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“Will we die here?” Norrie asks. “If the Bridge doesn’t pick us, does it just push us to the After Worlds? I’ve listened to every conversation, read every book I could steal, and no one has an answer. I thought it didn’t matter if I could save my sister, but now…I’d do anything to see her again. She’s such a brave kid.” Her voice breaks. “She shouldn’t be sick, but I don’t want to die either. Do you know what happens to those the Bridge doesn’t choose?”
“No. The twins don’t either.” I’ve worried about it, but honestly, I can’t let them be executed. Or sold off to some demon. Plus, I want to see Lala one last time, to know what clarity had come over her in the end because it’d been my final chance to actually be with her instead of the remnants of her mind left behind by the dementia. And now with the languishing souls? I’m all in.
“If you want to go home,” Rona says, “the Bridge will send you. No one sees where you go because you candidates are alone at the trials. You simply vanish. It doesn’t mean you die. The goddess who created the Bridge wouldn’t allow that.”
“How do you know?” Norrie asks.
Rona grins. “I knew the goddess while she was awake.”
The goddess who has slept for thousands of years in the Valley of the Gods. Just how old is Rona? I’m about to ask when the brownie speaks again.
“I could help your sister,” she says. “Or I know those who can. I’m not saying they can cure her, but they might be able to ease her pain. And yours.” Norrie sways as if she might pass out, and Rona flicks a hand to hold up the woman who’s so much bigger. “Go to your tower, girl,” she says. “I’ll help you if you promise not to fight Rosemarie for the crown and not to help Cutter’s candidate during the trials.”
“Done,” Norrie says around a knot of tears. “You both should know Wilborne is chanting all this stuff that doesn’t translate. I don’t know if he’s praying or hexing or what, but I thought you should know. Best of luck,” she tells me.
I’m still watching her run along the wall when the door to the Royal Tower opens. A woman in a black gown that looks like a period costume from a gothic movie comes out, the dress’s lace train dragging behind her. Her white hair frizzes in all directions around a crooked gold crown.
Anger steals my breath. This is the queen—the queen who has forgotten the dead and left them to languish in a cell where they can find no peace.
I step forward, ready to rage at her, but she lifts her head. Scars and puckered skin are where her eyes should be.
“What happened to her?” I whisper to Rona.
“She did that,” the brownie says. “In one of her fits, she tore out her own eyes. Better than seeing us monsters.” She hisses. “When she’s the monster.”
The queen walks to the Bridge, grabs a chunk and tears it away. “For not granting my wish.” She tosses the stone to the ground and goes for another.
The Bridge screams, and pain lances through my head. I have to make it stop.
But before I can move, Rona vanishes us away to the kitchen. I slump forward, hugging my middle and dry heaving. The Bridge’s cries still ring in my ears.
“Shh.” Rona rubs my arm, and the sickness ebbs away. “It was too much. Let me take some of the hurt from you.”
“What…why would she…?” I can’t catch my breath to finish a question. Huey hops next to me, fluttering up when I sit on the ground and pull my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. He settles on my wrist, almost weightless.
Rona pats my shoulder, murmuring more soothing words.
The tightness in my chest loosens, and my worries pour forth. “What was the queen’s wish? I need to know. I have to know. If mine could be twisted so terribly, I can’t risk what it might do to my Lala.”
Rona’s sad gaze meets mine. “The queen lost a child. The same as so many of us have. I’ve lost several. I understand her agony, I do. But she asked the Bridge for something she couldn’t have.”
A child? My heart breaks for the loss. “What was her wish?”
“For the return of her child. You are asking to speak with your loved one, to say a goodbye, to seek her wisdom. But visits weren’t enough for the queen. No, she wanted to rip the babe from the paradise where little souls shine brightly.”
I cover my mouth to hold back my horror. My sympathy for both drowns me, and I want to sink into it and not hear the rest. But I can’t.
“The Bridge couldn’t do that,” Rona says. “Or maybe it wouldn’t. It might have in the future when the queen no longer lives, but while she wore the crown, she would only be allowed to see the child on occasion, not to keep him with her. The queen went mad. She chose not to see at all rather than be bound by the Bridge. And now she desecrates it by tearing it apart piece by piece.”
My stomach churns and burns. I’m going to be sick. Except Rona sweeps a touch over my forehead, calming the swell of emotions as if stealing all but the ones I came into the kitchen with in the first place. Suddenly, my fight with Atticus doesn’t seem so big.
“Why didn’t the gargoyles replace her sooner?” I ask.
“The Bridge didn’t allow them to.”
“Why not? If she was destroying it?”
Rona brushes her mitten against my hair. “I suspect it was waiting for you to be ready. Now do you have the knowledge you require to face the choices you need to make?” Her voice jolts me like a shot of courage. “To do the things that must be done?”
