Behind me, in the reflection, the mortal girl drew down her hood to reveal her perfect heart-shaped face and rosebud mouth.
“The castle is not open to visitors,” she said, her huge dreamy eyes still not meeting mine.
“I’m not a visitor,” I said coldly. “I’m the wife of Lord Riverbarrow, the Arrow, and I will have what I have come for and then I will leave, and I think it might be best if we fetch you back to the mortal world when I go.”
“We don’t have time to save strays,” Sparrow reminded me.
“The castle is not open to visitors,” the girl said, and what in the world was wrong with her eyes? Now that she was close I could have sworn there was a red hourglass in her pupils.
I shook my head at the incongruity of it.
“The Library is down the hall to the left,” Grosbeak said, helpfully. “I was here once for the most delightful party. Antlerdale made visible an entire staff of mortals to serve dinner and between courses he made them fight to the death. The food was less than spectacular, but by the end of the night you could barely dance, the floor was so slippery.”
Nausea rolled over me. Would I never stop being horrified by the things Grosbeak had done in life?
“I was at that party,” Sparrow remarked casually. “I lost two hundred gold crowns when my mortal fell in the last duel. Slipped on someone’s intestines. Lost his footing. Terrible luck.”
“You bet on that fight?” I asked, horror in my voice.
“He looked strong,” she said defensively. “And his reflexes made him nearly Wittenbrand fast. If Antlerdale hadn’t made them fight that round blindfolded, he’d never have made such a disaster of it. He was a prince among mortals I think. Very pretty.”
“Ptolemoore,” Grosbeak added. “A prince of Ptolemoore. Beautiful for a mortal. A war was launched for his twin sister’s hand. I remember the drama of it. Antlerdale wanted the girl for himself but her brother took her place as a sacrifice to him, and Antlerdale put him in the entertainment as punishment for the insolence. Terrible waste, I thought.”
“Mmm,” Sparrow agreed.
I clenched my jaw, sealing my lips in censure.
“And to think I’ve felt pity for both of you being nothing more than severed heads now,” I said, chastising them. “You deserve no pity at all when you have none for others.”
“They were only mortals,” Grosbeak said, snickering. “Hardly worth noticing until Antlerdale immortalized them in death.”
“The same could be said of you,” I snapped. “For your life was nothing before my husband animated your severed head.”
I glanced over my shoulder to see how the mortal woman following us was taking all this, but she smiled calmly as she followed me, her eyes never meeting mine, as if hearing that her master made people die in grisly ways was of no more consequence than discussing the weather.
The hall to the library was lined from the polished floor to the high ceiling with skulls. They ranged from skulls so tiny they could only belong to a mouse to one the size of a fishing vessel that could easily have been the skull of a dragon. In that skull, the needle-like teeth were as long as my legs and laid out in three rows and the nose and brow bore bony ridges. I shuddered at the human skulls that accompanied them. Quite possibly one belonged to that poor twin prince of Ptolemoore.
The skulls were bleached and pale, mounted on walls of glittering gold, but I found I could not meet their empty eyes because when I did, it felt as if they were moving to watch me, as if they were as alive as Grosbeak or Sparrow. I had been too long in the Wittenhame to soothe myself with the idea that such a thing was impossible. Instead, the further down the long hall that I went, the more I was sure that it wasn’t only possible, it was certain.
“Do these skulls speak?” I asked calmly.
“Not that I’ve heard,” Sparrow said. “But they sing. One night, Antlerdale wrote his own arrangement for their choir. A strange piece that. It involved a great deal of rattling and crashing. I did not find it particularly harmonious.”
“He should stick to the written word,” Grosbeak agreed. “It’s not fair to be terrible at two forms of art at once.”
“Not fair to the audience,” Sparrow sniffed.
I glanced over my shoulder at my unconscious husband. I did not like bringing him to this terrible place when he was so vulnerable. I kept feeling a prickling in the skin of my nape, as though something terrible was about to happen to him. But what choice did I have? I must follow the clue or give up and I would not surrender for anything less than death itself.
We reached the towering doors of the library and I was grateful to have something else to focus on. I did not care for my friends’ grisly stories. They felt entirely too real in this Wittentale of a place.
If the library was anything to judge by, Antlerdale adored books.
The doors to it were heavy wood set with stained glass that depicted roses climbing through the panes as if they were living things rather than fanciful glass creations.
Those doors were open already, standing as high as five of me tall. But I barely glanced at them. My attention was entirely absorbed in what was beyond them — at the swollen library ten of me tall, set with enormous shelves around its circular perimeter, winding ladders and stairs, and stacks of books so mountainous one could never hope to catalog them all, much less read them. As I watched, books took flight — sometimes solitary, sometimes in flocks — fluttering across the library and arranging themselves as they pleased, as if they were caged birds rather than tomes.
And there in the center, in pride of place, was a pedestal. On it, under glass, was a single red rose floating in the air with only one petal left hanging from its sorry stem. Under the rose, heaped in dead petals, was a bound red leather book with its golden title emblazoned across the cover.
