Sometimes we passed huge rooms: a banquet hall with a vaulted, gilt ceiling, curlicues of gold spinning down the walls in the shape of vines and thorns; a narrow stone table long enough to seat dozens of people; high-backed wooden chairs carved in more elaborate, twisted patterns. Rooms that looked like salons, with sofas covered in black velvet and more gilt, or bedrooms furnished with looming black wardrobes and shadowy figures that startled me into frightened silence before I realized they were just our own reflections peering back at us out of tall, ornate mirrors. Every room was deserted.
And every room was full of mirrors—and heads. Patterned into the carpet, carved into the chairs and bedposts, paintings of heads on the walls, velvet curtains embroidered with heads.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Madison said under her breath as we crept slowly forward.
“Tell me about it,” I muttered. Nox held up his hand to hush us. Madison rolled her eyes at him, but he shook his head.
“I can hear something,” he hissed.
In the ensuing silence I strained to catch whatever it was he was talking about, and then I heard it, too: a faint scratching, as if a mouse was scrabbling through the walls a hundred yards away. It was coming from up ahead, and I was pretty sure that whatever it was it wasn’t a mouse.
Nox jerked his head forward, one eyebrow cocked, and I shrugged. What were we going to do—turn around, try to escape the courtyard, walk back to the Deadly Desert, and hope the Road of Yellow Brick showed up again? As my mom used to say once upon a time, before the pills anyway, there was no way out but through.
My mom—but no. I pushed that thought down as soon as it reared up. I couldn’t think about her right now
“Let’s do this,” I said, and strode forward toward the source of the noise.
The narrow hallway opened up suddenly into a room so enormous I almost tripped in surprise. A vaulted, cathedral-like ceiling soared upward. Huge, black marble columns formed two orderly lines leading to an immense throne at the far end of the room. The floor was polished to a blinding glow but that wasn’t the part that made all of us shield our eyes against the sudden, dazzling light: every surface in the room was covered in mirrors. Every wall, every shelf, every corner, every nook and cranny.
As my eyes slowly adjusted to the brilliance, I realized that cunningly placed windows allowed sunlight in at angles that maximized the sparkle. It felt like we were standing inside a giant disco ball with a strobe light going. The effect was disorienting but strangely beautiful—a strange, alternate-world echo of the shifting, sparkling mists at Rainbow Falls. But it was sinister, too: the fragmented mirrors made it look as though our heads were refracted hundreds of times, looking out in disembodied confusion from every angle no matter which way we turned.
The scratching sound was coming from the far end of the room, where a black-clad figure—the only other person in the enormous space—was bent over a table in front of the giant throne. Slowly, cautiously, we walked closer. The figure was a woman. She was wearing a loose, silky, black kimono-type outfit, embroidered with faces in delicate gold thread. Long, glossy black hair spilled down her back.
But her face was hidden behind an eerie, expressionless silver mask.
She had a ledger of some kind in front of her; the scratching was the sound of an old-fashioned quill pen moving across the rough paper as she filled out line after line of numbers, pausing occasionally to dip the nib in a ruby jar of pitch-black ink. She didn’t stop writing as we approached her, and she didn’t look up, even when the three of us had crossed the entire room and stood in front of her.
I stepped forward. “Hi, I’m Amy Gumm, and this—”
“I know who you are,” the woman said shortly, still not looking up. “Wait until I’m done.”
Somehow, the mask actually moved with her mouth. As if it was a part of her. As if it was her real face.
The three of us exchanged glances. Who was this chick? Langwidere’s inexplicably disguised secretary? Was her mission to slay us with rudeness?
I looked down at my glittering boots, wiggling my toes. Madison fidgeted. Only Nox stood straight and still, looking calmly ahead at nothing as if all of this was perfectly ordinary. He’d grown up in Oz; maybe for him, it was.
Finally the woman reached the end of a column and set down her pen. Her hands were beautifully shaped with long, pale, slender fingers. She pushed back her heavy black hair before looking up at us. Behind the mask, I caught a flash of extraordinary green eyes, gold-flecked like a cat’s.
“Well, well, well,” she said. “Look what the Wheelers dragged in.” The mask’s silver mouth smiled sardonically.
“We’re citizens of Oz,” Nox began. “We have no quarrel with your country. The Road of Yellow Brick brought us to—”
“Still lying through your teeth, even after all these years?” the woman asked. “Of course you have a quarrel with this country, Nox.”
She said his name like it was a curse word. Nox started.
“How do you know who I am?” he asked cautiously.
“Oh, Nox,” she said, her voice like ice. “I know all about you. You might choose not to remember the past, but I don’t forget. Anything.”
I looked at Nox, but his face was a blank. I knew he was as confused as I was. He’d never been to Ev before; how could he have met this woman? Who on earth was she?
The silver mouth opened wide, and she laughed—a cold, cruel laugh that sent a shiver down my spine.
This was definitely not a secretary.
I took a step forward. “Are you Princess Langwidere?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral. “I’m Amy. Amy Gumm. I’m with Nox and um, my friend Madison, and we didn’t mean to disturb you at all. In fact, we could totally just, um, leave,” I added brightly.
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t going to win any awards for diplomatic speeches. But still, I didn’t see a reason for this creepy chick to keep laughing at me.
“You’re the most recent conquest, I take it?” she said, when she was done chuckling. “You know you’re not the last in a very long line. Nox is quite the pretty boy, isn’t he? Always an eye for the ladies. So troubled and remote. ‘Only you can save him,’” she said mockingly.
“Look,” Nox said, his teeth gritted. Whoever she was, her barbs had landed. “I don’t know who you are, but you should really think about—”
“Oh, Nox,” she said. “Has it been so long? Have you really forgotten me so easily?”
Suddenly lines began to appear in the sinister mask. One by one, silver sections peeled away from her face like petals of a flower unfurling. As each section opened, the silver disappeared in a puff of gleaming smoke.
Underneath the mask her face was ordinary. Neither pretty nor plain. Something in the middle—a face almost remarkable for how completely unremarkable it was. I had the feeling if I glanced away from her I’d immediately forget what she looked like.
There was something almost uncanny about her ordinariness. Something almost . . . enchanted.
But next to me, Nox breathed out hard with a noise of total shock.
“Lanadel?” He was staring at her, his mouth actually open. I’d never, in all the time I’d known him, seen him so astonished. I looked back and forth between the two of them.