That evening, I progressed from simply destroying the mechanisms in Carlow’s little wooden horses to recreating them in perfect working order despite not knowing how they worked. Basil worked on their own research, something to do with the melting points of different metals compared to the red dirt. They had dragged their stool to my desk so they could work next to me. Creek and Carlow watched us, their heads bowed over a notebook. Only Carlow wrote in it.
“Carlow, Creek,” the Heir said as he walked the horse to them. “What do you think?”
Carlow and Creek, Creek and Carlow. Their names were always together and awkward when they weren’t.
“What’s the point of evaluation until she actually does what she’s supposed to?” Carlow asked.
Basil leaned in close to me and whispered, “It’s her, not you, I promise. She’s still sad.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Before you, we had another noblewrought. Poppy was twelve and adored Carlow, like a sister would,” said Basil quickly and as quietly as possible. “She died in her sleep two years ago. I think Carlow died a little too. Carlow loved her.”
I swallowed, remembering the bleak months after my mother had died.
“Even Creek’s been nicer since,” Basil said. “He’s like a different person.”
“How could he have been worse?”
The Heir placed the bowl of red dirt on the table before me, and Basil leaned away.
“Try to destroy this for good,” he said. “Even just a granule will do.”
“It won’t,” said Carlow loudly, “but I suppose it’s something.”
“It’s more than you can do,” I muttered.
Imagine the Door is about to eat me and you have to destroy it. It’s like the gun and horse but Vile. What sacrifice would be enough?
A hunger, deep and dark, opened within me. I gagged, heart in my throat, and lurched forward. My nails dug into the table, and the Heir pulled my hands away before I could split my nails. He placed a knife in my hands.
Only a granule. Only a granule. Not the whole Door.
Something cinched within me, and my vilewright growled. I focused on the minute ways mortal bodies re-created themselves. We were nothing but little pieces always working. My noblewright, after months of study, had created the knowledge in my mind. So many corpses, so much knowledge. I imagined the granules doubling and their centers, near bursting, pinching apart. I imagined their spindly insides dragging half of their vile bits into the new granule. I imagined reaching inside and plucking their insides away.
Take blood and a good memory of his mother from the Heir, and destroy what makes them repair themselves, I prayed. And if that isn’t enough, take blood. Not enough to kill him. If you need more, take it from the others. Don’t kill anyone.
I grabbed the Heir’s arm and nicked a vein. The dirt rippled, grains rolling down the little mound and pooling around the rim, and one single granule crumbled. Black smoke spiraled above the bowl.
No new grains appeared.
“Well done,” said the Heir.
His eyes fluttered shut, and he crumpled to the floor. Creek lunged, catching his head. I grabbed his coat and lowered him down. Basil ran out to call for a healer.
“No, don’t. I’m fine.” The Heir blinked, face suddenly pale and pinched, and glanced at me. “Did you specify that it shouldn’t take enough blood to kill me?”
I nodded.
“Maybe make sure it leaves me awake next time,” he said and groaned. “I should have given you Hana for this.”
“I’m so sorry, Alistair.” I helped him sit up, and he didn’t let go of my wrist. “I should have thought that through more.”
He stared at me, eyes wide behind his crooked glasses, and licked his lips. “It’s all right, Lorena. If you help me stand up, I’ll forgive you.”
Carlow cleared her throat. We all froze and looked at her.
“Stay sitting. I have bad news,” said Carlow, lips so worried her teeth were red. “I ran my calculations five times to be sure, and I can find no flaws. The Door will either open in five months when we fail to sacrifice enough mortals, or we will be forced to sacrifice a tenth of the Liran population to it within a single month.”
I dropped the Heir. “What?”
He groaned. “At least it’s only a tenth.”
“That’s six hundred thousand people. That’s nearly all of Mori,” I said. “We can’t sacrifice over half a million people to buy us time to fix the problem.”
“It wouldn’t buy us much time. Twelve years ago, the number of sacrifices began growing exponentially. After five months, the growth is unpredictable save for the fact that it will be growth,” said Carlow, pushing her goggles to the top of her head. Scratches marred the pale skin around where they’d rested. “I ran it five times and got the same answer each time. I haven’t told Her Excellency yet.”
“If the growth is exponential and increasing as Carlow says, one month is a blessing.” The Heir adjusted his glasses with steady hands. “Don’t tell my mother yet. This is good. This is leverage we can use to justify our research.”
This was a tragedy. One tenth of Cynlira wouldn’t touch the peers or even the councilors’ families. Cynlira had been walking toward a cliff edge for so long, and now we were sprinting toward it without a care, the peerage and councilors at our backs. They’d herd us all off, sacrifice hundreds of thousands to the Door, to buy themselves time. Far-reaching solutions had been unnecessary fearmongering, but now we were too late. They’d take the easy path that would keep them in power the longest.
And if they could choose which six hundred thousand to sacrifice, they’d allow it in the blink of an eye.
A starving silence, desperate for words to soothe us, fell over the room. I touched Basil’s shoulder, and they flinched. Creek sniffed.
“If we cannot save all Cynlira, then we will save what we can,” said the Heir. “We will find a way to shut or remake the Door.”
The peerage and council could’ve done it years ago, before it came to this.
“Maybe we should try eating it like we did the Vile,” I said.
Creek turned so fast his neck snapped. “That’s the only good idea any of you all have ever had.”
“Please try it.” Carlow tossed her journal aside. “Just wait until it’s about to open so that the end of the world is an inevitability and not our fault.”
“There is no time to waste then.” The Heir struggled to his feet and clutched his desk for support. He waved me off. “Lorena, come with me.”
He nodded to the door, and I followed. Carlow leaned forward against Creek’s back, her arms dangling between them. Basil sat heavily on the Heir’s abandoned stool.
“Where are they?” said Carlow. “The sky is infinite, but the earth is not. There’s no room for all the Vile the Door holds back. Space cannot be created or destroyed, so where are they?”
“If you had all the time in the world and all the books ever written, no knowledge would be safe from you,” muttered Creek. “You’ve done well.”
I followed the Heir outside before I could hear any more. I tried to ask him where we were going, and he held up one hand. His steps were still unsteady and his path winding. He led me deeper into the royal grounds, to a building I had never even seen, and the imposing stone carved straight from the side of the mountain gave way to marble floors and tapestry-covered walls. He tripped once, and I looped one of my arms through his. He leaned heavily against my side.
The Sundered Crown could not reign much longer, but to ensure that, I had to make the Heir trust me.
When we reached a stairwell at the center of the palace, the Heir spent a half hour contracting his vilewright to open a set of five doors. There were real locks and a key as well. Behind them all was a single staircase down into the depths of the mountain. We spiraled down it and deep into the earth, water oozing from the stone walls. Far-off screeches echoed down the halls.
“The sacrifices,” the Heir said. “Try to ignore them.”
This was where Will would’ve been.
We came to a stop an hour after leaving the lab. The near rush of water rumbled up my feet, a heavy damp hanging in the air. Salt and sulfur tinged the space, and a bone-white dust stuck to the wet walls dripped around us. The path dropped off, and the Heir offered me a hand as we descended into a cave system lit by the pale-green light of luminescent spiderwebs. My wrights writhed within me. Moss the color of old teeth lined our path.
And at the end, beyond dragging footprints and sacrificial stains, in the middle of a small sandbar encircled by salt-encrusted runoffs of river water, looming over me as it had that day more than ten years ago, was the door to my mother’s sickroom. She’d only survived three days, but I’d still know it anywhere.
“What is this?” I whispered.
“The Door,” he said. “It’s different for everyone.”
It was a crooked door set in a listing jamb. The wood was old and wet-warped, bug holes freckling the lower half, and the uneven slats left a gash of space in the middle. A brilliant white light spilled out through the cracks. No light so bright had ever existed in the Wallows.
This wasn’t some specter created by a noblewright; I would’ve noticed. This was the memory that marked the loss of my mother in my mind.
I was not afraid, and in that clarity came fury.
“Get out of my head,” I said, stalking to the Door. “That home’s not real anymore, and I never wanted to open that door.”
The Door grew, shrank.
A breath.
I leaned in close, unafraid, and whispered, “I burned that house. Did you miss that part of the memory, or are you grasping?”
And through the crack in the door came a soft, shivering laugh. I stumbled back.
I wanted to open the Door. Something in me whispered that my mother would be on the other side, her flesh healed. Her arms would fold around me, and she’d smell of soap and sawdust instead of seared skin and hair. She would laugh instead of scream.
I had never wanted anything so deeply. It was in my bones, my blood, every pounding thought in my head urging me to rip the door open.
“Messing with this will end the world,” I whispered. There were dark things beyond that Door begging to be let back in. They were begging me to let them in. “What if we can’t fix it?”
“There is no such thing as ‘can’t,’” he said. “There is only what we do not understand yet. This Door would not exist if it were impossible.”
I turned him to the Door and held his face so that he had to look at it. “Only someone who’s been handed the world would say that. It’s not the rich who will die. It’s not the peerage. You’ll all be safe behind your soldiers, stone walls, and wrought. It’s the rest of us who will die. You’ll destroy us.”
“No!” He yanked himself from my grasp and spun, red glasses cracking against the ground. “No, I can and I will. I was made to destroy. I have always destroyed lives, but for once, I can destroy this and create something better! I made myself a monster when it was expected of me, but I will not be that monster now!”
I knelt and picked up the glasses, far too aware of the Door at my back.
“I can,” the Heir whispered, eyes wet, breaths stuttering. “I can. I can. I promise. I can create something better. I just need more time. I need to understand it. To know.”
He sunk to his knees, gaze stuck on the door, and shuddered.
“I can create things. Good things.” He looked to me. “Please, Lorena, you understand, don’t you? My mother has never cared, but I do.”
Alistair Wyrslaine, the poor boy desperate to understand everything because no one understood him.
“Alistair,” I said, setting the broken glasses on his nose. For all the good I had ever done, I’d done it to survive. Not out of goodness but survival. We were not the same, but we were plucked from the same plot. “Of course I understand, but you have to be careful. Your mother has been down here an endless number of times. What do you think it’s done to her? Those sacrifices? Alistair, they have to stop. Even without them, she’s killed so many people. She doesn’t want you to succeed. Why do you think that is?”
“They’re guilty. Those are the rules,” he said, his gaze stuck on whatever Door he saw beyond my back. “I tried—I didn’t like…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Willoughby Chase is an exception, not a standard. Most buy their way out of the sacrifice if they can. Perhaps you’re right. He’s innocent. If he weren’t, he could’ve paid.”
Oh.
Society was built on the corpses of those the court cast aside—those who couldn’t pay a fine, those who stole to survive, those who couldn’t afford an education and didn’t know all the rules—and why should this be any different? Of course the wealthy only cared about the validity of the sacrifices when it happened to one of their own. Did Julian know?
“But then he did the one thing my mother cannot forgive,” said Alistair.
I couldn’t imagine the Crown forgiving anything and could not think of what Will must have done. It had to be insulting. It had to be demeaning. But Will didn’t have enough power or money to degrade the Crown.
“Lorena?”
“I know what we have to do,” I said, “but I’m afraid you won’t understand me.”
“Of course I will.” He rose up on his knees, the unnatural light of the Door reflecting red in his eyes, and grasped my coat. “I do not want to be remembered as the red-eyed vilewrought monster of Hila. I can’t be, and you understand that. I promise I will understand you.”
Maybe I didn’t deserve the people I was trying to save.
“We have to be very, very careful.” I stroked his cheek, suddenly seeing the boy Julian and the others were so afraid of. “We must deal with your mother. The Door will open within five months. We cannot let her stop your research. We cannot let her continue killing. She must be stopped.”
I had to convince him to kill the Sundered Crown.