“No, wait!” Jonah called out.
It was too late. Chip and Alex broke away from Jonah’s grasp. In four quick strides they were beside their own tracers.
“It’s okay!” Katherine hissed in Jonah’s ear. “They’re invisible, remember? They’ll just stay invisible! They’ve just got to find that … out. …”
Her voice trailed off because she was wrong. As soon as Chip and Alex sat down on the chairs, occupying the same space as their tracers, their forms sprang back into living color.
“It must be like multiplying negative numbers,” Jonah muttered. “Two negatives make a positive. So, invisible tracer, invisible time traveler—fully visible boy.”
“What are you talking about?” Katherine demanded.
“Never mind,” Jonah mumbled.
Chip pulled away from his tracer long enough to grin broadly at Alex. Alex grinned back. And then he called out in a high, sweet, pure voice that sounded a lot younger than his usual voice, “Mother?”
The sobbing queen on the bed—and all five of the sobbing princesses—jerked to attention and whirled around.
“Oh, no, their clothes!” Katherine moaned. “They look all wrong!”
But the queen and the princesses didn’t seem to notice that Chip and Alex were a strange blend of fifteenth century and twenty-first century. They must not be able to see the jeans and the Nikes and the short hair, Jonah thought. Maybe just time travelers can see that. The serving girl back at the Tower of London didn’t notice anything weird either. …
And then Jonah forgot to wonder about clothes or hair or anything else. The queen let out a shriek of pure joy and cried out, “My sons! Oh, my sons! I thought you were lost to me forever!”
She sprang up and dashed across the room, burying both boys in a hug. The princesses raced after her, their arms outstretched. They grabbed their brothers too. They were all so overjoyed that their laughing, giggling tracers back on the bed seemed downright solemn by comparison.
“But how did you get here?” the queen asked when Chip and Alex finally pulled back from the embrace. “My faithful servants said something went wrong with our plan, and you vanished. I thought we’d been betrayed, and you’d been carried away by the enemy. …”
“We thought you were surely dead,” the tallest princess added.
“We hid and came here on our own,” Chip said. “We distracted the guards and tiptoed up the stairs. We … we knew you had a plan, but we weren’t sure who we could trust.”
The queen gave a most unladylike snort.
“Is not that the story of our time?” she asked, and a hint of sadness crept into her voice. “Whom do we have left to trust?”
“Lord Rivers will come to us now, will he not?” Chip asked. “We can mount a campaign against Gloucester. We will defeat him.”
But the queen was peering over Chip’s head now. The sadness had taken over her face again.
“You do not know,” she murmured.
“Know what?” Alex asked.
“We know that Gloucester had himself crowned king,” Chip said in a hard voice. “We know that he is spreading slander about … about …”
The queen waved this news away, as though it was inconsequential. Or as if she had much worse problems to worry about.
“He had Rivers beheaded,” she said in a numb voice. “Rivers, and Grey, and Vaughan … he had Hastings executed too, because he said he was plotting against him.”
Jonah had no idea who any of those people were, except the Rivers guy—wasn’t he Chip’s uncle? The one on his mother’s side that Chip liked? As soon as the queen said “beheaded,” Chip slumped in his chair and clutched his face in shock and horror.
“No …,” he moaned.
Beside him, Alex was shaking his head in disbelief. With each name the queen recited, both boys gasped. Finally Chip dropped his hands from his face and peered up at his mother.
“Has he left us no one?” he whispered.
“He has left us ourselves,” the queen said with great dignity. “My daughters. My sons. Myself.”
Chip’s face showed what he thought of princesses and a queen as their only allies. Jonah hoped Katherine didn’t notice.
“Some of this conversation … it must have partly been what they were talking about anyway,” Katherine whispered.
Jonah noticed that the tracers on the bed had stopped laughing and giggling and rolling about. The queen’s tracer had the same expression of sorrowful nobility as the queen herself.
“But we shall prevail,” the queen said, her head held high. “We are in the right.”
Like an echo, the tracer queen on the bed mouthed the same words. The tracer princesses sat like statues beside her.
“I missed you, Mother,” Alex said, throwing his arms around his mother’s waist. “I missed how you always know the right thing to do.”
Alex couldn’t have seen his mother’s expression because he had his face buried in her skirt. But Jonah saw how the corners of her mouth trembled, how the pain and fear settled deep in her eyes.
“I can’t watch this,” Katherine murmured. “It’s like watching Holocaust movies, where you know everyone’s going to die.”
She pulled Jonah away from the doorway into the room so he couldn’t see either.
Jonah was busy trying to work something out in his head.
“They’re all going to die anyhow,” he said. “They lived more than five hundred years before we were born.” He remembered that he actually had no idea what time period he’d been born in. “Before you were born, anyway.”
“But can’t you feel it? In that room? The way it seems like really, really bad things are going to happen?” Katherine asked.
Jonah could. Foreboding, he wanted to tell Katherine. That’s what it’s called. What we feel. But what good did it do just to know the right word? Action was what counted.