Page 22

"Godspeed, Mother."

That left Arthur, Otis, Mona, Chewy, Barney, and Carol standing behind us with Kai, and just me and Zelda stepping through the place where a wall used to be.

The portal stayed open behind us like a window looking back into the ordinary world. Kai's hand glowed faintly gold against the Wayfinder on the other side, steady as anything.

Then the path responded to me. The Queen symbol on my half of the medallion lit up, warm against my palm, and a trail of light unspooled through the mist ahead of us.

We followed it. Not far. A hundred yards, maybe less. And then we saw it.

A single door, standing upright in the middle of absolutely nothing. No walls around it. No building. Just a door, freestanding in mist that went on forever in every direction, with two words carved deep into the wood.

MARGARET DELLENCOURT.

"That's not creepy," Zelda snorted sarcastically.

"Nope. Totally normal. Happens to me every Tuesday."

I reached for the handle.

"Maybe don't touch…" Zelda cautioned.

Too late. The door swung open, and what was on the other side wasn't a room.

It was a memory.

A woman sat at a plain wooden table, long dark hair falling loose over one shoulder. A crown rested on the table beside her hand, as if she'd set it down a hundred years ago and simply never gotten around to picking it back up.

She lifted her head. Looked straight at me as if she'd known the exact second I'd walk through that door, opened her mouth, and huffed, "Took you long enough."

7

"Excuse me?"

Margaret looked me up and down– mud, combat boots, swamp-stained everything, all of it– with the unhurried thoroughness of a woman inspecting a used car she already regretted test-driving.

"I expected the boots to be prettier."

I was, genuinely, personally offended. "They WERE prettier before everybody started making me fight in a swamp."

"Yep," Zelda said, beside me. "She's related to you."

Margaret's gaze slid to her. "Baba Yaga?"

"Not yet."

"You will be."

"Well," Zelda muttered, "that's unsettling."

I looked back at the woman sitting at that plain wooden table. I looked at the crown sitting on that same table. It was dusty, but it hadn’t been forgotten. She’d left it there on purpose, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know why. So, I asked the only question that actually mattered.

"Are you dead?"

"Very."

"Okay, so... what am I really talking to, then?"

Margaret's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Not a ghost. Not something trapped here, waiting on you. I'm what the crown remembered of her. A piece she left behind, on purpose, for whichever Queen came looking next."