Within the cat is a little girl with long curly hair and a sky-blue dress, her eyes open but looking off to the side, more interested in something else beyond the person looking at her.
The tiniest doll is a bee, actual-size.
Something moves at the end of the hall where the stone is draped with red velvet curtains—something bigger than a cat—but when Zachary looks there is nothing. He joins all of the dolls’ halves together separately and leaves them standing in a row along the shelf, rather than letting them remain trapped all in one person, and then continues on.
There are so many candles that the scent of beeswax permeates everything, soft and sweet mingling with paper and leather and stone with a hint of smoke. Who lights all of these if there’s no one else here? Zachary wonders as he passes a candelabra holding more than a dozen smoldering tapers, wax dripping down over the stone that has clearly been dripped on by many, many candles before.
One door opens into a round room with intricately carved walls. A single lamp sits on the floor and as Zachary walks around it the light catches different parts of the carvings, revealing images and text but he cannot read the whole story.
Zachary walks until the hall opens into a garden, with a soaring ceiling like the marble near the elevator, casting a sunlight-like glow over books abandoned on benches and fountains and piled near statues. He passes a statue of a fox and another that looks like a precarious stack of snowballs. In the center of the room is a partially enclosed space that reminds him of a teahouse. Inside are benches and a life-size statue of a woman seated in a stone chair. Her gown falls around the chair in realistically carved rippling cloth, and everywhere, in her lap, on her arms, tucked into the creases of her gown and the curls in her hair there are bees. The bees are carved from a different color of stone than their mistress, a warmer hue, and appear to be individual pieces. Zachary picks one up and then replaces it. The woman looks down, her hands in her lap with the palms facing up as though she should be reading a book.
By the statue’s feet, surrounded by bees and resting like an offering, is a glass half filled with dark liquid.
“I knew I was going to miss it,” someone says behind him.
Zachary turns. If he hadn’t recognized her voice he would not have guessed this could be the same woman from the party. Her hair without the dark wig is thick and wavy and dyed in various shades of pink beginning in pomegranate at the roots and fading to ballet-slipper at her shoulders. There are traces of gold glitter around her dark eyes. She’s older than he had thought, he’d guessed a few years older than him but it might be more. She wears jeans and tall black boots with long laces and a cream-colored sweater that looks as though it spent as little time as possible in the transition from sheep to clothing and yet the whole ensemble has an air of effortless elegance to it. Several chains draped around her neck hold a number of keys and a locket like Zachary’s compass and something that looks like a bird skull cast in silver. She somehow, even without the tail, still seems like Max.
“Miss what?” Zachary asks.
“Every year around this time someone leaves her a glass of wine,” the pink-haired lady answers, pointing at the glass by the statue’s feet. “I’ve never seen who does it, and not for lack of trying. Another year a mystery.”
“You’re Mirabel.”
“My reputation precedes me,” Mirabel says. “I have always wanted to say that. We never had proper introductions, did we? You’re Zachary Ezra Rawlins and I am going to call you Ezra, because I like it.”
“If you call me Ezra I’m going to call you Max.”
“Deal,” she agrees with that movie-star smile. “I retrieved your stuff from your hotel, Ezra. Left it in the office when I came to find you so there’s probably a cat sitting on it now keeping it safe. Also I checked you out of the aforementioned hotel and I owe you a dance since we were interrupted. How are you and what’s-his-name settling in?”
“Dorian?”
“He told you his name is Dorian? How Oscar Wilde indulgent of him, I thought he was bad enough with his drama eyebrows and his sulking. He said I should call him Mister Smith, he must like you better.”
“Well whatever his name is, he’s not here,” Zachary says. “Those people have him.”
Mirabel’s smile vanishes. The instant concern doubles the worry that Zachary has been trying to force to the back of his mind.
“Who has him?” she asks, though Zachary can tell she already knows.
“The people with the paint and the robes, the Collector’s Club, whoever they are. These people,” he adds, pulling the silver sword from underneath his sweater, cursing when it gets tangled and realizing he is more upset than he would care to admit.
Mirabel says nothing but she frowns and looks past Zachary at the statue of the woman with her bees and lack of book.
“Is he already dead?” Zachary asks, though he doesn’t want to hear the answer.
“If he’s not, it’s for one reason,” Mirabel says, her attention on the statue.
“Which is?”
“They’re using him as bait.” Mirabel walks over to the statue and picks up the glass of mystery wine. She contemplates it for a moment and then lifts it to her lips and downs the whole thing. She puts the empty glass back and turns to Zachary.
“Shall we go and rescue him, Ezra?”
Once there was a princess who refused to marr
y the prince she was meant to marry. Her family disowned her and she left her kingdom, trading her jewelry and the length of her hair for passage to the next kingdom, and then the next, and then the land beyond that which had no king and there she stayed.
She was skilled at sewing so she set up a shop in a town that had no seamstress. No one knew she had been a princess, but it was the kind of place that did not ask questions about what you were before.