“Notes?”
“Musical notes—it’s a song. The first few notes of a melody to be played on the crystallophone. It’s the song to summon back the dead.”
“The ‘Vanitas Vanitatum,’” I say.
“Henry Montague!” the jailer shouts a third time.
“I’ll be Henry Montague,” shouts one of the men over the dice, and someone else laughs.
“They’re calling you,” Mateu says. As I stand up to go, he smudges out the letters on the floor with the heel of his hand, and they’re brushed back into dirt like they never existed at all.
In the courtyard of the prison, Felicity is making a good show of exasperation, very little of which is likely put-on—I assume she’s channeling some of the sincere exasperation she always has for me in reserve. Dante and Percy are hovering nearby, Dante with his head down and Percy watching me approach with his face drawn. His eyes flit to my jaw, which feels tight and enormous.
“He’s such a rakehell,” Felicity is saying to the clerk. “Ever since we were children, he’s always doing things like this. I’ve had to bail him out of jail more times since we arrived on the Continent— Henry, you imbecile, get along. We’ve a coach waiting. Thank you so much, gentleman, I’m so sorry for the trouble. You won’t hear from us again.” As I follow them out of the courtyard, the clerk’s eyes boring into our backs, Felicity says under her breath, “Well, that’s much more to my taste than seduction.”
As soon as we’re out of the courtyard, Dante steps in front of me, blocking my path. “Did you meet him?” he asks, and I nod. I see the questions fly across his face, shuffled like the dials of the Baseggio Box. Was he well? Was he hurt? Did he mention me? Is he hungry? Is he sleeping? Is he thinner? Is he older?
But instead he asks, “Did he tell you the cipher?”
I’m not certain what I feel in that moment, but it isn’t the ironclad certainty I was nursing before I stepped into the prison that Percy needed to be made well and the heart was the way to do it, consequences be damned. My footing is starting to slide in my own foundations, perhaps because of the way Mateu Robles spoke of his wife, or because Helena was once a small girl with a string tied to her finger, or maybe because he trusted me with those six letters scraped into the dust and now I don’t have a clue what I’m meant to do with them. He gambled all he had on me—the slowest pony in the race.
Perhaps none of us needs it. Perhaps none of us deserves to know.
But it’s me—hopeless, pathetic me—who does.
“Sorry,” I say, “but he didn’t.”
20
None of us speaks much on the walk home. Percy stays close to my side, his pinched gaze darting to my face too often to be subtle.
We arrive home late. Helena is in the kitchen, and Felicity stalks in to present her rehearsed story almost before she’s been asked. Monty was arrested, we’d better not stay, no, really, what a stunt, he’s such a child, it’s time for us to be moving along, so in the morning we’ll be off.
A light touch brushes my elbow. “You want some supper?” It’s a moment before I realize it’s Percy speaking to me, though it’s just the two of us in the hallway—Dante’s already slunk away.
For an odd moment, it feels like I’m standing beside myself, watching, divorced entirely from my own being. I see my arms pull up and around me. Percy’s hand falls away. “No, I’m going to bed,” I hear myself say.
“You haven’t eaten all day. Come have something with me, you’ll feel better.”
“Who says I’m feeling badly?” I snap, then turn on my heel and head up the stairs.
Percy follows me into our room, closing the door behind him as I turn to the glass for a look at the damage done to my jaw. There’s a thin crust of blood dried around my nose, and a bruise starting to build to the left of my chin—red and swollen for now, but I know from experience that when I wake tomorrow morning, it’ll be a sunrise. The pain is a low, persistent throb like the rhythm of a song.
“Are you all right?” Percy asks. I can see him reflected behind me, no more than a shadow beneath the gauzy layer time has left splattered across the glass.
I scoop up a handful of water from the basin and scrub at the blood, leaving a faint trail through the water when it splashes back that turns from brown to red to pink before diffusing like a fist opening. “I’m fine.”
“Let me see your face.”
“No, don’t—”
“I can’t believe how hard he hit you.”
“Mmm.”
“It scared me.”
“I’m fine, Perce.”
“Let me see it—” He reaches out, and I snap, “Don’t touch me.” I yank away from him so hard my wrist catches the basin and it rattles in the stand. Percy’s hand stays raised for a moment before he draws it to his chest and holds it in a loose fold over his heart. We stare at each other in the glass, and suddenly it feels like we’re at my dressing table back home, me smearing talc over a black eye to mask it and Percy trying to coax me into telling him where it had come from.
We’ve been here before. This is a silence we’ve shared.
My hands are starting to shake, so I crumple them into fists at my sides before I face him. “Don’t you want to know?”
“Know what?”
“If Mateu Robles told me how to open the box.”
“I don’t care.”
“What do you mean, you don’t care? You damn well better care, because I’m doing this for you. We’re here for you, Percy, and we’re going to get to that damn tomb for you because you’re the one of us that needs a panacea, so maybe be a bit grateful for that.” My voice is rising and my jaw is throbbing, and I clap my hand over it, like that might stop it. “Goddamn, this hurts.”
Silence. Then Percy says, “I care that you’re all right.”
“Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be all right?” I slap another handful of water across my face, then wipe it on my sleeve, trying not to wince as the material scrapes at my raw skin. “I’m going to bed. Stay if you want or go have supper. I don’t care.” I kick my shoes off, letting them bounce at random across the floor and lie where they land before I slump down on the bed and curl onto my side, my face away from him.
Part of me wants him to be stubborn and stay. More than a part of me—I want him to come lie down with me, fit his body around mine like spoons in a drawer and not ask a thing and not be bothered by the silence. I want him to know what I need him to do, even if I’m too proud to say it.
But I hear Percy cross the room; then the door opens and latches softly behind him.