Apparently, she hadn’t been very subtle. She considered her answer.
“Honestly?” she said. “I don’t think you’ve got anything left to awaken.”
Dervish liked this.
“Well said,” he told her.
Some of the fury, the rigidity, seemed to leave his body.
“My son was older than you by perhaps twelve years,” he said. “His name was Pleasant. It sounds like a name from the Lowlands, but it is in fact what we called him. I loved the boy, as I have said and shall never deny. He did not love me. Pleasant suffered from great sea-changes of emotion, which he blamed on me. I tried in every way I could to bring him peace. I raised him in the countryside. I gave him a white stallion. A violin. The whole blue firmament. Yet whenever the storms gathered in his head, everything good and hopeful was swept away, and his hatred for me revived, like a serpent rising out of the sea.”
Dervish turned to his men. The nearest had been listening, which annoyed him. He sent them away with a flick of his eyes.
“One night, during some particularly grievous hours for my son, I made the mistake of leaving him alone,” he went on. “We had a brown-and-white spaniel named Flossie, and I had commissioned a portrait of her for Pleasant. I went to town to receive it. I thought it might elevate his spirits. I was gone perhaps an hour.”
Here, it seemed to Zoe, the weight of the story began to show on Dervish’s face.
“As I trod back to our door,” he went on, “I saw Pleasant standing in a window on the second floor. He was shirtless, and holding a sword that used to decorate my study. He had been waiting for me. He took the sword out of its scabbard. I knew what he meant to do. I dropped the painting. I lifted my hands, begging him to be still until I could get into the house and up the stairs. Instead, he turned the sword on himself.” Dervish paused. “He opened his OWN throat, he hated me so much.” He stopped again. “Later, the doctor chastised me for not reaching Pleasant in time. He said he might have lived. I told him—well, first I refused to pay him—and then I said the coldest thing I could think of, which was, ‘The damned boy has ruined the rug!’ After that, I did not allow a single thing on earth into my heart. I committed all manner of crimes and abominations, and have never regretted it.”
Even after everything Dervish had done to X and to her family, Zoe felt an urge to say she was sorry about his son. He must have seen the pity in her eyes. In an instant, he returned to his old, inhuman self, as if his reflective mood were a coat he had tried on and not liked.
A few of the guards had fallen asleep, and lay snoring.
“Rise, IMBECILES!” said Dervish.
The men woke, grunted, grabbed their weapons. Dervish gathered them around. He told them that according to his spies, X and Regent were on the way to a place called Where the Rivers End in the hopes of finding X’s mother. Dervish said that a “serving wench” named Maudlin was with them—she had a cat, which Zoe found hard to process—as well as a Russian guard. Here, Tree interrupted Dervish to say that the guard was technically from Ukraine. The lord gave him a scalding stare.
Dervish informed the squad that they would reach Where the Rivers End before X and the others—and ambush and savage them. The way Dervish beamed in anticipation of the bloodshed (just moments after telling her the story about his son, no less) convinced Zoe, more than anything else she had witnessed, that he was a psychopath.
Dervish finished his speech by crowing that X was looking in the wrong place for his mother, though he wasn’t far off. The lord looked forward to telling him how “EXCRUCIATINGLY CLOSE” he had come to finding her. Dervish seemed not to care that Zoe was listening. He appeared to relish it, in fact. He was taunting her.
As the guards lined up two by two, Dervish gave Zoe one of his revolting, lipless smiles.
“You must wonder why I have not ALREADY sent you back to your world,” he said. “It is because you are my greatest weapon. When X sees you, he will be shocked. Unable to believe his eyes. Rooted to the spot. Do you follow, little girl? It shall make his capture and torture SO MUCH easier. It will not even occur to him to do the sane thing and run.”
Dervish banished Tree to the back of the squad, and pushed Zoe to the front where he could watch her. She managed to get a glimpse of Tree every so often as they made their way down the tunnel. His right hand was pressed against the violent welt on his face. The halo of his hair glowed every time they passed a torch.
Zoe tried to dream up a plan as they marched. Her father—she couldn’t believe she was about to have a positive thought about him, but apparently she was—had always been an inspired improviser when he was caving or hiking. He carried the bare minimum of equipment, and made every decision half a second before he had to. He fed on the uncertainty. It scared Zoe when she was young. By the time she was Jonah’s age, she and her dad had run out of gas three times in the middle of the wilderness. (Three times that she could remember.) Zoe would beg her dad to tell her what was going to happen next, and he’d smile wide, and say, “I have no idea! How freakin’ cool is that?” As they continued to escape these situations with their lives, Zoe settled into the not-knowing. She learned to improvise, too.
Still, what could she do in the face of the Lowlands? X and the others would be taken by surprise. They’d be outnumbered five to one. Only Regent would have powers. Only the Ukrainian guard would even have a weapon, probably. What was the “wench” with the cat going to do? What was Zoe herself going to do? She’d defended herself before, she’d defended her friends, but she had never once hit somebody in anger. It wasn’t how she was raised. Her mother had five playlists of Buddhist chanting on Spotify.
Zoe couldn’t stop picturing X, and how shocked he’d be when he saw her. His first instinct would be to protect her—but he was powerless here, just a pale young man who grew up without enough to eat. He’d get mauled just like Dervish said he would. Zoe realized now that Dervish had made her march in front of the men partly so she’d feel ashamed: X and his friends were going to be decimated, and she herself was leading the army.
The tunnel squeezed tighter until the rock all but scraped Zoe’s arms. The torches on the walls grew rarer, like a species of flowers dying off. Soon, they walked in near darkness. After what Zoe guessed was half an hour, the passageway arrived at the top of a stone staircase. It was impossible to tell how far down the steps went. Zoe put a foot on the first one, but was too tired to continue.
Dervish pushed past her and flew—literally flew—down the staircase. The end of his robe shot out behind him, then disappeared, like the tongue of a snake.
“They are only STAIRS, Zoe Bissell,” he shouted from the bottom. “Shall I explain how they work?”
Zoe breathed in heavily. The oxygen had evaporated, or done whatever it was that oxygen did, as the tunnel grew tighter.
An idea came to her.
It came to her because she was so exhausted, because she couldn’t take another step. It was a small idea, but it might help X and his friends in the fight. She felt sure Dervish wouldn’t have thought of it.
There was a torch in a sconce on the wall. The light fell on the first handful of stairs. Zoe nodded to herself, and descended.
One hundred and twenty-two stairs spiraled down like a corkscrew. By the time Zoe reached the bottom, her shins were prickly with the pain, but her mind was alive.
“Let’s keep moving,” she told Dervish. “Unless you’re tired.”