Chapter 78
Late afternoon bled softly across the stone corridors, turning the windows to pools of liquid amber. Queen Henriette stood in the archway to the drawing room, wrapped in the same lace shawl like it was part of her skin now. The phone was clutched in her hand, its screen dim, forgotten. She watched Lui from across the room, still and composed, the way a statue might study a living man.
“Take me out on your beast,” Henriette said suddenly, her voice cutting cleanly through the quiet room like a ceremonial bell. There was no preamble. No warning. The words just fell, like an invocation, or a dare.
Lui looked up from his laptop, blinking slowly. “My what?” he asked, his fingers pausing above the keyboard. His brows lifted, suspicion already creasing the space between them.
Queen Henriette tilted her head, curious at his confusion, as though she were examining a word she had pronounced correctly but was somehow being told she hadn’t. Her gaze didn’t leave him, but something in her shifted, an eager tension settling behind her eyes, like a child on the edge of discovering something mythic.
“Your carriage,” she said, voice smooth and deliberate, the syllables carefully placed, like she was dusting off an ancient term and trying to fit it to modern machinery. “The small, fast one... with the glowing eyes.” Her eyes lit faintly at the memory, a flicker of delighted awe surfacing beneath her composed mask. “The one you arrived in,” she added, a hint of wonder edging her words. “It growled when it stopped. I could hear it from my chambers. I want to go inside of it. To see what it thinks.”
Lui squinted at her now, eyes narrowing slightly, unsure if she was mocking him or testing him, or perhaps, both. “You mean… my car?” he asked, slow and uncertain.
Queen Henriette straightened slightly, folding her hands in front of her as though preparing to receive guests in court. A flicker of amusement, or maybe satisfaction, passed over her features.
Henriette nodded, but it was the kind of nod that carried more weight than agreement. Her posture remained perfectly upright, spine straight, hands resting lightly over one another, as if issuing a royal command. “Yes,” she said. “Your mechanical steed.”
She tasted the word like it was foreign and bland compared to what she had imagined. But her eyes remained fixed on him, steady, gleaming with a strange mix of excitement and reverence. She blinked slowly, then added, quieter this time, “I want to see where it goes when it's not coming here. I want to feel the world moving under me. I want to know if it remembers the roads it takes… or if it invents them every time.”
A smile, small, almost private, tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Besides,” she murmured, voice now soft and conspiratorial, “I think it was whispering when it idled.”
Her fingers twitched at her side, as if already reaching for the door handle in her mind.
“Take me,” she said again. But this time, the command was barely a breath. Hopeful. Hungry.
Lui set the laptop aside with a muted sigh, leaning back in the chair. He studied her for a long beat, reading her expression—detached, but intent, like a chess master deciding whether the move she’d just made was a feint or checkmate.
“Why?” Lui asked, voice carefully casual, but his eyes didn’t leave her. He was used to her unpredictability by now, but something about this request sat differently in the air—heavier, like it came from beneath everything else she'd said so far.
Henriette’s gaze drifted toward the tall windows, their glass clouded with age and the press of time. Outside, the late sun spilled gold over the hills, staining the sky with the colors of a fading kingdom. Her expression softened, and she spoke without looking at him.
“To see if the outside still exists,” she murmured.
The words carried the weight of someone who had spent too long locked in metaphor and finally wondered if the world beyond the metaphor still held shape. Her voice held no jest, no irony, only the low ache of someone hoping their memories had not all turned to myth.
Lui didn’t answer. He simply stood, grabbed the keys, and headed for the door.
The gravel crunched beneath their shoes as they crossed the drive. The air smelled of dry earth and forgotten summers. Henriette followed a few steps behind, her stride measured, not timid, but precise, as though each footfall might shift the balance of things she wasn’t ready to face.
She tilted her head toward the wind once, like she expected to hear it call her name. Like the land might remember her.
And then she saw it.
The car sat parked beneath the crooked arm of an old tree, its glossy black hood still coated with dust and sun-glint. The “beast,” as she’d called it. The mechanical creature with glowing eyes. She slowed.
Her steps lost rhythm.
It wasn’t fear, not exactly, it was reverence. Fascination. That same weightless feeling one might get at the edge of a cliff: the knowledge that something immense, something utterly other, waited just past your feet.
She moved closer.
Each step seemed a negotiation between her inherited world and this foreign one. She reached out once, hovering a hand above the hood, but didn’t touch. The heat of the engine was still faint beneath the metal. It breathed, she was certain of it. Machines like this had lungs. Will. Temper.
It wasn’t just a vessel to her. It was an artifact. A construct from a world that had kept moving when she had stopped.