She took a deep breath.
“The final test is tomorrow.” His words were like the explosion of a cannon in the stillness of the room, rocketing through the languid silence and bringing with it all the nervous energy both had tried desperately to pretend away.
“I know. I can’t sleep.”
“Neither can I. But I think…” He sighed deeply, regretfully let her gown go, and shoved up to his feet. “We should at least try.”
She frowned, picked at an invisible thread in her dress, and with shoulders drooping, stood. “I want to go to the bowl.”
“Last time you saw a wolf, Shayera, which might I add, did not comfort you in the slightest. Why would you want to go back there tonight of all nights?”
She nibbled her lip and he sensed her strain. “Because after the test I am done, and this might be my final chance to decipher its meaning.”
“Do you really want to leave?” he asked with his heart on his sleeve.
“No,” she finally said after what felt like a horribly long pause. “But I fear what will happen if I stay.”
She had every right to fear that. Danika’s warning still rang in his ears. Not fear of the godmother, Rumpel was too powerful to be bothered by something so inconsequential, but rather fear of what would happen tomorrow.
The decision he knew in his heart he should make versus the one his intellect demanded.
Crossing his hands behind his back, he stood to the side. “Goodnight, Carrot.”
Brushing a stray curl out of her face, she smiled sweetly at him. “Goodnight, my dark prince.”
It was the first time she’d ever called him such and as he watched her walk away, he whispered, “Forgive me, Euralis, for I am too weak.”
Shayera settled herself beside the bowl, tucking her gown beneath her legs. She was a strange combination of exhausted and alert. Her body ached for rest, but her brain refused to allow it. She needed any sort of distraction, not only from the thought of the final game tomorrow and whatever it might entail, but also the fact that she and Rumpel had somehow managed to find and build a true friendship.
Dipping her finger into the cool water, she waited for the image to appear. The key to unlocking her happiness supposedly rested within its vision. A wolf made no sense, and if she was to go home, she wanted at least to know what it meant. Was she to find love with a shape-shifter? Was that it?
But even as she thought it, she rejected the notion. The thought of entangling her heart with someone she did not know when it was already obsessed with another felt wrong.
Sighing, she looked down and immediately an image formed. Just like last time, it was black that quickly coalesced into a knot of color, gray and red and dark blues.
But that image quickly shifted like fog over a moor, reforming and reshaping, and it was no longer a wolf staring back at her but a little boy with hair of ebony, snow-white skin, and lips as red as blood. He sat within a cage, holding its bars and staring out into darkness. Eyes the shade of heated magma glowed into the night and a lump formed in the back of her throat.
Shayera reached for him, forgetting this was only a mirage. The moment her finger touched the water, he was gone.
“No, little boy, who are you?” She gripped the edge of the bowl, silently pleading for his image to return. She’d never seen the boy before in her life, but it was the defeated, sorrowful look about him that tore at her soul.
Another image was forming. Stairs, a spiraling staircase that led up from the boy’s dungeon and out into a larder she’d seen before.
“Can this be?” She licked her lips as her pulse sped in the vein at her throat. Was Rumpel holding a captive in his dungeon? A demone boy?
And if so, why?
The images were gone now, the water was just water, but it didn’t matter because she’d seen all she needed to see.
Who was the boy? If he really did exist, if this wasn’t just a magic mirror that showed nothing, then who was he? Why was he kept so secluded, so apart from the rest of this world?
Was he a danger to himself, to others? To Rumpel?
Did the boy have anything to do with the games?
The moment she thought it, she knew it had to be. Because the child might be caged, but he was clean. Fed. Well cared for, all signs that he mattered, he was of some value to Rumpelstiltskin, but how?
Why?
She glanced back down at the bowl; there would be no more help from that direction. She couldn’t very well go exploring the castle. Rumpel was too powerful, and though she couldn’t see them, there were servants everywhere. If there really was a boy hidden deep within the bowels of this place, she’d never get close enough on her own.
But maybe, just maybe, she could find out the truth someplace else.