“What did you find out?” asked Séverin brusquely.

“Can’t this wait?” asked Laila.

“No,” said Enrique, pushing himself up on his elbows.

The longer he looked at Laila, the more the world sharpened with urgency. In that second, he felt the weight of their eyes on him. The irony of it was almost funny. Finally, he thought, they were all listening to him. Except it happened to be at the exact moment when all he wanted was silence. And sleep. But he didn’t want to imagine what nightmares would chase him through sleep. He’d given those dark dreams too much to feed upon—the dead girls in the grotto, the piled-up hands behind the stone-faced muses. A shudder ran down his spine, and he forced himself to sit upright.

“We were wrong about the Lost Muses,” said Enrique.

Ruslan tilted his head. “The women who supposedly guard The Divine Lyrics?”

“Not just guard,” said Enrique. “There was apparently something in their bloodline that allowed them to read the book itself. I don’t think it’s a myth. Not anymore.”

“But that’s impossible, mon cher,” said Hypnos. “What woman has a bloodline like that? And what does that have to do with those poor girls?”

Enrique stared at his lap. He could think of only one woman with a bloodline that let her do the impossible: Laila. And her very existence depended on finding The Divine Lyrics. He avoided her eyes.

“Enrique?” prompted Séverin.

“I don’t know who would have that bloodline,” said Enrique, forcing his thoughts back to the conversation. “But it’s clear the Fallen House believed in it. In the portal courtyard, I saw depictions of women without their hands, offering them to the muses. And none of those girls that we found—”

“—had their hands,” finished Laila softly.

“I think once the Fallen House got The Divine Lyrics, they tried to find women of the bloodline necessary to read the book. And when they couldn’t do that, they … they sacrificed them, arranging them like a shadow of the Lost Muses, like guardians for their treasures and The Divine Lyrics that they couldn’t decipher. They might have kept finding more girls, but then they were exiled.”

Laila’s hand flew to her mouth. Beside her, Zofia and Eva looked sick.

“And it’s not just blood,” said Enrique, thinking of the old man’s gouged-out eyes. “I think there’s more to it, like sight.”

“The old man,” said Eva, her eyes narrowing. “He said something about how if you cannot see the divine, then you don’t know where to use it? I didn’t understand what that meant.”

“I didn’t either,” admitted Enrique.

Séverin turned a small knife in his hand, and spoke slowly, as if to himself. “So to read The Divine Lyrics, someone would need a girl of the bloodline.”

A frisson of cold traveled down Enrique’s back. The way Séverin said it … as if. No. No, thought Enrique firmly. He would never do that. He wanted the book to avenge Tristan. Anything else was madness.

“But what about the other treasures of the Fallen House?” asked Ruslan. “Did the symbols lead to anything?”

Enrique shook his head. “I believe it’s a coded alphabet, but without more symbols or a key, I can’t crack it.”

At this, Zofia cleared her throat. She held up a Mnemo bug, and he remembered that she’d seen something inside the leviathan.

“I found more symbols,” said Zofia. “I think we can crack the code.”

22

LAILA

Laila lingered at the entrance to the Sleeping Palace’s kitchen quarters, caught between wanting to join the servants in their food preparations and avoiding the kitchens altogether. She used to love this—examining ingredients like scraps of a universe not yet made. She used to savor the safety of the kitchens where no memories could bite her, where all her touch conjured was something worth sharing amongst friends.

Once, she’d even baked edible wonders.

Now all that remained was wondering: How would she live? How would she die? She glanced down at her hands. They seemed alien to her. Long ago, when she’d asked the jaadugar how she might keep living, he’d only instructed her to find the book and open it, for therein lay the secrets to her making. He hadn’t said that she would need to find someone else to read it for her, and yet that’s what Enrique and Zofia’s findings confirmed. To read The Divine Lyrics, one needed someone of the Lost Muses bloodline.

“Mademoiselle?” asked an attendant. “You came to give us certain instructions for the tea?”

Laila startled from her thoughts. The attendants must have noticed her standing at the entrance. Beyond them, she spotted tea carts already loaded with samovars and gilded podstakannik designed to hold the thin glasses, mounds of glistening caviar beside slender mother-of-pearl spoons, jam sandwiches the color of blood, and fragile sugar cookies that looked like layers of lace. All in preparation for the meeting to be held now that Enrique was conscious once more. Laila cleared her throat. One step at a time. First, she needed the book. From there, she would figure it out.

“No pork for platter number two,” said Laila, pointing at Zofia’s tray. “Please do not let anything on the plate touch.”

She scrutinized Enrique’s tray and frowned. “More cake on that one.”

For Hypnos’s plate, she pointed at the water goblet. “Could you put that in a lovelier glass? Something etched and in quartz? And put the wine in a plainer goblet.”

Hypnos had a higher tendency to drink from a prettier glass, and they needed him sober. Laila hesitated at the last tray. Séverin’s.

“What does Monsieur Montagnet-Alarie want?” asked the server.

Laila stared at the tray and felt a mirthless laugh rise in her chest.

“Who knows,” she said.

The attendant nodded and promised to send the trays to the library within the next half hour.

“One more tray,” said Laila. “A little bit of everything on it … I’m not sure what she likes. And you can give it to me directly.”

The server frowned, but did as asked. With the platter in hand, Laila made her way through the intricate lower hallways to the room Ruslan had told her served as the infirmary. By now, the others would be gathering in the library, ready to break the code that Zofia had found in the leviathan’s mouth, but Laila needed one more minute of silence. She hadn’t had a chance to mourn the girls she’d read. She hadn’t even had the chance to catch her breath after Eva, Enrique, and Zofia had gone missing, and all that she and Séverin had found was a blood-flecked arrow spinning across the floor of the ice grotto.

What she needed was to give thanks, and to the right person.

Laila knocked on the door of the infirmary.

“What do you want?” snapped a voice from within.

Laila took a deep breath and opened the door. Lying on a makeshift cot in the center of the room was Eva. Immediately, Eva pulled up the covers, hiding her leg beneath the blankets. In those unguarded seconds, Laila caught sight of the thick, mottled scars on Eva’s skin and the shrunken muscle.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Eva, settling into her pillows.