through the manor’s smooth plaster halls, searching for clues about Aiyetoro. “This house felt like a prison,” I murmured, “but it’s still beautiful. I wonder why The Lady didn’t stay here.”
Woo In was quiet for a moment. “She did,” he said.
Kathleen shot him a warning look, and I shook my head.
“She would vanish for months,” I countered. “I would lie awake at night, wondering where she was. Wondering—” I swallowed. “Why she never missed me as much as I missed her.”
Kathleen nudged Woo In, scowling, but he pushed her away. “She deserves to know,” he told her, and turned back to me. “The Lady watched you to the point of obsession. She did leave a few times, to anoint more council members. But she always came straight back. She took notes on your first steps. Your first words. Your progress in all your lessons.”
I snorted. “A few times?” Woo In’s adoration of The Lady must have mottled his memories. I had been lucky to see my mother more than once a year.
Woo In winced. “I … did not always agree with The Lady’s methods regarding your upbringing,” he muttered. “But I’m sure she wanted the best for you. For all of us.”
My forehead wrinkled with doubt.
“Come,” he said. “There is something you should see.” We climbed a staircase carved into the plaster, and my heart pounded with recognition. Before us hung the thick, embroidered door flaps of my old study.
“I can’t go in there,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because—” I bit my lip. Because in that room, I hadn’t been one of Aritsar’s anointed. I hadn’t been the wuraola who commanded tutsu, or even the friend in whom Sanjeet and Kirah put their trust.
In that room, I had been an ehru. The Lady had been all I knew of love, and I would have killed for her. I had always been her puppet, even before she bound me with a wish.
“I tried to scrub them off, you know,” Woo In said then.
“What?”
“The maps,” he explained. “After I escaped the Underworld, I covered my skin with clay. Dressed in layers up to my chin. But I was always checking under my clothes. Fearing that the lines had grown. Hoping that they had faded. I checked so often, it became easier just to dress like this.” He gestured to his bare, pattern-covered chest. “I saw my past in the mirror every day. I grew accustomed to it. And then—” He drew aside the heavy door flaps. “I stopped being afraid.”
I hesitated, then passed into the dim room. The smell of musty scrolls washed over me. Dust motes twinkled in sharp slats of light, which fell from boarded‑up windows. My tutors had shut them so I would not hear the songs of other children. I could still feel the splinters in my hands, the arms gripping my waist, restraining me as I tried to rip the boards away.
“The Lady and the emperor have more in common than they think,” I murmured. “They’re both terrified by stories they can’t control.”
Kathleen sniffed. “The Lady only wants what’s best. For all of us.”
My old stepping stool lay on its side beneath a window, covered in spiderwebs. Just like when I was little, the long, high study table was piled with books and censored history papers. From its pedestal, the carving of The Lady still watched over the study, its onyx eyes gleaming. Woo In picked up the carving, blowing dust from the wooden crevices.
“Stop,” I stammered. “Be careful with that.”
He smiled and handed me the heavy bust. “Notice anything unusual?”
I squinted at the shapely face, so cold, and so like my own. I had studied beside the carving every day, and noticed nothing different about it now. Except—I held it to my ear and gasped quietly. “It hums,” I said. “Like the walls, and the orchard. I think it’s enchanted.”
Woo In took the carving back. “I’m guessing the servants didn’t let you touch it.”
“How did you know?”
He hesitated. “Because you would have taken its memories. You would have seen.” He beckoned, and I followed him to a narrow corridor I remembered as the entrance to the servants’ wing.
That place is very haunted, the servants had told me. Ghosts live there. Bad spirits, who take little girls away.
What if I want to go away? I had retorted.
Spirits who eat little girls, the servants had amended quickly. And first they take them far away, where The Lady can never find them. It is a very bad part of the house.