Chapter 5 #2
Silas sat between Cook and me. All Hands from the same courts stuck together, something that came very naturally, so we were all sitting in groups of three—the Clubs and the Spades on the left of the long table with the doors at our back, and the Diamonds and Hearts across.
That’s why I noticed every time Calren looked our way, and his eyes would always stop on Silas for a split second. Always, without fail.
Silas’s attention was on the front of the table, too—only on our side, on the Clubs.
Specifically on Reggie.
Jinx always told me that I saw everything, that I should consider becoming one of those detectives we read about growing up. I never really believed her because I didn’t see everything—only what caught my attention. Only what I chose to pay attention to.
But it was impossible not to notice the stolen glances of Silas simply because he was sitting right next to me, and every time he leaned in to see the beginning of the table better, I had no choice but to see him do it.
Eventually I leaned back all the way to make it easier for him. Casually, of course, so he didn’t even realize it.
“Pardon me, Timekeeper, but are the queens not coming today at all?” asked Anika the Diamond halfway through breakfast.
“Oh, but they must,” said Mimi.
“They’re so incredible! The White Queen was the best—”
“The Red Queen was the best! So kind and funny—”
“I wonder, do they sleep like we do—”
“Do they eat like we do? The very same foods—”
“Where do they live—”
“Do they use the bathroom, too, like the rest of us?”
On and on they went, one after the other, until Calren stopped them.
“Their Excellencies see you all the time, rest assured. They will be there to watch every trial, and I personally update them twice a day on every moment we spend together,” he said.
“So, they won’t come to see us in the meantime at all?!” asked Anika with a pout.
“No, they won’t. They have work to do—they are the queens of our realm,” Calren said with a sad smile—before his eyes moved to Silas lightning fast, then turned back to the rest of the table. “And yes—they do eat the same foods, and they sleep, and have to regularly relieve themselves—”
“Ew!”
“No, stop it!”
“Not while we eat!”
Laughter all around the table.
Calren shrugged. “You asked.”
After that, the others—and Calren—made joke after joke about sleep and food and bathrooms, and we didn’t stop laughing for a good while. It was one of the best meals I’d had in a very long time, and it had nothing to do with the food.
Then it was time for training.
Asha and Hector were the people who would be helping us prepare physically in the coming weeks for the trials. They were both Clubs, both muscular enough that they made me feel tiny in comparison, and neither of them smiled at us, only at Calren.
It seemed to me he was very well liked among the people here—and there were so many.
The hallways all the way down to the ground floor to get to the arena were near full—Timekeepers and Clockfolk alike, some with uniforms on, some with ordinary clothes, going about their business.
They all stopped to nod and say hello to Calren, though. And he always smiled and said it back.
The arena in which we would be training was half inside the palace, and half in its backyard under the open sky.
It wasn’t fancy like the rest of the palace, which I expected, but it was very well equipped.
The floor was a mix of different materials in different sections.
Some were laid with smooth pale stone, some were rough grit, some with metal plates bolted together, some with red mats.
Pillars jutted upward everywhere, short and tall—the latter ones holding up the ceiling, which was made of steel beams with holes in them to let the sunlight through.
The walls were made of reinforced glass, so there was plenty of light to see everything.
Racks full of weapons covered the wall on the right almost entirely, and they seemed to have everything in there, all kinds of blades.
The air smelled strange, like oil and chalk mixed together, but not as heavy as that of roses.
Then there was the outside.
Asha remained with Calren inside while Hector led us under the sunlight, and we were all too stunned to speak for a good moment. Tall cedar trees surrounded the wide space that was clearly designed for practice.
Wooden posts stood in uneven rows, each serving a different purpose, some fitted with rotating discs that seemed to spin a little with the light wind, others capped with brass bells that probably chimed when struck. Most stood straight but a few leaned crookedly, too.
To the sides of the posts, they had balance beams and hanging ropes and rings dangling from crossbars mounted on those cedar trees.
My father had been a soldier in our court once, briefly, and he’d undergone the queens’ training programs, and he’d explained a lot of these things to me, but to experience them with my own eyes was different.
It was so much more—especially the scent of pine and earth, so much better than roses or oil.
“For today, you will be running to get your blood rushing and your muscles heated up,” Calren said when he and Asha came to stand beside us. “For some of you, that won’t be much, but it’s a program that we have to stick to for all of you.”
As he said this, his soft green eyes were on Mimi, Seth and Reggie—the Clubs.
He was absolutely right, of course. Clubs needed to be on the move all the time—that’s how they generated more energy.
They only slept for up to three hours at a time, twice in the day and twice in the night, otherwise the stillness would kill them—literally.
They aged and died within minutes if they weren’t moving for long enough, and that’s why their entire court was made of towers and spiraling stairs, to forever keep them moving, so they never ran out of places to run to and from.
“No fair to compare us with these weaklings,” said Reggie with a grin, and his eyes darted fast to the other side of the line—toward the others. I didn’t see it exactly, but I was willing to bet he looked at Silas, and Silas was already looking at him.
“Who’re you calling weakling, you brute?” Silas said with a grin. “I’ll race you any time you please.”
Reggie roared with laughter. “I please it now. I please it very much,” he said—and the next second they both took off running.
The rest of us laughed.
“Well, I guess that’s a go. What are you waiting for, everyone—start the first lap, and we’ll take it from there,” said Hector, smiling and shaking his head as he moved away to leave room for us to pass.
We did.
I didn’t mind running, though I didn’t exactly prefer it.
Walking was more my style. Walking and sparring.
I’d been sparring with my father since I was about ten years old, at least four times a week in the evening before bed.
We’d bonded over it, and we began to understand each other while he taught me how to protect myself, how to fight, how to move my body to its full potential.
He’d started teaching me because of his own nostalgia for the time he’d been a soldier, but when he saw how much I grew to love it, he began to take it more seriously, making plans, creating movement patterns, watching what I ate and how I slept, too.
He came alive in our backyard, in our little training corner we’d built for it.
Jinx had sometimes joined us, too, but she wasn’t into movement as much as she was into reading and singing.
Most of the time it was just my father and me.
But here, in this arena, I loved the feel of the wind blowing my hair back, the taste of it, the scent, the heat of the morning sunlight on my face.
I doubted I’d smiled this much for this long ever in my life before.
Whatever magic was in the air here in the Labyrinth (I couldn’t quite believe I was thinking it myself, but—) I wanted to be a part of it forever.
Then someone fell into pace beside me, and his shadow shielded me from the sunlight for a moment.
“They’re gone again.”
I looked up at March, a mountain of a man compared to my five feet six—or maybe it was just his presence that was so massive to me.
I burned all of a sudden with an invisible fire that started somewhere within me. A miracle I didn’t lose my footing and fall, and it did take me much longer than I liked to admit to make sense of his words.
“Who’s gone?” I asked in half a voice and made a point to look around. All the other Hands were still there, running a lap all around the grounds.
“Your freckles,” said the Heart boy, and the gears in my stomach malfunctioned again. “They always disappear when you’re flushed.”
Impossible not to smile. “I had no idea.”
He looked down at me and grinned. “Now you do.”
I pulled my lips inside my mouth to stop the giggle that wanted out of me. I wasn’t that pathetic, was I?
“You’re very…observant,” I ended up muttering, a thousand things crossing my mind at once.
I wanted to ask him to stop so I could see his eyes better in sunlight—are they really that red, or is it just me?
Touch his hair for just a moment—it cannot possibly be as smooth as it looks, can it?
Smell him, too—why do you smell like rain and roses?
Pretty sure that was just my imagination, but I would really like to find out.
Then he went and said, “Only of beautiful things.”
Just like that, my train of thought disappeared somewhere down the railways of my mind like it had never even existed in the first place.
“Halt!”
Hector’s voice made me jump. I had already slowed my step, and March was already three feet ahead, stopping with the crowd.
Beside me was Mimi with the gorgeous, kind eyes, and a smile that must have mirrored my own.
She leaned in and whispered, “I think the Heart boy likes you, Spade,” before she ran ahead with a hand over her mouth to cover her smile.
“Rest for two minutes, then we go again,” Hector said, pressing the winder on the clock he held while I brought both hands to my chest to make sure my heart wouldn’t fly out of me. With the way it was beating, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Meanwhile, March was talking to Russ and Silas a few feet to the side, hands on his hips, breathing deeply, but I knew he saw me through his peripheral. I knew he saw my goofy smile, and so I turned my head the other way, went to join Mimi and Cook in their conversation.
My fingers pressed against my cheeks, and I wished I had a mirror in front of me just to see if my freckles were still gone. Just to see what he saw when he looked at me.
What a silly, silly thought, but in my mind (only) I whispered back to Mimi, I think I like the Heart boy, too.