Winterspell (22 page)

The woman sank to her knees at Nicholas's feet. “It
is
you. You have returned.”

Bo was beaming, bouncing on the balls of her feet. The other two approached warily.

“Afa,” the man said, “who exactly do you think this is?”

“I
know
who he is.” Afa turned to him, passionate. “I would recognize him anywhere. I've been praying for his return. We all have.”

At that the man looked at Nicholas sharply. Behind him, Clara noticed, the other woman had a hand on the knife at her belt.

“You swear to me, Bo,” said the man, “that you're telling the truth?”

Bo frowned. “And why would I lie to you about something like this? For laughs, I suppose?”

Nicholas helped Afa to her feet. “You need never kneel before me,” he said gently. “Afa, is it?”

There was a terrible silence as he waited—for the group's approval, Clara guessed. She hardly dared breathe, trying to read the emotions running rampant across their faces—doubt giving way to relief and careful joy. Then, without warning, the man surged forward, pushing Afa aside to embrace Nicholas. His fervor nearly knocked Nicholas flat, but no one seemed to mind. The other woman was laughing and wiping her eyes, and Bo was practically spinning with pleasure.

Clara stepped aside and watched. She was the misfit here, the unwanted presence. At least that's what it felt like—terribly uncomfortable, and even ominous. How could she and her troubles compete with this? There were four of them now, these beleaguered, hopeful
people, looking at Nicholas with stars in their eyes, inspecting him like a long-lost son, and surely there would soon be more. Clara would be cast aside in favor of rebellions and reclamations. They would fight their war, and weeks would pass—
months
—before anyone would think to wonder what had happened to her father.

And by that time it would be too late.

“. . . and this,” she heard Nicholas say through her rising distress, “is Clara.”

He held out his hand, and she took it, distracted, completely ill at ease, even with—
especially
with—Nicholas's eyes steady and warm upon her, as though he were
proud
to introduce her to these people.

“She is my oldest friend. She saved my life.”

The others looked at Clara with renewed interest.

“And she's right wicked with locks,” Bo chimed in.

“And with
loks
,” Nicholas said. “She fought a pack of them to save me. A pack directed by Borschalk himself.”

At that the man whistled low. He inspected Clara, newly delighted. “This pretty little thing, against that boulder of a faery? Against the queen's own lover?”

Bo punched his arm. “Just because someone's little doesn't mean they can't fight. Gutted the scum that attacked me easily enough.” She grinned at Clara. “Didn't you?”

Clara nodded weakly.

“And the faeries have her father.” Nicholas's hand tightened around hers. “I intend to help her get him back.”

Afa shot her a pitying look. “If the faeries have your father, I'm afraid there's nothing to be done. They are not in the habit of releasing their abducted.”

“What do they want with him, anyhow?” asked Bo.

“We don't know. But we
will
get him back. I've sworn it to her, and to myself.”

Clara flushed beneath the weight of his gaze. Such conviction in his
voice. God help her, she actually
believed
him, so determined and—there was no other word for it—
regal
was his expression. But how could he be so sure of success, and was he truly decided on helping her, even now, with his loyal subjects beside him?

The silence of the others seemed to echo Clara's own skepticism.

“Your Highness,” the tall woman said, “with due respect—”

“Wait.” Nicholas put up his hand. “Clara, you were about to say something.”

He was going to make her say it. “Well, I thought . . . That is, I had assumed, now that you know some people here
do
recognize you . . .”

“That I would abandon you? That I would forget my debt to you?”

She shrugged, as though it were an inconsequential thing. “That your responsibility to your people would take precedence. And I wouldn't blame you for that.”

“That I would give up finding your father in favor of reclaiming my throne.”

She almost flinched. “Yes.”

After a moment Nicholas's somber face melted into a smile. He pulled Clara into his side and turned them, together, toward the others. They watched him with varying degrees of delight, but only Bo's sharp eyes took in Clara as well, with Nicholas's arm around her waist.

“I don't see,” he said, “why I can't do both at once.”

A
fa took them to a room farther from the passageway through which they had come, at the end of a corridor lined with closed doors. Strings of crimson and sapphire beads hung at the entryway, trailing across Clara's arms as she passed through. It was clean here, and comfortable, with cool stone floors and plush carpets, and two low, wide settees boasting deep cushions.

Everyone sat. Bo scrambled on top of a chest of drawers and pulled a tiny gold lock pick from inside her jacket, rolled it back and forth between her fingers. The tall woman, Clara noticed, remained standing near the door, watching the corridor. Glyn was her name; the man, Karras.

Afa flipped back a corner of the carpet to reveal a small wooden hatch in the floor. She opened it and pulled out, with no small effort, an enormous book—yellowed, aged, but obviously well used. It had collected no dust.

She settled it in front of Nicholas on a low table. “It is,” she said quietly, “one of the few documents we have left from before that night, Your Highness. When they began to burn everything.”

“The Night of Red Winter,” Karras said.

Darkness passed over Nicholas's face. “Do you mean the night Wahlkraft fell?”

“Yes. The night of Anise's coup.”

Tentatively Nicholas reached for the book. His fingers trailed across the cover. On leaning closer, Clara could see four images inscribed there—a great black raptor; a sea monster; a stallion, rearing on powerful hind legs; and a dragon. A dragon like the one topping Godfather's cane.

“Nightbird,” Nicholas said, glancing at her. He pointed to the raptor. “Sea serpent. A flatlands stallion.” The horse. “Dragon.” At the last image he lingered. “The sign of my family. The Drachstelle family.”

“The rightful rulers of Cane,” Karras said fervently.

Bo laughed. “Not according to the queen.”

“I recognize these animals,” Clara whispered, running her fingers across them. “Godfather, he . . . he made me a mobile, for my nursery. These creatures, dangling from delicate chains. ‘Such a monstrous thing,' Father always said. ‘Is it really appropriate for a young girl's room?' But Mother insisted.
I
insisted. I have never taken it down.”

She broke off, haunted, uncertain.

Gently, Nicholas opened the book. “So, Anise is queen now, is she?”

“One of the first things she did was proclaim herself queen,” Afa said. “And who was left to challenge her?”

“No one,” Nicholas said. “There was no one left. I watched her kill most of them.”

He began turning pages, slowly at first, and then in larger chunks. The text was in meticulous script, broken up with images—diagrams, maps, lineages set in elaborately drawn trees. The handwriting changed throughout, as though multiple people had recorded the book's contents. Here and there Clara saw a page with nothing on it but a set of seven names. Some of the names were the same from entry to entry, others not, but they each ended in “meyer.”

Could it be?

Clara saw the familiar name on the next page and pointed. “Godfather,” she said, disbelieving, absurdly happy. “That's Godfather!”

Bo wrinkled her nose. “Who's Godfather?”

“Drosselmeyer,” Nicholas said. Clara could not interpret his tone. “He was one of the Seven when I was prince. They served the royal family. He was sworn in when I was a child.”

“He was—is—my godfather,” Clara said, the words sticky in her throat, thick with pain. “My . . . friend. He taught me how to fight, how to sneak and break into locked buildings—”

He is the reason my mother is dead. Him and the man now beside me.
Perhaps the more she thought the words, the less severely they would sting, and the less they would nettle her with suspicion.

“Wait.” Bo stuck her gold lock pick behind her ear. “You mean to say that Drosselmeyer, one of the Seven, was the ‘good teacher' you had?”

“Taught her to be a first-rate criminal, it sounds like,” Karras said, amused.

“He fled with me that night,” Nicholas said quietly. “Anise and her army invaded Wahlkraft. It was the night of the winter festival. No one was ready. Things had been so quiet for so long, we thought—we
hoped
—it meant a peace, even a temporary one. And then . . .”

Everyone was quiet. Clara felt the weight of memory fall upon her, a shared memory in which she had no part.

“They came in through the ceilings. Dozens of them. Hundreds. They swarmed the capital.”

“ ‘The streets of Erstadt ran black that night,' ” Afa whispered, as though reciting a passage from legend.

“ ‘Black with blood,' ” Glyn joined in, from the door.

“ ‘And black with fright,' ” Bo whispered.

“They killed Mother and Father.” Nicholas turned the page past Drosselmeyer's name. Two portraits stared back at him, at Clara—a man with Nicholas's mouth, and a woman with his fierce eyes and dark hair. A third portrait, below that, connected to the first two with elaborate scrollwork—Nicholas, handsome and groomed, lightly sketched, as though whoever had been working on it had been unable to complete the final piece. “The Seven got us out, on horseback, but Anise
came after us. My parents fell. The Seven fell. Except for Drosselmeyer. Except for me. We had two horses, and then one. And there were loks coming after us. Anise drove them to a frenzy.”

“Where did you go?” Afa asked quietly. She put a hand on his arm. “My prince, where have you been for so many years?”

Nicholas looked up at Clara. “In Beyond, where time passes more slowly.”

Karras seemed bewildered. “But . . . how did you get there? And how did you get back?”

“Through a Door.”

Glyn burst out laughing. “But, sire, those are children's tales. There are no other worlds but ours, no such things as Doors.”

“And children's tales cannot be true?” Nicholas snapped, silencing her. “I think you'd do well to examine such stories more closely, Glyn. There is more truth in them than you know. The magic folk have always known that, and so has the crown.”

No one said anything for a moment. Nicholas turned troubled eyes toward the book in his lap—toward his mother and father, toward the half-finished portrait of himself.

“How many years has it been?” His voice was flat.

Afa looked uneasy. “What do you mean?”

“I was Beyond for eighteen years. Has it been eighteen years here as well?”

Clara could tell by their expressions that it most certainly had not.

“Seventy-two, sir,” Bo said from her corner when no one else spoke. She looked terribly sad to tell him. “It's year seventy-two of the Iron Age.”

Seventy-two years. Clara thought quickly. Seventy-two here, and eighteen in New York. If that was the ratio, then . . . four. It came out to four. Four days here for every one at home.

She felt dizzy with relief. There was time, then, much more time than she had first thought. But she could not let this knowledge lull her.

Nicholas's shoulders moved—but with a laugh or a sob, it was impossible to tell. “Then everyone I know—everyone I ever knew—is dead. My friends, my teachers . . .”

No one said anything, waiting for him to . . . what? Grieve? Accept such an ungodly piece of information? Clara tried to imagine returning to a world so different from the one she had known, with no one familiar in it but herself; it was a horrible, claustrophobic idea.

“So,” Nicholas said tiredly, after a moment that seemed to have left a new weight on his shoulders, and in his eyes, “the Iron Age, is it?”

Bo's response was reluctant. “That's what the queen calls it, sire.”

Clara tried to think of something to say into this silence, something helpful or encouraging, or even simply bracing. The question of what they would do next to find her father—if Nicholas did in fact mean to help and wasn't just trying to appear impressive in front of his new followers—pounded insistently at the back of her mind. Four days here to every one at home. It had been perhaps a little less than one, now. A little less than one day since they had fallen through the Door and into the snow. Six or so hours at home, then. It would be dawn on Christmas Day.

Felicity would be waking to a morning that should have been joyous, to find her family gone and Concordia there instead. Clara's fists clenched, and her throat seized with urgency. She had to fix this—she
would
fix this.

Such a tiny twist of hope. She clung to it, and suggested, “Perhaps it would be helpful to see what the land looks like now.”

Nicholas looked up at her in surprise.

“Seventy-two years is a long time. You need to know what's happened to the kingdom in your absence. Don't you agree?”

“I agree,” he said slowly, “although I'm not sure I want to see.”

“Here.” Bo withdrew a folded paper from her jacket, jumping down from her perch and hurrying over. “I've been working on making this current. Not quite there yet, but it'll do.”