Take the Key and Lock Her Up (Embassy Row #3)(75)

There’s a look that people get when they don’t want to give a crazy person bad news. We need our delusions, or so it seems. The prince just met me, and already he knows how fragile I am, how breakable. And he doesn’t want to be responsible for my final, fatal crack.

“Grace—”

“You said you saw my mother here. You said you saw her wandering around the palace. When was that?”

“I don’t know.” Thomas runs a hand through his messy hair. “Years ago.”

“Was it three—almost four—years ago? Think.”

Thomas looks down at his feet, as if trying to remember. After a moment, he nods, certain. “Yes. We talked about how I’d just gotten my braces, so yeah. That would be right.”

It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for years. For centuries. But I can finally exhale when I say, “That was when she found them.”

I can tell by the look in Thomas’s eyes he doesn’t quite believe me. That’s okay, I think. I probably shouldn’t believe me, either.

“Think about it, Thomas. That day, when she was wandering around, she wasn’t lost. She was looking. And she found them.”

“Grace, that’s—”

“Where was she?”

“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago, and—”

“Thomas, think!”

I don’t mean to shout.

I don’t mean to rant and rave. Thomas is a good guy. He’s on my side. He didn’t choose to be a part of this, but neither did I. When he nods and leads me down the hall, I have to tell myself that we’re not looking for bodies.

We’re looking for a way out.

All around us, Adria is in mourning. Heads of state are paying their respects. Palace officials are running to and fro, getting ready for the official funeral. Thomas’s grandfather is dead and his father is now king, but the prince is here with me.

I have to wonder if maybe we aren’t both crazy.

But as soon as Thomas leads us down the south corridor I know in my gut we’re almost there.

“The gates,” I say as the old palace gates come into sight up ahead. I can’t keep from singing.

“‘Hush, little princess, it’s too late. The truth is locked behind the … gates.’”

They’re open now, and nothing stands between the south corridor and the atrium-like room that probably used to be a courtyard. The floor is cobblestone. In the center of the room there is a fountain.

More hallways and corridors and staircases diverge from this space and I turn around, suddenly lost.

“This used to be the outside, right?” I ask, but I think Thomas knows I’m really talking to myself. “So did they mean behind, like coming out of the castle, or behind, like you’re coming in?”

Thomas shakes his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t know it meant anything until now.”

Together we move toward the high iron gates that used to stand between the palace and the world but now stand open for all to see.

Thomas and I each take a gate and try to pull them closed, to move them in any way, but they don’t budge.

“They’re stuck,” Thomas says. “They probably haven’t moved in two hundred years, remember.”

I push harder. I pull with all my might. But then I stop and look closer at the gate before me, the old scrollwork and handles and the way the gate has swung back to perfectly block a tiny alcove in the wall. The bolt is extended, keeping the gate in place.

“They’re not stuck,” I tell him. “They’re locked.”

I opened the puzzle box this morning and pulled out the key that the king had been searching for almost his entire life. It hangs around my neck now, tucked beneath my T-shirt. When I bend down to examine the gate more closely, I can feel the cold metal against my skin, swinging on its chain and rubbing against me. Suddenly, I have to wonder.

“Could it be this easy?”

I pull the key from my shirt and hold it to the keyhole and give Thomas a look that says wish me luck.

Then I insert the key into the lock.

And turn.

And the gate swings.

The alcove beyond is shallow and damp. It was probably something of a guardhouse once upon a time, just room enough to keep a few provisions.

There’s a brazier where they probably kept a fire in winter, some hooks on the wall.

There’s a long, narrow window in the wall, and the sun is shining bright outside. Dust dances in a beam of light that slices through the dim room and then down a tiny, narrow staircase that doesn’t belong in this century or even the last.

“‘The sunlight shines where the truth is laid,’” I sing in disbelief. Thomas looks at me.

“Grace, is that … ?” Thomas starts. I can’t blame him for not being able to finish.

“Maybe.”

I inch toward the old stone stairs. The mortar is crumbling and the space is dreary and damp. This room belongs in a castle in the old, medieval sense of the word. The stone around me looks like the same kind that they used to build the wall a thousand years ago. This part of the palace is old. Ancient.

And the future king of Adria is beside me.

“What do we do now? We can’t just go down there. Can we?” Thomas asks—and he’s got a point. Now is not the time to rush. It’s not the time to panic. Old Grace would have rushed in where angels feared to tread, but the last person to come here may have been my dead mother and that makes even me cautious.