“I already won,” I remind him.
He smiles. “We will speak again.”
As he walks off I can’t help thinking that maybe I was better off when he was ignoring me.
I meet the Bomb in High King Eldred’s old rooms. This time I am resolved to go over every inch of the chambers before Cardan is moved into them—and I am determined he should stay here, in the most secure part of the palace, whatever his preferences might be.
When I arrive, the Bomb is lighting the last of the fat candles above a fireplace, the runnels of wax so established that they make a kind of sculpture. It is strange to be in here now, without Nicasia to buttonhole or anything else to distract me from looking around. The walls shimmer with mica, and the ceiling is all branches and green vines. In the antechamber, the shell of an enormous snail glows, a lamp the size of a small table.
The Bomb gives me a quick grin. Her white hair is pulled back into braids knotted with a few shimmering silver beads.
Someone you trust has already betrayed you.
I try to put Nicasia’s words out of my head. After all, that could mean anything. It’s typical faerie bullshit, ominous but applicable so broadly that it could be the clue to a trap about to be sprung on me or a reference to something that happened when we were all taking lessons together. Maybe she is warning me that a spy is in my confidence or maybe she’s alluding to Taryn’s having it off with Locke.
And yet I cannot stop thinking about it.
“So the assassin got away through here?” the Bomb says. “The Ghost says you chased after them.”
I shake my head. “There was no assassin. It was a romantic misunderstanding.”
Her eyebrows go up.
“The High King is very bad at romance,” I say.
“I guess so,” she says. “So you want to toss the sitting room, and I’ll take the bedroom?”
“Sure,” I agree, heading toward it.
The secret passageway is beside a fireplace carved like the grinning mouth of a goblin. The bookshelf is still shifted to one side, revealing spiraling steps up into the walls. I close it.
“You really think you can get Cardan to move in here?” the Bomb calls from the other room. “It’s such a waste to have all this glorious space go unused.”
I lean down to start pulling books off the shelves, opening them and shaking them a bit to see if there’s anything inside.
A few yellowing and disintegrating pieces of paper fall out, along with a feather and a carved-bone letter opener. Someone hollowed one of the books out, but nothing rests inside the compartment. Still another tome has been eaten away by insects. I throw that one out.
“The last room Cardan occupied caught fire,” I call back to the Bomb. “Let me rephrase. It caught fire because he lit it on fire.”