The Unwritten King

22. False Awakening

Nicholas slept for fourteen hours. He came to feeling as if he'd been knocked out - like, blunt force trauma to the head - but in a nice way. The way waking up from a coma always looked in those old, medically inaccurate feel-good movies.

He was hungry like he hadn't been in weeks. Lucky for him, it was so late in the day that breakfast and lunch had already been left just inside his door. He ate on his bed and watched seabirds skim the surface of Lake Charlatan far below. It wasn't until he'd cleaned every dish that his head snapped up.

His door?

Still there.

The king was surprisingly soft.

Nicholas tested the handle. Unlocked. He didn't go any further for a while.

For a few minutes, he stood at the stairs to the archive and contemplated disobeying Rayan's order. There was no way of knowing how much time they had left. In Nicholas' original story, the version he'd shared with Cici, there was only about a week between Adrian's intrusion on al-Narin and Rayan's death. A week had long since come and gone; there was no such timeline in the journal. Nicholas was trying to outrun a climax he couldn't see coming. He could only assume, based on his own illustrations, that the turning point would happen before summer's end.

It was nearly September. Rayan didn't have time to waste.

And Nicholas needed to go home. He wasn't quite sure when one had become more important than the other.

He glanced back at his bed. The sun always caught his window more directly on its way down. It still sat high, but the early-evening rays had begun to shed over his sheets.

All that fuss he'd made about getting a window, just to spend days at a time holed up downstairs.

Nicholas stripped off his shirt and stretched out on the bed. The light was warm over his back.

His dinner came, and he ate that, too, watching the sun set over the cliffs.

He rose and stretched. Arms high above his head until his back gave a satisfying pop, then dangling low to touch his toes. He put on his only other shirt, identical to the last. The door was still unlocked when he tested it again. He went downstairs to take one of the torches from the archive wall.

For the next several minutes, he moved hesitantly, braced for repercussions at several key checkpoints. But there was no shurta posted outside of the door, or in the main chamber of the library, or on either side of the library entrance. Nobody told him to turn around as he stepped out onto the first floor. Nobody asked him where he was going. The bouncing flame inside the torch cast deceptive shadows, but he was alone.

Nicholas didn't try for an exit. He wasn't stupid enough to think that would work, or shortsighted enough to want to.

And, anyway. It would be a waste not to explore his own castle.

Several doors were locked, but several weren't. He found a room for storage and a room for games, and more sitting rooms than seemed necessary. He found the public bath from his one-night stint as a courtesan and turned right back around.

Everything was beautiful, of course, because it had to be, but Nicholas thought he preferred the warm tones in Rayan's room; beautiful because they had been chosen.

He did love the courtyard, though. He had drawn it to be imposing, with its many asymmetrical pillars and its black marble floor and its view, if one looked straight up, of the castle's jagged roof. Now that he was there, it felt protective more than anything. The floor was just as reflective as the narrow, shallow pool that crossed its center. Nicholas sat on the pool's stone edge for some time.