The stairs are so steep and narrow, they are nearly a ladder. He leads the way up and at the top, they step out into Matthew’s room.
He sinks onto the edge of his bed to catch his breath.
“My brother made a game of it,” he says, “finding all the secret places.” And though he’s hiding it well, she can see the weariness sweeping through his face, the faint tremor in his hands.
He gestures at the wall across from the bed, at a garden tapestry that hangs there. When she draws it back, she finds a door. Not a hidden one, folded straight into the molding or the wood, but an ordinary door, the tapestry obviously added to put it out of sight.
A small gold key hangs from the lock, and Olivia looks to Matthew for permission. He nods once, and she turns the key. It whispers in the lock, and the door opens, not onto a bathroom or a hall, but another bedroom, a little smaller than his own.
The shutters are open, the curtains pulled back, the late afternoon light spilling in over a desk, a chest, a bed. A tattered bear propped on the pillow, a pair of shoes nestled neatly by the bedside table. Thomas’s room.
She pictures Hannah coming in here every morning. Edgar latching the shutters every night. They may go through the motions, but the room still feels abandoned. The floorboards too stiff, the dust that hangs in the air, even after being swept from every surface.
Olivia returns to Matthew’s room and closes the door, turning the little gold key in the lock. He sighs and rises from the bed. And as she follows him out, down the main stairs, she thinks of all the halls and all the rooms and all the hidden doors in Gallant. Perhaps she won’t need any of them. Perhaps the boy will still be there, in the fountain’s empty bowl, and she will never set foot again inside the other house. Perhaps it will be that easy—but she doubts it.
Three hours until dusk. Matthew is resting, but Olivia’s skin hums with nerves, and she goes out into the garden to get some air. The day is warm, and she walks between the flowers, eyes trailing over pink and gold and green before she sees it at the garden’s edge.
One of the roses has died in the night, as if a sudden frost stole in. The stem looks brittle, the leaves have curled, the head droops. A sharp slice of winter in the summer yard. As she nears it, she sees the gray weed wrapped like a hand around the rose’s throat.
Olivia’s fingers twitch, the memory of the other garden, the way dead flowers surged to life against her palm. She reaches out with her good hand, questing, careful, as if the rose is made of glass and just as sharp. Slowly, she cups a withered bloom, paper dry against her skin, and waits to feel the prickle, the chill, as she breathes life back into the flower.
But nothing happens.
Olivia frowns, tightening her grip, trying to force energy into the rose. But the flower only cracks and crumbles as the petals tumble free, scattering across the lawn. She looks down at her fingers, the dust of the dead rose a shadow on her hand.
Whatever power she might have beyond the wall, she does not have it here.
Two hours until dusk.
Her suitcase has vanished from the foyer, returned to the foot of her bed. Olivia changes out of her mother’s pink dress, climbing into her own gray shift, knowing it will blend into the world beyond the wall. She holds her breath as she does up the buttons, as if the clothes are a kind of spell, as if she might fade back into the girl she was at Merilance.
But she doesn’t. She can’t. She has never been a Merilance girl.
In the bathroom, she studies her reflection, her charcoal hair, her slate-gray eyes, her sallow skin. She looks like something from beyond the wall. Pictures herself silver lit inside the other house, twirling across the ballroom floor. A snap of thin fingers, and she is ash.
But then she sees her mother’s comb on the counter, the flowers summer blue. Imagines Grace Prior at her back, touching her shoulders, leaning in to whisper that it will be all right, that home is a choice, that she belongs here as much as there.
She takes up the flower comb, tucks it in her hair.
Beyond the window, the light is going thin. She looks down at the stone fountain, the woman with the outstretched hand, and she knows now it is a warning. Stay back, it says. But it is a message meant for strangers. She is a Prior, and Gallant is her house.
One hour until dusk, and every minute seems to drag. Olivia cannot stand the wait, wants to plunge back into that other world, to fling herself across the wall, but as long as the sun is up, the wall is nothing more than what it seems. All she can do is wait.
Wait and hope that she finds Thomas.
Wait and hope that Death does not find her.
Wait and hope that this will work.
And then what?
The question tangles through her like a weed.
Matthew said the thing beyond the wall is hungry, that it will never stop. But he also said that it is dying, that he meant to starve it out. Could they outlast its final, desperate throes, or will it only end when they do? If she stays, could they be a kind of family? Or will she have to watch her cousin waste away and wait for the dreams to turn on her as well?
A shadow crosses the doorway. Matthew stands there, waiting. He looks past her to the window, where day has turned to dusk, and says what she already knows.
“It’s time.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Downstairs, Hannah is latching the shutters.
Edgar is locking the doors.
And Matthew is lecturing them all. Perhaps it is only hope, but his back is straight and his gaze is focused, and Olivia can imagine the boy he might have been once, the man he could become, if the thing beyond the wall had not stolen his family, if the darkness had not frayed his nerves, and the nightmares had not whittled him so thin.
It is a simple enough plan, but he goes over it again.
Olivia will find Thomas and return to the wall. Matthew will be waiting on the Gallant side to let them out. She will knock three times, and he will open the door and seal it again in their wake before anything else can get through.
She imagines Matthew standing at the gate, palms pressed against the iron to feel the knocks, imagines the darkness whispering through his head, trying to coax him to unlock the door, to step through and see for himself. She wonders if he will hear his brother’s voice. At least he will not hear hers.
“You have to get back to the door,” he says, and the set of his jaw, the steel in his gaze, tells her if she fails, if she is caught, he will not come. He will leave her there beyond the wall.
As for Edgar and Hannah—
“You must not leave the house,” he warns them.
“And if something gets past you?” asks Hannah. “What then?”
“Go down into the cellar.”
Edgar snorts, a shotgun resting on his shoulder. “I think not.”
“You have to hide.”
“We may be old, but we have fight left in us.”
“Who are you calling old?” snipes Hannah, taking up a fire poker.
“You are not Priors,” says Matthew grimly. “You have nothing it wants. Nothing to give, and everything to lose.”
“This is our house as much as yours, Matthew Prior,” says Hannah. “And we will defend it.”
“You will die.”
Edgar stands his ground. “Death comes for everything.”
Olivia stares at them, these people she is just beginning to know, this makeshift family, but all she sees are the dancers in the ballroom, the way they turned to ash.