Sophia felt this, and yet she looked at Kane with relief. With love so simple and inexhaustible that it stalled even the teacup’s onslaught.
“Kane…” she mouthed. “You came home.”
This was not right.
This was not right.
As though sensing Kane’s reluctance, the teacup’s power turned upon his own mind, breaking through him with a vengeful annihilation.
Kane let the teacup go. He heard it shatter, and then he heard no more.
• Thirty-Eight •
SWEET DREAMS
Kane couldn’t move. Or he could, but there was no point. The teacup’s shards were scattered before him, cast across the carpet like petals. Kane looked past them, at where Adeline lay on the frozen stage. Her eyes were dark, her chest barely rising. Closer, Kane saw Sophia’s ankle. She had collapsed on the stairs.
The reverie still stood.
He had failed.
“Harder than it looks, isn’t it?”
The crushed form of Poesy sat up on the stairs, a zombie of the queen’s usual glamour. The charm bracelet snapped from Kane’s wrist and returned to her, orbiting the bloody stump of her arm. The arm, feeding magic from the starfish charm, rebuilt itself nerve by nerve. Poesy’s other damage shed from her, too, like a dingy husk, and when she stood up she was brand new. She wore a sleeved dress of thick white fabric embroidered in gold, its scalloped hem brushing her toned thighs. The belt cinching her waist was a braid of thick rope ending in belled tassels that jingled merrily as she swayed. A cape peeled from the air and clasped itself around her shoulders, and a wide-brimmed hat spun down and onto her head. Her makeup shifted on her face like a Rorschach test, finally settling on a look of pure, Hollywood glamour.
Poesy was back, and she was dressed for a finale.
“We are alike in many ways, Mr. Montgomery. But that teacup takes a certain ruthlessness that you have always lacked. You should have known better than to think you had earned its power.”
Kane barely heard these words. A profound fatigue had climbed up through the void in him, and it clasped lovingly at the pieces of his broken mind. It whispered for him to follow it down and away, and to leave this evil queen to do as she pleased.
But he could still see Sophia’s ankle. She was crawling away from them, toward Adeline.
“I’m not completely critical, of course,” Poesy went on. “I am rather impressed you made it back here, all by yourself. But then again, that was my intention. I figured your sister was good enough bait to draw you out, though I never thought you would actually attempt her unraveling. I figured you would be inclined to let go of your old reality if your own sister served as the foundation for my new one. Your cruelty toward her surprises me.”
Poesy’s words were the articulate edge atop the actual sound of her voice, which was the drone of cicadas.
Kane pushed himself up through pure spite. “You’re not human.”
Poesy curtsied. “Thank you.” Then she bent over the shattered teacup, finding the curved handle and plucking it up. The rest of the pieces swung after it like a marionette, joining together so that it rested, whole and healed, in her palm.
Steam rose from it a second later, and Poesy sipped casually.
Like lightning, Kane directed a snap right into Poesy’s face. The shot glanced sideways, but the deflection sent tea all over Poesy’s perfect, white dress.
“That was”—she looked over Kane with unmasked disdain, her painted face dripping—“your last act of indiscretion.”
Her clawed nails crushed the air, and a psychic grip closed around Kane. He slammed onto the throne, pinned there by Poesy’s invisible hand.
“It’s time to summon the loom,” she said, dabbing her face with her cape.
“I can’t,” Kane said, for once proud of his ineptitude. “And even if I could, I’d destroy it before I let you use it!”
Poesy paused in her dabbing to give Kane that same dazzling smile she’d served him in the Soft Room of the police station. She was laughing at him this time.
“I suppose it was too much to hope the loss of your memories would change your fundamentals,” she said, sobering herself. “I see now you haven’t changed at all. Such potential, yet so little interest in the act of creation. A fascinating apathy that I hoped to manipulate into loyalty after Ms. Bishop dubiously erased your memories. That was an accident, you know, but I thought it was good fortune for me. It provided me a chance to work with you directly. Your power, my creativity. But I can’t work with an instrument that’s developed intention.”
“I’ll never work with you,” Kane sneered. “Not willingly. You tricked me.”
She swept a hand over the front of her dress, and the tea stain bleached away.
“Well, it is a tricky business, creating a reality.” She gestured at the convoluted reveries around them. “But clearly I’ve figured that one out. What’s harder is maintaining it. One can’t hope to do it all alone; one must resort to delegation. And so I sought to create gods from worthy mortals. People like your friends. The Others!”
This last part Poesy said with mocking jazz hands.
“And that went well, too. But I needed more than a pantheon. I needed power. I needed to summon a loom, a source of infinite energy to produce my creations. And I needed to summon this loom in a form I could control. Manipulate. That’s where you come in.”
She dipped over Kane. Her skin glittered like cold gemstones beneath her dusted makeup. She made sure he watched as she removed the opal skull from her bracelet. It flared in the ballroom’s low light, assembling a wreath of spindles. A crown, made from bone.
Kane’s scars burned with recognition. She has the loom. She’d had it all along.
“You recognize this, don’t you?”
The invisible grip holding him to the throne tightened.
“Would you like to know how to summon the loom?” Poesy twirled the crown innocently. “It’s easy. First, you build an environment that can withstand an immense output of power, such as a reverie. Second, you neutralize every competing party with small feuds and love affairs, so they occupy one another completely. Third, you wait for the perfect moment, in which the very fabric of reality has grown threadbare, right before it’s about to tear open. That provides you with your opportunity to destroy the old reality and begin the new.”
She dragged a nail down Kane’s jaw to clutch his chin.
“And finally, you reveal that this loom is not a thing, but a person. It is you, Mr. Montgomery.”
Kane stopped struggling.