Pure, absolute darkness looked back at her, so stark that her eyes watered. No breath of air came through the doorway. But she realized there was a very, very faint murmuring sound, like the wind in very distant trees. Was it coming through the doorway? Or had it been here all along, and she’d only just noticed?
Next was a row of four little cupboard-sized doors, one atop the other from floor to ceiling. She opened them all: the same darkness. Faster and faster, she started opening doors. They all revealed absolute darkness.
The rushing noise was getting louder. It almost sounded like breathing. Rachelle’s body was wound tight and all her limbs jangled with the need to flee, but there was nowhere to run. The nightmare was her world now; there was no way out but fighting it.
The doors in the walls were all open now; she no longer stood in a room with four walls, but in a latticework cage of door frames, with darkness everywhere looking in. That was what it felt like: not an absence, but a ponderous shadow pressing in upon the walls of the room, ready to crush it at any moment.
She knelt and opened one of the doors set in the floor. More darkness.
“My dear little traitor.”
Her head snapped up. Erec stood in the doorway, so unexpected that for a moment he seemed more like one of the wood carvings come to life than the person she had known and trusted and hated.
“Whatever shall I do with you?” he asked, stepping inside.
She raised Durendal. “Stay back.”
The shock on his face sent a little curl of satisfaction through her stomach.
“How did you get that toy?” he asked.
“How did you get in here after me?”
He raised his hand where the crimson thread shone. “We are bound in every world, my lady.”
“You are desperate to believe that, aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. If it came to another fight, she would probably win, but she didn’t have the time to waste.
There were still at least ten doors left unopened in the floor, but she was starting to think that there wasn’t a right door. Something else was the answer.
“As you are desperate to deny it.” He lounged against the door frame, but she could tell he was readying himself to spring at her.
In the very center of the floor, between the corners of three other doors, there was painted a little red star. Nothing else in the house seemed to lead anywhere; maybe this did. As Erec lunged forward, she lifted Durendal and plunged it down into the star.
Cracks ran through all the wood. The whole house shuddered. And then it shattered into a thousand pieces.
Erec grabbed her arm as they plunged into darkness. They only fell a few moments, but the darkness was so heavy that it choked her. Then they both hit the ground and rolled, ending in a tangle of limbs, dust flying up around them.
Rachelle drew a breath full of dust and choked. It was not really dust: it was salt and ashes. As she gagged, Erec rolled on top of her and pinned her arms to the ground.
“Listen to me,” he said. “It’s not too late. We can still escape. Believe me, I know, for I once explored this far. We can go back, and give your burden to Vareilles as he deserves. I will make you my queen. We will rule together.”
His words were breathless, desperate. She realized that he was afraid. He was afraid of losing her, afraid of this place, and yet he was being brave. For her.
“I’m dead,” she told him.
“Your blood is still steaming,” he said. “The power of the Forest could still draw you back.”
She didn’t struggle against his grip. She looked up at him and said quietly, “Even if I could, do you really think I would go with you?”
“Where else? To your precious Armand?” A little of his old arrogance returned to his voice. “Do you think he would dare half as much for your love as I have?”
“No,” she said. “He never could. That’s why I love him.”
“You were desperate for me.”
“Desperate. Not happy.” For the first time in all the years she had known him, she truly pitied him. “You can never, ever make me happy. My heart will never rest in you.”
His mouth twisted into something that was half a smile, half a snarl. “And Vareilles, is he your rest?”
She remembered Armand saying, You are never content. She remembered the jagged lines of the Dayspring’s body in the painting, remembered whispering her sins into a listening silence.
“No,” she said. “I really don’t think he is.” Then she pulled her legs in and kicked viciously upward, throwing Erec off her body. She rolled to her feet, seized Durendal, and looked around.
They stood on a field of the white ash-and-salt powder that had covered the ground in the forest. It stretched out, flat and featureless, all the way to the horizon, beneath a dome of pure black sky in which floated fragments of the forest: a broken tree, a ragged circle of ground, a triangular shard of iron-gray sky.
“Don’t look back,” Erec rasped, sitting up. “That’s the rule in this place, don’t ever look over your shoulder. It sees you if you turn around.”
So of course she turned and looked.