Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(119)

None of this had moved dear Alice. She was focused on me alone as she stood at a distance, her chest heaving, the half stone clenched in her pale hand.

I couldn’t breathe from the smoke. The soot darkened the white of my servant’s clothes, graying Alice’s sapphire dress. The flames would destroy the whole city soon. Even I hadn’t the power to banish them all. The fire of death would engulf everything.

“Is this the world you wanted?” I asked her. “Is this what you dreamed about when you began your game? Look around us!” The white bonnet was already slipping from the crown of my head, so with a bloodied hand, I grabbed the straps and pulled it off, letting it fall to the grass. “The world is ending. The world is ending!”

“The world is beginning.” Alice’s countenance had always been praised by those around us despite concerns over the sickly hue of her skin. Her blond hair, freed from its bindings, whipped around her pointed features. Her blue eyes, usually dark with secrets, were now bright and wild as she stretched out her arms as if to encompass the whole of the world. “Don’t presume to judge me when you are just as guilty as the rest of us.”

“The rest . . .” I shuddered as I remembered that young mistress’s eyes, hollow with despair. “Because of what we did, Miss Patricia is dead. I do not even know where Miss Abigail and Miss Emilia are.”

Alice’s smile disappeared.

“Do you truly feel nothing?” My dressed flapped in the heavy wind. “How many more lives have to be sacrificed, Miss Alice?”

But these words only seemed to enrage her. “Do not presume to know what I feel and don’t feel, you mud wench. That you dare speak to me as an equal is the biggest shock of all.”

She was gone. The Alice I knew had disappeared into the ether of memory, her soul twisted and mangled into the sad, empty vessel I saw before me.

Maybe I never knew her at all. Maybe I was a fool for once thinking I did. The throbbing pain in my chest was enough to tell me so.

“Miss Alice,” I started, my tongue heavy. “If you had seen what I have seen . . . would you feel remorse? Or are you beyond even that?”

“I told you to watch your words.” Her hands were shaking in anger; she must have cut her palm against the sharp edge of the stone she held, because blood began to drip from it. “Never forget that it was my father who took you from the mud. From the jungles. My father who saved you from a life among the savages and allowed you to live here in the civilized world.”

“Your father told me where they are.” I spoke quickly as if every word could be my last. “?‘For only in calm can you hear them speak.’ Miss Alice, we can go to those lands. We can ask them for one last wish! I can take you! Let us go together! If we do, we can finally end this!”

“But my dear poupée. What if I don’t wish to end anything?”

My fingers curled against my dress, crumpling the fabric. The slightly mad look in her eyes used to send terrors through me. I would hide behind corners to avoid their gaze. But I couldn’t hide anymore. I couldn’t cower. “Then I will have stop you.”

“Stop me? You?” Alice lifted her chin, her lips stretching into an amused grin. “My Nicholas would never have looked at you if it were not for the training I gave you, the civilized words I taught you to speak. You should never have doubted me, Marian, when I told you that I would change everything. I changed your destiny. I dressed you. I raised you. I made you whole. My little doll.”

The sound of her giggles chilled me from the inside.

“And, poupée, I will not stop,” she said. “You will not stop me.”

Slowly and silently through breaths of flame, the handle formed in my hand. “My dear Miss Alice,” I said as the steel blade stretched out from the handle, born and forged from fire. The sword of the legends I’d learned of. “I was already whole before you met me.”

I brought up the sword, and in the reflection of its blade, I could see my own dark face, chestnut eyes narrowed in determination. In a blink, Alice disappeared and she was behind me, a knife raised above her head—

“Maia!”

It sounded like Lake’s voice.

Yes, I was Maia. I was Maia.

With a deep shudder, my soul started flying again. The sound of my name crashed through the surface of the memory, sucking my consciousness out of the apocalyptic scene, back into my own body in the museum. Breathing heavily, I dropped to the floor, though it wasn’t until my head had stopped spinning that I realized I wasn’t the only one down here. Lake was struggling to get onto her knees. Chae Rin was sitting, her legs flat against the stone, her body hunched over. Belle was the only one still standing, though she pressed a hand against her head as if to keep it from spinning.

“What was that?” I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again just to make sure I was me. The special volume was on the floor. “Did you all see that? Did you see Alice?”

“What?” Chae Rin looked genuinely confused. “No . . .”

“You didn’t?” I drew my knees up, gripping them with trembling hands. “Was it just me?”

“I saw her die,” whispered Lake, finally on her knees though she kept her hands against the floor to keep herself steady. “Patricia . . . She . . . she killed herself.” Her voice choked with emotion, and she covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her sob.