“Stay back!” Levieux shouted. He yanked his leg free, cursing, and threw the girl toward the big man, Morgan, who held her struggling form long enough for Levieux to run her through with his sword. The girl shrieked, a sound like the peal of alarm bells.
“Christ,” Blaser muttered. Hall turned to the Mace, to see if he would protest, but the Mace merely watched, stone-faced, as though well familiar with this sight.
The boy had jumped on top of the Cadarese, Lear, and somehow pinned him down. Now Howell grabbed the child and ran him into the bars, hard enough that the boy fell, stunned. Howell grabbed one arm, Alain the other, and Lear straddled the child with a knife. Hall could watch no more; he turned away, closing his eyes when the boy began to scream.
“Done,” Levieux said, an unknown amount of time later. “Come on.”
The Mace moved down the corridor, his Guard surrounding him, and Hall followed. He felt as though he were in some sort of waking nightmare, and the scene that met him was more terrible still: the two children lay on the ground, bleeding, but further down the hall was another child, a girl whom Hall had not noticed before, with a dagger buried in her chest. Just in front of the open cell lay a fourth body, a woman, tall and blonde, and now Hall finally understood why the children had reminded him of vultures: the woman’s torso was pulped, her ribs poking cruelly through the leftover meat.
“Kibby?” the Mace demanded.
Kibb had already disappeared inside the Queen’s cell, and now his voice echoed from inside. “Nothing. No one here.”
Hall barely heard this conversation. He had frozen in front of the adjacent cell.
“No sign? No message?”
“No. Pallet, candles, matches, two buckets. That’s all.”
“Where is she?” Pen demanded.
Hall raised his hand and waved it in front of the bars. The prisoner before him did not wave back. The man’s head was shaved and he could have done with a few good meals, but the face was Hall’s own, staring back at him.
“Simon,” he murmured.
“Neck’s broken.” Coryn’s voice came from far away; he was leaning over the blonde woman. “Clean death, before these things.”
“Ah, damn,” the Mace muttered, kneeling beside the corpse. “She did her job.”
Simon reached out through the bars, and Hall grasped his hand, resting his other palm on his brother’s cheek. Hall had not seen his twin in nearly twenty years, had worked all that time not to think about him at all. Yet here Simon was, solid and real.
“But where’s the Queen?” Elston asked. In other circumstances, Hall might have laughed at the plaintive note in the big guard’s voice. Simon’s lips formed words, but nothing came out. Hall leaned toward the bars.
“What?”
“The Red Queen. She took her.”
“What’s that you say?” The Mace shouldered Hall out of the way, but Hall clung to Simon’s hand as he skidded to one side.
“The Queen hit her head on the bars. The Red Queen carried her away.”
The Mace looked from Hall to Simon for a moment, then seemed to dismiss the resemblance as a problem for a later time.
“Where did she take her?”
Simon pointed in the opposite direction to that from which they had come.
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Many hours, I think. There’s no time here.”
“FUCK!”
Hall jumped. Pen stood with his back to them, his shoulders heaving.
Hall turned back to Simon, noticing for the first time the cell walls behind him, covered with drawings and schematics. They used to sit for long hours, the two of them, designing contraptions, drawing the plans in the dirt with a stick. Engineers. Hall blinked tears from his eyes and, realizing that Simon was still locked in, began casting around for a key.
“Where would she go?” Dyer asked Levieux.
“I don’t know.”
“Gin Reach.” The Mace’s voice was little more than a croak, and Hall saw, alarmed, that the man’s face had drained of all color. “She’s in Gin Reach. Andalie told us so, and I didn’t listen.”
“None of us did,” Elston reminded him. He put a hand on the Mace’s shoulder, but the Mace shook him off, and suddenly Hall felt it coming, sensed that the boiling point inside the Captain had finally been reached. The Guard seemed to have the same idea, for they instinctively began to back away as a group, turning their heads. Hall turned back to Simon and kept his eyes resolutely on his brother’s face as it erupted behind him: a long, wordless howl of rage and grief.
Chapter 10
Gin Reach
The malicious have a dark happiness.
—Les Misérables, Victor Hugo (pre-Crossing Fr.)
“My Palais is on fire.”
Kelsea jerked awake from a doze that had been deepening toward sleep. They had been riding for nearly a day, and her head was beginning to ache again, sharp throbs of knifing pain that pulsed outward from the enormous knot at the back of her skull. She drew rein and found the Red Queen staring behind them.
“Look.”