The hallway is even worse than the study. I see ghosts, I see memories, I see what the von Reigenbachs have done here and the scars and stains they’ve simply hidden behind portraits, all laid bare by the Augur’s Tears. I don’t feel drunk, but Icertainlydon’t feel stable either, the walls shifting around me through centuries of change.
I stumble to the nearest servant corridor. It’s deserted, as I hoped. Everyone is too busy waiting on our guests downstairs, and I understand now why Adalbrecht knocked out the only two guards on duty.
The dark, cramped corridors are only slightly better, but finally I make it back to my room in the riverfront wing. It, too, boils with ghosts, and I canhearevery speck of floating dust, every stitch of fabric on the bedspread, every spiral of frost creeping over the cold windows.
I drop to my knees, shaking, then curl up on the floor. How am I supposed to do this for anhour? I want the world to steady out, I want to feel safe again, I want my mother—any of them—
I catch myself before the unspoken plea can fully manifest. I know that price. I won’t pay it. I won’t.
Something soft pushes at my hand.
“No, you need to get up,” Ragne yowls. “You are sick, you need help.”
I open my eyes. She’s hard to look at, like when thenachtmahrin Lähl split into a thousand versions of itself at the toll of the bells. Only each of Ragne’s forms is different, and I see all of them at once, anchored in twin dots of burning red. A moon hangs over her head, waxing from dark to full.
I see blood on snow, a tiny, wriggling ball of shadows cradled in Eiswald’s cold hands. I see Ragne rolling and crawling with the beasts of the forest, learning their ways as she learns their forms, but never quite settling in. Her mother is a Low God, and her father is a human, and she is not quite either, and she is not quite kin with anything, and she is not quite of any world.
I hear her excitement to venture with me into the world of her father, singing through every heartbeat.
I hear her disappointment when the first human she meets is bent only on gold, and on saving her own skin.
“You helped me,” I whisper. “Why?”
“Because that’s what people do,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Humans just make it complicated. Up, now. You drank too much.”
I feel so heavy. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was angry, but it wasn’t your fault. It was . . . mean.”
Ragne doesn’t answer a moment. I think I see her tail lashing. Eventually she says, “It was mean, but your godmothers are cruel, and I think the Gisele hurt you. But don’t do it again. Please, get up.”
I roll over. The room spins. Somewhere above me, a couple is arguing in a time when this was a guest room. I can see the volcano that made the lava that turned to stone that tumbled through the mountains until it was dug up, cut into a square, and built into the wall beneath the plaster.
“It’s too much,” I wheeze.
Ragne bumps my hand with her head again. “I will go get help. You have a few hours before this reaches your heart and kills you.”
“Oh. Fantastic.”
“I will be fast,” she promises. And then she is gone.
“Lady? Can I do anything?” Poldi asks from the hearth.
I cover my eyes. “Stay there. I’ve had Augur’s Tears, and if I see the truth of you, I think my brain will break.”
“Right you are. Careful what you say, for as long as the Tears hold you, you’ll speak only the truth.”
What a fun, terrible new complication.
Every moment I lie there with my eyes closed, the truth digs into my other senses all the more viciously. I hear the wind in the forests of the timbers that built the bedframe. I taste Irmgard’s lies like rotten milk. I can’t . . .
I can’t stay like this.
I make myself get up. The floordoesfeel like it’s swaying now. I stagger to brace myself on the bedpost, then look up, and find—
The vanity mirror.
I see myself.
I see my own face beneath the pearls, I see the dress sitting wrong because it doesn’tfitme, it fits Gisele, all of this fits Gisele and I’m just a thief and a liar and too much of a coward to be—myself. I see the hand of Death and the hand of Fortune, one on each shoulder. I see my birth mother behind me, just the same as she was the night she left me in the woods, and the shapeless ghosts of my siblings behind her.
