Sadie Madison and the Boy in the Crimson Scarf

18 | The Most Beautiful Room In The World

Music filled the air like stardust cascading from the heavens. It had colour, and depth, and passion, and innocence. Tangible, something real. Sadie's fingers moved freely over the piano keys, as naturally as running them through water. But something more than music filled the room.

Something spoken, uttered, whispered.

Mystical words floating on hot, perfumed air.

But something ached deep inside.

Her heart, her stomach, her soul? Sadie didn't know.

Oliver had been gone for over an hour and every cell in her body called to him, pleading for his return. Her mind drifted from the piano keys to the eaved bedroom, the museum, Rhiannon's shop, the StarTrain, and the glorious passageways through The Winter Festival. But every face leaning in to say hello or congratulate her musical mastery was not his.

Not Oliver.

Sadie performance took place in a small opera house. The sort of place she'd seen in one of her father's books but had never visited.

Shaped like an egg, a stage had been positioned at the thick end with a proscenium arch, engraved with frescos and figureheads from The Winter Continent, towering overhead. Lush curtains in deep red, purple, and green hung either side while golden gargoyles of mythical creatures from The Winter Continent's vast history stared solemnly down.

The walls were decorated with red and black embossed paper, edged with white and punctuated by a dozen sets of double doors. Large paintings in elaborate gold frames hung in alcoves and recesses, dripping with amber lamplight, depicting more strange beasts and scenes from history. A shallow dress circle, twenty or more feet in the air, spun around the ellipse of the theatre filled with shadowy figures with gleaming eyes and twinkling jewellery.

From the centre of the ceiling hung the body of a mighty dragon, its mouth gaping with plumes of golden fire. Above, the beasts' wings filled the ceiling, sharp tips licking both edges of the dress circle, while in its claws hung the chain to a breath-taking chandelier burning with hundreds of candles.

Below, an assortment of chairs, sofas, and chaise lounges sat in irregular rows. Upon them perched an audience, their outfits as lavish as the room. Successful men and women, dripped in finery and priceless jewels, champagne flutes cradled in hand.

Dragging herself from thoughts from Oliver, Sadie revisited the memory of people trudging up Leviathan Crook. She saw them standing in the street drinking mulled wine and singing carols. She saw their faces pressed against the window. Cale Boswick and Arnold Tomes and hundreds more.

Memories of Danver flooded around her heart. Together they'd created new worlds from the dressing up trunk, drank tea, and read Penny Dreadfuls in the Temple of theDead, walked in the Candlelight Parade, saluted the Monument to the Victorious Dead, and hid beneath the piano in the music room.

The music reacted with each vision.

Happy, contented, and filled with promise.

But something ugly slithered through her mind.

Traces of the Nepenthe reached up, scratching and clawing away at the inside of her skull. She tried to ignore them, but the memory of pain and betrayal and loss endured. Sadie tried to think of Danver again, of happy times in the eaved bedroom, in The Glade of Remembrance, Iron Bridge, the music room at school.

But the darkness bloomed, spreading like a virus.

A ball of black fur and spikes floated in her mind against a brilliant world of white.