The way he phrased that last sentence did not sit well with me. I didn’t want to wish for anything ever again. Maybe I was better off not knowing anything.
But it’s probably helpful to know what to be scared of as opposed to waiting and finding out when it bites you in the rump. I ran to catch up, picking up my skirts and matching my two-legged stride to his four-legged one.
“He looks pixed at you. I am so not missing this.” Rexi hastily followed, with, if I wasn’t mistaken, a skip in her step.
“Where are we going?” I said breathlessly.
“To meet Blanc.”
“What’s a blanc?”
“Not what. Who.”
“Okay. Who is Blanc?”
Kato stopped so suddenly that I ran into him. “That is Blanc,” he said, lowering his head and using his horns to gesture in front of us.
In the far corner was a giant furnace of some sort—a big metal box with a wall of flame in front and two chimeras taking turns spitting molten lava into the sides.
Within the box stood the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She had long white hair—not white blond, pure-snow white. She wore a simple shift that was, you guessed it, white. Everything about her was empty, lacking in color or personality. Except her eyes. They were silver, and they pleaded.
I ran a few feet toward her before the heat from the flames pushed me back.
“Holy Mother of Grimm. You’re cooking virgins or something else cultish,” Rexi said from behind me.
Kato snorted. “Do you see her screaming in agony? No. Up until a few days ago, she’d been in a magical slumber for the last two centuries.” He walked over and sat in front of the wall of fire. “We’re not cooking her. We are guarding her.”
I stared at the woman, transfixed. She seemed frozen—all but her entreating stare. “Guarding her from what?”
“Guarding the world from her.”
I whipped around. The tumblers in my brain started to click. “She’s the White One.” I gestured over to the chimeras shoveling the coal. “And your whole ‘kingdom’”—I made little quotation marks around the word—“is all about keeping her imprisoned.”
Rexi ventured closer to the furnace prison and stilled, seeming to get into a staring contest with the woman. “So what did she do? Try to bake children into gingerbread cookies? Send a huntsman to kill off her much better-looking stepdaughter?” Rexi tilted her head to the right and to the left, like she was studying one of the animals at the palace menagerie.
She had asked, not so eloquently, exactly what I had been thinking. What could Blanc have done to deserve this? I studied the woman, trying to spot the flaw, the sign of her crimes.
“Let me tell you two a story.” Kato sat on his haunches, extending his paw over to a desk along the wall. He still used very humanlike gestures that I hadn’t seen the other chimeras use. “It even has pictures,” he said snidely in Rexi’s direction.
Rexi was busy flipping Kato off, so I got to the desk with its single chair and took a seat first. The desk had a few papers, but it was mostly bare, except for a thick tome. The cover was bound in some kind of hide and had curly letters written in platinum across the front: Blanc Pages.
I opened the book to a random spot. There were no words, just a large picture. It was of a younger Blanc, and she was happy and smiling.
“What is that?” Rexi brushed against my back, startling me.
“It’s a book,” Kato said wryly.
“Well, I can see that, gnome nuts, but why are the pictures moving?”
Rexi was right; it was like watching a magic mirror or a play transformed onto the page. I’d only seen one other like it before, an ebook—the e short for enchanted. They were extremely rare, and some said they could only be made by the Storymakers themselves.
Kato might have answered Rexi. I don’t know. I was too transfixed on what I saw on the page. The girl sat on the edge of a lake next to a boy. The water danced and spun through the air, performing acrobatics.
Kato cleared his throat. “Once upon a time, there was a family of powerful, evil elemental mages. Their eldest daughter was a water sorceress with no interest in villainy. She vowed to be good, left her parents and sister, and then fell in love with a handsome prince—but his parents didn’t approve.” The images changed along with Kato’s words. The happy scene of the two lovebirds shifted into one that looked like Blanc arguing with a man and a woman. I could see her mouth moving but couldn’t hear the words.
I glanced over my shoulder at Kato. “Why isn’t there sound?”
He shrugged his wings. “Probably the same reason everything else magic is a little glitchy.”
Oh yeah, me. I turned back and watched the book some more.