Chapter Ten Patrick
It was a spectacle.
The woman Patrick took to be Nina’s mother trembled violently. Fat drops of rain darkened her clothes. The noose swung before her.
First light, and they’d gathered them all there just to witness Tanner’s desperate attempt to force Nina’s hand. Artisans were showy pricks.
Several feet away, Theodore stood beside his father with glassy eyes. Briefly, his gaze touched Patrick’s.
Patrick wondered if this was the moment Theo would take Lord Tanner’s life.
He imagined the idium now flowing in Theo’s veins and thought of what his father had said.
He can bend water at the molecular level—even water in the blood, in a person’s very pores.
He can draw it back into a person’s lungs, if he so chooses.
Patrick hoped to see it. Right here, before Tanner’s lords and constituents. He hoped he got to see the life sputter from him.
They brought Nina out of those doors last. How different the circumstances were from when last they’d stood in this courtyard together.
He wanted to shield her from the sight of the rope and her mother. To take her face in his hands and let her see only him, hear only his reassurance. This was all for show, all of it. She and Patrick held all the cards, not Tanner. Don’t fall for it.
The trick in squeezing for compliance, Patrick knew, was illusion.
You can wrap the rope around the neck, you can take the lever in hand, but you never open the trapdoor.
If you do, the squeeze is over, your leverage gone.
Tanner wasn’t fool enough to hang his leverage.
Nina only needed to hold out a little longer—just a little longer.
The blood left Nina’s cheeks as she came through the doors, her golden hair tangled, lips parted, eyes blind with panic, exactly as Patrick had feared, exactly as Tanner hoped.
Patrick almost called out to her. He stepped in her direction only to be cut off by a soldier.
“Stay put, lad,” John said from his side. “Ain’t a thing you can do.”
So Patrick stood stock-still, his teeth clenched, and he watched Nina fracture as the illusion took hold. The noose and platform and the woman atop it.
“LET HER GO!” Nina bellowed and stumbled forward. The rain fell in earnest now, turned the navy robes in the courtyard black. It slickened Nina’s face as she ran for the gallows.
And Tanner smiled. A cat with a mouse.
Soldiers caught her arms to haul her back, and Patrick lurched forward reflexively, Theodore too. Both were halted by the hands of their fathers and told to be still.
It’s only a play, Nina, Patrick thought fiercely. Come on. Keep your wits about you.
“Miss Clarke, I bid you be quiet while I execute this woman, since she can no longer be of any use to this House, as you have made so clear.”
Tanner turned then in her mother’s direction, giving Nina his back. “Rose Harrow, charges of conspiring with national enemies have been brought against you—”
“STOP!” Nina bellowed. There was a howl as she drove her elbow into the groin of a soldier. “MA!”
“I sentence you to hang until you are dead.”
The noose was positioned around her delicate neck, and the woman’s lips shook. The rain seemed to soften in sympathy. She looked at Nina and smiled wistfully, in the way mothers smile at their children.
“Stop!” Nina howled. Still fighting, clawing. The guards struggled to keep hold of her slick skin.
Tanner’s face grew lighter, his voice louder.
He read Idia’s Last Rite. “And in Her last breaths on Earth, she decreed that all who bled as she bled, and suffered as she suffered, and toiled this land righteously and with the grace of God, should come before her father at the end of their charity, and He would grant them eternal peace.”
The noose tightened. Rose gasped as the rope pinched her neck.
“Do you ask Idia, the daughter, and our Holy Father, to grant you mercy?”
Rose’s neck craned, the artery red and horribly naked. She could no longer see her daughter. To the sky, Rose spoke in a voice that seemed to have succumbed already. “I don’t pray for mercy. He only wants my sufferin’.”
“MA!”
The infantryman moved to the lever. The lords in their finery twitched in discomfort. Tanner lifted his hand for the drop.
And Nina surrendered. “I’ll give you what you want!” she yelled fervently. “I’ll do as you wish. Just let her go! She’s done nothing!”
The game was over.
Patrick was shaking. Not for warmth, or for Rose, who was never truly to hang for those weightless charges, but for Nina.
He ignored the soldiers, his father, and he went to her, his feet eating up the ground and hands trying to grip his forearms and pull him back.
He barreled through the first two, then a third.
The fourth hooked his biceps around Patrick’s neck and stopped any further progress. “Nina,” Patrick said. “Stand up!”
For she was on her knees now, like a beggar. He wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter. A coup was at play. It was only a matter of moments.
He wanted to shout at Theodore to kill Tanner now, to fill his lungs with water and have him silently drown. “Nina! Get up!”
But Theodore only watched Patrick with wide, fearful eyes, and Nina did not lift her head to read Patrick’s face.
And before them, with a smile as crooked as the devil, Tanner lowered his hand, his conquest won.
“Very well,” he said to Nina. He sighed as though she were a child in the last throes of hysterics.
He turned to the man at the lever. “Let her down,” he said, good-natured now, waving his hand flippantly.
But the lever was pulled.
The trapdoor opened.
And Rose Harrow fell, the snap of her neck rallying over the courtyard.