Chapter 40
“How’s it looking? How’s it looking? Are they ready? Let me see…”
That voice.
It was harsh and sharp, annoying, mostly because it lacked warmth. It was too fast, too loud—and the person who owned it was the visual representation of it as well.
Johnny the speaker had found us in the main hallway of The Ever, suited up and barely holding our insides in before we set off for the fourth and final trial.
It was time. We’d already gone through most of the Turning Trials. Today was the last.
Bile rose up my throat anew.
“Hello, Johnny,” Calren said with a forced smile.
“You’re supposed to be out there preparing, are you not?
” He even tried to step in front of him so Johnny couldn’t get to us, but he easily moved to the side, his smile big, his eyes just the same as last time—brown, almost black, and perfectly round like most things about him.
He wore a deep green suit this time, though, and that made his skin look a bit gray.
“I’m plenty prepared,” he said with a wave of his hand. In the other was his device—round and as big as my fist, covered in some sort of a metal mesh. “Besides—I wanted to see how the Hands are doing.”
“They’re doing fine. You shouldn’t have bothered. As their warden, it’s my job to make sure they’re ready,” Calren insisted, rolling his eyes behind him so that we could see.
A few of us even cracked a smile—he had been trying to lighten up the mood all morning throughout breakfast. It hadn’t really worked, though. We were too full of feelings already—happy and sad, impatient and reluctant, panicked and desperate to get this over with and leave.
At the same time, who was to say what leaving really would look like?
I was eleven-hours certain neither of us was going to like it.
“Of course, of course. I’m not here for your job, Calren—relax.” Johnny’s grin. The dirty quality of his voice—or maybe that was just his teeth?
Calren couldn’t help himself this time. This murderous look he gave Johnny did make me smile a little.
“Let me see—ah, yes. Twelve Hands. All perfectly healthy,” Johnny said, and we tried to pretend he wasn’t even there, but it was impossible when he got up to our faces like that.
March, who was standing beside me since we’d come out of our rooms, said, “Way too deep in her personal space. Please move, Timekeeper,” when Johnny was in front of me, but the speaker only laughed, like he thought March was being funny.
He wasn’t.
I looked up at him to say thanks and my stomach did a flip.
We’d stayed together until Lida had come to knock on my door.
Then he had to go get ready in his own room.
Of course, Lida had tried to interrogate me on our relationship, but I insisted that he’d just come over in the morning to talk about a dream.
It was close enough to a real occurrence, I figured.
Then she’d insisted that she wanted to see my drawings, too, like she was suddenly curious to see if I was any good—but the suspicious look in her eyes spoke volumes.
That’s why I’d ended up hiding my sketchbook underneath the mattress when she went to the bathroom to prepare my bath, so she didn’t see it, and hopefully forgot all about it by the time we left the room.
Because I was not about to tell her anything that wasn’t her business. Not my drawings, not about March—and especially not about the tiny mushroom he’d given me before he left.
It was a small thing made out of what he called heartbone, which could have easily been white marble.
His sister had given it to him when he left home for the Turning Trials, and it was meant to keep him safe.
He said he wanted me to have it only until we met again outside of the Labyrinth—when he came to see me, or I came to see him, or we met somewhere in the middle of the realm—it didn’t matter.
I was to keep it safe for the next time we were together, and I promised that I would.
The emptiness inside me was so much less empty with March, and it was also a reminder. I couldn’t wait to get out of here already and get my whole self back, but I couldn’t wait to meet March beyond those fences more.
Soon.
I’d saved the mushroom in the nightstand of my room together with Jinx’s picture. Those—and my sketchbook—would be the first things I went for when the trial was over and we were free to go. I’d hold onto that little thing until we met again no matter what.
“You.”
The sharp, cold voice of the speaker startled me and pulled me back to the now. He’d stopped in front of Silas, had raised a chubby finger to his face.
“There’s something odd about you,” he said, which didn’t surprise me one bit.
Silas was grinning, though. “There’s something odd about all of us. We all chose to be here willingly,” he simply said.
“Yes, I suppose applying to be a Hand of the Turning Trials is enough to prove you’re…” Johnny grinned and it was pure evil. “Not well in the head,” he concluded. “Oh, but wait till you see this last trial. You just wait.”
“Do you know what it is?” Mimi asked in half a voice.
Suddenly Johnny looked offended as he spun his device around his hands. “Of course, I do.”
“Then tell us,” said Helen, and he actually flinched.
“Why in Time’s Temper would I do that?!”
“That’s enough,” Calren said, and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “We have things to go over. Go.”
“I was—” Johnny started, but Calren gave him a nice shove on his shoulder, and almost threw him to the floor.
“Leave, Johnny. Now.”
I’d never heard Calren sound more…dangerous. Like he wasn’t himself at all. It was worse than when we heard him lose it underneath the mechanical garden that night.
For a second, Johnny looked at him—angry, outraged, shocked, and then…afraid. The expressions on his face changed right before our eyes.
“Very well,” he then muttered, and raising his chin, he turned around, pulled down the edges of his vest, and walked out the door.
“Thanks,” Reggie muttered when Calren turned to us again—smiling, like always.
“He can really be a pain,” the Timekeeper said.
“Do you know about the trial, though?” Mimi asked him.
“I don’t. Neither does he—he just likes to pretend,” Calren said. “You will be all right.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one about to enter a trial where there could be timewraiths waiting to suck our time dry,” said Seth. “…are there?”
“No. No timewraiths in this trial, either,” Calren said without hesitation, which was why I believed him. “Just keep your head about you. Think before you act. You will be okay—you are all brilliant girls and boys.” His smile this time was genuine.
Not that it mattered, though. Not when the soldiers came through the doors and nodded at him to say that it was time to go.
It really was time for the fourth trial.
The sun shone outside, though it couldn’t have been later than ten s.b.
It was especially hot today, or maybe it was just the suit.
Suddenly it felt really tight against my skin, sucking the air out of my lungs.
March stayed by my side, though, my hand in his at all times, and that made it a little better.
Calren took us to the side of the palace and all the way to the arena, the same arena where we’d held the other two trials. Nothing about it had changed much—except the audience.
They lost their minds when we entered. There were so many people, a lot more than before, possibly over two hundred.
The screens behind the tiered seats where they were cheering and applauding showed the four symbols of the courts.
The queens were there too, both of them in their glass box, surrounded by the screaming crowd—together with them, but separate.
And ahead, there were no dark clouds, no domes, no gigantic trees attached to towers—only a forest, denser than any I’d seen before, the trunks barely feet apart, their branches intertwined so you couldn’t tell which belonged to which.
By now, though, I was used to things disappearing and appearing again in the morning in the Labyrinth, so the view didn’t surprise me.
What scared me timeless was the darkness between the trees.
It was so thick, so all-consuming, like the light from the sun couldn’t peek through the canopy at all.
“Your Royal Clocklinesses, ladies and gentlemen from all over the finest realm in the universe—welcome to the fourth and final game of the 31st Turning Trials!”
That voice. How I’d come to hate that voice.
My eyes closed and I tried to breathe in deeply where we’d stopped, between the seats of the audience, and the entrance of the unusually dark forest.
How come the fresh sunlight couldn’t slip through anywhere? It looked nighttime between those trees, and it made no sense.
The shadow from the tower of the Great Clock to its right didn’t help, either.
“March,” someone said—Calren. I opened my eyes to find him looking at March, waving for him to approach Levana and Helen.
My heart fell. I really didn’t want to have to walk in there by myself, but…
March shook his head once. “I’m fine right here,” he said.
It was like he’d served me the world right there in front of everyone.
And Calren wanted to argue. He wanted to insist that March went to stand in his place where he always stood in line before a trial, with the other Hearts.
Instead he took one look at my face. Just one look.
Whatever he saw in my eyes, it made Calren step back with a nod. I must have looked worse than I realized. “Very well,” he said, and moved farther up the line.
March turned to me and winked, bathing me in warmth. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“Time, as you all know, is patient,” Johnny continued through the speaker. We couldn’t see him from here, like usual, but he couldn’t be too far away. “It can wait as long as it needs to wait to be persuaded to move in the right way.” Easy to imagine him grinning as he said this.