“Shh, shh,” JB said. “They’re all right. Remember? I promised they’d be safe. You’re the one who probably just gave yourself a concussion.”
JB was poking at Jonah’s eyes, pulling the lids back, one after the other, and peering deep into his pupils, just like Jonah’s soccer coach had done that time Jonah banged heads with another player in the championship game.
Jonah turned his head and struggled to sit up.
“But you said this wasn’t supposed to happen!” he argued.
“I said it wasn’t supposed to happen yet,” JB said. “The king’s just a little early. I’m very confident about this … let’s watch it play out. …”
Jonah jerked away from him, rolled over on his side, and began digging in his pocket.
“That’s right,” Katherine cheered him on. “Try getting out of here using the Elucidator.”
Jonah pulled the Elucidator out, but before he could even glance at the screen, JB wrapped his hand around Jonah’s wrist. In one motion JB jerked the Elucidator away, stabbed a button on its surface, and tossed it toward the ceiling. It turned invisible in midair, but Jonah scrambled up and ran over to where he thought it might land.
JB threw it a little sideways, so let’s see, a normal trajectory would end up right about … Jonah listened closely, hoping he could hear the Elucidator hit the floor. But any sound it made was lost in the echo of the footsteps from 1483, King Richard III walking up the stairs toward the room where Chip and Alex sat, unaware.
Jonah dropped to the ground and began sweeping his hands right to left, left to right, groping for the Elucidator. At least he wasn’t searching for a stone on a stone floor again—this floor was smooth as glass. His hand hit something … but it was only Katherine’s hand. For the first time Jonah realized Katherine had also dropped to her knees and was searching.
“You two are indomitable,” JB said, sounding amazed. “I’m glad we’re on the same side—I just wish I could get you to believe we’re all on the same side.”
Neither Jonah nor Katherine answered him. They just kept sweeping their hands across the floor. Jonah was starting to feel discouraged. The Elucidator had to have hit the floor somewhere. Didn’t it? Could JB have activated some other function besides just invisibility—something that made the Elucidator impossible to feel, too?
JB let out an exasperated sigh.
“Look,” he said. “Just watch what’s going on in 1483. The king’s at the top of the stairs. …”
Jonah lifted his head and stared at the scene before him. A servant was greeting the king, promising to tell her mistress that he was there.
“See?” JB said. “The king came alone. He didn’t bring soldiers to carry out any murders. He isn’t brandishing knives or swords—he wouldn’t do that, anyway. Kings usually want other people to do their dirty work for them. At least … well, I know this is still the Middle Ages, but …”
Jonah stopped listening to JB. He also stopped searching for the Elucidator. He could only watch the screen as the king stepped into the chambers where Chip and Alex had been talking with their mother and sisters.
Chip and Alex were no longer there.
The queen—ex-queen, really—sat straight-backed and regal on her bed, her daughters arranged like miniature versions beside her. Amazingly, even the youngest had mastered their mother’s air of contemptuous hauteur.
“Richard,” the queen said. It was hard for Jonah to believe that one spoken word could sound so accusing and yet still polite, both at the same time.
Jonah noticed that the queen did not call him “king.”
“My dear, grieving sister-in-law,” Richard said, taking her hand and kissing it. “And my lovely nieces.”
He kissed their hands as well, then sat in the same chair Chip had occupied only a few moments earlier.
“I would have thought you would be feasting yet,” the queen said with an air of feigned interest. “Celebrating your coronation.”
The way she said “coronation” was masterful, implying in four short syllables that he didn’t deserve a coronation, and that everyone knew he had stolen the crown, and that if he had any shame at all, he would be throwing himself at her feet and begging her forgiveness for tarring her good name and his dead brother’s good name on his way to the throne. And yet, she smiled politely.
“My brother would have been feasting still,” Richard conceded, sounding only slightly humbled. “Feasting and drinking and dancing with all the most beautiful women in the kingdom. But”—his gaze was steely—“I am not my brother.”
The queen’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she gave no other sign that Richard had just insulted her dead husband.
“More’s the pity,” the queen said, and just enough grief throbbed in her voice that Richard could hardly have claimed that she was insulting him, though she clearly was.
“I’m sorry he’s gone,” Richard said softly, and just those four words seemed to turn the conversation from a nasty fight veiled in politeness to something more like a condolence call.
Had Richard really liked his brother? Jonah wondered. Was Richard maybe even sorry that Edward IV was dead, even though it meant that Richard himself got to be king?
“That is not what you came here to say, the night of your coronation,” the queen said. But her voice was softer now, and kinder. “You’ve told me that before.”
“It’s no less true today, milady. I assure you,” Richard said.
“Liar,” Katherine muttered under her breath. “You’re probably glad your brother died, so you could be king.”
“Shh,” Jonah hissed, afraid he’d miss something.
Richard and the queen sat silently for a moment, but Jonah glanced quickly around, wondering where in the room Chip and Alex were hiding. They hadn’t had time to go anywhere else, had they?
Richard leaned forward suddenly.
“Milady, this morning at … at Westminster, I was gifted with a vision,” he said.