“Oh, my dear!” Lady Isella turned to me with tears in her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you! I have never seen such power—you have freed me of him! After all these years, oh, thank you!” And she burst out crying.
“It’s all right, Mother.” Lachlan took her in his arms and comforted her while Bran and I stood by and gave them a moment.
“That was a good use of your power, Emma,” Bran murmured to me. “To bind an ogre that size is no small thing—I doubt one Fae noble in a hundred from the Summer Court could do it. Do you feel drained at all?”
Now that he mentioned it, I did feel pretty tired. I had assumed that was because it was getting late and I’d had a more than full day—I mean, I started that morning by making Morganna bald and I had ended by magically binding an ogre. But maybe using that much magic had something to do with it, as well.
“I would like to go sit down somewhere,” I admitted to Bran. “It’s been a really long day.”
He gave me a wry smile.
“You can say that again. Is our guide still here?” He looked around and we saw the tiny little old lady, Sirella, was still cowering against the wall. Now that the danger was over, however, she straightened up—as well as she could anyway—and hobbled over to us.
“My Lady,” she said in her cracked voice. “I would still be pleased to show you to your suite. If you would follow me?”
I looked at Lachlan and his mother. Lady Isella had a handkerchief and she was blotting her red eyes with it and Lachlan was still patting her back. I raised my eyebrows at him and he nodded.
“Mother,” he said, “We have to go now. Emma is tired and we don’t know what Queen Mab has planned for her tomorrow.”
“You’ll need your rest, of course,” Lady Isella said, sniffing and giving me a slightly watery smile. “Let me come with you and we can visit for a little while before you go to bed.”
I thought of how she had whispered in my ear that I was in danger and nodded.
“Of course you can come with us—we’d love to have you,” I said, smiling.
“Thank you, my dear.” She hooked her arm through mine and gave it a little squeeze. “Come on then—let’s go.”
I nodded at Sirella and the little old lady nodded back at me and said, “This way, Princess,” before leading us deeper into the Winter Court palace.
88
“The Winter Court wasn’t always a place of evil and darkness,” Lady Isella said, after we were settled in a spacious living area and she had put a ‘silence spell’ on the door so that no one could hear us talking.
The suite Sirella had led us to was like a luxurious—if gloomy—hotel, I thought. There were two bedrooms—one with two beds that the guys could share—and a bedroom with a single vast bed for me, though I didn’t much like the idea of sleeping alone in the haunted-house palace.
In the middle of the suite was the living room area where we were all sitting. I was on the plush couch, covered in black velvet, with Bran and Lachlan on either side of me and Lady Isella had drawn up a matching armchair to sit across from us. There was a kind of ebony, glass-topped coffee table between the couch and the chair.
“It wasn’t?” I asked, leaning forward. “What did it used to be like?”
“Well, it was simply winter.” Lady Isella shrugged. “It has always been a mirror image of the Summer Court—so if you were to walk outside the tree which houses the palace, you would see that the branches were bare and there was snow on the ground. But winter can be beautiful, you know,” she added, sighing. “I used to visit when I was a girl. And it was lovely here—before Queen Mab went completely mad and perverted it.”
“What drove her crazy?” I asked, frowning.
“I believe it was her thirst for youth and beauty,” Lady Isella told me. “She was sane—well, less mad anyway—when I was your age. That was when the Fae used to move back and forth between the Courts with ease.” She sighed. “I was a good friend of your mother, you know. I think it was she who drove your grandmother mad with her beauty.”
“But that wasn’t her fault!” I objected, frowning.
“Oh, I never said it was!” Lady Isella looked shocked. “She was a lovely person you know—inside as well as out. We played often together as children but as she grew, so did her beauty. You look very like her, you know,” she added.
“I, er, saw a picture of her in Queen Elia’s scrying bowl,” I admitted. “I thought the same thing. Except for our eye color being different, I look almost exactly like her.”
“Which is why you must be so careful, my dear!” Lady Isella leaned forward anxiously. “Your beauty far exceeds that of Queen Mab, just as your mother’s did. I fear that may be why the queen invited you to the Winter Court in the first place.”
“Well, she didn’t exactly invite me,” I pointed out. “There was some kind of prophecy and I didn’t have a choice. I’m supposed to stay in the Winter Court for a day and a night so I can decide which one I want to rule over when I come of age.”
I shook my head. I still didn’t quite believe the words coming out of my mouth. I felt like I was talking about somebody else—some other girl with a different life. Inside, I was still just plain Emma Plunkett with nothing special about her who lived in boring little Frostproof, Florida and waitressed at the I Scream Diner for extra cash.
But Lady Isella’s next words shook me out of my thoughts and made me cold all over.
“No, my dear—that isn’t why Queen Mab wants you here,” she said, looking at me earnestly. “She wants you so that she can steal your beauty and your youth—which is exactly what she tried to do to your mother before she ran away.”
“What?” I looked at her uncertainly. “Are you sure?”
She nodded firmly.
“Queen Mab will never give up the throne—not as long as she can keep stealing the youth and beauty she covets from others. Did you not see the one who guided us here?”
“Who—Sirella?” I asked, thinking of the little old lady with her hunched back and grey hair and wrinkles.
“She is no older than you,” Lady Isella told me. “I know, for she is a wood nymph who lived not far from me. One day Queen Mab summoned her to the palace and she had to go, poor thing, for no one dares to ignore a summons by the queen! Mab sucked away her youth and beauty and left her as you see her now—a dried out husk of her former self.”
I thought of the tight, white mask of skin stretched over the Queen of the Winter Court’s face. Was it possible she was giving herself the equivalent of a magical face-lift by stealing other women’s beauty?
“But…that’s horrible!” I exclaimed. I looked at Lachlan. “That’s a big deal, right? It must mean that her soul is completely corrupted, right?”
“Oh, it is.” He nodded. “But she hides the ugliness the corruption causes with magical means. She’s very powerful—otherwise she wouldn’t be able to manage it. But if you saw her true face…”