“Father knows that a king needs to rule his economy as much as his people . . .” Garyus trails off and looks toward his twin. “I could be king . . .”
The Silent Sister gives him an unreadable look, those strange eyes fixing him for the longest time. At last she gives a slight shake of her head and looks away. Garyus’s face stiffens in disappointment. He’s almost handsome beneath the deformity of his brow.
“I will be king.” He returns his stare to the city beyond the window. “You don’t see everything!”
The three of them stand in silence in the dimness of that tower room where only the shape of the window, sun-blazed upon the floor, seems alive. Something nags at me, somewhere I should be, something I should be doing.
“Wake up.”
I look around to see which of them said it, but they’re all three bound in their own thoughts.
“Wake up.”
I remember the dark street, the dead things creeping, the witch lying in the road.
“Wake. UP!”
I tried to wake, willing my eyes wide, trying with every ounce of my determination to spit the blood from my mouth and shake off the chains of Grandmother’s memories.
“Wake.” I opened my eyes and looked up at Hennan. “Up.” We both closed our mouths on the word. Panic had me on my feet in moments, reeling from one side of the alley to the other, reaching for the wall of a house to support me. Half of me still felt as though it were in that tower room. “How long?”
“Ages!” Hennan looked up at me, face dirty and etched with worry. He’d rescued the lantern from my tumble, though it looked pretty battered.
I glanced up at the sky—still velvet and dusted with stars. “Couldn’t have been more than an hour?” Kara’s spell could have had me on my back for a week. Had she planned it that way? Perhaps I was growing less susceptible. “Two hours?”
Hennan shrugged.
“Come on.” And I snatched the lantern before leading off. The voices of Garyus and the Red Queen followed me, sounding somewhere deep behind my imagination.
I hurried along, taking turnings at random, unhooding the lantern only when some or other obstacle presented itself—the damaged hood leaked enough illumination the rest of the time to stop me running into walls. I kept my eyes on the patch of light before me—whenever I glanced at the dark I saw the lines of Garyus’s room written across it. He seemed less damaged back then but surely he knew no king so crooked as he ever sat upon a throne. Still, children hope in ways adults find hard to imagine. They carry their dreams before them, fragile, in both arms, waiting for the world to trip them.
I ran, trailing other people’s lives and dreams, and each time I slowed they caught up, surging around me to fill the night so that I had to wade through the images, through scents, memories of a touch, struggling all the while not to be dragged down beneath them and cast into one of those endless sleeps that had plagued my journey south.
In time the visions lessened and we came to broader streets where the occasional person still came and went despite the hour. The morning couldn’t be very far away and I felt I could ward off the memories that my blood had sparked, at least until I had to sleep—what dreams might come then I couldn’t say. Sageous would have to fight Kara’s magic if he wanted a place on stage. I pulled Hennan to the side of the road and sat with my back against the wall, slumped.
“We’ll wait for dawn.” I didn’t say what we’d do at dawn. Run away probably, but at least it sounded like a plan.
? ? ?
I could have taken Hennan’s twenty doubles off him. The fact that it was my gold in the first place only made it an easier thing to justify. I could have taken the boy’s money, left Kara senseless in the alley, bought a horse and ridden for the hills. I should have done that. I should have taken him by the ankles and shaken my florins out of him. Instead dawn found me staring across the width of Patrician Street at the high bronze doors of the Frauds’ Tower, and the silvered steel bulk of the clockwork soldier standing guard before it.