Estella Valehollow's Arc

Chapter 8 of 11

They walked until the trees broke and the castle rose out of the snow, black against a white sky. Estella pushed the heavy door open and led Penny inside. The hall was cold and still. She set the child on a stone bench and began to unwind her scarf. Then a small sound started in her pack. A thin, turning music, soft as a lullaby. The music box had begun to play on its own. Estella drew it out. The lid had lifted by itself. Inside, the small wooden lovers turned slow circles, the dark-haired woman and the brown-haired man, locked in their painted embrace. Penny's breath caught. "Papa sings that one," she whispered. "At bed." Estella's hand closed white around the box. He had hummed her song to another child. He had carried it into a new house and laid it over a small head like a blanket. Something inside her went past anger into a colder place. She snapped the lid shut. The music kept playing. She set the box on the stone floor and stood over it, and her voice was very quiet. "Then he will hear it stop." She raised one hand. Heat rolled off her palm and the wood split with a dry crack. The little lovers blackened and curled. The melody bent, slowed, and died. Penny flinched but did not cry. Estella turned to her with ash on her fingers. She lifted the child by the blanket and climbed the winding stair to a high chamber where a great iron cage stood waiting. She set Penny inside and closed the door. The lock clicked. "Sleep," Estella said. "Your father is coming for you. I want him rested when he arrives." She went down the stairs alone. The song was gone. The bait was set. In the hall below, the burnt box still smoked on the stone. Estella passed a tall mirror on the wall and caught her own face in it — flushed, wet-eyed, a stranger wearing her skin. She struck it before she knew her hand had moved. The glass burst into a hundred shining shards across the floor. She stood in the wreckage and breathed. The girl was caged. The lullaby was ash. Adrian would come, and she would be waiting, and whatever soft thing had stirred in her at the sound of his song was buried now under broken glass.