Marissa Day (28 page)

She did not turn around. She did not permit herself to stir. She did not know if she had truly heard those words in her mind, or if she had only imagined them. She did not want to know. The pain was bad enough as it was.

Neither of them turned to see Mrs. Beauchamp’s watery blue eyes gleam as she peered through the parlor door at their backs.

A
s soon as Jane left the house, Thomas collected his hat and cane and hurried into the cold and rain-drenched street. He could not give Fiora the opportunity to question him. She had watched them both from narrowed eyes during the remainder of Jane’s strained, awkward visit. Jane herself had pleaded fatigue and left as soon as politeness allowed. But Fiora would have to be blind not to see the unshed tears glistening in her eyes, and Fiora was anything but blind.

She suspected him. He was certain of it. She suspected he had committed her treason. That he, Sir Thomas, Captain of the Seelie Court, had fallen in love.

He could no longer deny the truth. He loved Jane DeWitte. It reverberated through his heart and soul. Jane certainly knew the truth now, for she had felt it through the bond of desire he himself had forged between them as a tool of seduction. He loved her with all the strengths and weaknesses of a mortal man, and she loved him in return.

In that moment, when they stood together, the current of emotion running so high between them, Thomas had felt something snap within him, as sharp as the breakup of the ice in spring. The Fae knight shattered and the man—weak and shaken—emerged. Oh, he still had the gifts of glamour and perception the queen had bestowed on him, but the loyalty, that was gone. Because he could not love Jane and maintain that loyalty. His heart had made the choice as he stood with her. If he was honest, that choosing had begun soon after he’d met her; he had simply struggled against it. But when Jane turned away from him with tears brimming in her eyes at the thought of his leaving, all struggle had ceased.

Sir Thomas was forever gone. He was only Thomas Lynne, because it was only Thomas Lynne who could fight for Jane. But Thomas Lynne was also ten times a cursed, careless fool. He should have warned Jane from the house as soon as he suspected his heart. Failing that, he should have never permitted himself to be in the same room with her. All he’d needed to do was stay away from her for a few hours this evening. But he’d been too weak. He’d given in to his desire to see her, and to assure himself that she was all right. And she hadn’t been all right. Her heart was breaking, and he had reached out in a way no one, not even the disgraced and exiled Fiora, could miss.

Fiora said she was nothing but an old woman, but old women had eyes, and Thomas had known the single wish of Fiora’s existence was to restore herself to the queen’s favor. He thought back to something Jane had said while they walked together in Kensington House gardens. She said the only kind of persons in a court were those who were trapped or those who wanted something. But she’d missed one kind. Those who were useful. Once you knew the way to Faery, you never forgot it. Fiora would be able to make her way back to those guarded gates, and the queen might very well let her back in because Fiora had suddenly become useful.

Thomas shoved his cursing aside. The damage was already done. If he was not the queen’s enemy now, he would be soon, and he needed a battle plan. He had to find a way to save Jane. He could no longer trust Kensington House to hold her.

When Thomas had sailed with his father, he’d met the dark and fierce men of the Barbary coast. These men laughed at any danger, and were true as steel once they’d given their word, especially in battle. They had a saying, those Barbary pirates; the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Thomas had never thought to test that saying, but now he prayed they’d been right.

He lifted his head and surveyed the streets about him. The rain had halted, but the lowering wind sent the heavy clouds scudding hard against the sky. The first thing he had to do was get down to the riverbank. The proximity of flowing water was detrimental to magic. It would be safer to think and to plan there. Maybe he could still make use of the queen’s gifts before they were snatched from him. Whatever he did, he had to be cautious. This new, sprawling, bustling London was still a foreign land, and Fiora might already be having him watched. All the more reason to get down to the docks. There, the crowds surely still jostled shoulder-to-shoulder among the cargoes and casks. His fine clothing might show him up among the sailors, but there would be plenty of places to hide from any man of Fiora’s.

As long as they were still ordinary men. As long as she hadn’t been granted magical servants yet. Thomas lengthened his stride.

 

 

T
homas spotted his first shadow just as he reached the carriage house. A skinny, roughly dressed youth peered at him from under a shovel hat. A stable boy perhaps, or a bootblack. He ducked quickly behind a stack of barrels, denying Thomas a good look, but that quick motion gave him away.

Thomas stepped into the house and found the proprietor. A few words and a few coins later, and he had hired a spotted gelding of low parentage and suspicious temperament. While he waited for the man to saddle the ungainly animal, Thomas quietly helped himself to some horseshoe nails from the open barrel in the corner. Cold iron was the first and last enemy of magic. These little nails would do nothing if he came before the queen, and in the Fae realms they’d be a minor annoyance, but here in the mortal world, they could weaken or even break any lesser spells he might encounter. He slipped some into his pockets, and after a heartbeat’s thought, tucked one in his cheek like a bit of tobacco.

The spotted gelding was a wary creature, as streetwise as any pickpocket in the London stews. It took the horse a few blocks to realize Thomas wasn’t going to fall for his well-honed tricks, like suddenly changing gait, or deliberately stumbling over the slippery cats-head cobbles, or tossing his head to slip the bit. After several blocks of this, the horse grudgingly agreed to be ridden into the traffic. They dodged between the vans and drays, rocking cabs and pleasure carriages. This, the horse decided, was a grand game and he stretched his neck forward, eager as a blooded animal for a race. Thomas took a risk and gave the creature his head. The horse snorted, as if to warn him to hold on tight, and surged forward.

The horse broke into a canter, sliding like an eel through the jostling traffic, recklessly threading the thinnest gaps. All around him men cursed and women gasped, but Thomas just bent low over his horse’s neck and bared his teeth in a fierce grin. He kept a slack rein and hung on tight with his knees, letting the animal take them where it would. The streets narrowed, the buildings changed from grand stone edifices and tidy parks to slouching houses of timber and brick, some of which he swore he recognized from when he was a boy. The horse’s ribs began to heave and Thomas could hear him blowing even over the street noises echoing off the close houses. He sat back and the horse slowed to an easy trot, tired and satisfied enough to follow the direction of the reins. Thomas’s sense of direction remained good and he followed the winding passages east, down into the oldest, darkest parts of the city. Warehouses loomed between the taverns and grimy shops. He felt his shoulders relax. Finally, here was a place he recognized the feel of.

He spied a group of barefoot boys gathered to taking turns pitching stones at a battered box. But their game didn’t stop them from eyeing the swell on the hired horse who drew rein beside them.

“Who wants to earn a half-crown?” Thomas asked as he swung himself from the saddle.

Instantly, he was the center of a surging crowd of urchins.

“Me!”

“I do!”

“Right ’ere, y’r lordship!”

Thomas picked the biggest lad, who also had the most intelligent face, and gave him the address of the carriage house. He scribbled a note on a leaf from the book in his pocket and handed it to the boy. “Give this to the proprietor when you get there and you’ll get another shilling.” Then, he laid his hand on the horse’s neck and spoke softly in his ear. “I swear, should I live and ever become a free man, I’ll find you again. We’re well suited you and I.” The horse whickered and rolled one keen eye toward him. Thomas patted the gelding’s neck and let him go.

Of course now he had a flock of street sparrows swarming around him, all offering to be guides or errand runners, or anything else he needed. Thomas cleared them away by the timehonored method of tossing a handful of coppers into the dirt, and took himself around the first corner, and another. Then he ducked down a flight of dirty, treacherous stairs under a dark stone arch and came out at the riverside.

Thomas stopped and stared.

God’s teeth it had been a long time. The Thames was thick with tall ships: schooners, clippers, brigs and sloops. The air filled with the smells of tar and mud, water and fish. Rough shouts tumbled over each other from every direction. He could have traveled back in time on those voices, all the way to when he was running on these banks on bare feet, ready to swing aboard the
Free Hand
and make his salute to his father, who’d clout him on the shoulder and order him into the rigging. His ears filled with the sound of cannon and the fear and rush of battle as a pig of a Spanish galleon tried its best to waddle away from their sleek greyhound ship. He remembered the wicked mischief of rowing to shore with a dark lantern and a laden boat, to pass off some of the richest plunder to trusted friends all muffled in black, before taking the rest back for good Queen Bess’s coffers.

Had his brothers thought him drowned when he didn’t come back? Had his mother taken some of that money she saved and put up a headstone for him in the churchyard? God’s teeth! Thomas clenched his jaw. He’d had over two hundred years of life granted him, and he’d never once wondered about those he’d left behind. Two hundred years, and he hadn’t thought where his parents, his brothers and his sisters might lie now.

He’d had family once. He’d had place and purpose. And in one instant of fear and love, he’d thrown it to the winds.

He felt the last of that glamour slide away, shedding off his body and mind like water from a drowning man who had finally broken the surface. His heart swelled and constricted beneath the tide of the emotions that filled him. Love and sorrow, anger and regret; his heart gulped them all down, dizzy with the awareness that he was truly alive again, and that whatever happened next, for this one moment he was free.

I’m free, Jane.
Thomas turned to the sinking red sun and threw his arms wide.
Free! Do you hear? And I love you! I love you and I don’t care who knows!

“You might want to keep it down, regardless.”

Thomas heard the words a moment before he felt the prickle of magic against the back of his neck. He spun around, dropping reflexively into a low crouch, fists ready. The dark-haired man he’d knocked down outside Kensington House emerged from the mouth of a filthy alley beside the warehouse.

Corwin Rathe approached slowly, giving Thomas plenty of time to get the man’s measure. He had maybe six inches and two stone on Thomas, and his cold and wary face said he remembered each blow they’d exchanged. He still wore his workman’s corduroys and shirt, which gave him freedom of movement as well as a passable disguise.

Thomas faced the enemy of the Fae queen with empty hands and only the wisdom of men long dead to give him any hope. Slowly, allowing Rathe to see each move, he straightened up. He opened his hands to show them empty and spread them out from his sides.

“I ask parley,” he said.

The corner of Rathe’s mouth twitched into a humorless smile. “Since when does Her Glorious Majesty parley with mortal Sorcerers?”

“I don’t ask for the queen, I ask for myself.”

This gave Rathe pause, but nothing about his alert stance lessened at all. “I’m expected to believe so much from the captain of her knights?”

“You’re well informed.”

“It’s my business.” My business, not our. He was giving nothing away, but Thomas was sure Rathe’s partner was here somewhere. Maybe the Catalyst too. It was risky bringing a woman down here, but these three were not fools, and they would be ready with magic as well as force.

I don’t have time for this.
Thomas clamped down on his temper and spoke as evenly as he was able. “Listen to me, Sorcerer. Your country is in danger. An assault is coming. If you’ll listen, I will tell all I know.”

“And in return?”

“I ask safe passage for a woman out of Kensington House.” Jane had friends. Georgie. Surely Georgie could get her away from England if need be.

“That would be Jane DeWitte,” said Rathe, and Thomas’s guts twisted. Of course they already knew. He might have realized as much before, if he’d been less preoccupied with his useless struggle against his own heart.