“Wait!”
Root’s voice cut through the room, grinding everything to a halt. Vit let go of the barrel’s latches and turned to her in confusion. Beel ceased his fretting. Azriah loosened his grip on the king’s brick. It hadn’t broken.
They all paused, waiting, watching Root. She didn’t say anything else. The one word was the sum of the words she’d come up with so far.
“What?” asked Azriah.
“So much for being in a great big rush,” commented the king.
“Just—” Root put her hands up. “One second. I’m almost there…”
She had a theory—and little more—taking shape in her mind. She was so close—she could feel it. But if Azriah smashed that brick…
But the king was right: they didn’t have time to spare. So Root did what she did best: she started talking. She’d figure out the rest as she went along.
“Give him here,” she said, hand held out impatiently towards Azriah. Azriah paused, then handed her the king.
“Just wanted to do the honors yourself, eh?” asked the king. “Looking to curry the extra favor?”
“Oh, curry with extra flavor,” said Vit. Then they blushed. “Sorry, haven’t had dinner yet.”
“You did something,” said Root, eyes boring into the king. “You… did something,” she said a second time, adding a great deal more context to the accusation. She shook her head and started over. “What, you just suddenly think the best course of action is to run away? I know you’re a coward, but don’t think I haven’t heard the way you’ve been talking about the halo this whole time. All of our discussions, our planning meetings. You wanted that thing out of the church’s scummy hands. You wanted it out of our hands too, I bet. You wanted it for yourself.”
“Sure. It was once mine, and it was quite a sad day when I lost it. I’d certainly like to see it again—certainly like it to be out of the hands that stole it from me. So no matter what other motives you think I’ve been weaving into this, why in the worlds would I want you to fail? And what do you think I’m capable of? In case you hadn’t noticed, my current state means I’m reliant on you four even to help me up when I’m placed face-down.”
“You…” started Root. What was he capable of? He couldn’t have, say, swapped the halo with a fake the way they’d played Syrus during their nabbing of Hamlick’s flute.
But he didn’t need to, did he?
“This was your palace,” she continued. “Your halls. Your halo. Your skip snare. Your secret tunnels. You say you’ve had to rely on us; we’ve been relying on you, assuming whatever you say is true, assuming you’ve told the whole truth. These are your things. You know more about them than any of us—even the Children.”
“And what good—?”
Vit interjected. “Uh—actually, you know what? When we were down in the vault, he did help with the skip snare.”
“Help how?” asked Azriah.
“He said he could influence the magic a bit or something. Something about his… magical field around the brick. It was the first he’d mentioned it.”
“So he…?”
“I don’t know, he kind of… sang to it? Really quietly. And it glowed.”
They all turned to the king.
“I told you exactly the truth,” he said, defiance on his stony lip. “I did my best to help. But it was a difficult task. I cannot help that we failed.”
The others didn’t look convinced. They’d been swayed to Root’s side.
But what did it matter? The clock was ticking, and they didn’t even know if this accusation was true. For all Root knew, she was only making an enemy of someone who was still inevitably about to be pressed into very close quarters with her in mere moments. If only she could just confirm something. If only they had something concrete to work off of…
“Hold on,” said Root. She patted her bag. “Who has the mirror?”
“Root…” started Azriah, eyeing the king warily.
“Not now. Who has it? Beel?”
“Yes.”
“Give it here.”
Vit furrowed their brow. “What good…?”
“Do you remember when we were in the crypt?” started Root, taking the bundle from Beel and unwrapping it.
“Every day,” said Beel morosely.
“And… damn, it was just like this, the four of us trapped in a tiny room. We really need to stop letting suspicious characters direct us into weird tunnels.”
“I could not agree more, glad you’re finally coming to your senses.”
“Anyway, we suspected that Ophylla was up to something. We had a theory, but we couldn’t confirm it. Then we got the mirror, and I looked inside, and I saw the answer. I knew it was true. Do you think…?”
The wrappings fell away, dirty cloth suddenly revealing a shimmering golden sheen, perfectly polished as if it hadn’t been stuffed at the bottom of a travel pack for weeks next to muddy blankets and crumbs of smushed food. Like a returned king casting off the guise of peasantry, the mirror emerged triumphantly into the room. The king studied it with an unreadable expression.
Root took it in her hand. The energy of the mote periapt filled her at once.
It was one hell of a hangover cure.
The headache and lousy night’s sleep faded away like a pebble stuck in a boot getting ground away to a grain of sand, a melting reprieve. Thrumming waves of power washed through Root. She couldn’t ignore where they were—not the hopelessness of being trapped in a secret storage chamber, but the grandiosity of having just run a nearly successful heist on the most powerful church in the worlds. And despite the king trying to pull the wool over all eleven of their eyes, Root had caught him, stopped him. And she was feeling pretty damn good about that.
But she needed to know. And so she lifted the mirror’s hollow, empty frame, and she looked inside.
Wispy images took shape. There was the king’s brick, sitting atop the display case. And there was Vit. They used webs to pin back the skip snare, just as planned.
From the brick emerged two shadowy arms with long fingers, dark and smoky like Root’s sword. The fingers prodded the skip snare. Vit reached for the halo.
And the king’s hands snapped it up faster. He stowed it behind his stone back as his brick grew larger and larger, Vit shrinking smaller and smaller.
Root tore her eyes away. That was enough. And just as before, she knew with certainty, she felt it like a truth upon which the rest of the worlds’ happenings hung.
“He took it,” she said. She held out the mirror. No one else reached for it, but they nodded. They believed her.
She rewrapped the mirror and gave it back to Beel. They sat in silence for ten long, expectant seconds.
“So,” started Azriah. “It’s great that we know that. But now what?”
“Yeah,” said Vit. “We’re still trapped. And we don’t know where the halo is.” They made a good point. They seemed to have snapped out of their stupor, at least. “I don’t suppose it gave you any answers to those predicaments?”
Root bit her lip. “No.”
The king sighed. “You know, perhaps—”
She set the brick face-down atop a barrel.
“I guess it really doesn’t change anything,” said Azriah. “Whether it was David or the king designating the deposit point of the skip snare, the halo could still be anywhere. Unless that was also a lie. So we still have no way to know. I still say we get out of here and figure out the halo later.”
“Not necessarily,” said Root. “Vaults and locks and posting guards—I don’t have any expertise there. But you can be damn sure I’ve hidden things.”
“Like?” asked Beel.
“Drugs. Sex toys. Money, when I had a little more of it than I could justify. Nude sketches of a boy I knew. His friend did them; terrible angles. And I had this book I was kind of embarrassed about because—” She waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter.”
“So where would you hide something?” asked Vit.
“Under your sister’s mattress is always best practice. Especially if she’s the one looking for it to rat you out. Somewhere she wouldn’t look, and somewhere that, if someone else finds it, it’s not so easily traced back to you.”
“I don’t think he has a sister,” said Beel.
“No. But he also doesn’t have a whole network of churches and vast amounts of gold at his disposal. Unless he’s got some really loyal servants or something from his king-ing days—who’ve stuck around all these years, and, you know, I don’t think Capsoul had visiting hours or a mail system—he’s got no one. Plus, he’s paranoid. He’s so unbelievably paranoid. Didn’t even trust his own builders, right? Even if he had a confidant, would he trust them with the halo for even an hour? Doubt it.”
“So he didn’t move it to a vault.”
“Hell no. He didn’t move it far. That book—I stashed it in a bush outside the schoolhouse once so no one would see me with it. Went back that afternoon and it was gone. Someone else must’ve found it. So without a guard, he can’t just stick it somewhere random, no matter how well hidden. There’s no way to be sure someone won’t spot it anyway, and then it’s over.”
“So he didn’t put it in a bush either,” said Beel.
“What’s great about putting it under your sister’s mattress—when you share a room, that is—and what’s not great about sticking it in a bush is that you can keep tabs on it. Right? You want to know where it is. See it. And if someone finds it—say, because they’re poking around, trying to find something else. Like an exit. You want plausible deniability. Worst-case scenario, if it’s found, you want a scapegoat. You want it in your bedroom but under your sister’s mattress.”
Root was wandering around the cramped room now, scanning the walls, the floor, the mortar lines and cracks where the walls met. It took a few minutes, but then she spotted something that caught her eye: a chip missing from a grout line between two tiles, a gap big enough for her pinky. She’d seen several such spots—at the back of the fifth statue alcove outside the Villa Apostolic, at the palace base where they’d delivered their supplies to Vit that morning, and half a dozen other spots throughout the maze of hidden tunnels that opened yet another unseen door.
“He planned to reform in this room,” said Root. “He’d hide it where he would be able to keep an eye on it. Retrieve it. Or, if we found it first—somehow—pretend this area must’ve been compromised by the Children. That this was David’s backup hiding spot.”
Root took a deep breath. Please, don’t let this blast my face off with an explosion or a sudden flood of sludge or some other, more horrible trap. She held her breath as she stuck her pinky into the hole. She wiggled it around.
Tlick-at! Something moved under the tile. There was a creaking, a grinding of stone on stone. A section of the wall at waist height started to shift. Root ducked, just in case.
The bricks slid away. And there, in a small boxy cubby just beyond, alongside some scraps of bloodstained handkerchief, was the Halo of the Unsightly King.
A boy named Kiran stood lordly in the center of his bedroom, stark-naked and with both hands held in a thumb-and-forefinger gesture that framed the lower part of his body in a way he would’ve described as “perfect.”
“You’re sure that’s the framing you want?” asked his friend Yam, who lay on the floor with a sketch pad, looking up in a way that could only be described as deeply closeted.
“Um, ya,” said Kiran. “She’s gonna love this.”
“Sure,” said Yam, “but maybe… I don’t know, I could do a wider shot, put more of you in it?” He scooted back across the floor.
“If you do it from too far away it’ll… you know… make it look smaller.”
“But there’ll be more to look at.”
“No, do it from there. Just this.” He emphasized with his hands again, forming the rectangle and drawing Yam’s eyes back. “I know what girls like. That’s why I’ve almost had a girlfriend three times and you haven’t.”
“I just haven’t met the right person,” said Yam defensively in a way that convinced even himself. “Anyway. Um.” He did his best not to blush—about the girlfriend comment, obviously. There was no other reason to blush under the circumsizes. Circumstances. “Um, but the angle… wouldn’t it be better if it were sort of a three-quarter angle? Instead of… well, right now it’s like, your hip and your side, and your face is in it but way up in the corner, and it sort of has you looking down with a vague expression, and your chin and neck are pressed in all weird. Um, no offense. But it’s better than the first one with your toes.”
“Just draw it,” said Kiran, who didn’t sound like he was going to be receptive to further artistic critique.
Yam sighed and started the sketch.
“Man, she’s going to love this. And be so surprised. It’s a surprise, you know. I’m just going to hand it to her tomorrow. Yeah. And once she sees it, she’ll be my girlfriend for sure.”
(And in case you were wondering, she was surprised, but she never did say yes to being Kiran’s girlfriend. Kiran, in fact, went on to have another six almost-girlfriends before coming to some realizations about what exactly got him so interested in his hobby of modeling for his friend Yam.
They’re quite happy together.)