“I don’t remember,” said Sylvester briefly, which I felt wasn’t entirely the truth. I wanted to know more, but this was hardly the time to press him, even if I had been able to catch my breath for long enough to do so.
He seemed to know where he was going, however, and after many twists and turns and flights of stairs, we reached the room in which I had been held. There were scuffs of dirt and ash where Millie had been sitting, but no Millie.
“It’s too late,” said Sylvester. “She has been taken.”
“Maybe she escaped in all the confusion,” I said. “When you put everyone to sleep. They didn’t have her tied up.”
I willed it to be so. I pictured her slipping out of the palace, barefoot, creeping back to her life on the street. It would be filled with horrors, of course, but they would be familiar, understandable horrors, the mundane kind that filled every city street—not the arcane and unimaginable fate that awaited her at the king’s hand.
Perhaps she could even be found and taken in by a kind family—why not, since I was already imagining an unlikely future? Sylvester, however, looked unconvinced. “No. They work quickly, as I said. She is probably already undergoing the ... process.”
“Your father talked about aprocessas well,” I said. “What is it?”
“We might still be able to find her,” he said instead, and strode away again. Cornelius looked at me over his shoulder and gave his little cat shrug.
I don’t know how long we had been wandering about the palace at this point, but probably longer than we should have been. Sylvester didn’t seem concerned that his spell would wear off yet, and so I kept my mouth shut and followed in his wake as best I could.
I took about seven steps for every one of his. It was like a beetle racing a daddy longlegs. Cornelius was lucky to be able to perch on the sorcerer’s shoulder—I wished I could have.
I didn’t tell him that my legs were starting to ache. Honestly, I was so happy to be back in his presence that I could almost ignore the pain. It was exasperating to find myself right back under his spell when I had hoped to be halfway home by now, but I couldn’t resist its pull.
We came to a door that looked exactly like all the others, but Sylvester paused his long stride when we reached it.
“Do you know this room?” I asked, panting again.
“Yes,” Sylvester responded, briefly and unhelpfully. He pressed his flat palm against the wood of the door. Cornelius jumped down from his shoulder and wound himself around my shins as he smelled the distinctive scent of magic.
Sylvester had his eyes closed, a frown knitting his dark eyebrows together, and I could see how taut he was holding his body, how the expectation of failure white-knuckled his splayed hand.
Without thinking too much about it, I reached out and placed my hand over his. I felt his slight start as my skin touched his, and his eyes flicked to mine, sending a shock through me like the first time he had looked at me, back in the village. I forced myself not to look away.
“You can do it,” I insisted, willing him to believe.
He took a sharp breath and turned his gaze back to the door. The wood curled away from his long fingers, turning from planks to coiling branches that twisted themselves into an opening as neat as a picture frame.
It was oddly beautiful to watch, and even though I knew we had to move swiftly, I found myself mesmerized. I had never seen the sorcerer do anything with his magic other than destroy or burn things, or create pointless toys, and I was surprised by how moved I was by the elegance of it.
I was so absorbed in watching the door that I did not realize my hand was still on Sylvester’s, our fingers now entwined on what had become a branch. I snatched my hand back. Sylvester looked at me, his expression unreadable.
“You just have to remind the wood what it once was,” he murmured.
“When you’ve quite finished,” interrupted Cornelius.
Sylvester stepped through the new doorway he had created, and after a moment, I followed. The dimly swirling air in this new room had that same metallic taste of magic, stronger than I had ever experienced it. I might as well have been sucking on a coin.
“There she is,” said Sylvester.
The only light in the room came from a tall glass cylinder that looked like one of the heart jars, just on a much larger scale—eight feet tall, at least, and a good two arms’ breadth around. A thick, honeylike substance filled it and glowed golden, giving an eerie cast to the room.
I could see little else: a long table, bare; a tiled floor that sloped to a drain; and an assortment of gleaming metal instruments hooked onto the far wall, too dimly lit to see in detail. The yellow light had a queasy, unsettling quality that made everything in the room seem like a bad dream.
“That’s Millie,” I confirmed. I took a few steps toward the shining cylinder and stopped just shy of it, my feet refusing to take me any closer.
The little girl floated in the honeylike liquid, naked, her toes pointed like a dancer’s, her arms outspread and drifting. The liquid’s slow movement transformed her floating hair into mermaid curls, coiling up from her scalp like the flame of a candle and forming graceful, mesmeric shapes.
I was so engrossed in the eerie beauty of her that it took me a moment to notice the pins—wide as my forearm—piercing her hands, her feet, and, impossibly, passing right through her neck. There was no blood or bruising, no sign of injury. If anything, the curve of her lips was slightly upturned, as if she were having a pleasant dream.
From each end of the pins, which were almost invisible for their fineness, delicate threads like silver hairs rose up to the top of the cylinder, as if Millie had become a madman’s marionette. Her heart, removed from her chest by some alchemy, floated a little way in front of her body, attached by another silver thread.
