Chip clenched his jaw.
“It could have been rats that ate the food,” he said in a hard voice. “Those guys were talking about rats last night.”
Rats, Jonah thought. Bread. Oatmeal. Aspirin. Even the bubonic plague … It was so much easier to think about and talk about things that didn’t really matter right now. But that left them stuck in a stone room in the fifteenth century forever.
He sighed.
“About last night …,” he began. “Was it just me, or did none of that make sense?”
“What do you mean?” Katherine asked in her snippiest voice. Jonah happened to know—only because he’d been living with her his entire life—that she sounded like that only when she was trying not to cry.
“You know,” Jonah said. “I’m not exactly an expert on assassination attempts, or the fifteenth century, or anything else. But why were those guys trying to kill Chip and Alex by throwing them out the window? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stab them? Or—if you really want to be secret about it—just suffocate them with a pillow?”
Chip and Alex both winced. Katherine only stared down at the secretly massacred bread.
“Those guys were only trying to keep things a secret when they first came into the room,” Alex said. “If you want to keep things a secret, you don’t stand in a courtyard in the middle of the night yelling, ‘Where are the bodies?’ You don’t storm up the stairs with torches and search the royal chambers.” He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe … maybe they wanted to make it look like we fell to the ground accidentally. Like we died because we were trying to escape.”
“Died trying to escape,” Katherine said. “Of course!” She looked up now, as if it made her feel better to know at least some information. “In dictatorships, when there are political prisoners and the dictator has them executed without a fair trial, they always say they died trying to escape. We talked about that in social studies.”
Jonah thought that sixth-grade social studies must have gotten a lot more brutal since he’d taken it. Oh, wait—Katherine had the really hard teacher, Mrs. Hatchett, the one everyone tried to avoid getting.
“England isn’t a dictatorship,” Chip said stiffly, almost as if he was offended. “A monarchy, sure, but we have Parliament, too. Representative government.” Something like surprise spread over his nearly see-through face. “That’s weird. I can still think like him.”
Nobody had to ask. “Him” was Edward V.
“Did he know what was going on last night?” Jonah asked. “Or …” He glanced over at Alex. “Did the prince know?”
Alex and Chip exchanged glances.
“Things have gotten very weird lately,” Chip said slowly. “It’s complicated.”
“Maybe if you tell us—when did things start getting weird?” Jonah suggested. He looked down at the trayful of beer and oatmeal, at his own virtually transparent hands. “What’s normal around here, anyway?”
Chip frowned.
“It was normal that I became king when my father died,” he said. “Everybody expected that.”
Katherine opened her mouth, and Jonah thought she was going to object to Chip’s talking about the king as “I” again. But she only said, “Go on.”
“When I heard the news, I was at home—where I lived—at Ludlow Castle with my uncle,” Chip said.
“You lived with the guy who wanted to kill you?” Jonah asked, horrified.
Chip squinted, as if remembering. Or as if it took effort to translate his fifteenth-century memories into explanations the other kids would understand.
“No, no, a different uncle,” he said. “On the other side. I lived with Lord Rivers, who’s my mother’s brother. There’s kind of … bad blood between the two sides. It’s like our father’s family thinks our mother’s family is greedy and ambitious and, I don’t know, kind of lower class and tacky.”
“But they’re not!” Alex interrupted.
“No, no, of course not!” Chip said. “On our grandmother’s side they’ve got royal blood dating back to Charlemagne!”
Jonah couldn’t remember when Charlemagne lived, but he kind of thought he was French. If they were going to skip back to a whole other king, in a whole other country, this was going to take forever.
“Let’s go back to you becoming king,” Jonah said. “What happened then?”
“Lord Rivers said I needed to travel to London for my coronation,” Chip said. “He said it had to happen fast.” Somehow Chip sounded younger now, like he really was the twelve-year-old king. And he said “Lord Rivers” in such an admiring tone—no self-respecting teenaged boy would talk that way about anyone but a sports star.
“So Lord Rivers took you to London right away?” Jonah asked.
To Jonah’s surprise, Chip’s bottom lip began trembling. This was something Jonah would have thought was impossible, when Chip’s face looked so much like crystal. But, incredibly, Chip seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“No,” Chip practically whimpered. “Not because he didn’t want to! There were … arrangements to make! Troops to prepare, to make sure I was safe. And so … nobody could steal my throne—”
“Wait a minute,” Katherine interrupted. “Are we in London now or at that Ludlow Castle place?”
It was funny—Jonah hadn’t even thought to wonder that. One scary fifteenth-century castlelike place was pretty much like another, as far as he was concerned.
“London,” Chip said forlornly. “Ludlow Castle is miles and miles away. It took five days just to get from Ludlow Castle to Stony Stratford.”
Another strange name to keep track of.
“And Stony Stratford is …,” Jonah prompted.
The wobbly lip was back.
“Where it happened,” Chip whispered.
THIRTEEN
Jonah waited. It was hard enough trying to tiptoe around Katherine’s feelings, without having to worry about Chip now too. Jonah would rather dodge flaming torches again than see Chip cry.