“Axel . . .”
“Yes.” Magnus leaned over and tried to make out the streets below. “Yes, Axel . . . but here’s a question . . . If you were trying to find, say, the Seine, where would you look?”
The queen put her head back down.
He managed to find enough strength to restore the glamour on the balloon, rendering it invisible to the mundanes. He did not have the energy to completely glamour himself in the process, so some people were treated to the view of Magnus’s upper half sailing past their third-story window in the dark. Some people didn’t spare the candles, and he got one or two very interesting views.
Eventually he caught sight of a shop he knew. He pulled the balloon down the street, until more and more looked familiar, and then he caught sight of Notre Dame.
Now the question was . . . where to put the balloon down? You couldn’t just land a balloon in the middle of Paris. Even an invisible one. Paris was just too . . . spiky.
There was only one thing for it, and Magnus already hated it.
“Your Majesty,” he said, prodding the queen with his foot. “Your Majesty, you must wake up.”
The queen stirred again.
“Now,” Magnus said, “you won’t like what I am about to say, but trust me when I say it is the best of several terrible alternatives. . . .”
“Axel . . .”
“Yes. Now, in a minute we are going to land in the Seine—”
“What?”
“And it would be very good if you perhaps held your nose. And I’m guessing your dress is full of jewels, so . . .”
The balloon was dropping fast, and the water was coming up. Magnus carefully navigated them to a spot between two bridges.
“You may get—”
The balloon simply dropped like a stone. The fire went out, and the silk immediately came down on Magnus and the queen. Magnus was almost out of strength, but he managed to find enough to rend the silk in two so it didn’t trap them. He swam on his own power, pulling her under his arm to the bank. They were, as he’d hoped, quite close to the Tuileries and its dock. He got her over to the steps and threw her down.
“Stay here,” he said, dripping wet and panting.
But the queen was unconscious again. Magnus envied her.
He trudged up the steps and back up onto the streets of Paris. Axel would probably have been circling the area. They had agreed that if anything went wrong, Magnus was to send a blue flash into the sky, like a firework. He did it. Then he sank to the ground and waited.
About fifteen minutes later a carriage pulled up—not the simple, plain one from before but a massive one, in black and green and yellow. One that could easily carry half a dozen or more people for several days, in the grandest of possible styles. Axel hopped down from the driver’s seat and rushed to Magnus.
“Where is she? Why are you wet? What has happened?”
“She’s fine,” Magnus said, putting up a hand. “This is the carriage? A berline de voyage?”
“Yes,” von Fersen said. “Their Majesties insist. And it would be unseemly for them to arrive in something less grand.”
“And impossible not to be noticed!”
For the first time von Fersen looked uncomfortable. He had clearly hated this idea and had fought it.
“Yes, well . . . this is the carriage. But . . .”
“She’s on the steps. We had to land in the river.”
“Land?”
“It’s a long story,” Magnus said. “Let’s just say things got complicated. But she is alive.”
Axel got to his knees in front of Magnus.
“You will never be forgotten for this,” Axel said in a low voice. “France will remember. Sweden will remember.”
“I don’t care if France or Sweden remembers. I care if you remember.”
Magnus was genuinely shocked when it was Axel who instigated the kiss—how sudden it was, how passionate, how all of Paris, and all the vampires, and the Seine and the balloon and everything fell away and it was just the two of them for one moment. One perfect moment.
And it was Magnus who broke it.
“Go,” he whispered. “I need you to be safe. Go.”
Axel nodded, looking a bit shocked at his own action, and ran to the dock steps. Magnus got up, and with one last look started to walk.
Going home was not an option. Saint Cloud’s vampires were probably at his apartments right now. He had to get inside until dawn. He spent the night at the petite maison of Madame de ——, one of his more recent lovers. At dawn he returned to his apartments. The front door was ajar. He made his way inside cautiously.
“Claude!” he called, carefully staying in the pool of sunlight by the door. “Marie! Ragnor!”
“They are not here, monsieur,” said a voice.
Henri. Of course. He was sitting on the staircase.
“Did you hurt them?”
“We took the ones called Claude and Marie. I don’t know who Ragnor is.”
“Did you hurt them?” Magnus said again.