We stilled, listening for signs they had heard us, and they still mumbled.
“You jerk,” Dris said to Emrys and smacked his shoulder.
These two were going to be a handful for me, although I had to admit their back and forth was entertaining.
“OK, spider goat Fae, do your stuff.” I pushed Emrys toward the princess’s door. Emrys rolled his eyes and began picking the lock with a criminal’s finesse. It popped open almost as soon as he got started, and a smug grin appeared on Emrys’s face.
“I’ll make sure they put you in the books as the criminal who once opened a door.” Dris pushed him out of the way, and we entered the room together. Emrys grabbed a torch from behind us since the room was very dark, and no light could enter past the thick, closed curtains.
Nyx’s tomb was pretty and didn’t feel final in many ways, like she was sleeping, waiting for true love’s kiss from the storybooks to wake her. But looking at her room, it was like she’d been dead for centuries. The real tomb was here, in her quarters. Spider webs and dust covered every inch of this once magnificent place. Her bedspread of gold and blue had swirls sown in across its comfortable material. A canopy of silk hung from her large wooden four-poster bed, and beside it was a pile of books resting on a table. Books were also scattered across the floor, like she’d been unable to sleep. She had a wardrobe bursting with fancy clothes covered in dust and dirt and strings from the material fraying.
“This place looks like the real tomb,” Dris murmured and I nodded. It was creepy, and it felt wrong seeing her things.
“Let’s look around and get out of here,” I whispered, ignoring the state of this room. Even though it gave me the chills, I peered in every direction to see if any details stood out as mystery-solving worthy.
“I’ve been looking for these books!” Dris hissed, her fingers running over the books piled on the table.
“I think you can forgive her for not returning them,” I replied.
“She was reading some heavy stuff. Core anatomy and scientific experiments by Gregory Debaru. A genius but a madman. She was researching our history, too. Trying to find something. I think she—yep —took notes in these books. Who does that?” Although the librarian in her was upset, there had to be a huge clue in those notes.
“Anything, Emrys?” He moved around items on her vanity. Brushes and makeup sat in their organized place, waiting for the princess to begin her morning routine.
“Didn’t the princess have purple hair?” he asked.
Both Dris and I nodded. I’d stared at her sleeping body enough to know that she indeed had lavender-hued hair.
“What did you find?” Silently I walked over and looked at the brush he held. It was not purple but a darker colored hair. Odd. I thought of excuses or an answer to this new piece of the puzzle, but I couldn’t come up with anything. The princess’s room was as mysterious as the woman in the tomb.
“Guys, I think I found something.” Dris waved us over to the collection of pretty dresses.
“There’s something under there. Look, see those markings,” she continued, pointing toward the floor of the expansive wardrobe.
“I see it.” Emrys reached over and pushed the petrified dresses out of the way.
“Oh, my heart tree.” Dris gasped, her owl eyes widening at the madness before us, written all over the wall of the wardrobe.
“No one said the princess was mad, too.” Emrys’s low voice of confusion mirrored the thoughts in my head.
Scribbled on the wardrobe were words of a madwoman. Over and over. Every warning bell in my mind told me to run. Run far and run fast.
He knows.
He’s coming for me.
Must split it. Must hide it.
He knows.
He’s coming.
Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
The darkness is coming.
The darkness is coming.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I stared at the books piled on the floor next to my bed, the ones Emrys and Dris helped carry down to my chamber after fleeing the princess’s quarters. All three of us were silent in a mixture of confusion and fear. We were missing something but where to begin?
Nothing in the stories I’d heard mentioned the princess was mad like her mother. Her mother only went crazy after using up her powers to help put her daughter in the onyx tomb, right?
My mind hurt from all these new revelations. Dris told me she would come into my room this morning to help me search through the princess’s notes. As confused as I was, another emotion rattled me more. Nyx was frightened and unhinged in the days before being locked in her tomb. Nothing on the sleeping princess’s face showed fear or the madness of a woman who wrote such scary words on the back of the wardrobe. She looked at peace in the onyx. Maybe she split and hid what she wanted to or knew she was safe from the darkness in there.
The only thing I could associate the darkness with was whatever Verin released into the world. I remembered the story of when mankind fell. There was a flash of black across the sky and people died where they stood. It couldn’t be a coincidence. There was a common denominator here—Verin, the evil king.
I yawned widely and loudly as I answered the quiet knock on my door. Dris wore comfortable clothes instead of the cute dresses she usually wore.
“Did you get any sleep?” I asked, seeing the dark circles under her eyes. I had tossed and turned, thinking about an unhinged Nyx until the early sun rose.
“Nope. Who could sleep after being in that room? It’s scarier than the dungeons.” I’d have to take her word for it since I had no interest in going down to where the dungeons were.
“It’s small, but come on in. I was about to start reading.” She sat on the edge of my bed, while I closed the door.
“I don’t even know where to start.” She looked at the pile of six books, all different in sizes and leather covers binding them. I agreed with a grimace at the difficult task before us. This wasn’t going to be fun, but there had to be a reason Nyx was looking at these books before she laid down to accept her fate.
“You do those three, and I do the others?”
I separated them and set three randomly in front of her, then curled on my bed with the others. The task before us seemed vast and intimidating. I hadn’t even opened a book and I grew overwhelmed.
“One page at a time, right?’ I mustered up a pep talk for the two of us. Dris grinned and opened a book she hadn’t touched in twenty years. To her, this was a great adventure.
The woman I’d heard about from Rune and Tor made the princess appear levelheaded, strong, and a badass. My fingers trembled slightly as I lifted the cover to the first page of the core anatomy book.
Dris and I silently read through Nyx’s notes and flipped the pages with interest. I took in the information she wrote, as well as what was on the page itself. I now understood more about how the cores worked.
The Fae had the power of their nature’s core, and the Fae had the ability with absolute mental control of their essence to solidify it. According to the book, since the queen’s core was a diamond, she could take all of her essence and turn it into one diamond stone, probably a large one . . . like taking tiny particles and combining them to make them into a bigger substance.