Torn, page 38
My gaze caught something else, however. We were south of Fountain Square, pressed into a side street that spliced into River Street.
River Street. My hand flew to my pocket, burrowing into my skirts to find what I had hidden there before the ball.
The key to the secret tunnel into the Stone Castle.
“Theodor,” I said carefully, forcing my words past the tremor in my voice. “Do you think, with a little luck and some swordplay, we could make it from here to River Street?” There were fewer people on the south side of the carriage—the street was narrow here and most people poured in from the north.
“A lot of luck,” he said, holding the door closed as someone outside tried to jimmy it open. “Fat good it does us.”
“I can get us somewhere safe,” I said. “With this.” I produced the key.
“Brilliant,” Theodor said. “We can get back inside the Stone Castle.”
“How do we—” I hiccuped as the carriage rocked again, this time violently.
“No time,” Theodor said. “Look. I’m going to open the door and fire this.” He checked the pistol’s priming and cocked it. “That should give them a bit of pause—then I jump and you run.”
“You run, too.” There wasn’t time for heroics like single-handedly fencing an entire crowd of armed revolutionaries.
“I run, too.” He gripped my hand, pulled me roughly toward him, and kissed me full on the lips, then put his hand to his sword. “Now.”
He flung open the door and fired the pistol into the crowd. I didn’t have time to wonder if he’d hit anyone before his sword was drawn and he was on the rails of the carriage. I jumped past him and dashed through the rent the pistol shot had torn in the crowd.
I wanted to know if Theodor followed me, if someone else followed me, but it took all my strength to keep my feet pounding the cobblestones. I couldn’t slow myself by turning. I reached River Street and swung wide, diving down the little side street with the door. My breath was ragged, and my dress felt like a hundred-pound weight.
As I slid the key into the keyhole, I finally turned. No one was there.
My hand shook and I nearly dropped the key. What was the point, I wanted to scream, if Theodor hadn’t come with me? The strength of my reaction shocked me—if he wasn’t there, I wasn’t opening the door. I wasn’t going to save myself without him.
Then his sky blue silk suit tore around the corner.
“Open it! For heaven’s sake, Sophie, open it!” A half dozen large men followed him.
I fumbled briefly with the key—it stuck in the cold lock—but then I felt the sheer relief of the tumblers clicking into place. I flung the door open, all but fell inside, and Theodor clattered in behind me. I slammed the door shut and turned the key in the lock on our side.
Fists made contact with the door on the other side. We didn’t wait to see if they would try to tear it down or if they’d move on to easier targets. Instead, we picked our way carefully down the pitch-dark tunnel together.
48
NO ONE STOPPED US AS WE LIMPED OUT OF THE TUNNEL AND INTO the hallway I had been in mere hours earlier. The main floors of the Stone Castle were empty save a few guards who recognized Theodor and his family crest.
One of the captains stopped Theodor, and the two discussed the situation on the streets in quiet tones. I leaned against the wall, my legs wobbling like an undercooked pudding. As we had seen, the side streets were barricaded to force the path of the soldiers. But the League had not expected the full force of the soldiers to deploy all at once, and so quickly. The king’s troops had secured the palace, the government buildings, and the perimeter of the city.
The streets were still chaos. There was no escape for me tonight. No escape at all. I took a shaky breath and resigned myself to the king’s justice, and hoped for his mercy.
“No idea on losses yet,” the captain said, “but I’ve had dozens of wounded roll in already. And it’s been less than an hour since they left.” He shook his head. “This isn’t going to end without a fight.”
Theodor listened attentively as I slid down the wall. The exhaustion that had throbbed in my bones since the ball was overtaking me swiftly. Cream silk ballooned around me as I sat down, hard, on the cold stone floor. The hem was filthy, and I had ripped a large hole in the bodice leaping from the carriage. Madame Pliny was not going to be happy when she returned from her winter home in the south. I almost laughed, but it hurt too much.
I leaned my head against the cold granite behind me. Crags in the rough stone caught my hair and I winced. Theodor told the captain, briefly, without names or sources, what Kristos had told us—that there was a rift in the revolutionaries themselves. His voice was low, hurried. Who was there to keep a secret from? No one, I thought, except that the truth of what was happening was so ugly that it was hard to declare it loudly.
Without meaning to, I fell asleep there on the floor. My dreams were confused and dark—roasted pheasants turned into winter crows and pecked out the king’s eyes, and a dancing troupe of women in court gowns leapt and dodged a huge puppet made of rocks and stained glass, its strings held by Pyord high above in the palace dome.
I woke with a start, freezing and stiff, less than an hour later. Theodor sat beside me, staring absently at the opposite wall.
“The palace holds,” he said before I could speak. “And most of the city is secure.”
I found my voice. “But it’s not over?”
“Not yet.”
“The hired soldiers with the Red Caps?”
“Haven’t arrived. Perhaps they weren’t intending to come until later, perhaps they were stopped.”
People moved past us—soldiers with dirt and blood staining their uniforms ferried wounded men into the building and boxes of ammunition out of it. I swallowed, watching those crates trot past, imagining the crates that must have already been spent on the streets tonight.
I still felt like I’d been run over by a team of oxen, but I couldn’t bear to sleep while the city fought. I inched, slowly, up the wall until I was standing. If only I had my sewing kit with me—but, foolishly, it was sitting on Theodor’s ottoman with my clothes.
“Do you have a penknife?” I asked a clerk with a blanched expression as a trio of soldiers hurried past, dragging a comrade whose leg was a torn mess of blood and flesh and brown wool. I gripped the edge of the clerk’s desk, hard.
He stared at me as though I were speaking Pellian.
“Or scissors? Shears? Anything with a sharp edge?”
He shook himself and rummaged on the desk. “Penknife,” he replied. His words stuck to his mouth.
I snatched it from his trembling hands and dodged a troop of soldiers marching a group of prisoners, arms crossed behind their heads, to the cells below us. Theodor waited in the little alcove I had fallen asleep in, the puzzled expression on his face fading as he saw how I used the knife.
Carefully, delicately, I sliced into the hem of the gown. Dozens of embroidered flowers grew there, spattered with mud but still vibrantly pink and still imbued with the good luck charm I’d stitched into them. The charm glowed past the mud, past the stains. I cut, pruning each flower from the embroidered vine trailing the edge of the skirt. And I dropped each square of silk bearing a flower into Theodor’s hand.
“Give them out. To the soldiers. They’re charmed. For luck.”
“You should—”
“They’ll take them from you. They’ll know your sword, your family crest on your medal. They’ll trust you.”
And they did. Each man Theodor stopped accepted the flower, tucking it into a pocket or, more often, lopping it over a button or sliding it through a pin. Somewhere visible.
Watching Theodor, how he clasped the hands of the soldiers, offered them a few words of encouragement, of thanks, of sympathy—something stirred in me. He made a good duke, could be a good prince or king.
Soon all the flowers on my gown had been cut off. I wrapped myself in a blanket that one of the prison guards brought me and, despite myself, fell into a deep sleep.
49
I WOKE TO LIGHT STREAMING THROUGH CURTAINED WINDOWS and Theodor sitting on the floor beside the crude cot I was sleeping on.
“Where … what time … did they … how long?” I murmured through a sleep-tied mouth.
Theodor laughed. “Slow down. You’re in the Lord of Keys’ room in the Stone Castle. It’s nine o’clock in the morning. And it’s over outside. It seems a large number of Red Caps abandoned the fight midway through.”
“Kristos managed to convince them,” I said. “Kristos! Is he—did they find—”
“No word.”
I closed my eyes. That was not the worst news I could have received.
Theodor wrapped his hand around mine. “My father arrived from the palace along with the Lord of Keys half an hour ago. There were two small detachments of Kvys hired cavalry stopped at outposts outside the city. They didn’t put up much of a fight. It’s possible Pyord had more hired than were due to arrive in the first wave, but they’ve dispersed if so.”
“They aren’t still on the way here?” I asked.
“No, not how they would operate. Pyord hired them, probably a limited contract reporting to him alone. They most certainly aren’t under order from the Kvys government—tacitly permitted mercenaries hired through lesser oligarchs, likely. When it benefits Kvyset, they claim their victories, and when it doesn’t, they pretend to know nothing about them. I have a feeling they’ll dissipate quickly, now that their contract is void.”
“Void?”
“They found Pyord last night, trying to escape the city. When it became clear he couldn’t win, he ran.”
“Coward.”
“My thoughts exactly. He was killed trying to scale a wall—rather inglorious.”
“It feels like there should be more,” I said. “Like that can’t be the end, somehow.”
“I’m sure it’s not,” Theodor said, sounding weary. “Likely what my father wishes to discuss, before anything else—the possibility that they might mount another attempt.”
“Your father is here,” I said, then sat bolt upright. “Your father! And the Lord of Keys! Do they know that I—what did you tell him?”
“Well, my father had noticed that I brought a strange young woman to the Midwinter Ball. In fact, he asked me who the lovely young duchess or countess was.” He choked back a laugh.
“And?”
“And my father thoroughly chastised me for trying to be a knight-errant last night, leaving the palace when we were supposed to stay under guard, but he was so wrapped up that he forgot to ask who you actually were.” He shrugged. “I’ll straighten him out later. But you should be safe remaining here.”
“It feels as though—as though it can’t be over.” I picked at a loose thread in the blanket.
“You’re probably right. We stemmed the tide last night, but there are still scores of unhappy people and a very real revolution in thought. The leadership of this particular attempt fell to bits, but it doesn’t mean that the motivation of the participants in last night’s attempt at a revolt wasn’t real. They found ways to arm themselves once, secured funding once—they can certainly do so again.” He hesitated. “And the king is not well.”
I sat up straighter. “What are you saying?”
“He was badly injured last night. It’s too soon to know much, but I’m rather forced for the first time to truly consider my role as an heir.”
I swallowed and stared at my hands. An heir—and the words he didn’t say: to the throne. The great chasm between us, between our stations, widened just a little more as he spoke.
“I suppose I’d never really thought I’d be in line for the throne,” he said. “First I figured that the king would have a son, then that Annette would have a son before the king died. Now—maybe not. The line could pass to my house.”
“And greenhouses and studying flowers have to be put on hold if you’re the heir apparent.” And affairs with seamstresses, too, I thought.
“It’s not a bad thing, really,” he said, toying with the fringe at the edge of a throw pillow. “I want to put botany aside if I can do more good in taking on my role as a noble. I mean, truly take it on. Your damn brother,” he added with a rueful laugh.
“What?”
He tossed a pamphlet on the bed between us. “Before that movement went off the rails, before it turned to regicide and Pyord’s dark schemes, this was all there was to it.”
“Talk,” I said. “Words and talk and idle hours in cafés.”
“No, not idle,” Theodor said. “Talk about making things better. And your brother, for all his faults, had some good ideas. He took the theory and the economics and the philosophy and he applied it in such ingenious ways—some of this is actually possible, Sophie. Not only possible but plausible.”
I remembered how he’d looked the night before, handing my charmed flowers as talismans to the soldiers. How he’d seemed to carry hope with him. How he didn’t shy away from shaking the hand of a scarred man splattered with blood.
How he looked, in that moment, that he’d been made to lead men.
A knock on the door, and Viola’s face appeared in the crack she opened. “Hate to interrupt,” she said, “but my father wanted to speak to Sophie.”
I started, my head feeling very heavy. Perhaps I wasn’t so safe after all. Perhaps one of Pyord’s men had given me away. To add more insult to the prospect of being arrested, I was still wearing the scraps of Madame Pliny’s court gown.
Viola scanned the rags with a neutral expression. “Stay there.”
She returned with spare clothes, plain linen petticoats and a loose bedgown with tattered ribbon ties. “Wear these. You look ridiculous.”
“Are you all right?” I asked as I unlaced the bodice of the ruined gown.
“I’m fine. Plenty of others aren’t—I’m sure in noble homes and common ones this morning. Now put on those clothes. I went to a lot of trouble to fish them out of the bin of goods confiscated from prostitutes and thieves.” Her tone was even but her hands shook slightly, and there was a haunted look behind her eyes.
I threw the clothes on and followed Viola to her father’s office. She opened the door and shoved me through with a gentle push, but waited outside. My head still throbbed faintly, and I felt as weak as a kitten. But there was a vague relief that it was truly over now. No more hiding. No running.
The Lord of Keys waited in a sparse sitting room, his dark uniform and leather helmet blending in with the dark wood and stone of the castle. I sank onto the nearest chair, winded by the trip downstairs.
“It’s over?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said simply. Theodor and his father slipped quietly into the room. “For now,” he amended. “We’ve been questioning participants all morning.” My heart sank—he knew. I gathered what little courage I had left to face the charges I was sure were about to be read against me.
But the Lord of Keys continued. “There’s some indication of a shift in leadership—a committee that crumbled, or a single leader and his sergeants who disagreed. We can’t be sure.” I was sure—Kristos wouldn’t stand for a dictator after being fed on democracy, and it turned out that many of the Red Caps were loyal either to his ideals or simply to Kristos himself. Pyord, in his final calculation, had made an error. “But many of them say one of the members of the leadership is hiding in the city, biding his time until he can mount a second attempt. It’s come to my attention that this man may be your brother.”
I clamped my mouth shut. Even after everything we had been through, I couldn’t betray Kristos. I wouldn’t.
“I don’t know where my brother is,” I answered honestly. “I saw him last night, briefly. But I don’t know where he went. I—” I hesitated, but continued. “I told him he should escape while there was still time.”
To my surprise, the Prince of Westland smiled wanly. “I would have probably done the same for my brother. And he for me.” Theodor’s father looked very much like him, I thought as he spoke.
“I appreciate your honesty, Miss Balstrade,” the Lord of Keys said. “The picture we have established from those held prisoner is fairly clear—this revolt failed and they’re not able to produce another in short order. I have to investigate all potential elements.”
I considered this. “The rebels offered all this information willingly?”
“They believe they’re going to be killed. They were taunting me.”
“Are they going to be killed?”
“I’d advise against it,” Theodor said. He looked older, somehow, his face poised with the same concentration it wore when he played violin or discussed the finer points of botany. “Find and execute the leadership, yes, what remains of it.” I thought not only of my brother, but of Niko, still unaccounted for. Of those just under them, their sergeants, who might be considered highly ranked enough to hang. “But let the common folk go.”
“I agree,” the Prince of Westland added. “Making martyrs will only further this divide and harden their resolve.”
“What would you have me do?” The Lord of Keys paced toward the fireplace. “It’s the king’s decision, regardless.”
“Indeed. Hold those arrested until the king recovers. Or until”—the prince’s face constricted and his voice cracked—“until he does not recover.” The possibility of the king’s death spread through the room like the cold when a door swings open in a strong wind.
“How did they do it?” I asked after a long silence. “How did they get into the dome?”
“The masonry around the windows and the stones above the entryway was replaced with a weaker compound,” the Lord of Keys said. “There was work done on the exterior just a week ago. I failed, I suppose, to thoroughly vet the masons who did the job because I am sure now that they must have been in alliance with the rebels. Slight pressure deteriorated the compound around the windows, allowing access to the dome itself.”
