Chapter Twenty-Eight - Teresa

  Somehow, not being able to recognize myself made everything hurt less.

  Looking in the mirror - that girl wasn’t me. The armor, the facepaint, the braid… none of it was anything that the Teresa I knew would ever do. She’d never have to worry about turning her head too fast and having metal thorns sharp enough to draw blood scrape her neck. Never hear the ringing ting of strange, brassy, almost golden metal tapping together, or feel the almost imperceptible flex of some strange, dark leather that felt like an extension of her skin.

  It made it easier to draw a mental line. To disassociate from the pain of what had happened, the discomfort of the bath, and the urge to shrink into myself as two strangers helped dress me. Thinking about how the me in and the me out of armor were almost different people was just about the only thing keeping me from shutting down as I kept my eyes locked on the mirror.

  That and how both of them tried to make it as easy on me as possible. Agatha, I’m sure, knew well enough what had happened. The other girl…

  She was scared of me.

  Agatha had gone out and given me a little bit of space after he had left. I’d…I’d gone to my stuff. I hadn’t managed to get up the energy to check what all was there. The spear was leaning next to the table, now, and the dagger made from the boar’s tusk sat on top of it. I’d had it in my hand when Agatha and the girl came in and…

  I’d almost stabbed her. My hand still shook, slightly, thinking back to it. That didn’t feel like me, but…in a worse way than the armor. A part I didn’t want to embrace even if it could help - the urge to lash out felt foreign. Tinted in flecks of flying ash and forgotten, burned away colors.

  Once that was…resolved… they both seemed just as lost as me. This armor was clearly not something a regular person could put on by themselves. Not without magic, which of course I had no idea how to emulate or imitate. Too many pieces and things that needed to be held taut as they clicked or snapped or cinched together. The timid girl had apparently gotten just enough instructions to figure it out between the three of us, even with her stuttering and shaking, me just making the motions, and Agatha lecturing me about the absolutely terrifying prospect of what was coming

  Somehow, when it all finished and they moved on to my face and hair, the entire ensemble felt almost like it wasn’t there. All the leather and metal somehow let me move and feel almost normally. Just a slight tightness around my chest and at my hips, or a barely-there weight on my shoulders when I stretched. It just didn’t click in my head that this was actually what I was wearing. I’d expected gaudiness – obviously it would be something ostentatious if that awful Faerie was planning to show me off – but this wasn’t what I’d imagined.

  It was better, but…

  There was a small clink as my hands started shaking again. The metal phalanges nudged together while my nails dug uselessly into the leather around my palm. The sound was just slightly off, closer to what glass should make than metal. It looked like something more at home in a fantasy story than real life, so maybe this was normal for whatever it was.

  The way he had described it, though, the entire outfit wasn’t normal.

  It was mostly metal. Something that looked almost like gold but was tinged closer to bronze. It shone in the dim light, the crystal’s glow soaking in and flowing in luminescent streams along its grooves and patterns. In daylight it would’ve been blinding, I imagined. For most of it, that meant glowing lines of something that looked vaguely like either bark or scales. On the breastplate, it radiated from a symbol I wasn’t sure how to describe as anything other than a fractal tree. Even where the metal stopped and the underlayer was exposed, the glow leaked out in rippling veins that connected everything to the symbol. It wavered even absent movement, dappling between dim and bright in a nearly hypnotic pattern that it would be oh-so-easy to lose myself in.

  I’d only touched the metal with my bare skin a few times, but it felt a lot warmer than it should’ve been. Even before I put it on. It was so smooth that I couldn’t even feel the engravings that had to be guiding the light and magic in it.

  There was definitely magic.

  It wasn’t as bad as trying to look at the Fae, but it was significantly brighter than I was: a swirling maelstrom centered around and writhing inside of the metal. Maybe there was some order to it, but it was too abstract for me to see. Yet. Maybe ever – for some reason I doubted that the Fae would teach me whatever this was, or even let me learn. I could be wrong - nothing since they took me made any actual sense - but letting someone that wanted to kill me learn magic would just be stupid.

  Wait… could Fae even die?

  That – that probably wasn’t a question I should ask. I didn’t want to think of what kind of punishment they’d come up with if I did.

  The armor barely even clinked as I shivered. I knew it weighed a fair amount. When I’d helped hold up the breastplate as it went on it had been enough for my arms to shake. But somehow it was perfectly balanced around me, imperceptible in how it sat. Everywhere the metal touched, it slid over itself perfectly. Where it didn’t, the nearly skintight leather or cloth or whatever it was in the underlayer covered me completely. The only skin exposed was on my face and neck, and even that was covered with designs in some kind of metallic grey paint.

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  There was no helmet, not unless I looked with the Sight. Then, a dome of racing light appeared, somehow thick enough to hide everything behind it and crystal-clear at the same time. The effect gave me a headache as it swirled, unceasingly, around my face. When I looked past it, I couldn’t even see the joins between each piece. The magic just flowed seamlessly; if I hadn’t watched it seal together with my own eyes, I’d have thought that it was all a single unbroken piece.

  I really hoped there was an easy way, or at least a plan, to get it off. Otherwise using the bathroom would be problematic.

  Something I hadn’t noticed until I tried to look at it in the mirror was that the Sight didn’t show anything in reflections. The juxtaposition of looking out through a chaotic glow and seeing my painted face looking completely normal had made me nauseous until I gave up looking. The grey marks made my eyes stand out, wide and shining, while the thorns in my hair glinted green. I knew there were more of them running through the thick braid down my back - the dots of drying blood I could feel on my neck made that clear - but there was no point in posing to look. This me-that-wasn’t-me, as I was trying to compartmentalize it, had no use for things like that.

  “Ma’am, it’s almost time. Do…?”

  Agatha’s obvious question was just too much. Frustration and fear and anxiety blended together, then boiled over.

  I snapped, “Yes! I’m not deaf, or stupid. I heard you the first dozen times. What that monster told me comes first. Don’t open conversation with a Faerie. Do what he says. Do what the other monsters that watched a wolf with acid spit try to murder me and laughed say. Listen to the other, other ones unless it contradicts him or would hurt me. Be polite. Bow instead of curtsy, even though the armor has a skirt. No eye contact, no promises, no agreements. Try to look impressive and like the bauble he says I am. Never, ever, point my spear at someone, or draw the dagger. There, did I get it all? Happy with how you drove home that I’m nothing but a pretty piece of meat for them to show off yet?”

  I’d listened to her go over etiquette and niceties and gestures for what felt like hours as they dressed me. I knew it was meant to help, but all it did was make me feel worse. The disconnection in my brain could handle a lot, but not that reminder that even with the armor, I was a fragile teenager teetering on the edge of an abyss of ash that looked so, so welcoming to just give in to.

  I did feel bad about how the other girl pulled away. There were tears in her eyes as she dropped her brush and a bowl of the paint, which somehow landed together without spilling or splattering, then hid behind the older woman.

  Agatha just took it in stride and rolled her shoulders as she started to push me out of the room. The girl followed and shut the absurdly thick door. Once we were all out, she took the lead and didn’t even look back to make sure we were following.

  “Don’t do that again. Please, think about what I said. You need to be careful. I can’t say if we’ll be allowed to mingle and help you, yet, but just go up to any servants there if you must. There’s not much else to say – most of us, we don’t have quite as explosive an introduction to these things. Try not to get overwhelmed, then try to get through it. It’ll all get easier, Ma’am. I promise.”

  The hallway was a lot like my room. The same patterned wood, albeit with narrower banding. The path had a slight curve to it, only noticeable when I looked way out ahead. It was undecorated save for the twisting cages that held the lights. Doors at near-uniform intervals studded the walls, one every few dozen feet. No signs, no marking, nothing at all to differentiate them; I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to find the one we’d come from on the way back.

  Were there people like Agatha or the other girl or me in all of them?

  I saw the end of it coming long before we got there. The curve ended at a ring of black that grew thicker the closer we got to it. A railed path crossed what looked like a fairly significant drop, the hallway resuming across it. I thought it was just crossing the upper part of a bigger hallway, at first. But when I got there, it was obvious that I was wrong.

  Seeing that little slice of it wasn’t nearly enough to prepare me for stepping through that ring of charred wood.

  Space unfolded around me alongside a wave of vertigo. It could’ve been actual magic, or it could’ve just been how huge the place was. This place – it wasn’t a hallway. It was clearly indoors, yeah, but the word didn’t fit. All I could manage to do was keep up with Agatha as she turned to walk along an empty, burnt pathway. We didn’t run into any other people, but that wasn’t because the place was empty. Far from it – there were more people in sight than I’d seen in total on my tours around Pinecrest. There was no way everything I was seeing could have fit inside of a tree, not even the gigantic ones that had been in the distance this whole time. Not unless they were the size of literal mountains.

  That would be… wait. Honestly, I’d believe it.

  We’d turned from a bridge onto a ramp that cut its way along one wall, completely devoid of railings. It was inset into the blackened wood, almost a tunnel with how amber goo dripped across its open side in an unending curtain. Through the gaps, I gawked at the dizzying maze of pathways, landings, and open-air rooms that stretched out further than I could see. Every wall, every piece of wood I could see beneath the ceiling – was black.

  Burnt.

  What people walked on was smooth, polished to a mirror-like sheen that reflected the glow of my armor. The vast expanses of the walls were riven with cracks that dripped the sap that blocked out entire chunks of the room as it fell. Some drops slid down the boundaries of the place, bigger around than I was tall, but others fell from protrusions to land directly in the turgid river dozens, maybe even hundreds, of feet beneath our ramp.

  There were at least a dozen different ‘levels’ I could see of walkways, but none covered more than a fraction of the space. On one I saw rows of shelves and people in monk-like robes. Another dipped down below the rest of its level, an amphitheater centered around a platform just barely suspended above the drop. Nonsensical rooms and omnipresent paths, some of which seemed to do nothing but loop back together. Where they reached the ceiling, littered with the only lighter spots of wood outside of the hallways, they disappeared through pockmarks that led out of sight. Each one was ringed by a cascade of sap.

  “What is this place?”

  I felt like my voice should have echoed. Instead it just fell flat, the sound dying barely past my lips. That made me realize that since we’d walked in, everything had gotten…muted. I could see all the people, see the river and the dripping walls, but there was nearly no sound. Not even footsteps.

  When it came, Agatha’s voice was just as muffled. She wasn’t quite reverent, but her words dripped with both regret and respect.

  “The House’s deathblow, Ma’am. The Weeping Gallery. Always bleeding, ever rotting, never sealing. The other Galleries, they’re all wounds. But this – it was the last.”