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MY EYES just about popped out of my eye sockets as my heart slammed against the insides of my chest. Filled with past memories of Valcas’ first plan for our engagement, his request that I pose as his betrothed, the role I would so perfectly fill and his successful search for me, I nearly exploded. I wasn’t just startled, I was angry.
“Where did you ever get an idea like that?” I hissed.
Valcas sharply inhaled a shallow breath. His eyes were full of fear and the shock of rejection. He didn’t look anything like the Valcas I remembered back at the palace. This version of Valcas was vulnerable and innocent like the one I’d met on my last visit to the white tower. And he had a lot of guards who would be happy to escort me off of the premises if I got out of hand. He just needed to say the word.
I clasped my forehead with my hand and took a deep breath, trying to calm down. Did he really believe that we were in a relationship? That we were engaged? But, how?
“I’m sorry. That came out wrong,” I said. “I don’t remember you ever asking me to marry you. Or, does it happen some other way here?”
“It’s right here—” Valcas pulled out from his robes a printed photograph from the night we’d flown together on his Estrel-Flyer, the night I’d left the white tower to help Edgar.
Two bright faces smiled at me—Valcas’ face with his usual grin and emerald green eyes, and my face with a fixed smile and eyes of a swampy moss green. We looked good together. Well, he looked good, which I suppose made me look better just by having him next to me. I shook my head. It still didn’t make any sense.
“That was a really fun night, but what about this photo makes you think that we’re engaged?”
“Turn it over, Calla.”
On the back of the photograph someone had handwritten slash marks with dots that I couldn’t decipher along with a short poem.
Flying with Calla Winston, the woman I will marry,
She who dims the brightness of the four moons
and the glow of the tower.
Valcas looked at me with admiration and devotion. “I’ve kept this photograph with me and have looked at it every day while waiting for you to return to me. If you’ve changed your mind, at least allow me the chance to change it back again.”
I stood there wide-eyed and openmouthed, not because I was frightened, but because I finally understood what had happened, what Valcas had done. Sometime soon after I left the tower, before his memories of me erased, he and Shirlyn must have developed the photos from the flight. Then, he’d taken the picture of us, a physical object, and wrote what was on his mind. I turned the photo in my hands from front to back again.
My heart warmed, touched but with an edge of panic. He must have misunderstood his own inscription after the memories of that day were erased. He’d mistaken a passing romantic fantasy of marrying me someday for the existence of an actual engagement. That part I can’t read must be the date, I thought. The poor guy has been reminding himself of me every day for two weeks. I wondered how to break it to him that we never were engaged.
I looked up at Valcas sympathetically, expecting him to be discouraged by my delayed response. Instead, a grin spread out playfully below two twinkling eyes. He made it difficult to not flirt back, especially when this closer relationship could help me with my research.
“You have your chance.” I smiled. “It’s not like I’m wearing a ring or anything.”
Valcas pulled me out of the hallway and into the room. “True, the ring doesn’t become important until I make the official announcement to my parents, but they won’t be back for some time.”
“Wait—there’s already a ring?”
Valcas didn’t answer me with words. A flash of teeth cinched into a smile beneath a playfully raised eyebrow before he circled around me and left the room.
In a haze of awkward giddiness, I looked around the suite of adjoining rooms. It was bigger and even nicer than the guest suite I’d shared with Shirlyn. The front room had a burgundy and bronze color scheme with dark wood furnishings and glass tables trimmed in gold. A picture window hung on the wall, covered with gauzy curtains that were completely drawn. I arranged the bouquet of roses in a table vase that I found on top of a glass end table. Then I sank down into a pile of floor cushions that were upholstered in rich Bordeaux velveteen. I studied the table vase that held the flowers Valcas gave me.
“At least Valcas and I are together again,” I murmured out loud.
Before long I grew bored with sitting by myself and ventured out into the hallway. “I am not spying on Valcas’ private life this time,” I kept telling myself as I tried to remember which door would take me to the guest suite I’d shared with Shirlyn.
I wondered where she and Romaso could be. Even though Enta said it would be okay, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d abandoned them, that I was somehow responsible for having brought them to the white tower and leaving them there. There should have been other photographs from the flight outside the white tower, including the one of Shirlyn, Romaso and their driver. Where were they?
A horrible thought entered my mind. What if Shirlyn was out there somewhere lost, famished and separated from Romaso, with no memory of how she’d gotten there and with Valcas having no memory of her ever having arrived?
I desperately started twisting doorknobs, trying to open the white doors. Guess after guess, none of the doorknobs would turn. Reaching in my backpack for something of use, I grasped hold of the box that held the small telescope. I opened the carved box and looked skeptically at the small instrument. It didn’t look like a key and didn’t appear to have any on or off buttons. I briefly considered using the travel glasses to ask someone what to do with it, but there wasn’t anyone to contact. Edgar was gone. Enta had made it clear that she needed time alone. Any communication with the presently existing Valcas—the one presumably out there still looking for me—was absolutely out of the question. I suddenly felt very stupid. I didn’t have the magical key that I’d been looking for in my backpack.
At the sound of faintly approaching footsteps, I turned my back to the door I’d just tried to open. A sharp intake of breath later, the footsteps—those of a guard—became louder and more pointedly directed toward me.
“Hello? Is there someone there?” a voice called out.
I stood still, not sure whether to respond, not wanting to give myself away. As the figure of a man became more visible in the hallway, I noticed that it was my interrogator, the security guard who questioned me when I arrived at the white tower the first time. “Hello,” I called out, waving. “I’m trying to find the guest suite I stayed in earlier, but none of these doors will open.”
The guard increased his pace, stopping twice to lock a couple of white doors—from the outside.
“Miss Winston. I should have known. I’m locking up for the night. Shall I escort you back to your room?”
“No, thank you. I was trying to find—”
“Back this way, Miss Winston. I’m not sure how you managed to wander so far from the main house. The guest suites have been vacant for a couple of weeks now. No one’s been in there since the silhouettes were last sighted. The rooms are locked now, as a matter of security.” The guard peered down at me over his thick moustache.
“The silhouettes are still here?”
“Only what’s left of them, the remnants of travel.”
“Huh?”
“Occasionally travelers will bring along with them guests from other places, most often the past, and then just leave them here. That’s all well and good and everything, but it gives me the willies. It’s like living in the midst of ghosts.”
I stepped in time with the guard, our footsteps tapping noisily down the hallway. “Do the silhouettes find their way home without the traveler who brought them?”
“No. The way I understand it is that the silhouettes just fade away, eventually disappearing. Oh don’t worry now—there’s no harm in it. Can’t hurt anything really.”
“Then why bother locking the doors?”
“Erm,” the guard grunted. “Another presence has been felt here, one in addition to you and the two silhouettes. Boggles my mind how it would have gotten past security. Ah, well, maybe whoever it is hasn’t completely shown up yet. Don’t you worry now, Miss Winston, we’ll be keeping an eye on the situation.”
The guard bowed and bid me good-night once he saw that I was safely back in my suite. The door behind me locked with an insistent click.