Rook (7 page)

And she’d looked up into her father’s face and asked him why the satellites fell. He said he didn’t know. So she’d asked him what they were for, and why the Ancients had put machines in the sky at all, and he said he didn’t know. Did they keep them on the moon, to be tidy? And how could the Ancients climb a ladder high enough to put a machine up there in the first place? He’d said he didn’t know. And so she, in her seven-year-old wisdom, had decided that if he did not know, then she did not believe him.

Now she was not so sure. She watched the blazing light narrow to a pinpoint, falling away somewhere beyond the horizon. What would it be like, she wondered, to live in a world where everything that must have seemed so permanent was suddenly stripped away? Where the things you’d built dropped like fiery rain on your head? Would it be like waking up and finding no sea beyond the cliffs? Or that Bellamy House had disappeared in the night?

Sophia climbed down from the tree, feeling the chill of the wind now that she had been still. She stole quickly down the lane, wondering if she should take that streak of light in the sky as a sign of hope, like some had, or a sign of despair? Or maybe it wasn’t a sign at all; maybe it was just a streak of light, and the difference between the hope and hopelessness was entirely up to her. On her left she could just see the outline of the Holiday coming into focus, standing well back from the road. She decided that it was up to her. But that didn’t mean the light had no significance.

She cut across a field to the yard of the Holiday. The inn was dark, no lights showing, the squelching of mud beneath her boots the only sound beyond distant surf; even the fox kennels were quiet. Sophia circled the building, counting the second-story windows. Orla may not have gotten into LeBlanc’s room, but she had found its location. When Sophia saw the window Orla had described, she drew out a pair of gloves—her own, not Mr. Lostchild’s—and a thin rope with a small iron hook from beneath her vest. She tossed the hook lightly upward, landing it in the roof thatch.

She dragged the hook, looking for purchase, and on the third time the hook found a piece of the wood framing beneath the thatch directly over the window. Sophia leaned back, testing the rope. When she was sure it was snagged well she slid one foot from a mud-caked boot, snaked the rope around it, and pulled herself upward, using the wrapped rope like a stair. She pushed off the other boot, and then she was climbing, quickly, rewrapping her foot, scooting and pulling herself up the rope until she had reached LeBlanc’s window.

She got one stocking on the casing, then the other, and crouched, a hand still clutching the rope. She drew her knife from the sheath and slid it down between the two panes of glass until she heard a click and felt the latch give. The windows pushed inward, and Sophia dropped silently into LeBlanc’s room.

Even with her eyes adjusted to the night the room was black. But it was also empty. She could feel that. Or maybe hear it, or smell it. Sophia hauled up the rope, winding it carefully into a pile on the windowsill, and again went to the supplies she kept beneath her vest. She would have to risk a small fire, and a light. As soon as she had a taper lit, she smothered the flame she had begun in the hearth and drew the curtains over the slightly open window. She tucked away the steel and flint and went straight to a traveling trunk in the corner.

Careful to put her damp knees on the matting, Sophia opened the trunk and sifted through LeBlanc’s clothes—much less interesting than René’s—and then a box containing his correspondence—every bit as dull as René’s. The box was expensive, plastic that had been melted and reformed, its color dull and without a name. Something Ancient and irreplaceable had been destroyed to make that box, which was yet another crime of the Sunken City, in her opinion. At least the Commonwealth didn’t allow melters to operate within its borders; everyone would know it if they did. It was impossible to hide the stench.

She set the box away, studying the room. Bed with curtains, no canopy, small table with an empty drawer, plain chair. Nothing under the mattress, no wall hangings, just an imperfect cube of plaster riddled with tiny cracks. Nowhere to hide anything. Maybe LeBlanc kept important things with him. Or maybe he kept everything important inside his head.

She went back to the plastic box, took the papers out again in a precise stack, and held it close to the candle. The outside of the box was satin smooth to her fingertips, and so was the inside. Except at one end. Her finger paused, pushed, and the bottom of the box flipped up and open, showing a shallow compartment underneath. Inside was a stack of letters. Sophia smiled, and then she froze, one hand full of papers. A board had creaked in the hallway, just beyond the door.

She lifted her other hand to the candle, ready to grab the telling light and blow it out if a key went into LeBlanc’s lock. But the moments passed and there was no other noise. The old wood settling, most likely. She went back to the papers, scanning each one quickly. She needed to be gone.

The letters were written in Parisian, just like the rest of LeBlanc’s papers. One was from Allemande, making LeBlanc aware of governmental minutiae, and one was from Renaud, his secretary, with the city’s most recent list of traitors. None of her relatives or childhood friends were on the list this time, but seeing the names made her fingers itch for a set of picklocks all the same.

The next letter was an ill-written report from Gerard—the Gerard of the Tombs, she realized—giving LeBlanc a somewhat sketchy description of the Red Rook. Young, medium to smallish height, and in the robes of a holy man. Sophia cursed once beneath her breath. The holy man was not her only disguise, but it had been one of the most useful. She wondered what Gerard had promised the poor wretch who’d told him this. Freedom? The freedom of his family? But promises or no, now that Gerard knew he hadn’t just been bribed, but bribed by the Red Rook, whichever prisoner had given this information would surely go straight to the Razor. The fact that Gerard was even mentioning it to LeBlanc made her feel certain this was already a truth.

She shifted the papers. The last letter was half-finished, and written in a hand that had to be LeBlanc’s. Small, precise, and somehow ferret-like, just like him. Her eyes widened, nose moving closer to the paper as she read.

Sophia stared at the words, barely resisting the urge to crumple the paper. Instead she put the letters in the same order inside the false bottom and pressed it closed. She replaced the stack that had been on top, shut the lid, and set the box exactly where she’d found it. Then she stood, breath coming hard, candle held high to check the room. Her hand was shaking. Not from fear, or even a bout of temper. This was rage.

René and his cousin had planned this from the beginning, never intending to have René marry her at all, or at least not for the reasons they had assumed. René had come for the Red Rook, and was using her father’s financial circumstances to do it. LeBlanc must have already had his suspicions before the night she’d rescued the Bonnards. And then he’d played her from both sides, actually threatening her with the loss of René’s fortune when he knew she was never going to get the marriage fee in the first place.

She took a long breath. How ironic to be so angry that there would be no marriage, when marrying René Hasard was what she had so desperately not wanted in the first place. She thought of him playing games in the sitting room—what a time to give in to pique and spout all those things about Mrs. Rathbone!—and the way he’d been looking at Tom’s leg, as if trying to judge its fitness. And LeBlanc thought the Red Rook was a man. Sophia bit her lip. A net, indeed, and it was closing tight around her brother.

She blew out the candle, replaced it in her vest, unwrapped Mr. Lostchild’s glove, and dropped it on the floor below the window. Then she gathered up the rope and stepped out onto the casement. The night sky was still overcast, very dark, a stiff breeze gusting as the remnants of the storm passed. She left the window open, climbing hand below hand down the rope, her mind going much faster than her descent.

With the rain gone, Cartier should be on the run by now. He would have a decent start before the glove was found and they set the foxes on the scent. That was good. But would it be enough to divert suspicion from Tom? It should be easy enough to prove Tom hadn’t gone anywhere near the Holiday. Especially since he hadn’t. She thought of that subtle trap on the chessboard. Did René think he had engaged himself to the sister of the Red Rook, or could he have the first inkling that he was actually engaged to the Rook herself? And what were they going to do about it if he did?

A soft swish startled Sophia from her thoughts, a whisper of metal slicing through the air. The swing of a sword. She kicked at the wall and pushed off, turning half around, gasping as she caught what should have been a hack through her spine as a glancing cut to one side. The rope swung crazily, spinning the world in circles around her head. She let go and dropped beneath the next swing of the sword. The blade struck the wall of the inn with a dull tang, severing the rope, and Sophia hit the muddy ground as if she’d landed on ice. Her stockinged feet flew forward and out, the back of her head slamming hard into the limewashed stone, and suddenly the cloud-black night was full of stars and fire and lights that exploded in red and green before her eyes. Like they had in the Sunken City, confusing the gendarmes, making the mob around the bloody scaffold panic and scatter. Then the lights were gone, and it was black.

Sophia came back to herself in the dark, mind as thick and slow as the ground she could feel beneath her. The Holiday. LeBlanc’s room. Someone had tried to kill her when she climbed down the rope, and now the foxes were barking. Her eyes snapped open. She must have been out for only an instant because a candle or lantern was just beginning to glow from a window above her head, spilling out in a pool of curtain-filtered light. A form lay beside her, prostrate in the shadows, a man with a face she’d never seen. He was flat on his back, very still, sword in one hand, a knife handle-deep in his chest.

Sophia scrambled to her feet and her vision blurred. She swayed. There was pain in her head, a horrible pain in her side, and a commotion starting in the inn, sleepy voices raised in alarm. The foxes would be loose any moment. She grabbed the knife and wrenched it from the dead man’s chest, thrusting it quickly through her belt. Then she picked up her boots and ran, hand pressing her side, blood running through her fingers as she slipped and stumbled across the muddy yard of the Holiday inn like a drunkard.

S
ophia
slid down from the saddle, the jar of landing making her skull ache and her stomach sick. She was back in the woods of the Bellamy estate, she realized, in the little shelter she and Tom had created for stashing a horse. The horse had known to go there even if she hadn’t. Her head was fuzzy, the trees stretching and bending in odd ways, the light of a yellow sun cresting the horizon behind ragged clouds. There was something about dawn that needed remembering, something Tom had said, but she couldn’t think what.

She threw the reins over a post, and noticed that something was wrong with one of her hands. She opened her palm. Red. And sticky. Her whole left side was wet and stained, and it hurt. She left the mare to its hay, breaking out of the tree line in a slow, lumbering walk.

Bellamy House rose up before her in a mist, a mismatched hodgepodge of stone and concrete built around decorative arches of red and white brick from the Time Before, a building mostly made beautiful by its age. She could see the roof, and the ledge and lattice path that led to her bedroom window, but for some reason the drainpipe seemed daunting. She would climb it later.

She chose an unobtrusive little door instead, sunk into the wall stones around the corner of the house, its weathered wood half-hidden by ivy. Slowly, and with panting breath, she drew out a loose stone from the house wall and retrieved the key beneath it. She unlocked the wooden door, replaced the key and stone as she always did, ducked beneath the ivy, and pushed the door shut behind her.

Stairs twisted downward, spiraling round and round in the dark. She took the steps one by one, unaware of time, until they ended in a room that was a cold blackness, smelling of earth and underground, wind moaning from blocked tunnels beyond the walls. But she didn’t need a light; she could walk this room blind. She knew exactly where the little cot was, and that there would be a blanket. Tom always had a blanket. It would be a good place to rest. Just for a little while. She sank down onto the chilly straw mattress and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again she knew immediately where she was. Tom’s sanctuary, as he called it, deep beneath Bellamy House, a room that was nothing but Ancient. Light moved over walls tiled with white and artificial red—the red seen only in artifacts from the Time Before—arched doorways blocked with gray stone making dull, ugly scars in the otherwise bright surfaces. The pillars that held up the ceiling were also arched, some with their steel exposed beneath chunks of missing concrete. Tom was very careful with that steel. He oiled it regularly, so it couldn’t, after all this time, decide to rust and let the roof collapse.

Sophia let her eyelids fall shut again. Her head, her side, everything hurt. She tried to move but there was a heavy blanket covering her, and something tight around her middle. And then she stopped any movement at all. There had been light. And she smelled fire. Her eyes flew open.

Flames were dancing in the little brick hearth just a few feet away, driving away the chill, and across the expanse of cracked and patched floor, a little farther down the tiled walls, there was a star of light flickering in the dimness. A man stood with his back to her, tall and lean, illuminated by a candle, white shirt untucked over brown breeches, boots to his knees, and hair loose to his shoulders. He was running a hand over the display shelves, where Tom stored the objects he’d dug up from the grounds around Bellamy House.

The man picked one up, such a vivid blue it could be seen from across the room, bat-shaped and the size of a hand, with some sort of knob on one side, a gray cross, and four small circles inlaid with yellow and unnatural red on the other. She’d watched Tom puzzling over this item many times. He thought the cross and brightly colored pieces were meant to be pushed, though for what purpose neither of them could imagine, and he’d had no success looking for the word “Nintendo” in the university archives. It was beautifully worked, though. Like a piece of art.

The man held up the artifact, examining it carefully from all sides and underneath. Then he looked over his shoulder.

“Bonjour.”

Sophia sucked in a breath. It was René. The René who was her almost-fiancé. The René who had come here to catch the Rook. And his hair, she saw, was indeed red. A dark russet in the candlelight. She hadn’t even recognized him. She turned her head on the pillow, making it ache. Some of her memories were clear, straight lines; others were blurred and smudged around the edges like cheek paint.

René laid the blue object back in its box and picked up the artifact next to it. He held up a round, flat disk, speared on his finger by the hole in its middle, flashing like a mirror as it caught the glow of flame. Sophia clutched harder at the blanket, torn between the desperate need to know what René knew, and hoping he was not about to break one of Tom’s precious things.

“Do you know what it is?” René asked without turning around.

“No,” she replied. Maybe she could get rid of him before he discovered she was hurt. She needed to get to Orla. And Tom. She struggled to sound more like herself. “But you should put it down. It’s made of plastic, and it’s delicate.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle. I am aware that this item is made of plastic.” She could hear that note of amusement in his voice. “I think I will tell you what my
maman
says about these disks. She says that her
grand-mère
told her that her
grand-mère
said there are messages hidden inside these, thousands upon thousands of pictures and words, so well concealed that we shall never find them.”

He glanced over his shoulder again. “Do you think that could be so? Do you think there are a thousand pictures inside this disk? Or were my ancestors only very imaginative?” He gazed at the artifact. “I think perhaps they were. My
grand-mère
was a terrible liar. She used to say …”

Maybe she should kill him first. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Ah.” He set the disk down in its nest of soft cloth. “It was very curious. I was walking your grounds, watching for the sun, and then I see there is someone coming across the lawn …”

Her fiancé wasn’t to have left the north wing; Spear and Tom were supposed to be watching him—she remembered that. So he couldn’t slip out to LeBlanc, like the dawn before.

“I thought it was your brother. I thought he was unwell, that he had been … what do you call it in the Commonwealth? ‘Out for a bender’?”

Sophia did not correct him. How was he moving in and out of Bellamy House?

“I watched him take a key and unlock a door. And so through the door and down the stairs I came, thinking to be a useful future brother, and who is it that I find?” He turned fully around then, a grin on one side of his mouth. “And how are you feeling, my love?”

Some of the more hazy recollections in Sophia’s mind were taking on their proper shapes. The rope coming down from the window. The man with a knife in his chest. She must have done that, though she didn’t remember. The strange, foggy journey on the horse. But the memory she was having the most difficulty reconciling was the man holding the candle on the other side of the sanctuary. The voice was different. Deeper, not as smooth, and not nearly as Parisian. As it had been for just a little while in the sitting room the night before. And that was the only thing about René Hasard that was anything like the night before.

She lifted a hand to touch the back of her head. A large knot had risen at the base of her skull, just inside the hairline. She said, “I took a fall, I’m afraid. From my horse. I think I’ve hit my head rather hard.”

“Yes.” René was moving across the room now, lithe, and with very little noise from his boots. He used his candle to light an oil lamp that was hanging from one of the exposed crossbeams. “And you also seem to have fallen on that knife you were carrying.”

Sophia reached down to her side. The sword cut. Who had the man with the sword been, and was he still alive? Surely not. And just how much had she bled? She looked beneath the blanket. Her vest was gone, her knife gone, and there was a gash in her shirt, the cloth around it soaking in a large, dark circle. Blood had also run down the side of the breeches, all the way to the knee. Then she saw that another strip of cloth had been tied tight over the wound beneath her shirt, circling her waist. She lifted her eyes to René.

“Did you bandage me?”

It was not an inquiry; it was an accusation. He had taken off her clothes. Or at least taken them off a little. The line of René’s jaw flickered as he bent over another candle, a grin lurking again in that corner of his mouth.

“Please don’t think me impertinent, my love. We are betrothed, after all. And Monsieur Hammond was not here to do the job this time.”

Sophia clutched the blanket, watching René closely. He lit more candles, flame to flame from the one in his hand. The words
KINGS CROSS ST. PANCRAS
spelled inside a circle of Ancient red leapt to visibility on the side wall. Even the way he held his body was unfamiliar, controlled, with no embellished movements.

She tried to think. The rope and hook would be found, and the glove. That was to plan. The wounded—or more likely dead—man was not. And neither was this living one. They would have the foxes following the scent on the glove, the scent Cartier was leaving in a zigzag trail across the Commonwealth. But it would not take long for news about the events at the Holiday to reach Bellamy House. The net had drawn tight, and now she was the one caught.

“It does seem careless of you, my love,” the different René said, still grinning as he moved toward the cot. “Riding alone, in the dark, with a knife out of its sheath. Will you make a habit of such things after we are married?”

She’d spotted her knife now. It was on the floor beside her vest. Well out of reach. “I don’t know,” she replied. “Do you often take walks before dawn?”

He stood over the bed. “I do not know. Do you often go riding past nethermoon?”

Sophia raised her eyes. René Hasard was dirty and mussed, with an open collar and stubble around his mouth, as unpredictable as his hair color. She raised one arm over her head, covering her eyes. The best shield she had at this moment was her charm, and, if he was anything like his cousin, the belief that a female would be incapable of climbing up a rope, sinking a knife into a strange man’s chest, and spiriting innocent souls out of the Tombs. But surely even René was not this stupid? She was beginning to be afraid that he wasn’t. She had to keep him distracted, at least long enough to find a way out of this room.

He pulled up a stool. “Are you in pain?”

“Some,” Sophia whispered, giving the word the tiniest tremble.

“Look up at me, and watch the candle.”

He held up the light and put a finger to her chin, peering down into her eyes. She watched the candle, but mostly she was watching him, trying to see any remnants of the man she thought she’d been engaged to. Even with the polish gone, René Hasard still looked more than capable of flirting with a girl at a Bann’s ball. He raised and lowered the candle, moving it from side to side, the wandering light and shadows making the fire-blue gaze into something wild. Sophia revised her earlier assessment. This René would definitely flirt with a girl, but then he might also nick her purse. He sat back suddenly, and Sophia let out the breath she’d been holding.

“You have some concussion, I think,” he said, setting the candle on the little table beside the cot. “Your eyes, they do not change quickly for the light.” He reached for the edge of her blanket, and Sophia gripped it harder. This time his smile was a little sly. “You will permit?”

She permitted. She’d thought better of it, anyway. She watched as he pulled down the blanket, bashful through her lashes. The act of being coy was costing her, but at least she wasn’t manufacturing the embarrassment; that much was real.

“And turn,” he said, adjusting her body so that she was almost completely on her unwounded side. Sophia winced, this expression also unfeigned. He lifted the end of her bloody shirt, exposing the bandage and also her skin from her breeches to about halfway up her rib cage. She concentrated on the movement of the flames in the hearth as he undid the knot in the cloth.