Dust dances in a beam of light that slices through the dim room and then down a tiny, narrow staircase that doesn’t belong in this century or even the last.
“‘The sunlight shines where the truth is laid,’” I sing in disbelief. Thomas looks at me.
“Grace, is that … ?” Thomas starts. I can’t blame him for not being able to finish.
“Maybe.”
I inch toward the old stone stairs. The mortar is crumbling and the space is dreary and damp. This room belongs in a castle in the old, medieval sense of the word. The stone around me looks like the same kind that they used to build the wall a thousand years ago. This part of the palace is old. Ancient.
And the future king of Adria is beside me.
“What do we do now? We can’t just go down there. Can we?” Thomas asks—and he’s got a point. Now is not the time to rush. It’s not the time to panic. Old Grace would have rushed in where angels feared to tread, but the last person to come here may have been my dead mother and that makes even me cautious.
I tell myself that the bodies have been hidden for two hundred years. Twenty minutes more won’t matter.
So I turn to Thomas. “Now we go find Dominic.”
“Who?”
The question stuns me. For a second, I stand, gaping, and I have to remind myself that this boy doesn’t know me. He’s not going to call me crazy.
Not even when I say, “The Scarred Man.” The words are quiet, almost reverent. “I have to find the Scarred Man,” I say, and I know now, more than ever, that it’s true.
Because this time I know that he’s on my side.
“He loved my mother,” I explain. “He’ll know what to do. We can trust him.”
“Okay.” Thomas nods. “We’ll split up and find this Dominic and then we’ll meet back here.”
“Sounds good,” I tell him.
We start back down the south corridor then split up when we reach the main hall.
As soon as Thomas is out of sight—as soon as he’s safe—I reach for my flashlight and turn back. Maybe because I’m being stupid. Maybe because the last person who went down this proverbial rabbit hole ended up dead.
But, more than likely, it’s just because there are some paths you’re destined to walk alone.
It smells like the tunnels. Like centuries of dust and damp and mildew and … secrets.
The stone steps are steep and dusty but not dark. I walk in that beam of light, past torches that still hang from the walls as if waiting for the guards to change shifts—for an emergency to send them down these stairs. Maybe for supplies. Maybe reinforcements. I just know that with every step, I get further from my own time and closer to my mother. Closer to Amelia. Closer to the truth.
When at last I reach a cold stone floor, I stop and get my bearings. Cobwebs cling to my hair and to my clothes. I’m walking through a century’s worth of dust, and it feels at least ten degrees colder here than it did in the rest of the palace. The ceiling is made from stone and ancient wood, and I can’t hear the servants who are rushing from room to room upstairs, getting ready for the onslaught of dignitaries and world leaders who
will come to mourn the king. Somewhere, Thomas’s father is dealing with the fact that the job’s now his. And Ann …
Ann is probably thinking that she’s won.
And she’s probably right.
But I keep walking anyway.
My flashlight’s small, and its beam is thin as it sweeps across a room that’s full of crates and boxes. There’s no telling what it used to be, but now it’s filled with old pieces of furniture and marble busts.
There are heavy barrels along one wall, cases of what look like wine on the other. But this isn’t the palace’s wine cellar, I can tell. No one has been here in ages. It’s like a time capsule, like a display at a museum.
There’s a rack nearby with swords and belts, like the men who wore them have just changed shifts and will be back in a few hours, ready to start another day. There’s a heavy table in the center of the room, surrounded by chairs that are so solid and so heavy that I wonder if I could even move them.
A pair of old ceramic cups sit on the table, like their owners might come back at any time and finish their drinks.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Surely there wouldn’t be a sarcophagus or a marker. There was never going to be an X to mark the spot.
I feel silly for a second. Defeated. But then I see the beam of light that falls from the room’s lone window. It’s high on the wall, probably just above the ground, and it’s barely enough to fight the darkness that surrounds me, shining like a spotlight upon a stage.
Except … not a stage.
The table.
I walk to the huge wooden artifact in the center of the room. This isn’t one of the grand antiques that fill the palace, but I have no doubt it’s just as old. Heavy and rough, this was built for hard use by hard people.
Scuff marks and burn marks mar the surface. A thick layer of dust covers the whole thing, and I run my hands across the scrapes and scars of careless use and then, in the center … something else.
I lean over the massive relic and brush with all my might, blowing away the dirt and dust that have settled into the symbol I’ve seen all over this city. Never has it made my heart pound like this.