“They took him to Beauchamp Tower after night fell. That’s all I know.”
“I want to see him. Can you ask for me?”
Lady Grey shook her head. “The only way to see him will be to denounce him, and then you would only see him burn.”
The guards arrived. They escorted Lady Frances from the room, without another word between them, and Jane was alone again.
Her prison seemed to shrink around her. The despair she’d known earlier became a drop to an ocean. One star to the entire universe. Her mother had abandoned her, no matter what she claimed. There was only one person left in the world to think about, and that was Gifford, locked away in Beauchamp Tower, so close to the Queen’s House, but it might as well have been the other side of the world.
Jane sank to the floor again, drowning in grief and misery and wretchedness and despondency and . . .
A brilliant white light flared about her, making her blink back stars.
When she could see again, everything was different. The room was bigger, for one, and she felt . . . funny. Shorter, which was saying something, but oddly long. Her spine felt strange and hunchy, and she was on all fours. And her sense of smell! There was something sour—unbathed human, probably—and musky.
The sound of voices below, the feel of the stone floor under her paws—it was incredible.
She’d changed into . . . something.
She was an E?ian.
She was an E?ian!
Jane hopped around the room in a crazy little dance, thrashing her head from side to side so hard she bashed into a wall. Unfazed, she made a soft clucky sound and danced again, an overpowering sense of joy filling her. She was an E?ian, just as she’d always hoped. What was she? It didn’t matter. She was small and furry (she could easily twist herself around to see her body, but it was hard to get an idea of a whole based on just a few too-close views) and she had the best sense of smell and the best sense of hearing and the best dancing skills she’d ever possessed in her life, even if dancing sometimes meant she ran into walls. Wouldn’t Gifford be so amused when he saw her?
Gifford.
The sense of elation faded as she remembered her predicament and now that she was . . . a something . . . she would likely be burned at the stake as well.
But her animal self was small, she knew that, and maybe she could do something useful now.
She hopped over to the door. There was a large crack beneath it, not quite big enough for a human fist to fit underneath. But maybe she could fit?
Jane shoved her face into the crack beneath the door. Her head went right under, followed by her shoulders, but the rest of her body stuck a little.
That was embarrassing.
She squeezed and scrambled and pushed until she popped out of the other side.
There was more light in the corridor. Twilight to her human self, but she could see quite easily now, at least within a few feet. Everything beyond that seemed fuzzy and oddly flat. Everything was shades of gray, too, except a faint red cast to some things, like the light of a lantern on the wall.
So her vision wasn’t that great, but she was small and close to the floor, so what did she need with fantastic distance vision, anyway? She had other senses. Better senses.
Jane scurried to the edge of the first stair and paused, looking down. What was nothing particularly difficult in her human form suddenly appeared quite challenging. She couldn’t just step down.
She pressed her belly to the stone floor and pushed her front paws ahead of her, sliding down the first stair until her paws touched the next. The rest of her body followed with an awkward flop. She repeated this process a few more times until she found a better way to control her rogue hindquarters and moved down the stairs at a quicker pace.
At the first landing, she found the guards. She was the size of their boots. She resisted the urge to smell all their interesting, earthy aromas, and instead streaked past them so quickly they didn’t notice her.
Other voices below grew louder as she descended the stairs, too distant for the guards on the landing to hear, but her ears were fantastic. Amazing. Probably very cute.
One of the speakers was Dudley, she was sure of it, though in this form, the sound was overwhelming and held qualities she’d never heard as a human.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’ve obtained a body,” another man said. His voice was familiar, too. The royal physician? She couldn’t remember his name.
“Very good.” Dudley sneezed and sniffed. “Drape a shroud over it and no one will know it isn’t Edward.”
Jane stopped moving. It felt like all the fur on her body was standing up.
They didn’t have Edward’s body?
“They haven’t found him yet?” asked the doctor. “The poison would have killed him by now. There’s no way he could survive without an antidote.”
Dudley sighed. “He was sick. Wounded. Starved. He had to have left some kind of trail.”