My hands sweep frantically over the meager contents of each space I search. Kennan’s quarters are immaculately tidy. Fortunately, I find a small sewing kit in the drawer of the bedside table. I shove it into my pocket and head for the door.
My mind tries to reconcile Kennan the murderer with Kennan the ruthless trainer. The woman I tried so hard to find camaraderie with, to trust. It’s hard to picture Kennan, even at her most austere, as a killer. It’s difficult for me to attach the title to someone I know, no matter how deeply I dislike them. Murderers were scary figures from cautionary tales. They seemed almost as imaginary as Gondal.
Gondal! My eyes snap back to the desk. I grab Kieran’s ox, clutching it for dear life.
I hobble back to my room, locking the door behind me.
I rip out the thread from my previous attempt, ready to make a fresh start. I concentrate my thoughts on the Book of Days, pushing everything else from my mind.
The needle flies through the fabric. The Telling starts, smoother and more immediate.
I watch the wall out of the corner of my eye as the door begins to manifest. I focus on the end result—willing the door into existence, deftly stitching around the resistance I meet.
The needle grows red hot, but I’m faster this time. I complete the final stitch. The needle snaps, burning my fingers. I frantically look at the door as it flickers in and out of view.
Until, finally, it affixes itself in reality.
“That’s more like it,” I whisper to no one in particular as I get up from the bed, gripping the little stone ox in my pocket. For luck.
I open the door.
* * *
The hallway I’m in is dark, cut through the stone of the mountain like the lower caverns. The same luminescent stones line the walls. I step cautiously as I move deeper in. I keep my guard up. The castle makes it impossible to know reality from illusion.
I see a faint, rectangular light ahead, the corners of a door. It pushes open easily and plunges me into light.
I’m in the refectory—or at least, a room that looks exactly like it. I see the rows of long tables, all empty. There is an eerie undercurrent as my steps echo a beat after I take them. Everything is as it should be, except …
Veils of light enfold the room, wrapping around and contorting everything in it. They shift and flicker around one another. I have to close my eyes and open them again to fully understand it. There are different versions of the space, different versions of reality. Limitless possibilities. It’s like standing in a room made of mirrors.
When I look at my hands, the shroud shimmers over my own skin. It’s not an illusion, not exactly. I’m in the same refectory, but on a different layer, one accessible only through the altered reality of my Telling.
All around me, there are faint streaks of movement. Dreamlike silhouettes of people move within the various layers of reality. If I try to look at them directly, they disappear, but I can follow them on the periphery of where I gaze.
This labyrinth isn’t a separate space within the castle; it’s in an entirely separate realm of existence. As if two truths—or even limitless truths—are capable of existing at the same time. That is why no one could find it. It is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We are in it, and it is hiding from us, at every turn. No one thought to look right under their noses. I didn’t.
Hidden in plain sight. I wonder, has the Book of Days been hiding all these years in this separate realm?
“Three more disturbances have taken place…” I hear an unfamiliar voice, cutting in and out before fading. I glance around the room, searching for the source.
“Our manpower and resources are stretched too thin…” Another voice. It reaches me from across the room, across dimensions until it disappears.
A third voice. “We receive less and less from every tithe we collect…”
Roughly a dozen older Bards, including Niall, are clustered around a map of Montane at the end of the room. They rapidly flicker in and out of sight. When I step closer, the images condense somewhat. The figures are still ethereal, but more firmly anchored in front of me.
“At this rate of attrition, we won’t be able to maintain our numbers for much longer,” one Bard says, crossing his arms. “We’re squeezing blood from a stone.”
“We can’t afford to lose face or pull back. The chaos will only spread,” Niall counters, drawing a few nods from his peers. “We control them. Collect extra from the towns that haven’t been hit yet by famine. They just need the proper motivation.”
“And when the famine ravages everywhere else? Then what shall we do? How do you propose we motivate them?” The first Bard struggles to control his voice.
“The way we always do,” Niall replies readily. “Our agents in the villages will plant rumors, and control and monitor the flow of information. Keep the people suitably frightened.”
“You’re risking widespread panic,” another points out. “The people are already frightened.”
“Then they’ll be all the more eager to double their tithes in exchange for our favor, won’t they?”
I make tight fists, letting the bite of nail pressed into skin ground me. Not too long ago, I was one of the people they’re talking so casually about manipulating, controlling, and extorting.
As quickly as the vision appeared, it dissipates. Disgusted, I turn away.
The door I used to enter the room has, predictably, vanished. But instead of trapping me, several others take its place.
It really is a labyrinth, I think as I watch the doors alter, shift places, and realign. There is no pattern, only random movements. I’m not sure how to pick the door that leads to the Book of Days.
Unless it doesn’t matter.
“There’s an old rumor, a legend really, that the castle will lead certain people where they need to go…”
“All right, High House.” I brace myself and approach the nearest door. “Do your worst.”
* * *
I regret those words almost immediately as I stumble along the uneven floor. There is minimal light here. Only a thickness to the air that makes me feel as if I’m walking underwater. I’m in the ghostly bowels of the castle. A place lit by braziers that cast shifting shadows across the stone walls and thick, metal doors.
The sanitarium.
It is more frightening than I remember. I use the phantom figures that glimmer in this plane to guide me. Their movement is punctuated by bloodcurdling screams, always shifting and fading through the spaces where existences collide.
The end of the cells spills out into a larger, circular room. It’s sterile and the lights are blindingly bright against the whitewashed walls. The sound of screaming is loudest here.
There are peculiar holes on the floor, and I jump back when my foot sloshes against a dark red liquid draining into them. Perhaps most unsettling are the apparatuses set up in the center. Each one is different, and obviously meant to contain a person, but it’s nearly impossible to say what the purpose of such disturbing machines might be. When I look up again, people’s silhouettes flash and contort inside the room. They lie on beds, their hands and feet bound by metal shackles. Their gaping mouths open, their shrieks echoing a second too late.
Would this have been my fate if I had not been discharged? A shiver penetrates deep in my bones. Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down.