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Before I could ask, she lifted a hand to a stone even with her shoulder and pressed.
What had seemed like an impenetrable wall of stone shifted, creating a passageway.
“After you,” she said, voice still emotionless.
I ducked to get in, but once I was through, I was able to stand easily. She slid in behind me, leaving the way open.
On one side of us, a wall of water. The backside of that grand waterfall, I realized. On the other side, a stone wall that reached up and up and up. Every inch of it was covered in carvings.
“What is this place?” I stepped back, craning my neck to see, minding the edge that plummeted to the pool below.
“Forgotten,” Veyka said succinctly. “The water gardens are forbidden to courtiers. They have been since my mother and father’s reign. Perhaps longer.”
I noted the slight tremor in her voice, but she was trying so hard to cover it that I didn’t acknowledge it. “Why keep them hidden?”
I watched her bite down hard on her cheek. “It was incidental.”
My eyes tracked over the carvings at my eye level, as well as those that Veyka could easily see. “It looks like a depiction of the Great War.”
I could make out the shapes of the Ancestors—Nimue and her consort, Accolon, the first two fae from each kingdom to fulfill the Offering. Higher up on the wall was the Battle of the Roses, where so many of my own bloodline had fought and died.
Veyka’s face lifted higher, scanning above her own head. “Parys said this is the oldest part of the palace. This existed before the Great War.”
I followed her line of sight. Sure enough, the events of the Great War gave way to less familiar representations.
“This is Annwyn,” Veyka said, tracing an outline in the shape of the continent, then pausing at a similar outline carved right below it. “Is this the human realm?”
I looked closer. The landmarks were the same, but the symbols marking them were different. “It must be. They are mirrors of each other.”
That was how the rifts worked. The human and fae realms existed on different planes, but their physical attributes were the same. The Effren Valley, the Split Sea, the Spine… all of those landmarks existed in the human realm as well, by different names, used differently by the humans who lacked the magic, speed, and the long-life of the fae.
The rifts allowed one to travel between the planes. If one passed through the rift in the mountains surrounded Baylaur, they would emerge at the same place, but in the human realm.
I followed Veyka’s hand as it drifted upward. To another outline of Annwyn, above our own. Then another. And another.
Nonsense, all of it. Without the historical reference points, I couldn’t begin to decipher what any of it meant. I moved farther along the ledge, studying the carvings. There were two armies, facing off against one another. One had the pointed ears of the fae, the other the rounded of the humans.
I knew no history of a war between human and fae. Humans were too weak, too easily put down.
This was a waste of time.
The carvings were rough, impossible to glean any real meaning from. The eyes of the humans were little more than black smudges, their bodies carelessly rendered. While the fae were perfectly wrought, here and there a human arm or leg stuck out at an odd angle.
I recalled an adage my mother said once, during those brief years she’d thought to school me for a life of royalty rather than bloodshed. Something about history being recorded by the victorious. Whatever fae scholar had etched these carvings, they didn’t think much of the humans.
A belief I shared.
I made my way back to Veyka. She’d drifted from side to side, examining the carvings, but was now back as I’d left her—tracing the repeated outlines.
“Anything?” she asked, eyes not leaving the wall.
“Depictions of a human-fae war.”
Her eyes flicked to me in question. I could only shrug.
“I’ll ask Parys to look into it.” Then her eyes were back on the wall.
Her empty expression had given way to something else, something softer. Her brows were furrowed slightly, lips pressed outward in the slightest pout. I watched her fingertips moving—first over the human realm, then Annwyn, then higher to the repeated image.
