She retraced her steps through the empty palace. Where was everyone? There were no servants, no guards, barely any signs of life. And what little there were seemed to be dying. The large double doors of the main hall taunted her, tempting her to try and escape. But she was invested. She needed to follow through for so many reasons. Her pulse raced, wishing it were as easy as walking away, but it couldn’t be.
Besides, she didn’t have the seam ripper. And if she did leave, Teague would have every excuse to destroy her brother and friends.
This was the test. He wanted her to break her word, so he could destroy everything important to her.
She clenched her fists and headed in the opposite direction. She would not be the one to break her promise. Teague was a trickster, a cheat, and a liar—the most dangerous one alive.
After a few turns, her little Fae light surprised her in the hall—at least she thought it was her Fae light.
“Can you take me back to my room please?” she asked.
The light bobbed in response and floated about happily. Mina followed with cautious steps down a wing with double doors on the end. The light stopped in front of a door on the left, not quite at the end.
“This can’t be the door to my room. There was no door. We traveled through the walls and ended up…” She turned and tried to follow the direction of the walls with her eyes. She shrugged and opened the door.
It was her room—as far as she could tell. But this time, when she entered, she made sure to wedge a book in the doorway to keep it from closing and locking her inside. She didn’t want to upset Teague, but she also didn’t want to be locked in again.
She waited hours. He never returned to either lock her door or close it.
The next morning, she changed clothes and ate the food delivered to her. Then she decided to explore the palace. There had to be someone left. She found her way to the sitting rooms, where she had waited during the choosing ceremony. The wing full of rooms the girls had stayed in, the library, and the palace kitchen—all of them empty.
The kitchen was depressing. Everything had been abandoned, left as it was when the servants ran away or disappeared. Old bread on the table was hard and dry, dirty pots and plates left in the sink. No fire had been made in ages, which meant no food had been prepared recently here either. So whoever was preparing her meals wasn’t doing it from the kitchens. She did find buckets, mops, soap, and the water pump. She could do more than just mope around the palace.
She spent a few hours working in the kitchen, cleaning out the fireplace, finding the woodshed, and restocking the logs in the grate. She found some kindling and searched for a way to start the fire but was at a loss. She couldn’t find any matches. Then she noticed an odd red Fae light hanging just outside the window.
Mina opened the window, and it came in and moved toward her stack of logs, brightening. She jumped as a spark of light shot out, and her kindling lit. A few seconds later, she heard the crackle of wood and could feel the glow of the fire. Mina blew on the flame and fed it more kindling until a steady fire burned.
She smiled at the Fae light. “Thank you.”
Mina heated water over the fire and brought it carefully to the sink and added soap shavings from a jar on the shelf. She washed dishes for what seemed like hours. More Fae lights joined her, watching her move about the kitchen as she tried her best to put things away. If she moved a pot to the wrong spot, a light would move over and direct her to the right place.
Soon, she began to talk to the lights like she did her personal light, the one that watched over her in her room. And she realized they were all different. Some were larger than the others. Some had a hint of a different color. Some moved slowly. Others zipped about the kitchen.
She laughed as a few of the lights seemed to get in a tizzy over who got to guide her. One of them began to pull on her shirt, and Mina followed as it led her to a wooden chair. She sat down and watched as two of the larger Fae lights attempted to move a large broom between them. Two more joined in and, all together, they were able to sweep the floor.
Entertained, Mina clapped in encouragement to them, and they shone brighter. But something suddenly startled them, and they scattered, hiding.
Teague stood behind her, surprised.
“What did you do?”
“Cleaned.” Why did she feel unsure now of all she and her Fae friends had accomplished?
“Why?”
“It needed to be done and…” She paused in thought before answering. “And because it made me happy.”
He gave her the most disgusted look, and she had to cover her mouth to hide her smile. It really did make her happy. She had found a purpose, something to occupy her thoughts from worry.
“Like mother like daughter,” he said as he gazed around the kitchen, his face unreadable.
He said that as if it were an insult, not a compliment, and his careless words stabbed at her barely healed heart. She tried to not let him know how much those words hurt her.
“I guess,” she answered stiffly.
“You did this by yourself?”
“I had help from the lights.”
He turned to her in surprise. “Really? Interesting. Where are they now?”
“I’m not sure.” She glanced around the kitchen and couldn’t find a single one.
Teague gave her an odd stare and abruptly left. It took a few minutes before she could get her heart rate under control. She thought she was in trouble.
She made herself get back to cleaning and, after a few minutes, the Fae lights came out of hiding. They helped her tackle the hallway. They swept, mopped, and washed the high arched windows. Before she knew it, it was evening, and she was famished. When she returned to her room, warm food waited. She devoured it all and slept soundly, her door never closing.
The next morning when she went to the kitchen for soap and water, even more Fae lights greeted her.
“Are you here to help?”
They bobbed and blinked excitedly.
“Well, then we need to take down the remnants of the old tapestries, and we need to replace or repair the paintings. I hate to get rid of them, but they need to be fixed. Can you handle that?”
Before she had even finished, a third of the lights dashed out the open window. Another group—the ones she figured she worked with yesterday—worked together to carry large pots to the pump.
Mina went out to the main hall with a bucket and started gathering large pieces of the broken column. She didn’t know how they were actually going to clean up the pillar. She definitely wasn’t strong enough to move it.
The double door behind her banged wide open, and she smelled it before she dared turn to look. A large fur-covered beast stood peering over her shoulder.
Chapter 22
Mina swallowed a scream and scrambled backward, tripping over the rubble she was trying to clear. The white-haired beast stared at her, its gruesome teeth lifting into a half-smile, making her knees shake. He was huge—easily over twelve feet tall—with white and gray tufted fur covering his whole body. His nose was apelike, and his teeth were large and flat. Her first thought was Yeti.
His furred hand reached for her, and she rolled out of the way, scraping her stomach across the sharp pieces of marble and stone. When she stopped moving, she had time to notice it wasn’t attacking. It was actually hefting the large broken column onto its shoulders and turning to walk back out the doors. A few minutes later, he returned and picked up another piece of the colonnade and dragged it out.