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That the Shadows were messengers for the Shadow King.

I needed to find him first if I intended to bargain for Ofelia. If I could send him a message, I could follow his creatures, his heralds, right to him.

“I have a message to be delivered to the king of Shadows,” I told the crowd gathered all around me.

They did not so much as whisper.

I sighed, dropping my hands to my sides. “Tell him Lope de la Rosa wishes to have an audience with him.”

Silence, still. If they didn’t want a message, what did they want?

Stories, Ofelia had said. They didn’t just take breath, they took stories.

I had no strength, but I had my poetry still.

I did not memorize my poems, but after so many nights on the wall, watching, listening to the night, doing nothing but waiting for monsters, I’d gotten quite good at creating new poems and then letting them die in my memory. Verses and words, detached, disjointed, sewn back together in my head just because they sounded lovely as a whole.

I wasn’t a real poet, in my mind, not like the poet I named myself after or any of the greats. Meter and rhyme took effort for me. But poetry was, at its core, playing with words. Like how Ofelia wove her stories, adding twists and turns, new characters and new surprises. Ideas to be strung together like pearls side by side on a strand. I couldn’t explain how I knew the way they fit together. Something deep in my chest told me so.

I closed my eyes and pretended to be back on the wall. Thinking moony thoughts of Ofelia, and Carlos saying,You’re dreaming of someone, aren’t you?

Yes. Yes, I was always thinking of her.

“A girl in love,” I whispered.

“She sings a song no one will hear,

She bears a wound no one will see.

She places her neck upon an altar

And draws the knife herself.

She pleads to the gods for mercy,

She pleads to the skies for courage,

A thousand Shadows she battles a night,

And none compares with the monster of her mind,

Drawing her to what she cannot have.”

My voice shook. My poem wasn’t done. My story wasn’t through.

“No more.

She will brave your monsters,

Your Shadows,

Your claws,

And she will proclaim the love

She’s kept silent for far too long.”

Upon opening my eyes, wet with tears, I found that the Shadows had retreated a few paces, watching with their empty faces, tilted as if to hear me better. Then, like leaves swept up by a gust of wind, they moved together in one wave, winding through the tall grass. They streamed forward, down the steps, in the direction of the moon—east, then, if there was an east here.