I’m still clinging to Percy like a leech. Felicity reaches out like she’s going to touch my face, but all I can feel is Helena slapping me and the thief-taker raising his hand just to see me flinch and then it’s my father, and all the while me with no power to fight back or protect myself against any of them.
And I begin to cry.
Though cry seems far too gentle a word. I begin to abso-bloody-lutely sob.
Felicity is kind enough to look away. Percy is kind enough not to. He puts his arms around me and lets me turn my face in to his shoulder because I’m trying to stop and that’s making it worse, so stifling it is second-best. “It’s all right,” he says, his hand working in soft circles on my back, which just makes me cry harder. “You’re safe, you’re all right.” And I go on crying, great rolling sobs that rip through my whole body, and I can’t seem to stop. I can hardly breathe. I cry and I cry—it’s years’ worth of it, and it’s years overdue.
I don’t realize I’ve stopped until I wake up again—I fell asleep or insensible or whatever happens to you when you’re sobbing and trying to rid yourself of a drug. Percy is still holding me, though he’s shifted so that it’s my head on his shoulder, my body curled into his, and one of his arms around the small of my back. My face feels swollen and tight, a shameful reminder of completely losing my mind when I thought about Helena striking me and somehow it turned into my father.
I sit up, and Percy starts beside me. He must have been dozing. “You’re awake,” he says. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” I say, which is the truth. I feel exquisitely more myself than I did before, though still rattled to my core, and my stomach isn’t yet sitting well. A foul taste shakes loose in my throat, and I cough.
Percy pushes my hair out of my eyes, his thumb lingering upon my temple. I still feel right up against the verge of tears, so I press my face into the crook of my elbow, like there’s anything subtle about that. “What happened?”
“We ran.” He offers a small smile. “Only a few hours earlier than we were planning to anyway.”
“What about Helena? And Dante?”
“We were gone before Helena came to. And Felicity stuck a chair under the handle of Dante’s bedroom door, though I don’t think he would have done anything to stop us. She’s very dastardly, your sister.”
“Did you get your fiddle?” I ask.
“What?”
“Your fiddle. Have you got it?”
“It’s only a fiddle, it doesn’t matter.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.” He shifts so I can see where it’s sitting on his other side.
Warm relief floods me—the first pleasant sensation I’ve enjoyed in days. “Where’s Felicity?” I scrub my hands hard against my eyes, then peer down the street in either direction. We’re under a long, cobbled bridge, a canal lapping at the gutter in front of us. The smell is rancid—rotted fruit and piss and sewage stewing in the heat. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere near the docks. Felicity’s gone to see about a boat back to France.”
“We’re going back?”
“Where else would we go?”
We’re interrupted by the slap of wooden heels on cobblestones, and a moment later Felicity sinks down on my other side. “You’re awake.”
“So are you.”
“I think your case is a bit more noteworthy.” She puts the back of her hand against my cheek, the movement a bit stuttered, likes she’s afraid I might start to cry again. “Your color’s much better. And you’re not so cold.”
“We’re going to get cut up and sold back to Father in pieces down here.”
“Oh, Monty, you’re so dramatic.” She tests my pulse with two fingers, then asks, “Do you remember what happened?”
“Helena poisoned me.”
Felicity gives a little sigh through her nose. “She did not poison you.”
“She stabbed me with something.” I pull up my sleeve to show her, but the mark from the needle is gone. “And then everything went wrong.”
“It was the Atropa belladonna.”
“The what?”
“Sleeping nightshade—one of the alchemical cure-alls they had in their cabinent. It’s not a poison, it’s an anesthetic that sends the body into a temporary comatose state to heal. It made you look . . . quite dead.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Obviously,” Felicity says, at the same time Percy murmurs, “Thank God.”
I sit up straight, pulling my legs up to my chest with a wince. “We need to get away from here, before the Robleses find us.”
“Why would they care what happens to us?” Felicity says. “It’s not good that we know about their mother’s alchemical heart, but I imagine they’ll have other things on their mind now that they’ve got their box back.”
“About the box.” I tip my chin toward Percy’s fiddle case. Percy and Felicity are wearing twin expressions of dread as he flips it open.
“What were you thinking?” Felicity cries as Percy lifts the lid on the rosin drawer to reveal the Lazarus Key. “We’re trying to get rid of it! That’s why we brought it to them.”
“I couldn’t leave it—Mateu Robles told me how to open the box.” I fish the key from the drawer—my hands are still so shaky it takes three tries to get a grip—then hold it flat on my palm. We all three bend our heads together to examine it. It’s well small, I realize now that I have it in the light. The teeth look like nothing more than the feathered ends left after a bone is snapped. On one side of the bow is inscribed the Lion of Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice.
When I look up from the key, Felicity is glaring at me. “So. What precisely are you planning to do with this now that you’ve stolen it again?”
“I think we should go to Venice and collect the heart,” I say.
“What for?”
“For Percy.”
I look over at him. He lifts the key from my palm and holds it upon his own. “Did you find a boat?” he asks Felicity.
“Several,” she replies. “There’s a fleet of xebecs that go between Genoa, Barcelona, and Marseilles—the next one leaves in an hour or so. They’re not meant to carry passengers, but they’ll take us on.” She pauses, then adds, “If we can pay.”
“Unless you two had a windfall while I was mostly dead, we’re short in that department,” I say.
“Well, yes, that’s where my plan collapses. I think first we need to decide where it is that we’re going.”
“We can’t go back to Marseilles,” I say. “Not yet. We should sail to Genoa and from there find a way to Venice.”
“But that heart is not ours to use,” Felicity protests. “A woman died for it.”
“But we need it,” I say. “And if she’s already dead, then what’s the difference if it’s used or not?”
Felicity’s eyebrow hitches. “We need it, do we?”
“Percy needs it,” I amend. It seems a trifle not worth addressing. It’s not as though any of us don’t know what I’m speaking of.
“What say you, Percy?” Felicity asks.
Percy closes his fist softly around the key. “I don’t want to take her life.”
“Why not?” I ask.
He looks up at me, a bit surprised, like he didn’t think he was going to have to argue this point. “God, Monty, I couldn’t live with that. Knowing I stole this woman’s life from her so I could be well.”
“But she’s already dead. Someone should use it and it shouldn’t be the duke and you need to be well.”