The War of Queens

Chapter 26

Evelyn

 Two guards accompanied the oldest princess through the halls of the castle. She felt their eyes on her and she wished she could ask them to leave. She done that once the week before, when she had finally had enough, but her mother had heard and Evelyn had been reprimanded. Now the guards had strict orders: under no circumstances was she to walk alone, unprotected.

 It was all because of a string of rapes in the city. They were frightful affairs; the girls were given a special sort of poison that made them unable to move. Nobody was sure who did this, and how many had taken this method, but Evelyn found herself doubting that they would be able to make it past the castle gates, especially now that the entire City Guard was on the lookout for them. Yet her mother prevailed in having her escorted at all times.

 She found the way to the stairs that led to the crypt. They were behind a thick door in a part of the castle that was almost never travelled, and when she opened the door, she turned around and spoke to her guards.

 “Wait out here,” she commanded.

 They glanced nervously at each other, and she sighed in exasperation.

 “Do you really think that there is a man down there, waiting to rape me?”

 “As you say, Your Grace,” the quickest of the two guards muttered and shuffled to stand at the side of the door.

 Evelyn took the torch that was hung beside the door before continuing through the door way and down the steps. Burnt-out torched lined the wall, but she did not light them. The darkness did not scare her, and neither did the way that the flame flickered and sent shadows crawling across the walls like living things.

 When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the rectangle of light from the still-open door had all but disappeared and she found herself in a corridor with a ceiling so tall that the light of her torch could not reach it. Rows and rows of statues, as old as Etheron itself, flanked her side; kings and their queens, and sister and brothers, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, they all looked down at her as she passed by, her flame lighting their ancient, long gone faces.

 As a child, she would stop and study their faces, intrigued by the legacy of her blood. As she grew older, she learned that she had no legacy but the one she built for herself and stopped wasting her time with the past.

 The corridor seemed to go on forever, with more than three centuries of history passing by her in a flurry. They said it had reached the edges of the castle, and that the masons were planning on turning it so that it would stay within the castle walls. She found the notion ridiculous. At some point, the crypt had to outgrow the castle. Death never ends.

 At the very end, she found the only statue she had any mind for. Her brother’s.

 The mason had been amazing. It was Tysh, who had also done some work on the theatre that Evelyn had worked on, who had carved out Christian’s striking features. His curls were beautifully done; it was as though a light breeze was brushing through them, making them seem so alive. But when her hand went to cover his cheek, it was not warm and soft; it was cold and hard, like the stone it was made from.

 “It’s funny,” she said to the statue, “that you should be the one carved in stone, and I in flesh and blood. You were never cold or hard, and I never warm or soft.”

 She placed the torch in a contraption next to his statue that was meant to keep torches while you prayed to your ancestors. Once more, her gaze went to his hair. No crown adorned his head and it made her sick to the stomach to think that he had died before being given that right. Who knew how many of the other statues were first sons that had been outlived by their fathers?