Page 75 of The Lies We Conjure
She gestures with a little laugh, and I glance at her.
Lavinia’s whole left arm is streaked in blood, the fine hairs dark and matted. Evander’s fingerprints had buffed away some of thestain around the original cut, healed by his renewed magic so quickly it would be an afterthought if not for all the evidence.
“But really—I know you’refine,but healing him took a lot out of you. Literally, it seems.” She’s watching me now, and I have to look away as I bump another rock with my toe and stagger to the side. Lavinia makes to catch me, but I toss my arms out, balance firing at the last moment.
Thank God we’re almost to the manor.
“Come on, keep up,” Evander shouts from up ahead, feeling the tug on the shield as we fall behind, his pace increasing steadily with the stark onyx visage of the house looming ahead on its elevated perch. Like the world’s most gothic, inedible cake on a stand.
When we’ve resumed our huddled march, Lavinia places a hand on my elbow, her relic angled down and away. It’s the hand I healed—just a gentle reminder that she’s close enough to steady me. When I don’t move away, she grimaces at the ground and asks, quietly, “What if you have to do it again?”
“Let’s hope I don’t.”
I need water and food—and rest that I’m even less likely to get.
“Are we going to talk about who threw them?”
“Not many choices.”
“No,” she agrees, quietly.
The Cerises. Infinity. Winter. Maybe even Luna—nothing seems impossible or easy to dismiss since Ursula left us.
I nod to my cousin, driving fast and determined up front, Kaysa on his heels as we knot tightly—woozily—behind. “Let’s just see if we’re right and move from there. It’s much easier to confront everyone if we have another master.”
We march straight into the courtyard from the most direct route, the tearoom, which straddles the back of the house and the courtyard on the first floor. A relief, because I can put eyes on the only other possible weapon I know that exists in this manor—Shadrack’s Horace-killing Colt .45.
It’s still there. On the wall, next to the bear’s roaring final protest.
I don’t know if the antique revolver is loaded, or if it would work if it was, but it’s a relief that it hasn’t disappeared.
“Courtyard, straight ahead,” Evander directs, picking up speed.
We step through the glass doors leading to the courtyard.
The gaping center.
Unlike the outside of the black-as-night exterior of the house, the siding here is whitewashed brick, a canvas for climbing ivy reaching for the sky, gargoyles growling down from above. There are enough fountains to dry the Colorado River, and vegetation is packed into every inch except for the thin, star-tile walkways crisscrossing to various points of interest like so many veins, an echo of the design in the garden behind the manor.
Squat and square, the courtyard was designed as an outdoor space that could guarantee privacy in a world that was becoming increasingly less private, more prying eyes and population, even in the wilds of the Rockies.
But in the time since Shadrack envisioned it as a place of contemplation, it’d evolved like everything else. Not in a technological way—everything here is frozen in the time of Ursula’s childhood, her preference as matriarch and distrustful modern citizen. No, in that over the generations, bare soil and magical talent were augmented with love, time, care.
Like the rest of the grounds, the plants here are dying now. Drooping, drying, petals falling, and stems withered brown.
There are cracks in the whitewash too, ones that weren’t there days ago. Not superficial like Lavinia’s wound, but deep enough to touch the next layer, bricks dislodged and falling to the courtyard, cracked, broken, pebbled. The decay is from magic withdrawal. A spell from Ursula or some other source, I don’t know.
My bleary vision zeroes in on the eastern wall, where the ivy runs in thick ropes, as dense as yarn taut in a loom. The leaves overlap into a patchwork, feathers by another name. A single slash of sun nails the bare spot between swaths of ivy, revealing a smattering of black dots that freckle the whitewash. I point. “It’s there—the mural.”
Lavinia gasps—the most delighted noise I’ve heard in at least aday—as a smile lights her dirt-smudged face. “It’s a negative. Black stars on a white sky.”
“Exactly.” I nudge the ivy apart. Evander doesn’t help, holding the shield. “But I have no idea where the Great Bear might be. Nothing is labeled and with all this ivy, it’s hard to know what we’re looking at.”
We’re quiet for a moment, surveying the massive space before us. The sky above us has gone indigo, the clouds from this afternoon ambling on east, an intrepid slash of sunlight lasering onto the ivy, cut with precision by the western roof line.
“Wait, I have an idea.” Lavinia produces her phone and turns it on. Marsyas didn’t give her the memo about bringing an external battery, I see. After a moment, she unlocks it, swipes, and taps. “I have Radical Stars. My da—I, um, thought this app might be neat to use while we were in the mountains.”
Pinking with excitement perhaps at the fact that she can contribute, Lavinia flips the phone around so I can see. “You hold it up to the sky and it shows you what you’re looking at.”
