Marissa Day (30 page)

Jane screamed, weak and hoarse. She couldn’t help it. The other Jane, the one with Mrs. Beauchamp’s eyes smiled sweetly and reached down to pat her cheek.

“Thank you so much, Jane. Don’t worry. I’ll not need your visage long, but I promise to take good care of it.” She straightened and smoothed the night-robe down.

“Take her to our queen,” ordered the Other Jane to the inhuman creatures who held her. “Let her find out what happens to those who try to take what does not belong to them.”

Then Other Jane walked through the rusted garden gate Jane had left open in the walls around Kensington House and disappeared in the darkness.

“No!” cried Jane. “No!”

But a cold hand passed in front of her eyes bringing with it a wave of absolute darkness. Jane felt herself sag in her captors’ grip and then there was nothing at all.

“J
ane.”

Someone was calling her name. Jane struggled to form an answer, but it was as if a blanket of cobwebs smothered her thoughts.

“Jane.”

She was freezing cold and her body ached. For some reason she’d lain down on a sheet of ice. She’d been having a nightmare. Fiora Beauchamp had stolen her face and thrown her to a pack of shadows. She’d screamed and screamed but she couldn’t make any sound . . .

“Jane. You must wake up.

It was a man calling her. A man she knew. She wanted to remember who. She needed to remember. Slowly, the cobwebs that enveloped her mind parted, and Jane felt her thoughts flow together and become whole.

“Thomas!” Jane’s eyes snapped open.

She lay huddled in one corner of a room made entirely of white marble. The floor, walls, even the door were smooth and seamless white stone streaked with black. Even the bars covering the slit of a window high above her were polished marble.

The window let in a weak silver light that was just enough to show her Thomas as he edged out of the corner. His clothes were torn, rumpled and mud-spattered, and his golden hair hung loose about his shoulders. A bruise like a smear of ash spread across his temple.

“My God, Thomas!” She lunged for him, but something jerked her arms and ankles back. She cried out and fell to the marble floor. She stared down. She was also chained. Silver manacles held her wrists and ankles. A solid bar ran between the wrist cuffs, keeping them a precise distance apart. A similar bar ran between the cuffs holding her ankles, and from one of those ran a length of chain to a silver bolt in the ice-cold floor.

“Easy, Jane. Easy.” Thomas’s breath puffed out in silver clouds as he spoke. He lifted his hands, reaching for her, but now she could see he was chained as he was. “Have they hurt you?”

Jane made herself breathe evenly. None of this was possible, but then, neither was anything else she’d seen since she left her room. It would do her no good to protest it. She must understand it.

Jane took an inventory of her body. Her head ached, and her wrists and ankles were sore where she had just strained them against her bonds, but otherwise her limbs seemed sound.

“I think I’m all right,” she told him. “I’m weak but . . . Thomas, what are they? What’s happening?”

“Oh, Jane.” Thomas reached out as far as the chain permitted. Jane inched herself forward, stretching her arms to their limit, and found she could just graze his fingertips. His hands were cold, but they were steady.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas whispered. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault.” His head lolled forward and she saw the bruise again.

“Thomas!” she cried. He’d taken a heavy blow. Her heart twisted as she imagined the pain, and twisted again because she could do nothing to help him. She also knew if he fell asleep now, it might be hours before he woke. “Tell me what’s happening!”

Thomas shook himself and his face creased with pain. Jane pressed her fingers against his. She stretched until her joints creaked and pain lanced up her shoulders, but she could get no closer.

“We’ve been taken by soldiers of the Fae court,” Thomas said slowly. Bitter recrimination filled his voice. He bowed his head so she could not see his eyes. “We are being held to await the judgment of Queen Tatiana.”

“You can’t mean this.” She saw the impossible marble room around them. The air smelled of frost and winter. She felt the cold of it, saw the fog of her breath as she panted against the bite of the silver chains around her wrists so she could remain even this close to him. All these things were real. But what Thomas was saying . . . her mind shied away from hearing it. “You’re telling me we’ve been kidnapped by the fairies!”

“The Fae, Jane. I came to you as a servant for the Queen of the Fae.” He spoke the words in deadly earnest. Now he lifted his head so she could see his eyes. The desperate doubt that had sheltered her melted away under the pain and earnestness of his gaze. “They are as real as the old stories, and as powerful and as terrible. I served their queen for two centuries. It was she who granted me the magic to reach into your dreams and seduce you.”

“But why?”

“The baby, Jane,” Thomas said softly. “The duke’s child. It has been prophesied that a great queen of England will defeat the Fae and drive them from the island for all time. But if she can be kept from the throne, the Fae Queen will be able to return to the rule she enjoyed in ancient days. So one of us had to get past the magics and iron guarding Kensington House.”

It was too much. Even after all Jane had seen and all she already knew, this was too much. She tried in her mind to turn and flee, but there was nowhere left to go. The truth was all around her, ice-cold and stone solid. It was in the chains that held her, in Thomas’s anguished eyes and the flat finality of his voice.

She jerked her hand away from his so fast he flinched. “You were
helping
these . . . the Fae?”

“Yes.”

“You used me?”

“Yes. At first.”

“My God.” Jane scrambled backward until her back pressed against the flat stone wall. “My God. What a fool I’ve been!”

“No, Jane, no!” Thomas cried. “Please, listen to me.” Heartbreak cracked his voice and glittered in the tears that hung suspended in his beautiful eyes. This man was still the Thomas she loved, and she loved a monster.

“It was only at first.” She could feel him desperately willing her to hear his words. “I was sent as Her Glorious Majesty’s trusted captain. I’d never once failed her, not in the two hundred years I’d been at her court.” Jane huddled in her corner. She wanted to crawl inside the marble walls and clap her hands over her ears. Maybe then she wouldn’t have to hear him. “But once I met you, once we spoke and walked and loved . . . Jane, you touched me like no other. You reminded me that I was a mortal man, with all the passion of a mortal heart. I fell in love with you, Jane.”

No. No. It could not be true he loved her. He was a monster, a creature out of legend and nightmare.

“Because of you, I wanted to come back to the sunlit world,” said Thomas. “I wanted to live and grow old and die, as weak and changeable as only man can be, as long as I could live and die beside you. I tried to turn away from the queen, but I was too slow, and they captured me. And now they’ve captured you.”

“I will not listen to you.” She couldn’t even cover her ears. The bar between her manacles prevented her from moving them closer together. Jane squeezed her eyes tight, as if she were a child and believed that what she couldn’t see must somehow vanish.

“You must listen, Jane. Hate me if you will.” Thomas’s voice faltered. “I deserve your hatred. But you must listen. We have to get you away from here. You must find the Sorcerer Corwin Rathe.”

“Rathe?” Jane opened her eyes. Memory stirred, as if woken from years in the past instead of a single day. A dark-haired woman with a false, vapid smile stood in front of her. “I met a Mrs. Rathe at the drawing room.”

Thomas let his head fall back and winced as it thudded against the stone. “I should have realized. They knew your name. I don’t suppose they did anything so convenient as give you an address.”

“How did you know?”

To Jane’s surprise, Thomas began to laugh. The pained noise bounced off the marble walls, and the harsh echoes rang through Jane’s aching head.

“Oh, they are admirably direct, these servants of the mortal crown. They knew you were tied to me, and so they made sure to put themselves in your way.” He shook his head. “Then, either you would come to them for help, or I would to spy, and either way they’d stand a good chance of unearthing the whole of the plan. Listen, Jane, I’ve held parley with Rathe. They have promised to protect you. You must get to them and tell them what’s happened.”

Jane stared at her manacled hands lying limp in the lap of her filthy night-robe and clenched her jaw. She must not give way to her riot of feeling. She must be as cold and hard as the stone around her. “How can I believe you?”

“Because you know me, Jane. No other has known me as you do. Look at me now. Please.”

Jane lifted her head, and she looked directly into Thomas’s wide, green eyes. She remembered how she had looked into the counterfeit of her own face and had seen Mrs. Beauchamp’s ancient eyes there. She remembered the beast’s eyes in the faces of the creatures . . . the Fae who surrounded her outside Kensington House. Whatever magics these beings possessed, they could not disguise their eyes. Whatever else might be illusion, Thomas’s eyes were real. His eyes pleaded with her, holding all the strength and desperation that came from a final hope, the hope that she who had trusted him with her body and her heart would now trust him with her life. But beyond that, Jane saw the same joy and pain she felt in her own heart as she looked at him now.

“Thomas.” Fear and anger dissolved into a terrible ache, for she knew that this was love, and it came in the midst of a horror beyond description.

“My sweet Jane,” he whispered. He felt it. He knew she loved him, and she felt the pain and the wonder in him. “I promise, it will fade,” he spoke the words as if they would choke him. “Very soon, in fact, and you will be able to feel what you should for me.”

“I do feel what I should.” Was it possible to experience elation, here and now, when all the world had overturned and magic and fairies were real. Yes. Yes it was. Because her heart remained free, and it was not broken after all. “I love you, Thomas.”

“No,” his voice cracked on the single word. “What you feel now is the sympathetic bond between us. It’s a spell, a form of glamour. It will break when . . .” He stopped. “It doesn’t matter, Jane. We must get you out of here.”

“I won’t leave you.” It was a moot point anyway. She was as tightly chained as he was.

“You have to, Jane. Once we’re taken before the queen, there will be no chance of escape. Now, stretch out your hand, as far as you can.”

“Thomas . . .”

But his face was hard, and she saw again the dangerous man she had glimpsed so briefly in the park. “Jane, the queen means to conquer and to rule. If you do not get a warning to the ones who can defend England, she will take the whole of this island.”

Jane had a million questions, but she clamped her mind shut against them. She stretched out her hand to the limit of the shining chain. Thomas’s chains clanked as he shuffled closer, cursing in a thick, strange voice she barely understood. He stretched out his neck to her palm, and he spat. Something wet, hard and warm dropped into her palm.

It was a nail.

“Touch it to the bonds.”

Jane flipped the nail around, grasping it in her two fingers. She bent over, bringing up her ankles until she touched the nail’s tip to the bar between her ankles. With a jolt, the bar vanished.

“Iron. Salt. Moving water,” Thomas said as she moved to touch the nail to the cuffs around her ankles. Both fell open and clanked against the stone. “These are their weaknesses. You can use them all.”

Jane listened and tried to accept without thinking. If she thought about what she was doing, she would curl into a ball and be unable to move. She had to free her hands now. That would be trickier, but Jane risked dropping the nail into her skirt where she could lay the bar between her wrist manacles against it. As soon as the bar vanished, she was able to deal with the cuffs easily.

“Now you.” Jane climbed painfully to her feet, but Thomas jerked back.

“No, Jane. I have to stay here.”

“What? Why?”

“Jane, what you are doing now is breaking the spells that bind us, and what I am doing is hiding your actions.” She knelt again beside him. Now, she could see the sweat on his brow gleaming in the weak silver light. The strain in his voice came not just fear, but from some unseen effort.

“There are guards outside,” Thomas nodded toward the marble door. “I’m using a glamour against them, but it will only fool them for so long, and the second I leave this room, it will be gone and they will be after us both.”

“How can I leave you here?” she whispered. She touched his brow. His skin was so cold and the sweat made it clammy. He was beginning to shiver. With a blow to his head, it could be a fever coming on. He could die here in the midst of all this magic from a cracked skull and chilled body.