Page 70 of The Darkening (The Darkening)

I don’t need a dream for one faraway day. I just need tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll have Pa back. The rest can wait.

The guard at the palace gates recognizes me and waves me through with barely a glance. I make my way to the gardens, sidestepping an attendant. I walk quickly, purposefully, and take a breath only when the hedges hide me from view.

I hurry down the path. At the first bend, under a gnarled tree, Izamal waits with his lips set in a grim line.

I nod at him. I know what I’m doing.

I toe a line in the dirt between the two sides of the hedge that mark the entrance to the garden. Now that I know what to look for, it’s easyto pick out the traces of previous lines. How many times has Dalca walked this way?

I draw a line through pebble-studded dirt to connect two fruit-dense trees, and another to connect a gap in a row of flowering bushes. The tricky bit is knowing which gaps to close and which to leave open. Izamal’s no help; he paces in a circle until I glare at him, then stands biting the pad of his thumb, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

He inches close, hovering as I draw an arc connecting two curving hedges. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

I point. “Go. Wait for me by the pool.”

He throws his hands up and goes. When I get to my feet, I find he’s left a circular track in the dirt. Great. I smooth it out and take care to erase our steps, lest they add stray lines to the ikon.

It’s harder than I’d anticipated to fit the bird’s-eye view of the garden to my view from the ground. Especially when I come to a set of two thigh-high gates set four feet apart. The ikon I’ve got in my head tells me that there has to be an open channel here, but I can’t tell which it is.

I crouch, peering closely at the one on the left. I shift to the one on the right.

There—the tiny pebbles are pressed deeper into the ground here, the dirt less compacted, as if it’s been shifted often.

I open the gate on the right and pick my way through the rest of the garden, until I’m satisfied all the right lines have been connected.

I make my way to the center, erasing Izamal’s steps as I go.

The golden gate creaks shut behind me, and I give it a tug to make sure. That should do it. Iz crouches by the pond’s edge, jumping to his feet when I nod.

I hold my breath, turning to the mosaic wall of the two figures with their hands pressed together.

Iz reaches the mosaic first and ducks behind it. He steps back into view, shaking his head. No door.

My stomach falls. What did I miss?

I close my eyes, going over the ikon. Did I forget it? Misremember it?

I open my eyes to the little pond, still as a mirror, reflecting the mosaic. There’s something fierce and almost hateful in the man’s and woman’s expressions, as if they’re locked in a struggle. But their hands are held as if they’re dancing, meeting above their heads and below their hearts.

Leaves crunch underfoot as I reach and trace the tiny tiles, feeling for anything with a little give, like the bas-relief door Dalca showed me.

The curve of their arms almost makes a circle. I get so close my nose brushes the stone. There’s a gap between their hands. It’s at odds with their expressions—they scowl as if yearning to engage in dance or warfare. Between their fingers is a funny bit of decoration.

I press on the tiles near their fingers, and a three-by-three section of tile pushes out. I twist it, half a turn—and what seemed like a funny decoration is now the lines of their hands, fingers touching. I press the section until it clicks into place.

I do the same to the tiles between their other hands, holding my breath before they click into place.

The rumble of stone under my fingers tells me everything I need to know, though Izamal’s face as he watches the mosaic wall’s backside—eyes wide, mouth agape—is a welcome confirmation.

I grin at him. This is a marvel of ikonomancy, and I figured it out. A delicious warmth fills me from toes to fingertips as I circle around.

Where the back of the mosaic once stood is now a doorway into darkness. The daylight only reaches a few feet in, revealing stone stairsheading down. “It might only let one of us in at a time,” I say. “You first.”

He’s barely in before stone rises up from below and seals it off.

It takes me thirty seconds to redo the tiles and reopen the door. “Izamal?”