“I didn’t know. Carwyn must have used Dark magic to confuse my mind. He came in, and I started to feel dizzy and strange. I could barely keep standing. He put the hood on me, and he whispered ‘I remember her’ and everything went black. I don’t remember anything else. I don’t even know who he meant.”
I remembered what Aunt Leila had said, about Carwyn being confused when he was sick and mistaking my mother for someone else. “I think he meant your mother.”
“Our mother?” asked Ethan, instinctively kind.
I smiled at him. “Yeah.”
“Did you two—did you plan this together?” Ethan sounded helpless.
I could never have planned this. It would never have occurred to me that Carwyn would ever do something like this.
“No,” I said again. “It was all him.”
Ethan shook his head, sounding even more helpless. “I came to in the street wearing this hood,” said Ethan. “I didn’t go back to him. I came to you.”
“Let’s take it off now,” I whispered.
I put my hand on the collar. I felt the dip and bob of his throat beneath my ringed fingers, just before Ethan was about to speak.
The door was open. We both heard the steps on the floor of the hall outside. Ethan reached for me but let his hand drop when I shook my head. I went for the kitchen counter, where I had left the sword.
It was my Aunt Leila. She had a furled paper in her hand that must have been the pardon. I did not dare even glance toward Ethan. I looked at the paper and her face, the severe black and white lines of both. Only the paper promised mercy.
I tensed again, my hand touching the edge of the counter but not the sword yet. But I saw Aunt Leila had tensed too. She had not expected anyone else to be there.
She looked at Ethan, and her eyes narrowed. She had seen Carwyn at the hotel, had seen he was not collared, and I did not want her thinking about why the same boy might be collared now. I could not speak. I could not risk her suspecting. I did not know what to do.
“Send him away,” Leila said at last. “Lucie, we need to talk. You need to listen to me.”
“That’s not what ‘We need to talk’ should mean.”
“Look what you accomplished at the clock tower,” Leila said. “Think of how much you could do if you joined our cause properly. You have so much power as a symbol.”
“It’s unlucky that I’m a person too, isn’t it?”
Aunt Leila looked at me. There was so much distance in her gaze: the wall between us could not be broken down, no bridge could be crossed. “It would be a mistake for you to think you have enough power to stand against me. You may be the Golden Thread in the Dark, you may be my niece, but you are not more important than our justice. Every time you stand against me, you will be punished. There is no victory you can win that I cannot take away.”
“What do you mean by that?” I demanded. “What have you done?”
None of us were expecting it when Penelope hurtled through the open door and straight into Aunt Leila. I barely saw her as she went by, blood gleaming in the tight black curls of her hair, her expression set with fury. She went for Aunt Leila as if there was nobody in the room but her target. She went flying with her against the wall, into a window, and then Penelope smashed Aunt Leila’s head against the glass. More blood spilled then, but it was not Penelope’s, and they slid onto the floor in a tangled, bloody heap, the thud of their bodies on the wood like a clod of earth hitting a coffin. Penelope looked up at me.
She had obviously been taken in by the sans-merci again. I had a thousand questions, but they all died in the fire of her gaze.
She snatched the pardon from Aunt Leila’s clenched fingers and threw it toward me. The roll of paper tumbled across the floor, and I stooped down, but Ethan got there before me. He knelt down and offered the pardon up, pressing it into my hand.
“Lucie!” Penelope shouted. “Lucie, you have to go now! Get to the cages! Lucie, run!”
I did not ask why, or what was happening. I did not ask what had been done to her, or if Aunt Leila was still breathing.
I ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
From the account of Marie Lorry:
They put us in one of the skinny black cars that important people drive in, and drove us around the city. I saw Ethan’s dad in one once, waving, and everyone watched him and cheered. I thought he seemed to bring a holiday with him.
But it was different when it was me. The car wasn’t as nice as it had looked from the outside. It was ripped up inside. There were no seats, and they put all six of us in standing up. It was like we were bringing a funeral with us.
At first I didn’t notice the people watching, because when they put us in the car I saw Ethan. He was standing up in the car, between two people I did not know. All of them had their arms draped with chains, fastened to the floor of the car. They had only put one restraint on me, and I could move better than any of the others.