Rook (46 page)

Sophia shinnied down the rope. The world was shaking, the hole that had eaten the prison building slowly opening wider, the surface cascading down, creating a stampede of people running in the opposite direction. Another explosion, this one with a flash of fire and wind and a noise that left her ears ringing, and then rain fell, a heavy rain, all scattered bits and pieces. The panic of the fleeing crowd intensified as they were pelted, and Sophia saw a larger piece fly past and shatter on the scaffold. One part of her brain registered that what had just sailed past her head was a skull. That it was raining bones. But the bigger part of her was intent on surviving.

Her feet hit the wood of the platform and an arm came around her, pulling her into a run. René had her, Tom on his other side, and he was dragging both of them across a scaffold that was suddenly tilting uphill. The ground was giving way. LeBlanc’s viewing box fell, though whether he was in it or not she didn’t know. And then they were enveloped in a choking cloud of smoke and dirt.

“Jump!” René yelled.

Sophia pushed off the edge of the scaffold as it tumbled downward into a hole, the Razor collapsing with it. They hit the paving stones hard, but just enough to stumble; the ground had not been all that far away.

“Tom!” she said, pulling him upright. “Move!”

They all three began a slow run, tripping over bricks and bones, the rumbling beneath them slowing and softening to only the occasional fall of stone somewhere deep below. The prison yard had nearly emptied, but there was a thick ring of people around the edge of it, a fence of bodies. They stopped before them, and Sophia turned to look back.

The first light shone down on air that was hazy with dust, and where the prison building and the Razor had been was a great, smoking, rubbish-heaped pit. She looked up to the cliffs and saw people there as well, pressed against the iron fences, and even higher up, black specks thronging the balconies and air bridges. Above that was the white line of smoke pointing the way across the sky. She felt Tom grab her harder, his legs giving way beneath him.

She let him slide to the ground, and then looked to the semicircle of people, a buffer of awe making an uncrossable space between them. But when she spoke she did not sound like a spirit, or even the Red Rook.

“Can someone help my brother?” she yelled. “Please! Can you help my brother?”

“Sophie!” Justin was pushing his way to the front of the silent throng. “Here, come with me …” Tom’s eyes were rolling into the back of his head. René came around and got beneath his shoulders while Justin picked up Tom’s legs. René’s face and hair were dulled by dust, mouth pressed as he lifted Tom. But he was whole. Sophia had that feeling of being another Sophia, from another time; she couldn’t believe that he was here, that Tom was here. That the Tombs were gone.

“Make way!” Justin said, backing his way through the crowd. “Let us through!”

The people parted, one or two hands reaching out to touch her back as she followed René down the opening path. Something tickled her neck, and Sophia reached up and discovered the rook feather still perched in her hair.

Someone gave them a cart, and soon they were on Blackpot Street, carrying Tom into Justin and Maggie’s house, a small shanty of planks and scrap boards that had at one time been Mémé Annette’s. They put Tom on the bed, and Maggie went for water, dipping from the barrel in the corner, where they kept the boiled water. Where it had always been. Sophia helped her get some of it into Tom’s mouth, relieved when he sputtered and choked, his eyes flying open long enough to drink half of it on his own. Tom laid his head back on the coarse sheets, breathing deeply.

“He’s wasted to nothing,” Maggie said, while Justin shooed sleepy children back into the bedroom they shared. “I’ll heat some broth.” She kissed Sophia’s cheek.

Justin came back out and spoke to Maggie quietly while Sophia sponged some of the dirt and blood away from Tom, but Sophia could hear them planning. No one knew what had become of LeBlanc, or who was taking orders from whom. All the children but the baby would go to Maggie’s sister. The neighbors would make sure they had warning. Just in case.

And then Sophia’s head swiveled around, a little panicked, but she found René almost immediately, standing against the wall with his hands in his pockets and a great rent in his shirt, looking a little out of place. He held out an arm, and she crossed the tiny room as if she’d been pulled. He held her tight, cradling her head while Maggie cleaned Tom’s face and stirred a pot, and the newest baby cried in the other room. They sank down to the dirt floor, a surface so shiny it looked polished, without ever really letting go. René leaned back against the wall, her arms around him, and held her chin so that she had to look at him.

“You believe me?” he said.

“Yes. And you won’t leave me?”

“No,” he whispered. He drew her head onto his chest. “My love.” Sophia closed her eyes. A drowsy contentment was flowing through her, a sense of the poles of the world shifting again into their rightful place.

“René,” she whispered, a little surprised. “I’ve gotten your shirt wet.” She hadn’t even realized she was crying.

“It could only be a help.” He sounded exhausted.

“What did the coin say?”

“Hmm?”

“You didn’t catch it; you let it fall. On the altar.”

She felt him smile against her head. “What is it you say? I think it is, ‘No bloody idea’? Everything blew up and I did not even see it.”

She laughed once, a sound that was mostly breath, and tightened her encircling arms. “I’m glad you had it with you.”

“What?” he murmured.

“Your trick coin.”

“Ah. I think … I left that in my other pants.”

Sophia frowned in the darkness behind her eyelids. “Then what did you toss?”

“A coin I found in the … gendarme’s pocket.”

Something in her mind registered that he had risked everything on that toss. She clung a little tighter, cheek against the warm skin of his chest where the cloth was ripped, listening to a heartbeat, feeling the rise and fall of his breath as it slowed.

Tom opened his eyes to slivers of sunshine peeking through the tiny holes in the roof and the smell of broth on a fire. And when he turned on his side he saw his sister sitting on the floor, her face on René Hasard’s chest, the back of her head covered with his hair. They were both asleep.

T
he
sun was high when Justin came again, saying he’d found a landover driver willing to take them to the coast, though the driver would not enter the Lower City. So they would borrow a trader’s cart to get Tom to the Seine Gate.

“But the gates are all open,” Justin said. “No gendarmes anywhere. And there’s a crowd outside.”

Sophia looked back to the fire. René was on his knees beside her, tending the cut LeBlanc had put on her arm, while Tom sat up in the bed, cleaner now but still with a beard, wearing René’s gendarme coat to cover up some of his prison raggedness. She didn’t want to think about a crowd. She was no deity, and certainly no saint. She winced as René tied the cloth tight. At least she had not needed stitches.

Justin said, “They’re also saying in the market that LeBlanc has been taken.”

Sophia frowned. She’d hoped LeBlanc was lying crushed beneath the rubble of his own prison. “Who has taken him?” René asked.

Justin shrugged. “The mob. The Lower City. They say they have him locked in a loo.” Justin glanced at Sophia once, before he looked to Tom, shifting his feet. “Do you want to see him, before you go?”

Sophia met Maggie’s quick gaze, where she sat rocking her baby. Justin was asking if Tom wanted an eye for an eye, so to speak. It was Lower City justice.

“René?” Tom said. “You have as much reason as me.”

René paused his tying and looked around at Tom, and shook his head. Tom turned back to Justin.

“Who is in charge of the city?”

Justin shrugged. “No one knows. But in the market they’re saying that the Rook has given them leave to choose a new leader. That we will choose a new leader.”

Tom said, “Then let them keep on choosing. And let the people of the city decide what to do with him.”

Sophia hugged Maggie and kissed Justin’s cheek before climbing into the cart. Blackpot Street and its alleys were swarming, gathering even more bodies as they wound their way up to the Seine Gate. But it was a quiet multitude, introspective rather than raucous, and Sophia found it uncomfortable to be the center of their undivided attention. She was relieved when they switched to the landover and could close the curtains, but René leaned over and opened them again.

“I think your brother would like to see the sun,” he said.

So Sophia watched the passing streets of a quiet Upper City from the shelter of René’s arms, which she seemed unwilling to do without for very long. One or two people were on the streets, repairing doors and sweeping up the mess, but it was like the city was at rest after a sickness. Or maybe like a field after the battle: a needed pause, almost blissful after the chaos, but with the ramifications of all that had happened still yet to be understood. They passed a young gendarme, the first she’d seen all day, uniform covered in dirt and mud, walking down the sidewalk with a small pack over one shoulder.

“Wait,” Sophia said. “Stop! That’s Cartier!”

Tom leaned forward to look out the window and René banged hard on the roof, signaling for the driver to stop. The landover slowed, pulling to the side of the road, and Sophia opened the door to wave Cartier in. He trotted down the pavement.

“Thought I’d been left behind,” he said, crawling in beside Tom.

“You nearly were,” René replied. “Did my uncles forget you? Or was it Maman?”

“Your uncles, I think, Monsieur.” Cartier seemed unfazed. “Not much blame to them, though. It was a mess down at the prison.”

“And they all left for the coast? Uncle Émile, and Benoit?”

“
Oui
, sir,” said Cartier, mixing his Parisian and his Commonwealth.

“Was Spear with them?” Sophia asked, settling back beneath René’s arm.

Cartier looked at her, confused and a little stricken. “But … I thought …” He didn’t go on. Sophia sat up again.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Cartier, what’s happened?”

“It was the prison,” Cartier said. “Well, it exploded, didn’t it? And Mr. Hammond? Wasn’t he the one that exploded it?” Cartier had switched fully into Commonwealth now, and was speaking quickly. “I was with Monsieur’s uncles, all of us dressed as gendarmes, and we were ready to nab the two of you as soon as you came out the prison doors, but you came from the other way, and there was no way to get to you, not with all the people, and … Miss Bellamy went up the scaffold and I didn’t want to look …”

Tom nodded. “Go on.”

“So I looked down, and I was standing on a drain, and way down below me, there was Mr. Hammond, in one of the tunnels, and he was dressed like a gendarme, too.”

Sophia sat back, thinking of the uniform Spear had used so often when they came to the city, but René’s red brows came down. “How could you see him?”

“He had a lantern, and … he’s just not so hard to recognize, is he? But the thing is, I was looking at him when the Razor came down. I know he thought you were dead, Miss. I did, too. Until I saw you climbing on top. And when I looked back into the tunnel again, Mr. Hammond was gone. That’s why I went looking for him … after …”

Sophia sat forward, her face in her hands. She felt an ache take residence in the center of her chest, a piercing pain that was going to be difficult to bear. Had Spear gone back into the Tombs to unset the firelighter, or to set it again? She would never know. But either way, it had been for her. Right or wrong, everything he’d done had always been for her. Perhaps the guilt was going to be just as hard to live with as the pain. She looked up from her hands and met Tom’s eyes, wondering if her face looked as wounded as his. “How many died at the prison today?” she asked Cartier.

“There were a fair few hurt, Miss, but I only helped bury Mr. Hammond.”

She made sure the boy was looking at her before she said, “Thank you, Cartier. For everything.” She stared out the window as the city passed, silent but for the tears streaming down her face.

They drove straight through the Saint-Denis Gate, no guards, not even a pause through the cemeteries, where most of the flowers and the black and white masks of the Goddess had been pulled down. Cartier went to sleep almost instantly, leaning his peach-fuzzed cheek against the velvet-lined wall. Sophia laid her head in René’s lap, soothed by the rocking motion and the wheels and René’s hand in her hair. She closed her eyes. But she could not sleep. She ached too much. After a long time of stillness, she heard Tom say, very quietly, “When did you see him last?”

“Last night at the cliffs,” René replied, “climbing out of the Lower City. He cut my rope when I was about halfway up. But it was my rope, placed there for a reason. I knew where to fall.”

She could hear Tom rubbing the unfamiliar hair on his chin. “I take it he had the Bonnard denouncement forged.”

“Yes. I saw the original. He was carrying it with him after your arrest. You requested it, am I right? Because you thought the Hasards would choose to remove the Ministre of Trade from his post? To keep their fortune?”

“I wasn’t going to let my sister marry just anyone, you know.”

“You were right to look. We are not all we seem, that is true.” After a moment René said, “Someone hired the hotelier of the Holiday to attack me. He knew where we were hiding, knew what room I slept in. I had thought it was Hammond. But he said no, in the prison, and now I am inclined to believe him.”

Sophia stayed very still beneath the safety of René’s hand.

Tom said, “I told him to look. To go to LeBlanc and offer himself up, if he needed to. See if we couldn’t flush someone out of the shadows. Did he find out …”

“I do not think he ever stopped believing it was me.”

“I don’t want you to think …,” Tom sighed. “Spear wasn’t a bad man.” She could hear the grief in her brother’s voice. It started her tears again, leaking onto René’s lap.

René said, “I think, perhaps, that he loved her too well.”

The landover wheels rattled over ruts. She could almost hear Tom thinking, choosing his words. “I wouldn’t have sanctioned it, you know. We never had the conversation because I knew Sophie didn’t … and Spear was family to us.” Tom took another moment. “But he would never have been happy with my sister. It was like … like he thought there were two Sophies: the one she is now, and the one she would be just as soon as she decided to settle down with him. And it was the Sophie to come that he loved too well, not the one she was. That she is. But Sophia isn’t going to change. You know this?”

René laughed without humor. “Oh, I know this.” He stroked her hair just a little. “I should tell you that the Hasard fortune is lost. I do not know what will happen in the city, but I would guess it will take some time, years perhaps, to put our finances back in order. There will be no fee. Not in time.”

“And she says she will have you, anyway.”

“Yes. She does.”

Tom adjusted his bad leg. “A lot has changed since I crossed the Channel Sea.”

“That is so.”

“The Commonwealth won’t recognize it.”

“We could go to Spain,” René suggested.

“They won’t recognize it, either, not with her citizenship.”

“Ah, but it is so much easier to lie about such things in Spain.”

“What would you do there?”

“No bloody idea.” He paused. “It is my new phrase.”

“Our father might have something to say about it.”

“As will Sophia, and as will my
maman
. We can all gamble on that.”

“Sophie lied to me about our father, when we were in the prison. I would guess this means he’s not well.”

“He is grieving. And he blames his daughter for his grief.”

“I see,” Tom sighed. “And now he’ll go to prison, grieved or not, and we are going to lose the house. Unless we find another Parisian suitor for my sister in the next … what is it now? Five days? I’m afraid I’ve lost track.”

“Three, I think.”

“Right you are. But I suppose everyone involved will object to that plan now.” Sophia almost smiled.

“And what about you, Monsieur? Do you … how did you say, do you ‘sanction’ this?”

Sophia tried to relax her body, to not alert René to just how very awake she was. She waited for Tom’s answer, René rhythmically stroking her head.

Finally her brother said, “Why don’t you call me Tom?”

Sophia rocked with the movement of the landover, eyes still closed, sure she was failing at hiding a little bit of her smile. She was torn between grief for the man who wasn’t there, and love for the two who were. But what were they to do now? René didn’t want to go to Spain. There was nothing for him there. And what about Tom? She wouldn’t be leaving him behind with no house, no inheritance, and the responsibility of their father. Neither Tom nor René would be sacrificing for her. Not if she had anything to do with it.

Then she felt René go tense beneath her. Tom hit the landover roof, and the vehicle slowed. She sat up, wiping her eyes. They were on the cliff road, nearly to the sea, and Cartier had startled awake as well, looking at them all blearily. It took a moment to see what Tom and René had, but when she did, Sophia opened the door of the landover before it had even slowed to a stop and went running toward an open green field. The trees bordering the field had been broken, a line of splintered branches showing a path from the air, and in the grass there was a burn mark, like a long, blackened rut made from a giant wheel. And at the end of this lay … something.