He spoke slowly, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was struggling against the seal on his lips. “I wish . . . we could have met . . . somewhere else.”
The air stilled in my lungs. If that was not a confession of love, it was near enough.
“I do too,” I said.
If I asked, he would probably kiss me again. For one moment I imagined staying. I could crawl into his arms and kiss him until I forgot everything, the dead girls and my monstrous husband, the doom upon my country and my duty to fix it.
Then I thought, I do not have time for such things.
I stood. “I need to go. I—I still have to find the other hearts.”
Shade caught my hand, slid his fingers through mine. The touch felt like lightning up my arm.
“He’s right about one thing,” he said. “This house has many dangers. I cannot save you from most of them.”
I clenched my hand until I felt the bones of his fingers.
Then I let go and forced a smile. “I wasn’t born to be saved.”
11
At night, the hallways seemed longer and stranger, subtly out of proportion. It was seldom pitch-dark, for light glimmered from unexpected corners; but it was hard to tell exactly where the light came from, and I had to force back the suspicion that the shadows were falling toward the light, hungry for warmth and being.
Demons are made of shadow.
But the shadows had never attacked me before, no matter how late into the night I wandered the house. Ignifex must have ordered them to leave me alone. I had to believe that, or I would go mad with terror. I did believe it, mostly, but the nagging fear still itched down my spine.
I went on anyway. Soon I turned into a hallway decorated with elaborate gold molding and murals—I thought they showed the gods, but in the shadows, I couldn’t see more than a tangle of limbs. At the very end of the passage was a simple wooden door. Did my footsteps echo a little louder as I walked toward it? My shoulders prickled; when I reached the door, I paused—but heard nothing. No demon leapt out of the shadows to kill me, no doom fell down upon me. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the steel key out from my bodice. It slid easily into the lock. I turned the handle.
I pulled open the door and saw shadow.
All my life, I had heard the warning, Don’t look at the shadows too long, or a demon might look back. It made me afraid of closed-up, darkened rooms, of dimly lit mirrors, of the quietly whispering woods at night. In that moment, I realized that I had never seen shadow. I had seen objects—rooms, mirrors, the whole countryside—in the absence of light. But through this door lay nothing at all except for perfect, primal shadow that needed no object to make itself manifest. It had its own nature, its own presence, palpable and seething and alive. My eyes stung and watered as I stared at it, but I could not look away.
Then the shadow looked at me.
There was no visible change, but I staggered under the weight of perception and the knowledge I was not alone. Gasping, I grabbed the door and started to push it shut. I leaned my weight against it, but the door moved slowly, as if I were pushing it through honey. When I glanced at the slowly closing gap, I saw nothing coming through the doorway; but when I looked back at my hands, I saw from the corner of my eye a webbed mass of shadow gripping the doorframe with its tendrils.
All this had happened in complete silence. I was too terrified to scream. But when the door was nearly closed, I heard a chorus of children’s voices. It sang the tune of my favorite lullaby, but the words were wrong:
We will sing you nine, oh!
What are your nine, oh?
Nine for the nine bright shiners,
The night will snuff them out, oh.
The sound crawled over my body like a thousand cold little feet. I had been taught charms against darkness, invocations of Apollo and Hermes. But the voices nibbled the knowledge out of my mind, and I sobbed wordlessly as I struggled to push the door shut.
Eight for eight dead maidens
Dead in all the darkness, oh.
The door was almost shut now, but the pressure of the shadow pulsed against me from the other side. One tendril touched my cheek, burning cold. I choked, the air stopping in my lungs.
Six for your six senses,
Never more will feel, oh.
With a final burst of desperation, I pushed the door shut. Gasping and shuddering, I staggered back against the wall. The shadow was gone, but I still shivered, and my eyes stung with tears. When I wiped them, the tears burned icy cold on my skin. I looked at my hand.
Liquid shadow dripped across my palm.
I remembered the people dragged before my father, reduced to broken husks. I thought, This is what it was like for them.
Then I finally screamed.
They sang from all around me, a million bodiless children whisper-chanting in my ears:
Five for the symbols at your door,
Telling us your name, oh.
Four for the corners of your world,
We are always nibbling, oh.