Chapter Thirty-Four
From what we can see through the windows, a riot has begun outside the palace gates. Torches are burning, and hundreds are begging for an audience with the queen, shouting over each other, so it’s just a roar of outraged voices.
“I’m not letting you go alone,”
Faith says. Marion lays her hand on Faith’s shoulder and nods. “If you’re going, we are too.”
“I’ll have you remember, I absolutely cannot stand to be left out,”
Emmy says.
Olive sniffs back tears. “Oh, fine. Let’s go.”
“I can’t guarantee your safety,”
I say, overwhelmed with emotion.
Faith pulls on her cloak. “No time for a speech. We get it. Come on.”
We circle along a path through Kensington Park that pops us out on a sleepy, moonlit lane off the high street, far from the riot at the gates.
“He said something about the Tower,”
I explain. It’s what we overheard him talking about when we walked in.
The Tower of London is all the way on the other side of town. It will take us hours to walk there and we don’t have the time, so we risk hailing a hackney carriage. Still in my wedding dress, the other girls in their bridesmaid gowns, we don’t make an inconspicuous group, but we don’t have any other options.
Marion passes a thick stack of bills through the window to the driver. “The Tower, and a little extra if you keep this ride between us.”
The driver tips his cap.
The streets of London are quiet tonight, as if everyone who isn’t rioting at the gates of the palace have barricaded themselves inside their homes. The carriage is so crowded, Olive has to sit on my lap.
The hackney driver lets us out on the dark cobblestone streets in the shadow of the Tower of London. The smell of the Thames is thick and heady tonight.
Olive takes me by the hand. “Let’s go.”
At the gates is a yeoman guard with a bayonet in his hand. “No one in or out tonight,”
he barks without looking at us.
I straighten to my full height and stare him down as best I can from six inches below him. “Do you know who I am?”
The guard’s gaze flicks down to me.
“I’m Queen Ivy, wife of King Bram. Please don’t waste my time with these theatrics.”
The guard pauses, and I sneer. “Are you going to make us wait all night? My husband will be hearing about this.”
After a moment the guard reaches for his thick metal keys, unlocks the gates, and waves us inside.
The Tower is dark and quiet. The only sound is that of the waves of the Thames crashing at Traitors’ Gate and the chattering of the ravens watching us from the eaves.
It’s as if we’re being surveilled by ghosts as we creep through the Tower.
We split up into two groups, Marion and Faith search one end, and Olive, Emmy, and I search the other. We meet back in the middle on Tower Green.
He’s not being held in the basement cells, nor in the queen’s apartments or the towers along the ramparts. There is only one place left to look.
“Emmett?”
I whisper. The only answer is a caw-caw from a raven perched on the ancient turret.
The steep spiral steps to Wakefield Tower are lit with a single flickering torch.
“That’s hopeful,”
Emmy says.
“Oh yes, I feel full of hope.”
I try to joke, but the words come out sounding as scared as I feel.
“I’m sorry,”
I say to Faith as we begin to climb. She pauses on the stairs. “Sorry for not telling you the truth, for not pushing Emmett to be more transparent with you, for seeing you as competition when I should have been supporting you.”
It’s not the right time, but I have to say it.
Faith smiles sadly. “It’s all forgiven. Let’s go get your boy, yeah?”
There are two guards at the door, but I command them to wait at the bottom of the stairs.
The small chamber at the top of the tower is lit only by a beam of moonlight streaming in from the narrow archer’s window.
The bars of the cell look new, as if they were only recently put in, and behind them, sitting perfectly still, isn’t Emmett. It’s Queen Mor.
She’s unsettling in her perfection, looking unmussed, even here. I’m struck by how young she looks, stripped of her finery and jewels. Her long black hair hangs in ribbons over her sharp shoulders, and her hands are covered in dried blood. Edgar’s blood.
She sighs as we approach her cell. “Not you all, again.”
I sit down on the cold ground, as close to the bars as I can get, and the others lower themselves beside me. “Where is Emmett?”
Something like sadness passes over her face like a breeze. “He took Emmett?”
“He’s not here?” I ask.
“I’m the only prisoner here tonight.”
My hope deflates. “I know you can lie,”
I say, but for some reason, I don’t think she is.
This gets her attention. “You spoke to Bram, then?”
“I’d like to hear the story from you,” I say.
“I thought I was doing what was best,”
she says. “I didn’t know what he’d become. You must understand, he’s not all bad.”
“Emmett loved him and was betrayed.”
Mor looks at me with pity. “That was always Emmett’s great flaw. He was so hungry for love, he couldn’t see the faults in who was offering it to him. His father was all too willing to let you both risk your life for his zealous cause.”
“You knew?” I ask.
“People like his father have existed for as long as I have reigned. Rebellion isn’t novel.”
“Why did you marry Edgar, then?” I ask.
“Because I didn’t realize his true motives until he was already my husband. By then I was quite fond of him. It seemed a great inconvenience to kill him.”
“But then you killed him anyway.”
She doesn’t reply, but for the briefest moment, sorrow breaks through her cool mask of detachment.
“Why didn’t you stop us?” I ask.
“You weren’t really a threat.”
“But we were, weren’t we? We worked out that the May Queen trial was the key to violating the terms of your bargain.”
The queen laughs at us like we are children.
And to her, we are.
“You think I would have let that trial happen if there was any risk in it? No.
The risk was from my own son.
He was still king of the Otherworld, which I didn’t know.
I thought he was telling the truth when he came to me, distraught, a few years ago, with a story of his father ousting him.
I loved him too much to see through his lies.
I didn’t know that when he married, his bride would be both a princess of England and queen of the Otherworld.
It didn’t matter what girl he chose. This was always going to be the outcome. I understand now why he was so keen to marry.”
Queen of the Otherworld.
The words settle over me, and some awful part of me is tempted to laugh.
I got what my childhood self always wanted, but now I’d do anything to undo it.
“This was always his plan?” I ask.
Queen Mor settles against the back wall of the cell and extends her legs in front of her.
“Before you or your parents or your grandparents remember, the portal between our worlds was open.
The folk could pass through as they pleased.
And oh, did they please.
But they didn’t call it England in the court of the Otherworld.
They called it the Hunting Grounds.
My kind are easily bored and have long used humans as our playthings.
The games were bloody and the humans were always the losers.
It got so bad, the folk whipped up a civil war and sat in the trees to watch the battles for fun.
I couldn’t dance at revels, where the dance floor was so bloody, I slipped.
I couldn’t bear to smile from my throne as another courtier brought an enchanted human for my entertainment.
It wasn’t fun anymore.
It was disgusting. My people were half out of their minds at all times, intoxicated on human emotion. It was completely undignified. I announced to my court the portal between our world and the Hunting Grounds was closing.
“But there were many who didn’t take kindly to that.
My son among them.
He was young then, and, together with a group of like-minded courtiers, he staged a coup.
It placed my then-husband on the throne, but that was always part of his plan.
Bram played a long game.
I didn’t see it coming.
I didn’t see tonight coming either.
I suppose that is my great flaw.
I will always believe the best of him.
“As the band of traitors took the palace that night, I had enough time to run, and I will always believe that was intentional.
I ran for the woods.
My final act there as queen was warding the portal between our world and yours.
I enchanted it so that only members of my family could come through.
I always harbored a hope that Bram would come to me and we could be a family again.
He’s got a good heart under all that ambition.
“When I crossed through the portal for the final time, it was onto King Edward’s battlefield.
You may fault me for this, but I had grown used to being a queen.
I had no desire to be a witch in the woods.
I wanted a castle.
So I made my first bargain with the humans.
I do not regret it.
“When Bram passed through the portal four years ago, he came to me on bended knee.
He told me he was sorry for the coup, that he was manipulated by his father, that he regretted it and he missed me.
He told me he, too, had been deposed in a coup by a rival family, such things are fairly common in the Otherworld, and he begged me for shelter.
It was everything I had dreamed of for four hundred lonely years.
I welcomed him with open arms.”
“Why lie and say he was so young?” I ask.
“Humans aren’t fond of being reminded of their own mortality.”
Mor goes on: “We thought it best that you see Bram as closer to one of you. It would allow him to integrate himself into London society and life at court without humans fearing him.”
My stomach is in knots. “How old is he?”
The queen waves her hand vaguely. “We stop counting after one thousand.”
Next to me, Olive winces.
“He said he’s still king in the Otherworld. He’s been going back and forth,” I say.
“I know that now,”
Queen Mor says. “I loved him too much to be suspicious of him.”
“How could he rule there and spend so much time here?”
“Time works differently there,”
Queen Mor explains. “What is only a few hours here could be days there.”
“Now that Bram is king, we could do away with the bargain system,”
Olive says hopefully. “He could still be a just and fair ruler. We could usher in a new age of democracy and equality, just like you wanted, Ivy.”
I wonder if the other girls still believe there’s good in him. He was skilled at being exactly the right thing to each of us.
The queen laughs once more. “Your soft heart is going to be the death of you, Olive Lisonbee. Bram isn’t here to usher in a new age of anything. He’s doing the bidding of his courtiers back home. He’s here to reopen the portal. He is singularly focused.”
Something that isn’t sadness but close to it flickers in her eyes. “Steel yourself for what’s to come.”
She turns to me. “And you, Ivy Benton. You’re stronger than you believe. You were always my favorite.”
“We could kill her now, get our revenge,”
Faith suggests.
“You’re going to need me,”
the queen replies icily.
The five of us stand, now towering over her as she sits in her stone cell. “An apology, then,”
Marion says. “Say you’re sorry for what you did to us.”
The queen’s steely gaze rakes over us, one by one. “I’m not sorry at all.”
“Why not?”
Emmy asks.
Queen Mor almost smiles. “Look at how strong I made you.”
“But what about Greer?”
Olive croaks. “What about what you did to our friend?”
The queen waves her off with her hand. “It’s been a long night, and I am tired.”
There are heavy footfalls on the stone steps. Emmy races to the door and throws her body weight against it, but the guards are pushing in.
“I have just one more question before we take our leave,”
I say. “Where was Lydia?”
“You already know the answer to that.”
I think of myself, lost and cold and alone, searching for a door to the Otherworld the night I first met Emmett. I was right all along. “Why send her there?”
The queen shuts her eyes, dismissing us. “I was bored.”
After an eternity, there is only boredom or the lack of it.
But something about her explanation rings hollow. For the first time tonight, I’m not sure if I believe her.