Cruel Beauty(24)

I slipped inside, my mouth watering. In moments I was devouring the food—and perhaps it was the hunger, perhaps my fear, but it was the best breakfast I had ever tasted. Certainly the best I’d had in years, for our current cook served up sausages burnt and mushrooms nearly raw. But there could be no complaining, for Aunt Telomache had hired her, so each morning I would chew through the mess in silence while Astraia smiled and thanked the cook and bravely chattered how she loved the sausages so well-done and weren’t the mushrooms wonderfully tender and—

Abruptly, the food was a lump in my stomach; the olives remaining on my plate looked revolting. I swallowed, trying not to imagine Astraia at the breakfast table right now. I had to stop thinking of her. What was the use in remembering her smile, the clink of breakfast dishes, the way she mashed her sausages—I pulled back the curtain, desperate for a distraction.

Pure sky stared back at me. No clouds, no sun, no land or horizon. No anything but warm, blank parchment like the first page of an empty book.

No escape. Not ever. Because the Rhyme wasn’t true. There wasn’t any way to kill the Gentle Lord and escape; all I could do was collapse his house about him. If the gods smiled on me, if they answered the prayers that had been screamed to them for nine hundred years, I would free Arcadia. But I would be locked inside this house, not even able to run, with the parchment sky to smother me and my monstrous husband and his demons to torment me.

I shoved a fist against my mouth and drew a slow breath. I had always known my fate. I had always, always known. It was stupid and useless to be shocked now.

I would never see my sister again. I would never escape my fate. I had a mission to carry out regardless, and it was time for me to start.

I looked back one last time before I left, and that was when I noticed the door next to the stove. It was barely as high as my hip; when I bent down to peer inside it, I saw a low stone tunnel. It curved away to the right, so I could not see where it ended, but diffuse light glowed from the other side.

A breeze blew out the little doorway, caressing my face. I inhaled the warm scent of summer, dust and grass and flowers: the smell of free, open spaces.

It could be a trap, but if this house wanted to kill me, I was trapped already. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel. Once I was inside, I still knew I might be going to my death, but I couldn’t feel worried anymore; and as soon as I rounded the curve, I emerged into a small round room and was able to stand up.

Could it be called a room? There wasn’t even a ceiling; it was more like the bottom of a very large, dry well. The stone wall that curved around me went up, and up, and up until it ended in a perfect circle of cream-colored sky. Though the light in the kitchen had looked like morning, here the sun glinted overhead, pouring warmth onto my shoulders.

There were no furnishings and no decorations—except the wall on the opposite side had a small alcove, and in the alcove was a bronze statue of a bird, green with age. I thought it might be a sparrow, but it was so corroded that I couldn’t tell for sure.

I wondered if it might be the statue of a Lar.

In this room—like the first hallway—the air smelled of summer. But there was no half-heard laughter on the air, no sense that space was subtly wrong, nor that invisible eyes were watching. There was only the warm, peaceful stillness that exists between one breath of summer breeze and the next. A trickle of water ran down the wall on my left and pooled before the alcove; I drew a breath, and my lungs filled with the mineral scent of water over warm rock.

Without thinking, I sat down and leaned back against the wall. It was not smooth; the stones formed hard, uneven ripples behind my back—yet the tension ran out of my body. I stared at the bronze sparrow, and I did not entirely fall asleep, but I almost dreamt: my mind was full of summer breezes, the warm, wet smell of earth after summer rain, the delight of running barefoot through damp grass and finding the hidden tangle of strawberries.

At last I sat up again. Though I had been slumped against hard stone, I did not feel stiff or sore anywhere, but rested as if I had slept for a week.

I looked again at the sparrow. This room was nothing like any household shrine I had ever seen—nor had I ever seen a household god without a human face—but as I stared at the little corroded form, I felt the same deeper-than-bone recognition as when a tone of voice, a shift of wind, or the sunlight on a ball of yarn calls to mind a forgotten dream. I could put no name to the sparrow, yet I was sure that it was a Lar and this room was holy.

I remembered kneeling under my veil, speaking my wedding vows to a statue. It had been just yesterday, but already I felt as though a hundred years had passed. The words of the vow, though, were still clear in my mind. If this was a Lar, the god of Ignifex’s house and hearth, then it was now mine as well.