Page 69 of Fortress of Ambrose
My knees are weak, so I sit on the bed, my mother’s bed when she was a girl. Yellow paint is peeling from one of its four posts. There are little ponies painted on the headboard. One of the posts unscrews when I touch it, two sleeps from broken. I smile, working the post back and forth.
The pillows are a soft satin, and I wonder if I ever slept here with her. For a moment I consider running down the hall and trying each key in every door. Maybe I have a room I never knew about, too. But I tuck my knees into my chest where my mother once sat.
Eventually, I pull open each drawer on a small bedside table and find a stack of old photographs. In one picture, my mother is no more than seven or eight years old, in a frilly dress with a lace bodice and satin-capped sleeves, jeweled gloves on her tiny hands. She wears an older-style bonnet hat, ornately decorated with bows, ribbons, and some flowers. In one photograph she appears to be a young teenager. She wears the house riband across her, a beautiful bonnet, and elbow-length gloves. The joy in her smile is what strikes me most. There are creases around her eyes as she hugs Grandmom tightly. It makes mine sting with tears.
I grab the box with the pink blanket and settle on the floor with it to see what else is inside. But when I grab its top to open it, my feet go numb beneath me. I should stop. If I stay here too long, how will I ever leave? How can I heal if I keep ripping open the scab of the same wound?
How can I heal if I don’t?
I open the box.
Inside are paper dolls with crookedly drawn smiles, a pearl necklace,and several folded sweaters. The next box of my mother’s things is easier to open. This one is full of colored drawings and what appears to be my mother’s old schoolwork. Something shines from the bottom of the box. A hair clip with a butterfly made of pearls, similar to the one my grandmother always wore.
I make more space on the floor for another box. This one is full of diaries and folded letters teenage Rhea wrote to herself.
Apparently she used to go by the nickname “Rae,” and she had a best friend who failed out at Second Rite. She never saw her again. My motherdidinduct when she was seventeen, a year later than Grandmom wanted her to because she was late to emerge. There is a sketch of a diadem on the page with a date, and my heart skips a beat. The drawing is painted gold like Grandmom’s, with clear-colored stones.
I drag a blanket to cover my legs and finish one diary before picking up a tattered covered book with a sticker on the front. I don’t know what time it is. And I don’t care. Her loopy handwriting is scrawled across the pages in every color ink, decorated with hearts and doodles. She talks a lot about débutante training as something in her past on these pages, so this diary must be from when she was close to my age. It’s unclear whether she passed or failed Third Rite, but she gave me her dagger, which means she can’t have passed. She took up House duties, working as Grandmom’s assistant, I read in her diary. She even mentions Dexler a few times, who apparently competed with Maezre Cuthers to be Grandmom’s right arm.
Cuthers walks around like she has a stick up her butt. But little does she know, my mother would much prefer it to be her foot.
I snort at a mother I never knew and never can know. I scrounge through more boxes until I find another diary covered in sticker hearts. A bunch of folded letters spill out. These are from someone special. A boy. He always signed his letters:Yours, Teddy. She snuck out to meet Teddy many times. Grandmom caught her once and locked her in her room for a week. But Teddy visited her even then, posing as a House of Marionnestudent. She ran away with him at some point after her Second Rite exam, but they were found and brought back by Draguns within days.
Teddy…
She’d never mentioned anyone by that name. Not even a friend. Any questions I ever asked about my father went unanswered, so I stopped asking.
He drew boxy little hearts by his name on each of the letters. I stuff them back into the book and return it to the box. That’s when I notice a hatbox wrapped in a mauve velvet ribbon tucked behind the door where I came in. Its top has slipped off. This box shines with a newness that’s eerily out of place. Inside is not one of my mother’s bonnets. But instead a bouquet of dried black roses, tied with more ribbon. Attached to the flowers is a card.
For Rhea.
Upon my death.
Yours,
Mommy
But it’s the writing of the card that sends a shiver up my arms.
My life’s greatest work.
12 Sparrows Circle
Twenty-Eight
Jordan
Quell is too hard on herself. I wait on the stairs for her until the world sways. She doesn’t come down. By noon, I drag myself to my bed and sleep. Finally.
When I wake, a day has passed. My bruise is almost completely faded. Smooth skin covering my ribs. There’s no pain. Quell hasn’t come by. There is no note. I’m not sure what other problems having the Sphere’s magic inside me could cause. And I’mnotwilling to “feed the toushana,” whatever that means, as Zecky suggested. I need this magicoutof me.
I turn his card in my pocket, pondering how trustworthy Zecky could be. He’s really smart. He knew stuff about toushana even I haven’t heard.Willam would know.I look for him but find Yani.
“There you are,” she says. “You’re a ghost around here.”
“I’m looking for Willam.” I try to walk past her. She gets in my way. “What do you need?” I ask.
“I just wanted to know what’s wrong. I heard you have some kind of wound. Is it from the Sphere’s magic?”
