Page 68 of To Steal the Sun

Charlotte dropped her hands, using them to brace herself against the wall instead as she took in the room. Celandine was dashing between the plinths, Henry in pursuit. But somehow she always slipped from his fingers. Should Charlotte help? If she tried to circle from the other direction, they might be able to trap her and force the scepter from her hand.

Or maybe Celandine would bring the ceiling down on their head before they could. The palace was already creaking alarmingly, and they were three stories up. If the wing collapsed, none of them would survive.

Her eyes swept over the room until a beam of lamplight coming through the open portrait caught on a round, smooth golden surface. The one familiar object in the room of plinths. The golden apple.

With a jolt, Charlotte remembered the moment Gwen had first placed it in her hand and her explanation of its purpose. Gwen had arranged for it to be placed here with intention. If there was something in this room that could stop Celandine, the apple would tell Charlotte what it was.

She pushed off from the wall and ran toward the apple, swerving to avoid Celandine’s path on the way. Thankfully, the deposed queen swerved to avoid her as well, unaware of Charlotte’s intentions.

She staggered the final steps to the plinth, the floor unsteady beneath her. Her fingers fell on the apple, and even before she had fully picked it up, her mind warmed with the awareness of multiple familiar objects all around her. It was nothing like her previous experience with the apple, not only because of the affectionate familiarity she felt toward the objects but because of their number. They overwhelmed her mind.

She gasped, whirling to look at all the objects with her eyes, trying to match them with the sense of their presence in her mind. Her eyes landed on a small golden whip, sitting alone on a plinth near the door. As she focused on it, her awareness of the other objects in the room muted, receding slightly to bring this one to the front of her mind.

It was the pair to the golden halter in her pocket, the tool Celandine had used to fight Gwen’s travel on the wind—a tool that had leveled a village and nearly sunk a fleet. It was no good to her inside the room when the halter wasn’t in use, but it called to her because it was familiar.

She tore her eyes away, forcing her mind to the next object along. But there were too many objects in the room, and the rumbling was growing even louder. She could barely hear anything above its sound now. If she examined the objects one by one, she might not find anything of use in time.

Instead, she squeezed her eyes closed and filled her mind with the apple’s awareness. Even with her eyes closed the objects floated in her mind, no longer attached to their plinths. She let her mind drift over them, releasing her conscious thoughts to let the instinctive layer of her mind take control.

There! Something flashed past her awareness, and she seized on it, focusing in. The object was a jewel, cut to fine points and polished to a high sheen. Its outside was cold and hard and clear, but inside it roiled and pulsed with an intensity that took Charlotte’s breath away. Anger, sadness, love, joy, hatred, envy, excitement, anxiety, disgust, all mixed together and contained beneath the smooth surface of the jewel.

And Charlotte knew—thanks to the apple—the meaning behind what she sensed. This object removed emotions, sucking them from anyone who touched it and storing them inside the jewel instead.

Charlotte had noticed the change in Celandine after she entered the room and wondered if the scepter was responsible. But Celandine must have touched the jewel on her way past. How often had she come into the room to hold the jewel? From the store of emotions inside it, she must have come countless times.

Celandine didn’t believe in emotions—she had made that clear. She saw them as weaknesses, so it made sense she wanted to purge them from her system. But that meant she had never learned to deal with them, to feel them. She had never learned how to let them wash over her and recede. If Charlotte could break the jewel, would the emotions return to their original owner?

Her eyes snapped open, and she scanned the room, looking for a jewel that matched the one in her mind. Her gaze caught on a red stone thanks to the lamplight that made it gleam.

She ran toward it, ducking past Celandine as she went. Celandine was in the middle of lunging away from Henry, and her body slammed into Charlotte’s arm, knocking the apple from her grip. It flung halfway across the room, rolling out of sight. But it didn’t matter now. Charlotte already knew what tool to use.

She reached the plinth and snatched up the jewel. Instantly her body calmed and her mind felt clearer and easier, the terror and anxiety she had been feeling sucked away. She could see why the object had been appealing to the former queen. But it had become a crutch.

Lifting it over her head, Charlotte threw the jewel with all her might at the closest wall. It sailed through the air, winking as it arced high. It caught the attention of the others, and they both paused, turning to look. Celandine let out a wordless cry of protest, but it was too late.

The jewel hit the stone wall and smashed, shards flying in all directions. A wave of fear and anxiety hit Charlotte so strongly she staggered backward as her fear returned to its original owner. Gasping, she barely kept her balance, spinning to find Celandine.

If the returned emotions had hit Charlotte so hard, what would they have done to Celandine, who had stored decades’ worth of every emotion in there?

Celandine’s head was thrown back, her face twisted with heightened emotion, her eyes wide and staring. She fell backward, colliding with a plinth and taking that down too, its object toppling off and bouncing away in one direction while the scepter flew from Celandine’s hand in the other.

Celandine curled into a ball, sobbing. Her arms wrapped so tightly around her knees it must have hurt, her sobs turning into a keening that rose higher and higher.

It was hard to turn away from the horrible effect of twenty years’ unchecked emotion, but the floor was still shuddering, the rumble in the air still vibrating in Charlotte’s bones. The scepter had flown in her direction, so she dropped to her hands and knees, searching the floor for it.

“There!” The tip showed from between two chests, fallen gold coins lying atop and around it, obscuring its presence.

She stretched out, wrapping her fingers around it and pulling it back toward her. The second she touched it, her mind expanded, taking in not just the room or the palace but the mountain range in every direction and the sky above her. Holding the scepter, she could shape her environment however she wanted. The thrill of power ran through her, but following behind was the fear. It was too much. No one person should be capable of re-forming the land itself.

Charlotte nearly flung the scepter away from her, only just stopping herself. Her fingers remained wrapped around it, but she looked up, pleading wordlessly for someone to help her.

A figure holding a lantern appeared in the open portrait, another dark shape behind her. Charlotte’s mouth fell open at the magnificent sight of Gwen in an enormous wedding dress, the filmy layers falling around her and the train disappearing behind, her hair piled high and the tiara on her head winking in the light.

Gwen paused for one second as she took in the room—Celandine balled up and keening with Henry hovering beside her, and Charlotte sprawled across the floor on the far side of the room, a scepter gripped in her outstretched hand and terror on her face. She met Charlotte’s eyes, seeming to read the plea for help there, and handed her lantern to Easton behind her.

But she didn’t run toward Charlotte. Instead, she gathered her skirts and darted in a different direction, stooping to retrieve something fallen on the ground.

For a stupefied minute, Charlotte’s consciousness hovered between the mountains outside—whose peaks were beginning to crumble, enormous boulders rolling down their sides—and her friend. Was Gwen retrieving the object Celandine had just knocked loose? Charlotte hadn’t even seen what it was, but surely it wasn’t important in the middle of such danger.

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