from the closet, the cat tilted his head, as if he needed to position his ears to listen.
“Carver?”
“No. It’s a big damn closet,” he added.
“Bigger than it should be?”
Carver didn’t reply. Instead he headed for the second closet.
“What is he looking for?” Shadow asked.
“A way into these rooms. For the servants,” she added.
“In the closet?”
Jewel did not particularly relish attempting an explanation of the back halls to Shadow. They made sense to her because they had existed for her entire life in the manse; they made sense because they existed in other grand mansions across the Isle—and in the larger homes of moneyed merchants on the mainland. She compromised. “They’re usually tucked away out of obvious sight.”
“Why?”
She exhaled heavily. “Ask Ellerson.” To avoid more questions, Jewel headed toward the closet into which Carver had disappeared.
“Where is Ellerson?”
Jewel frowned and turned, slowly, to look at the whole of the room. “Avandar, where is Ellerson?”
When he failed to reply, she wheeled. She still held Carver’s magestone as if it were her own; its light reddened her fingers and her knuckles, no more, her hands were so tight. “Avandar.”
He didn’t answer, but looked toward the closet into which Carver had just walked.
Gods, gods, gods. She ran across the room, comportment and title and Kings and Shadow forgotten. Only the last one followed her. Unclenching her right hand, she yanked the closet door open. The sight of dresses, in neat rows, did not calm her; something was wrong with the way they caught light, although she couldn’t immediately say what.
What she could say, no what she couldn’t bring herself to say, was that Carver was nowhere in sight. She had seen him open the closet, had seen him enter it. When had the door shut behind him? Why hadn’t she noticed?
Shadow started to growl, and the sound of his voice dropped the temperature in the room so severely her fingers felt winter. Avandar said, “A moment, Jewel.”
But there were no moments left. She heard armor, movement, understood that the Chosen were arrayed behind her, and that her presence in the small frame of the door blocked their way.
Jewel.
She didn’t argue. She moved. But she moved into the closet, and not away. She understood what The Terafin needed—but in this moment, hand clutching magestone, she wasn’t The Terafin; she was Jewel Markess, and Carver had stepped into an unknown that should have been safe. And wasn’t. It wasn’t.
Shadow shouldered her to one side. Rows of colorful cloth brushed against her face, her hands, her throat, as she stumbled. He was still growling, and what she wouldn’t surrender to the Chosen, he’d taken: point.
“Stupid, stupid, girl,” he said, over his shoulder. The arch of his wings was higher, but the wings themselves were constrained by the width of the closet. She heard two things at her back. The first, the slow creak of a door closing. The second, the sharp crack of splintering wood. The latter was followed by smoke, dust, and the flying bits of wood that generally followed that sound.
This is not a game, Jewel.
Where the door had been, Avandar stood. Come back, now. There is something at play here that is beyond you.
Her right arm began to throb; she felt the brand on the skin of her inner wrist, and knew, if she ignored it, it would bleed. She ignored it, willing to divert some of the wild and endless fear she felt to instant, mutinous rage. Rage, she could handle. She inhaled and exhaled evenly as she continued to follow Shadow. She did not descend into pointless argument; she didn’t speak to Avandar at all. But it was better. Rage was always better than fear. Anything was.
Carver.
Anything, anything, anything. The closet gave way—as it must—to hall, the wooden floor becoming cold stone so suddenly, it felt as if it were the edge of a precipice. As it did, the hall widened, lengthened; the ceilings disappeared into darkness above her head. She felt exposed in so many ways the darkness didn’t frighten her. She forced her right fingers to loose their grip on the magestone, and stumbled over the syllables that would bring it, instantly, to the harshest of light it could shed.
Shadow was silent. Light sharpened the lines of his flight-feathers as his wings spread; light gentled the shape of his shoulders, the musculature of his legs, his back. Ahead of his rising wings, the hall continued into darkness; the magestone she held couldn’t penetrate it at this distance.