by Lindsey Duga
We built a fire the old-fashioned way and threw our bed wraps over Millennia. Though Brom had assured me that physically he felt fine, nearly dying had taken its toll on him mentally, so I pressured him to sleep, and in no time, his head was on my lap and he was snoring lightly.
At his snoring, Zach and I looked at each other and shared a smile.
Zach prodded the fire with a stick and gestured to Brom. “I owe him my life.”
“Stand in line,” I said with a soft laugh.
“What’s the story between you two?” he asked. “Most Royals don’t care so much about their pages.”
“We’re family. He was assigned to me when he was very young, after he lost his parents. So he might have actually seen me as more of a mother back then, even though technically he was supposed to take care of me.” I brushed some hair away from his forehead and smiled. “One of his first nights as my page, he developed a bad cough. It had been from crying himself to sleep the night before. I stayed up that night with him, giving him honeyed lemons. After that, he followed me around wherever I went. He was there for me when my mother never wanted to be. I…I don’t know what I would’ve done if he’d… I was foolish to let him come.”
“From the sound of it, I doubt you could’ve stopped him.”
“Probably not.” I bit my bottom lip and looked at Zach. “It was Love, wasn’t it?”
He almost smiled, then he dropped his gaze to the fire. “You tell me, Ivy Myriana.”
I wasn’t a witch or a mage. My only magic came from my Kiss. For all I knew, I did not have magical tears, for I had cried enough to know.
“I know nothing about Love, Zach, so you tell me.”
He looked up, brows raised. “You said you knew what Love was.”
“Only the Legion’s version of Love. Something tells me it’s different than yours.”
I thought he would’ve been happy to talk about the force he believed so strongly in. Instead, he looked uncomfortable. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m starting to understand that, but please try,” I said quietly, running my fingers through Brom’s light brown hair.
“Well, there’s Love between friends and family—Familial Love.” He tilted his chin at Brom. “Some people say that’s the best form of Love. It’s universal. Even Royals accept it—without calling it that. They understand it, because it helps them preserve strong bloodlines.”
I nodded, plenty familiar with that already. It was the Royal “bond” that I thought I’d always shared with Brom. Now I knew, it wasn’t strong enough to describe what I felt for him.
“But Romantic Love…” Zach shook his head. “It’s completely and utterly irrational. It can’t be understood, and it can’t be explained. It’s unreasonable—which is probably why the Legion doesn’t want to believe it exists. It’s falling for someone even when you know they can’t love you back.” At that, his eyes drifted to my face, and I looked away, my pulse spiking.
“Love is sacrifice. It’s painful. It’s wishing that you could have one more day together, one more minute, one more second together, and hoping it lasts a lifetime, and then believing maybe it could.” Zach was whispering now, watching the sparks in our tired fire die.
“That sounds absolutely foolish—”
He frowned. “Well, maybe but—”
“—and completely wonderful.”
He looked up, and his eyes widened.
I wasn’t sure what kind of expression I was making, because I’d never remembered feeling this way before. I lifted my hands to my mouth and sucked in a quick breath, holding back a tide of emotions. Terrified, excited, sad, and happy all at once—swirling inside me.
His mouth pulled up into a small half smile, and he looked at me with what I could only suspect was…well, love.
…
“How did you fall in love with your fiancé?” I asked Millennia later.
She stopped, and the stone steps she’d been raising crumbled. After a long rest for both her and Zach, we’d finally picked up the trail to the top of the ravine. While I’d been trying to focus on the path ahead, my mind kept going back to my conversation with Zach hours before.
Her blue eyes narrowed. “What do you mean—how?”
“I honestly want to know. I don’t talk to many Romantica. I don’t know how Love…happens.”
Her shoulders relaxed a little, and she stared off into the distance, as if lost in a memory. “That’s the thing. It just does. No reason at all. Or maybe it’s all the reasons.”
She was about to continue when Zach peeked his head from the top of the ravine’s wall we’d been climbing for the past hour. “Hurry, ladies, you have to see this.”
Glancing at each other, Millennia and I dropped our conversation and picked up the pace. She lifted the stone steps back up for me, and in no time we were at the top.
I saw why Zach was excited. We were very high into the mountains, but the stone had given way to life. Grass, trees, and other greenery decorated the side of the mountain we were now traversing. It was a nice change to see green rather than gray, and I was grateful for it. In a few months, this would all be snow. How lucky we were that it was late spring. Passing under a few trees, I found the pain in my chest and the weight in my shoulders barely tolerable, and rested against a large trunk.
Millennia stopped next to me, checking my face, then called up to Brom and Zach, “Go on. See what’s ahead. We’ll catch up.” She turned back to me, handing me her water flask.
“Thank you,” I said, then guzzled down the water. I handed back her flask. “You were saying about Love?”
She smiled as she took the water. “Where was I?”
“The reasons,” I urged.
She was quiet for a moment, flattening the grass with her boot in a small circle. “You find yourself looking at his faults, looking at yours, comparing them over and over in your head until you realize you just don’t care. For me…Tarren and I grew up together. We were childhood friends, and it just grew into something more, naturally. Not that it wasn’t hard sometimes. I once thought he was cheating on me, and I became so jealous.”
She paused, squeezing her eyes shut as if it hurt to bring up those memories.
Then after a few minutes, she opened her eyes and continued. “It turned out he was being secretive because he was trying to buy me a ring.” She shook her head and laughed, then her smile crumbled, and tears swam in her blue eyes.
I took her hands. “Oh, Millennia, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, it’s all right. I just miss him.” She hurriedly wiped tears away, then looked back at me with a hardened gaze and held out her hand in front of my face. On her ring finger was a gorgeous band of braided silver. The ring Tarren had given her. “But it forces me to keep going.”
I couldn’t find any words to reply as we started back down the path.
…
Another sharp pain split my side, and I winced, drawing Brom’s attention from staring up at the great mountains ahead of us.
“You feel it more up here, don’t you?” Brom asked, sidling closer to me.
I scowled. Of course he noticed. Zach had, too. They had both been slowing down for me and taking more breaks since we’d left the ravine. Both could tell the pain in my chest grew worse and worse. Zach in particular kept hovering around me, the same expression of guilt he wore when he’d first learned I’d taken his Sense from him.
“I’m fine.” I kneaded my side, and the pain eased slightly. “Just tired of sitting in the same position for three hours.”
Brom rolled his eyes and rested his folded arms on his knees. “And yet you’ve never complained during watch before.”
Ignoring him, I turned my attention back to the sky. The stars and moon were no longer visible. Instead it looked like a dark charcoal blanket had been placed over the world. “The sun should have risen by now…”
My gaze focused in on the horizon. A cluster of black clouds had emerged betwe
en two peaks where the sun was supposed to be. With a jolt of horror, I realized they weren’t black clouds. They were sparrow harpies.
I jumped to my feet, my heart racing like I’d just run up the side of the great ravine. While sparrow harpies feasted only on the dead, I’d never heard of a swarm this size. A swarm that blocked the sun.
“Sparrow harpies. Everyone up. MOVE!” I yelled.
Millennia and Zach were up in seconds. We scrambled for our gear and raced toward the rocky outcrops, searching for shelter. Brom was the one to find the first cave. It was a small entrance, barely big enough for Zach to fit through, but he squeezed in between the rocks just as the buzzing sound reached our ears. In no time, the sound grew to the magnitude of a torrential downpour. It was like a tornado was whipping through the mountains, shredding the very stones.
On instinct, we backed farther into the cave, our boots slipping on the pebbles and loose rocks. Millennia produced a small fire, and its light bounced around stone walls, illuminating stalagmites and stalactites that stretched toward each other almost like the teeth of a great monster in the Seas of Glyll.
Brom leaned against the cave wall. “How long do you think we’ll have to stay in here?”
“However long it takes for the swarm to pass.” I cursed. “I just hope they stay in the mountains.”
“But sparrow harpies don’t feed on the living,” Millennia said.
I shook my head. “That doesn’t mean they’re harmless. There’s no telling what a swarm that size could do.”
Zach nodded. “We need to find that egg.”
As a particularly loud buzz echoed through our cave, Brom slipped from his stance against the wall and fell with a surprisingly loud crash of…metal?
Confused, Zach, Millennia, and I converged on Bromley. Millennia held the ball of fire in her palm, casting its orange glow at his feet. Scattered across the cave floor was an array of ancient-looking mining tools and a slew of small glittering gems. The magical firelight danced over the jewels’ surfaces, making them look liquid.
I bent and touched a rusty pickaxe then winced as the blade nicked my finger. Still sharp. Only dwarf tools and weapons could remain that sharp after all these years.
“Dwarf mine,” I whispered under my breath, a little excited. This could’ve been the cave where the dwarves of the story had dwelled, guarding their jewels and luring unsuspecting humans to trade and double-cross—sometimes murder. Could this be the legendary cave where the hunter Raed was cursed into a beast and fled to Maid Freida’s cabin? It was a silly thought—there were so many caves in these mountains.
“I’m not surprised,” Millennia said, lifting her fireball higher to give the room a wider glow. “According to legend, these caves had been full of them long ago.”
“Yes, but they also should have been cleared out by Royals hundreds of years ago. After the dwarves stole away the first heir, Myriana and Raed personally led an army to these mountains and tore apart the mines.”
Zach shrugged. “There must’ve been hundreds. Maybe they missed one.”
I didn’t reply. Something…something felt strange here. For the past two days my Sense had been pulling me in a certain direction. It had been strong and painful, barely able to ignore or push down. But the moment I’d stepped into the cave, my Sense had been…muffled. Almost like someone had placed a pillow over it. It was there, ever-present, but muted. I’d never experienced anything like it before. That alone made me insatiably curious.
I moved deeper into the cave, seeing more relics strewn about that had been tested by time. Most of them were jewels and mining tools, and others were tablets with dwarven curses carved into the stone.
Millennia suddenly gripped my arm tightly. I turned to look back at her, and her eyes looked strangely…purple in the firelight.
“We shouldn’t venture far,” she said, her voice low and heavy.
I pried her hand away and turned deeper into the tunnel. My Sense was almost entirely deafened now, replaced with a strange inner toll. It was like when I was in Myria Tower and its bells pealed over the kingdom, sending vibrations into my bones.
We entered a room much bigger and cleaner, as if someone had cleared away all loose rock and pebbles, but it held more dwarven items. Large symbols were carved into the stone, and against the far end of the room was a full-length mirror, more symbols lining the edges, like a decorative frame.
The mirror was dusty and tarnished, but I knew, without a doubt, that this was where the vibrations inside me were coming from. I moved toward it, not even sure what I wanted to do, just knowing I had to find their source, like the bells in the tower back home.
“Ivy.”
I flinched at the sound of my name, and looked over my shoulder to see Millennia standing there with wild eyes. They were back to being blue, but she clutched her head like she was in terrible pain, as if a wedge had been driven into her skull.
“Ivy, don’t. What are you doing?” she whispered.
Her voice was frightening, in a way that made me both scared of it and scared for her. I looked behind her to see Zach and Brom, both staring at me, completely mystified.
“Ivy, what is it?” Zach asked. “Talk to me.”
“It’s a magic mirror. It has to be. And I feel something strange, like…like bells or…”
Millennia gripped her head, her hands buried deep into her raven black hair, her breath coming out in wheezes.
I looked back at the mirror, close enough now to see the symbols clearly, and I realized that what I had thought were dwarven symbols were actually spell words, more specifically, the words of shared memories.
Don’na illye min’na.
“Ivy,” Millennia hissed, “back away.”
Zach, Brom, and I stared at her in surprise. Her voice was like a viper’s hiss, unnatural and…and evil.
I glanced back at the mirror. What did she so desperately not want me to see? “You know what this is,” I muttered, finally recognizing what I saw in her eyes—fear.
She said nothing, but her shoulders were tense, her hands clenched at her sides. The flames that she’d once held now danced across her knuckles, turning her hands into two glowing balls of fire. But her long sleeves did not catch. Perhaps a strange thing to notice, but seeing the crazed look in her eyes, I knew there was no way she was fully concentrating, so why was her fire so controlled?
Like I’d suspected from the beginning, Millennia was too skilled for someone her age. I’d chalked it up to a natural-born talent, but even that was farfetched for her level of control. It was too strange…impossible, even.
Then there was the place she’d said she came from: Raed. The forests of Raed. It was where my mother had said there’d been a sighting of the Evil Queen—she had asked to send troops to investigate the sighting.
It was too much of a coincidence, and it all came down to one important question.
“Millennia,” I breathed, taking a backward step toward the mirror. “Who…who did you say your master was?”
She lunged for me, as I somehow knew she would, but I flung myself at the mirror and collided into the glass.
“Ivy!” someone screamed. Zach, or Brom, or maybe both. They sounded far away.
Amber light poured around me, sucking me into the world of the mirror.
Chapter
Thirty-One
Shared Memories
“The world of the mirror, my child, is a place you should never enter. It holds the memories of its owners, including their thoughts, hopes, and dreams. Spend too long within the shared memories of a magic mirror and you will begin to lose yourself and forget that these memories…are not your own.”
Gelloren’s words from a childhood lesson came back to me in the glow of the brilliant amber light. It seared my eyes and made my head scream in pain, as if it was about to split open. As quickly as it came, the pain faded, and a scene swam into view.
I recognized the Hall of Ancestors, half-built, with the roof still sti
ll open to the sun and clouds. The arches had yet to be joined in the middle or the carved faces added to the walls.
The details of the memory were crisp, as though whoever it belonged to had retained it from that morning.
A handsome man, with dark brown hair and a clipped beard, wore fine clothes and a cloak that was such a deep red it reminded me of Weldan’s. He stood in the center, arguing with a group of other men plainly dressed. He gestured wildly and shook his head, finally raising his voice to the nonexistent ceiling, “I don’t care what they all think. This is the end of the discussion.”
“But King Raed—”
Raed. That means the magic mirror holds the memories of…
Anxiety flowed through me as I stood watching Raed, my husband, argue with those from the village.
“I said no. Now leave. I must talk to my queen.” His gaze shifted back to me.
As the scene transformed into shades of amber light, the people and the half-built hall contorting, I tried to hold on to who I was—I was Ivy, not the owner of these memories. But I already felt unbearable sadness flow through me like white-water rapids, pulling me under until I couldn’t separate my own self from the memories that now surrounded me.
I was in a bedroom, curled in the sheets, sobbing, a pool of blood between my legs.
“Darling,” a soothing voice called to me from the end of the bed, “you should let them clean you up. Don’t worry, we can keep trying.”
At Raed’s voice, I sat up and swallowed back more tears, preparing for the same argument we’d had months ago, after the last miscarriage.
“We have to stop this, Raed. We have a beautiful daughter already. Daisy.” I wrapped my arms around myself and took another breath. Each one was a struggle. “Why can’t we just make love like we used to? Why do we have to keep trying for another baby? We know the dwarves’ curse worked. I can no longer deliver a pregnancy to term. We know this.”
Speaking the words echoed the pain of losing the child all over again. Losing another precious baby who could grow up to be just as gorgeous as the one I had now. It was unbearable. Like knives cutting into my useless womb. With every lost child, the knives stabbed deeper.
