Page 17

Nobody laughed. Which, honestly, told me plenty.

Carol tried the Vault door first. Pressed her palm flat against a symbol worn into the wood, muttered something under her breath in a language that sounded older than the building around us.

Nothing happened.

Zelda stepped up, pressed her own palm to the same spot.

Click.

The door swung open on its own, easy as anything, like it had been waiting specifically for her and nobody else.

Carol stared at it. "Well."

"That's never a comforting word from a Baba Yaga," I said.

Zelda did not look thrilled about any of this. Not one bit.

Inside, the Vault didn't look like much at first glance– shelves that seemed to disappear into a darkness deeper than the room should've allowed, locked boxes stacked three and four high, glass bottles that whispered faintly when you walked past them, like they had opinions about being disturbed. Something growled, low and unbothered, from behind a door at the far end that nobody made any move toward opening.

"Can I touch stuff?" Chewy asked.

"NO," everyone said, more or less in unison.

"You people are exhausting,” he sighed, rolling his eyes and sticking out his tongue.

The Vault, it turned out, cared exactly as much about Zelda's presence as the front door had. A path lit up along the floor the second she stepped past the threshold, faint gold light guiding us between the shelves to one old wooden chest sitting alone on a low table, no lock in sight. Just three symbols burned into the lid.

Queen. Witch. Guardian.

Kai reached toward it.

ZAP!

He yanked his hand back, shaking it out.

"Would you STOP touching things you're Magically forbidden from touching?" I snapped.

"You literally opened a tomb by touching it," Kai grumped in return.

"That was different," I sighed with a roll of my eyes.

"That's what she said about the cake," Chewy offered, from somewhere near my ankles.

I decided not to dignify that with a response.

I opened the chest myself.

No crown. Just a crown-shaped indentation pressed into faded velvet, empty, and waiting. Beside it sat a small disk, black and cool to the touch when I picked it up, a medallion with three symbols carved around its edge.

Queen. Witch. Guardian.

The Guardian symbol had a thin hairline crack running halfway through the carving.

Kai's jaw tightened when he saw it. I hated that more.

Tucked beneath the medallion was a folded scrap of paper, brittle with age, the handwriting cramped and careful in a way that told me whoever wrote it knew it needed to survive a very long time.

The crown cannot remain where the Door was closed. Margaret carried it away. She hid it where no Queen could reach it until she chose freely to become what the crown required.