CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Sweet Dreams

The bedroom is empty and still when I stumble in, almost jarringly so. I’m trembling, cold and hot and furious and ruined, and the worst part is I know I have done this to myself. I am falling, falling, and the longer I plummet, the harder I know I will crash.

The tears are coming, I know they are. If I stop for even a moment it will all overthrow me. Instead I tell myself to go back to packing, to count the gold, to be ready to run—

A slip of paper crackles under my boot. I must have knocked it off the credenza. I pick it up and find a short message from Gisele:

The “baker” decided he doesn’t need to socialize this afternon, so I’m doing the same. Ragne and I will be keeping an eye on the children tonight to give Umayya a break. Ragne may be back later, and I’ll see you tomorrow. G

P.S. If security’s a concern, I know someone who might be willing to spend the night again!

 

I didn’t realize until this moment that I wanted to talk to her. Or Ragne. Or Joniza. Even my mothers, just once. Someone.

Damn everything, I—I want to talk to Emeric.

But apparently I can’t without holding a knife to his throat.

That’s when it catches me.

I choke back a sob, but another wells up in its place, then another. The paper crumples in my hand. I let it fall to the floor and stagger to the bed. Some remote part of me remembers to kick off my boots before I crawl beneath the blankets, though I only remember to untie my cloak after.

Something’s off about the bed. It takes me a moment to realize: It smells like lavender.

I am already good as gone.

I curl up and bury my face in a pillow as another sob rattles me like a loose door in a storm. I thought I could beat it, my fear, my past, the wolf still at my heels. I thought I could win this game.

But it’s a draw at best. I will leave Minkja with my life and my gold and a promise of freedom. Two weeks ago, that would have been enough.

Two weeks ago, I didn’t know how much more there was to lose.

I cry into the pillow until my sobs dry to gasping heaves, and when those are spent, I lie in the dull, sore haze of defeat. My head pounds from weeping, my jewels ache, and every time I think of the look on Emeric’s face my heart shatters all over again.

The day cools to afternoon, then to early evening. The room is mostly shadows when I hear his footsteps in the hall. I hate that I know

they’re his. They slow by my door a moment . . . then carry on.

Of course. Emeric has bigger problems.

Evidently Adalbrecht is too busy for dinner, too, for I hear Trudl bringing trays to the riverfront wing. Emeric’s muffled thanks is a punch in the stomach. I don’t answer when she knocks on the door, because Gisele took the pearls with her, and I have no time to cover the lines of rubies marching toward my heart. I hear the bump of a tray left in the hall before she moves on.

Not long after, the message-mirror pulses warm in my pocket.

Iron shoots through my veins. I don’t want to look, I don’t want to face the damage I’ve done—but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t starving for even a scrap of hope.

I pull the case out, heart in my throat, and unfold the mirror. Words trace across the fogged glass:

Vanja—

I can’t

I wait. There has to be more. There has to be more, it’s Emeric and he wouldn’t do less than a three-part proposal, with footnotes and a bibliography.

The fog fades, reappears. And it spells out again:

Vanja—

I can’t

Something in me breaks. I stare at the mirror, watching the words scrawl out again and again. Pain ripples through me, the jewels glittering as they swell larger. Maybe it’s just the curse, reminding me I only have

two more days. Maybe it’s just my own greed.

I am too much for him. I am not enough.

In the end, I find I still have tears left after all.

`

At some point I fade into fitful sleep.

I don’t know what wakes me up. It’s dark still—but not quite. A chilly blue light fills the room, but it’s too deep a blue to be frigid dawn.

“Get up.”

I wrench around.

Adalbrecht is standing at my bedside, a granite mountain glowering down at me.

His eyes burn the same blue, his blond hair hanging stringy and loose around his stone-hard face. He’s wearing only breeches and boots, his naked chest pale, twitching, glistening with sweat.

An iron horseshoe is nailed, points-down, over his heart. Icy light gasps from it with every beat.

I scream. My hands skid on the sheets as I try to push away. He just snatches my upper arm and drags me off the bed.

“Stop that noise,” he barks, dumping me on the ground still tangled in blankets. “No one in this castle will help you.”

The dinner. “You poisoned them.” But then—Emeric—

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not cleaning up such a mess.” He turns around and heads for the door. “They’ll sleep as long as I want them to.”

Angry black-threaded welts stitch a bleeding ring between his shoulder blades, around a patch of gray skin inked with complicated wheels of runes.

Bile surges in my throat. It’s Klemens’s tattoo. Adalbrecht has sewn it into his own back.

And suddenly I piece it together. The horseshoe, the skull, the vision of the horse head. He hasn’t used the mark to bind himself to all the Low Gods. He’s used it to bind himself to all the nachtmären. And there are as many as there are dreamers.

That’s how he’ll overrun the free states and any territory that resists. That’s why he wants the Göttermarkt for the wedding: to make sure that, for whatever he’s planning, the temple bells will be silent.

My eyes sweep around the bedroom as I struggle to my feet, looking for any way out. The pearls are with Gisele—I don’t know what he wants with me, I don’t have time to chase those threads—and Ragne’s not here either. The veranda—no, I can’t get down the trellis and to the Lovers’ Road fast enough. The windows are the same. He’s blocking the hallway door. The fireplace—

Is burning frosty blue.

I feel even sicker. “What did you do to Poldi?”

“I reminded the kobold who’s master of this castle,” Adalbrecht says. “Stop dragging your feet and come with me.”

I don’t have a way out. Yet. I follow him to the hallway.

Bodies are scattered up and down it, like they simply fell asleep where they stood. Lurching, giggling nachtmären squat on each one, stroking their ears, tying knots in their hair. Of course—one for every dreamer. And Adalbrecht can command sleep itself now.

This is beyond anything I could have planned for.

I glance toward the stairs. The hallway’s open, maybe I can make a break for it.

Then I realize Adalbrecht is leading me to Emeric.

I have no choice but to go along.

The same blue flames cast an uncanny pallor over Emeric’s room as Adalbrecht throws the door open. Emeric’s collapsed over his desk, head cushioned on his wrists; he didn’t even take his spectacles off, one wire arm digging into a temple.

A pale, grinning mahr hunches on his shoulders, hugging its knees and rocking back and forth.

Adalbrecht reaches over to the nachtmahr and grips its shoulder, closing his eyes as if listening to a distant song. A moment later, he sighs. “I see. I was right.” He thinks a moment. “I believe you’ve been informed how my father died. If you’d like to avoid Conrad bleeding out through his feet, you will listen very closely to me now. Am I understood?”

I nod.

“Am I understood?” he repeats.

“Yes,” I say aloud. His eyes flare blue, and I realize what he’s waiting for. The word sticks like coal in my teeth. “M’lord.”

“I’ve known you were a fake for nearly two weeks,” he says shortly. “The nachtmahr told me everything it dug up in your head: the pearls, the curse, even his”—he gestures disdainfully at Emeric—“ridiculous façade. That was the real Gisele in your room the night of the ball, wasn’t it? I couldn’t recall where I’d seen her, until I remembered that filthy orphanage from your dreams.”

“You’re bluffing,” I say. “If you knew where she was, you could have exposed me days ago.”

“And let the empire know an embarrassing little parasite had burrowed into my castle? I think not. I meant to kill you as a gift to Gisele, and then come to her as a savior. She would have been delivered from her misery, a prinzessin reborn.”

“And then you would murder her,” I bite out.

Adalbrecht shrugs. “Of course. But she would have died happy, and you took that from her too. I do owe you, you know. It’s impossible to find a binding mark like this anywhere else; the prefects don’t let that secret out of their sight. The Pfennigeist gave me an excuse to call them in without getting my hands dirty. After that, all I had to do was make sure you and the boy kept each other occupied.”

My belly feels like it’s turned to lead. I did this. I made this possible. The dance, the guest room, the charade of improper interest—in the end, I was always something to be used.

Adalbrecht touches the nachtmahr again. It convulses, then begins to shrink. Emeric doesn’t so much as stir a finger.

“Do you know what we do to thieves in Bóern?” Adalbrecht asks calmly.

The answer to this kind of question is, as ever, no. Or: “No, m’lord.”

“It depends on what’s stolen. What do you think the punishment would be for a treacherous maid who stole her mistress’s name? Who stole her life?” Adalbrecht watches the mahr shrivel to the size of a beetle. It slithers over Emeric’s throat.

“I—I don’t know, m’lord,” I stammer.

The mahr crawls into Emeric’s ear.

Adalbrecht’s blazing eyes flick over to me as he rests a hand on the back of Emeric’s skull. “Think harder.”

The answer should be no, but— “Hanging,” I say, desperate. Little thieves go to the gallows.

A jolt runs through Emeric, his brow furrowing with pain. Adalbrecht looks at me, waiting.

He wants worse.

“Hanging,” I say swiftly, “but—but the maid drops into a barrel, one that’s been lined with nails. So she tears herself to pieces thrashing on the noose.”

Emeric quiets.

“Good girl,” Adalbrecht says. “That will do.”

What have I done?

Adalbrecht enlightens me, shaking out his hands. “As thanks for bringing me the prefect, I will give you a choice. Tomorrow night, I will arrest Gisele von Falbirg’s maid for the crimes of the Pfennigeist. The day after, Gisele will marry me in the afternoon. Her maid will be hanged, just as you’ve described, at the end of the wedding ceremony. Gisele herself will die after the wedding night. You can play either role, and so can she. So here is my gift to you: a day to decide which of you goes to the gallows, and which of you goes to the altar.”

My fists clench in my skirts. “There’s nothing to keep her from running.”

“You are a thief and a liar. I am certain you can be convincing.” Adalbrecht brushes a bit of grime from Emeric’s shoulder. “And if you aren’t . . . we will find out how large a mahr needs to grow before it pulps a boy’s skull from the inside.”

I’m going to vomit.

He’s smiling in the gentle, savage way that says he knows it’s over.

He knows he’s got me. He knows I’ll do it, because I wear my own greed on my face.

I hate him so much. I want to seize the copper knife and see if all his blood burns blue. But he’ll kill Emeric before I can put even a scratch on him.

“Why are you doing this?” I spit instead. “You were born into everything. A family, power, wealth—”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” he says flatly. “So long as Bóern is strong, it is a threat to the imperial throne, unless that throne is mine. I watched my father send my brothers to their deaths, one after the other to thank House Reigenbach for keeping the empire safe. He bowed to an empress when we deserved to be kings. Then he sent me, and all I had on the battlefield were my nightmares. You should understand better than anyone. This isn’t about petty squabbles or silly games; it’s about taking control of my own life. I’m doing this to survive.”

And for just a moment, the mountain shudders, candor cleaving down to the raw bedrock. He believes it. He believes that he is a victim, because the life he has is not the one he thinks he is owed. That in that way, the world betrayed him, just as it betrayed me. That in this, he knows me; in this, we are the same.

But he will never understand that girls like me become liars, thieves, ghosts, all to survive men like him.

“I stole from spoiled nobles who barely missed the money,” I hiss. “If you didn’t like your life, you could have vanished into the empire. You could have lived like the rest of us, but you didn’t want to lose your castle. This isn’t about survival, it’s about comfort. You’re nothing but a murderer and a monster.”

Adalbrecht closes the distance between us in a stride. He catches my chin in those iron-hard fingers and drags me in close, smiling that awful smile. “And you still dream of me.”

He tosses me aside like a rag. I crash into the footboard hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs. When I pick myself up, he’s gone.

Emeric is motionless, still crumpled over the desk. The fire still burns unforgiving blue, the only noise in the frigid silence. Poldi can’t save me now.

I am on my own.