Page 41 of When Sorrows Come

The spell collapsed with a sudden rush of limestone and creeping thistle, perfuming the air so heavily that Quentin gasped, finally catching the familiar scent of his childhood—what? Babysitter? Guardian? What would a seneschal have been to the Crown Prince of a High Kingdom?

I opened my eyes. The smooth stretch of wall was gone, broken by the outline of a humble door, the kind of door that led to nothing special, closets or storerooms and the like.

“Cover your eyes,” I said. He gave me a startled look. “If she has no illusions and the sight of her kills me, I’ll get better.” Probably. “You won’t. So cover your eyes, or my nerves won’t be able to handle opening this door.”

He put his hands over his eyes. I reached for the doorknob, pausing at the last moment to check it for pressure plates like the one that had been on her quarters. There were none. “This is either a solution or massive stupidity,” I said, and tried the knob.

It was locked. Of course, it was locked. If you’re trying to get someone out of the way—or to hide a corpse—you don’t shove them into an unlocked room if you have any choice in the matter. That’s not hiding someone; that’s putting them on a shelf until someone needs a roll of toilet paper and opens the wrong door.

I sighed heavily. The problem I’d had earlier was looming again. I didn’t have my lockpicks with me, and I’d given Raj back his. I glanced at Quentin. “I don’t suppose you have your lockpicking kit with you, do you?”

“My knight would send me to my room without dessert for a week if I didn’t carry them with me everywhere I go,” he said, and produced the kit from inside his tunic, offering it to me with a cheeky grin that was no less recognizable for being on the wrong face. I took the kit and wrinkled my nose at him, then bent and began working on the lock.

It was a fairly old-fashioned piece of hardware, good enough for locking someone in a room and not letting them out, but notremotely good enough to stop me. In under a minute, I was bundling the tools up again and passing them to Quentin, who tucked them back into his tunic. “Sounds like your knight is pretty good at her job,” I said lightly.

He kept smiling. “She has her moments,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and grasped the doorknob again. This time when I twisted, it turned easily, and the door swung inward to reveal what it had been hiding.

On the other side was a storeroom filled with racks of towels and pristine, sparkling dishes, like something out of the Bed Bath & Beyond attached to Medieval Times. Half the room was also filled with a wall of water.

It split the room almost flawlessly, reaching from the floor to the ceiling, glimmering and clear. On the other side of the water, towels and napkins floated on a gentle current, moving around the figure of the woman who hung suspended in the center of the flood.

I blinked. “That’s new,” I said. The water was acting as a sort of refraction device. I could tell the woman—whose eyes were closed, and who appeared to be sleeping—wasn’t wearing any illusions, but the sight of her didn’t hurt with the water in the way. She was a modern-day Medusa, wrapped in the loving embrace of her own rippling mirror. “Keep your eyes closed.”

“What’s going on? Did you find Nessa?”

“Pretty sure, yeah, and not sure,” I said, reaching out with my bloody hand to touch the surface of the water. That was either the best thing or the worst thing I could possibly have done, and I had no idea which it was going to be.

Eventually, I was going to have to learn to figure that out first, but since I’d been doing pretty well with my “be basically indestructible and refuse to stop moving forward” agenda so far, this didn’t seem like the biggest risk.

As soon as I touched the wall of water, it popped like a soap bubble, cascading down on us and driving me back until I hit the opposite wall. Quentin, who had been standing to the side of the doorway, was merely soaked to the skin. He made a protesting noise, but he didn’t uncover his eyes, and I appreciated his obedience more than I could say.

I coughed and spat, trying to get the water out of my nose and mouth even as I wiped my eyes. Nessa was sprawled facedown inthe middle of the storeroom, not having been washed remotely as far as she should have been. I picked myself up and took a step forward, my dress impeding my motion as it hadn’t before now that it was soaked through and clinging to my legs.

“Excuse me, Nessa?” I said. “Are you awake?”

She didn’t move. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. My voice was unfamiliar, and she’d been abducted; if she was awake, she had no reason to make this easy on me. If anything, she had good reason to make it as hard as possible.

“If you’re awake, please veil yourself,” I said. “My name is Sir October Daye, Knight of Lost Words. I have been invited from the Kingdom in the Mists to hold my wedding here, and you’re supposed to be the one overseeing the organization. Your quarters are full of boobytraps, including a bunch of pixie-sized elf-shot—that’s pretty awesome, considering that my groom is currently unconscious, and supposed to stay that way for a century—and a Doppelganger has been pretending to be you.” I didn’t tell her about either of the dead men. She could handle the knowledge and the guilt, if it came with any, once she was herself again.

She tensed but still didn’t lift her face from the floor. I realized, perhaps belatedly, what she was waiting to hear.

“The High King was not harmed; the crown remains where it was placed,” I said. “The High Queen sits her throne, sick with worry for her absent seneschal. I have yet to see the chatelaine, but her magic was fresh in the hall outside your rooms, and I believe her to be unharmed.”

Slowly, Nessa moved, sliding her hands under herself and using them to push her torso away from the floor, slowly moving into a seated position. She kept her head bowed, hair hanging to conceal her face.

“Thethingwas in my quarters when I returned from my duties in the kitchen,” she said, voice low and dull. “I had to convince the staff to allow your friend to bake a cake in their ovens, to cast stasis spells in the presence of their supplies. It was no easy task, but it needed to be done before the rest could be put in order. And when I went to wash the flour from my hands and wipe the grease from my brow, there was a monster in the place where I should have been safest.” She was beginning to shake. “I lowered my illusions and showed the thing my face with nothing to protect it, and it only laughed. It looked on me andlaughed.”

I suppose if your best weapon had always been your face, having someone shrug it off without noticing would be disconcerting. I certainly don’t like it when people shrug off being stabbed, even though I do it all the time. “Doppelgangers don’t see the world the way the rest of us do,” I said. “They look at people as pieces to be stolen, and it wanted to steal you.”

“I know that,” she snapped. “It held iron to my throat and bade me make myself disappear, and then it dragged me through the halls to this room, where it sealed me inside.”

That didn’t answer how she’d been compelled to cast a nigh-unbreakable illusion over the door. Thankfully, Quentin was as curious as I was.

“How did it make you hide the door?” he asked.

Nessa was still for a long moment before she said, anguished, “It told me it had only come to kill the High King, and if I concealed the door, it would spare the High Queen. I’m sure it was treason to do as I was bid. I know my life is forfeit, but the children have been gone so long, and I miss my babies so much, and I was not willing to let a monster make orphans of them if I had the chance to stop it.Ní dhéanfainn dílleachtaí de mo mhuintir.”

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