Chapter 34
Chapter
I drifted in and out of consciousness. Lucy’s terrified face above mine. Elizabeth, screaming. Buckland’s hands, covered in blood.
Henry, pulling something from his coat pocket and hurling it off the balcony, down to the chamber floor. The room exploding in white.
Bloody hell, what was that? a voice said. They’re dead, another said. They’re dead, aren’t they? But who were they? Radicals. Fools.
So many voices, shadows, flickering in the darkness.
Hold on, Mary.
Save her, Stanton—
Please.
—You must have more.
Prometheans.
In the space under my collarbone, above my left breast, someone was striking a hammer against chisel, digging deeper.
The stone must be shale; it fell apart in flakes of blood and flesh. The fossil they were unearthing would be very fine indeed.
Is the girl—
—dead?
You can’t let her die. You must have another.
Goddamn it, Mary. Don’t you die on me.
—it’s her heart. The girl who was shot—
—saved Lord Knackbull.
—Do it, Henry.
Don’t they know—
—Idiots.
They’re hurting their own cause?
Soft hands cradled my back. Searching fingers probed into the hole above my breast.
A boulder on my chest. I couldn’t breathe.
Stay with me. Oh, God. Stay with me. This will hurt, but then it will help, I swear.
The hammer struck hard, splitting bone—Oh, no, I thought, surely they’ve broken the fossil—and everything burned white.
I woke in a forest, a bower of solemn greens and smooth, dark woods. Soft morning light filtered through thin, young leaves, warm across my cheek. I lay beside a rosebush, full white blooms like clouds bending toward me with the smell of sweet summer wine.
“Oh, thank God. You’re awake.”
I blinked, Edgar Murray’s face coming into focus.
“Where…where am I?”
“My house,” Edgar said. “The Green Room.”
I could see now that it wasn’t a forest at all; it was a bedroom, and I was in a bed with twisting wood posts and a draped green canopy.
The arched window above my head was stained glass, a family crest in green and gold.
The rosebush was, in fact, a vase of cut white roses on the side table, though anyone would forgive the mistake; it was fifty roses, at least, the vase itself buried under fronds of draping greenery.
“What are these?” I muttered.
“Roses,” Edgar said. “Courtesy of Lord Charles Knackbull, Earl of Harewood. You saved his life yesterday.”
Ah. That had to be the old man. I tried to sit up, then stopped short. I’d just remembered. I was shot.
I frowned, peering down at my shoulder. Someone had dressed me in a crisp white shirt. My arm and chest twinged a little, but it certainly didn’t feel like a gunshot wound. It felt like I’d tweaked a muscle, and weeks ago at that. Not like I’d been just shot in the heart.
“Are you all right?” Edgar gently helped prop a pillow behind my back.
I poked at my shoulder with my other hand. “I thought…for some reason, I thought I was shot. But—did I just pass out, then? What happened?”
“Oh, no, you were shot. Just above the heart.” He chuckled. “You bled out all over the visitor’s gallery, I hear.”
I stared. That didn’t make sense. Had Edgar drugged me to kill the pain, then?
Henry banged on the other side of the door; I knew it was him, because his shout accompanied the frantic knocking.
“We can hear her, goddamn it. Let us in, Murray, or God help me, I’ll—I’ll break both your kneecaps.”
Edgar rolled his eyes, but rose to unlock the door.
Henry barreled past him, his eyes blazing. Lucy and Buckland rushed in behind. My chest tightened as Henry claimed Edgar’s place in the chair beside my bed.
“Praise God,” Buckland said, shaking his head solemnly.
“You’re alive,” Henry breathed. “You’re alive.”
“Apparently,” I said, my fingers brushing over my chest. “But—how? Edgar said I was shot.”
Lucy, Edgar, and Buckland looked at Henry.
“I healed you,” Henry said quietly, and uncurled his fingers to reveal a small bivalve on a leather thong. A reliq. “Here. It’s empty now.”
Back home, rich Mr. Jenkins once shot himself through the foot cleaning his musket, and it took the physiomagician sixteen reliqs to close the wound, and even then Mr. Jenkins limped for two weeks.
But I’d been shot near the heart and healed with only one. Henry nodded, seeing that I understood.
One of the manifold reliqs. I took the shell. I could feel its emptiness, the lack of the telltale hum of stored magic. Only a fossil, again.
“I wasn’t even sure it would work.” He looked down at his hands. “You’ll have a scar, but I—I did what I could.”
I didn’t wait for the men to look away as I pulled aside the top of the clean white blouse to look at my chest.
I stared, with some combination of shock and awe, at the puckered scar, running in parallel below my collarbone. My fingers brushed over the uneven skin, almost like a rough seam. The skin around the wound was pink. Blood had been wiped away, leaving a stain. But my body was whole. Healed.
If I’d had these, back then…if I’d carried a manifold reliq the day Father fell from the cliffs…
And—and Mother. If a manifold reliq could heal a wound to my heart, could it also heal her mind?
I shivered and covered myself quickly, as if that could distract me from my own overwhelming thoughts. “And the others? Did everyone else make it out all right?”
“Fine. All fine. There were no other injuries.”
“Well, at least not until the riots began,” Buckland said.
“I wouldn’t call them riots, exactly,” Lucy countered, archly.
I frowned. “Riots?”
“After Westminster evacuated, the soldiers went out to disperse the crowd and—well, they did not hold back.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.” Lucy’s lip jutted.
“It’s a wonder you slept through it all, honestly,” Buckland huffed. “The rioters marched to the Shoreditch slicks and burned it half down. When I took Elizabeth home this morning, Catherine said they could smell the smoke even from there.”
Edgar leaned over to peer out the stained-glass window. “Things seem to have run their course by now. Only smashed glass and a few drunkards left on the street out there.”
“And ruffians,” Buckland grunted. “With their pamphlets. Saw several of those on my way back here. Trying to start the chaos all over again.”
I exchanged a look with Lucy at the mention of pamphlets. I had to imagine the riots would be an unfortunate setback for the Promethean movement. Lucy’s dour expression suggested I was right.
Henry looked almost as solemn. He’d been quiet since he’d handed me the manifold reliq. There was no sign of his usual smirk, and his brow was drawn tight. He must have been deeply shaken by the attack on Parliament.
I started to climb out of the bed. Buckland put a hand on my shoulder. “And where do you think you’re going?”
“Let me up; I’m healed. You all saw,” I protested, as Lucy and Buckland wordlessly colluded to press me back gently but firmly. Healed or not, I was weaker than I should’ve been; the effort of pulling myself up left me almost breathless. “I need to check on Ajax.”
“What you need,” clucked Lucy, “is rest.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, as Lucy arranged my pillows into a fluffy barricade. I couldn’t explain my fear, but it made my voice thin and high. “I have to know that he’s all right.”
Buckland patted my hand. “Not to worry. The riots didn’t go anywhere near Palmanaeus.”
“I’ll go.” Henry was already striding to the door. He looked more like himself now that he had something to do. He grinned as he put on his top hat and tipped it forward. “But if I am struck down by ruffians while in your service, Mary, you must promise to weep on my grave.”
He was gone before I could properly scoff.