One Salt Sea
Page 36

“I got it,” I said. “If there’s nothing else, you can have thumbs again.”
He yawned, whiskers curling forward in what looked distinctly like amusement. Then he turned and walked away.
“Remember pants,” I called, and reached into the opening, feeling around. My fingers brushed the surface of a wooden box. I lifted it out.
Stickers obscured most of the varnished pine of the box itself, a mix that ranged from cartoon characters I recognized from Gilly’s childhood to more recent bumper stickers and band logos. I remembered giving her some of the older ones, treasures smuggled in from the mortal world. There was no rhyme or reason to the way they were layered; they seemed to have been slapped on entirely at random.
“What do you have?” asked Tybalt, stepping up behind me.
“I don’t know yet,” I replied. Putting down the box, I carefully removed the lid. “Did you remember pants?”
“Blessedly, yes,” said Etienne.
“Good.” The box was filled with scraps of paper that seemed as random as the stickers at first glance. I picked up the first one; a list of chores, written out by one of the house Hobs, clearly intended for a child. Half the chores were crossed off in purple crayon. I bit my lip, digging a little deeper. The crayon was there, about three layers down. I remembered bringing her that, too. “Oh, oak and ash.”
“What is it?” asked Tybalt.
“Her childhood.” I tipped the box out onto the floor. Lists of chores, crayon sketches, dried flowers taped to pieces of parchment . . . all the things I would have expected to find in the dresser drawer of the child she’d been when she was taken. One of the papers landed upsidedown, revealing a block of much tighter, more compressed writing. I picked it up, skimming quickly.
Rayseline’s handwriting never improved much beyond her initial childish scrawl, but it was legible. Almost too legible. She’d turned her scraps into a sort of disassembled diary, one that became more comprehensible as I flipped more and more of them over and shuffled them into something like chronological order.
“Toby?”
“Just a second.”
—understand what they want from me. I don’t think they understand what they want from me—
—light is always so bright here, the edges of things are so sharp, and they won’t stop talking to me TALKING TALKING TALKING I just want them to all SHUT UP and let me THINK—
—don’t even know my mother anymore—
Taken together, they painted the picture of a girl who was terribly angry, both younger and older than she was meant to be, and scared almost out of her mind by the world she’d been thrust back into. The “almost” was the first to go. Etienne was looking at me in silent curiosity, years of training forbidding him to interrupt. Wordlessly, I handed him the paper in my hand. It managed, in just five words, to be the worst one I’d found so far.
Sometimes I miss the dark.
Etienne read the slip of paper without comment, passing it to Grianne. Her face remained impassive, but her Merry Dancers flared a brief, sickly red, outward manifestations of her internal dismay. Tybalt was the last to read the paper. Like the others, he didn’t say anything. Just handed it back to me, and waited.
“I want to see whether I can get these into any sort of real order,” I said, starting to shove scraps of paper back into the box. “I don’t expect them to have a full blueprint for the kidnapping, but . . . well . . .”
“Any port in a storm,” said Tybalt quietly.
I glanced at him and nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Come on—let’s finish searching this place. We have a lot to do before tomorrow.”
We combed through the rest of Rayseline’s bedroom, and found nothing else that seemed relevant. She had a lot of dresses, any one of which probably cost more than I make in a year; she had a lot of broken toys, hidden in the bottom of her wardrobe. I left them where they were, unable to shake the feeling that I had done something wrong by finding them in the first place.
In the washroom, I found a vial of something pale blue taped to the bottom of her cured-oak bathtub. There was a ribbon taped next to it, holding a dozen shining silver needles in place. I was very careful not to touch their points as I peeled back the tape and added them to the small assortment of things to be taken away.
The needles were a chilling reminder that Raysel had been working with Oleander de Merelands when she tried to use poison to assassinate Luna. Just wondering what might be on those needles made me feel like running screaming from the room. We didn’t find anything after that, and I was secretly glad; I’d had about as much as I could handle. In the end, I was grateful to take what we’d found—the box, the bottle, the needles, and the drawer of shoeboxes filled with rocks—and leave. I wanted to be gone. Even the Queen’s Court would be a pleasant change after seeing the prison Rayseline had made to replace the one she’d lost.
Tybalt carried the drawer, leaving me with the rest. I placed the needles and vial in the box of papers, waiting while Etienne opened a gateway back to the receiving hall. Tybalt cast a glance in my direction.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” I said. “But right now, that’s going to have to be good enough. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“So soon?” He smiled wryly. “I was just becoming accustomed to the décor.”
That was surprising enough to wring a laugh out of me. I was still laughing as I stepped through Etienne’s gateway, feeling the familiar dip-and-weave as the knowe settled into its new configuration. Tybalt followed half a step behind. Grianne was already gone. I raised an eyebrow at Etienne.
“Sir Grianne had duties elsewhere,” he said, closing the gate with a crisp motion of his hand. “I shall give her your regards, if you would like.”
“Yeah, I’d like that.” I looked down at the things I was holding. “Look, I hate to ask you to do this, but can you—”
“I will inform His Grace of our findings, and make him aware that you’re removing them for further study.” Etienne’s gaze darted toward the throne room doors. “He’ll ask where you’ll be. He’ll ask when you’ll know anything.”
“Yeah, well. I’m going to be at the Queen’s Court at dusk tomorrow. She’s agreed to let me question the staff. And at some point, I’m going to be visiting Saltmist. I need to search the boys’ rooms.”