Rook (44 page)

LeBlanc looked down on the hundreds of faces, indistinct in shadows and torchlight, and smiled beatifically. He was seated in the viewing box, his streak straight and robes perfect, all wounds discreetly covered. And he was in Allemande’s chair, from where his new power would flow. The other ministres had not seemed quite confident in his story of Allemande’s death by armed rebels, LeBlanc had thought. But they all knew who the gendarmes were taking their orders from. And so the ministres were around him on the scaffold, one or two yawning with the early dawn, seated in their velvet chairs, waiting to witness the death of the Red Rook.

LeBlanc opened his pendant. Its black hand pointed to dawn, and though dawn was looming, it had not precisely arrived. But the haularound had. LeBlanc sighed. This was inconvenient. And Renaud was missing, leaving him no one to blame or complain to. That was aggravating, as was the thought of training a new secretary. They could take so long to break.

And then there was this odd silence. Not the way a Lower City mob ought to behave when presented with the gift of the Red Rook’s head, and her brother’s. He had seem them beg for blood that was worth much less. But now they were merely standing aside, making a path for the haularound to approach the scaffold.

Sophia looked up past the torchlight to the huge, heavy blade already pulled high and hanging in the air, ready to end her life. The executioner and his team stood next to the rope, his only job now to trip the lever and let the blade fall, then pick up the head from the bloodstained basket and show it to the crowd. The Razor crept closer, and she wondered vaguely if she and Tom would go one at a time, or if they would lie down on the block and die together.

She felt curiously detached, as if this moment were happening to another Sophia Bellamy, a girl who had lived a thousand years ago and already knew the end of her story. But at the same time, little things were sharpened into importance, things that held meaning only for her. A knitted blue skullcap just like Mémé Annette’s, someone who had their child sitting on their shoulders, a woman with a red-tipped feather painted on her cheek, reaching out a hand in the dim and eerie silence. And then the haularound stopped.

The gendarmes came and cut her rope from the post, pulling her down and toward the steps of the scaffold. Evidently it was to be one at a time, and she would be first. She heard a whisper of talk trickle through the mob, a current of sound running just beneath the quiet.

“Tom!” Sophia yelled suddenly. “Tomas Bellamy, do not look. When it’s time, do not look! Swear it to me!”

She caught a glimpse of him over her shoulder, standing up straight now despite his injuries. He nodded once. She was satisfied. “Let me go,” she said, yanking her arms free of the gendarmes. “Let me go! I can walk on my own.”

She was getting angry now. That was good. She moved just out of the guards’ reach, and walked up the scaffold steps. That gendarme who cut her bonds did it a little too well, because they were loose around her wrists now. She stopped and planted her feet in front of the viewing box, bright with torches, tilted up her chin, fixed her gaze on LeBlanc, and smiled.

Somewhere far away in the crowd, someone was calling her name.

L
eBlanc
stood, his pale gaze on Sophia Bellamy. She looked young and small and very defiant standing down there with a bloody sleeve and a smile on her face. He could not wait to see her die. He pulled out a long roll of official-looking paper with a flourish.

“By order of the government of LeBlanc,” LeBlanc shouted, voice reverberating against the surrounding buildings, “I, your most gracious premier, find Sophia Bellamy, also known as the Red Rook, guilty of crimes against the City of Light …”

Spear froze at the sound of Sophia’s name, and looked up at the ceiling of the tunnel, where the drains of the prison yard were dark with feet.

“Sophia!” René yelled, using his elbows and body to fight a way through the crowd. The people had gone stiff, muttering. They’d been expecting Tom Bellamy to be the Red Rook, not this slim, small girl. And they’d thought their premier was Allemande. René pushed them all aside, screaming himself hoarse.

“Sophia!”

“For the removal of criminals fairly condemned of treason, and circumventing the laws that have condemned them …”

Sophia had stopped listening to LeBlanc. She was hearing the swelling confusion of the mob behind her, and the voice that was calling her name. She let LeBlanc keep on talking, turned from the viewing box and the solemn ministres of the Sunken City, and walked away, dropping her loose ropes onto the stolen stone altar as she passed. She approached the Razor and straddled the board, but instead of lying facedown, she chose to lay on her back, placing her neck in the stained, curved groove, chin up and facing the blade. She closed her eyes.

“Sophia!” The people in the crowd were beginning to part, to let him through, making his progress faster. “Listen to me!” René shouted. “I did not lie to you. It was not a lie! Sophia! Open your eyes!”

She opened her eyes and saw a sky of translucent blue, the kind that comes just before the dawn, and the giant wedge of metal that was the Razor, its sharpened edge glittering with the torchlight. She knew the voice. She’d known it all along. It was taking the steel from her anger and melting it into nothing. LeBlanc was still talking, but she wasn’t listening. Not to him.

“Sophia!” the voice screamed. “I did not lie to you! Think! Do you believe me?”

Spear pushed against the wall, scraping his nails against the rough and filthy stone, face looking up to the drains. Sophia was on the scaffold. And someone was screaming her name.

“Sophia!”

She blinked. That time she’d heard the sound of anguish inside her name.

“I did not lie to you!”

Sophia stared up at the blade, surrounded by ribbons and flowers. LeBlanc was talking on and on. And then her gaze moved over to the executioner. He was watching her curiously, his hand out and ready to trip the lever.

“Sophia! It was real! Do you believe me?”

She leapt up from the wooden slab, knocked the executioner to one side, wrapped the hauling rope around one leg, and tripped the lever herself. The Razor came down and Sophia rose, jerked from her feet, flying fast into the air. She hung on to the rope, and the blade hit the block with its usual thump.

Spear fell to his knees in the muck of the prison tunnel at the sound of the blade.

Sophia got her knee up and over the wooden framework that formed the top of the Razor, knocking black and white flowers to the crowd below. She put her feet beneath her and stood, still with a handful of rope, legs apart for support against the breeze. Her gaze went to Tom, leaning against the rail of the haularound, his eyes riveted on her—just what she’d told him not to do—working his knots free while no one was looking.

And then she spotted the red head, swimming frantically through the humanity of the Sunken City, dressed in the blue of a gendarme. He finally gained the scaffold and came careening up the steps to stand before the Razor, chest heaving and face turned upward.