Chapter Ten #4
I imagined dunking his mind underwater, and amongst the swaying reeds was our childhood, the memories that made me feel the most alive.
I took him to the meadow with long, disheveled grass.
It was summer. Birds stopped their singing, disturbed by our shouts and our laughter.
I was so much shorter than Roland and Hal; one of their strides was three of mine.
I couldn’t see through the sunlight, but I’d keep running until I could stretch my hand out and touch them.
You’re it, I’d say, and finally, finally, I would win.
Faster, faster. Push harder. But they were too strong; I’d never win this way. Roland had taught me well.
I toppled to the ground. “Help!” I cried. “Roland! Hal!”
Both of their heads snapped back.
I clutched my ankle. “Help! It hurts!”
Roland glanced at Hal and rolled his eyes. “She’s lying.”
“What if she isn’t?” Hal’s expression was pained. “Prospero will kill us if we leave her.”
“She’s a lying little shit.”
Roland reached the tree first and whooped, but Hal jogged back to me. I was howling and screaming so loudly that Hal’s favorite hawk, circling above, shrieked back.
He crouched beside me, and as soon as he was off-balance, I pushed him to the side and ran. He swore, grasping at my hem and missing by a hair’s breadth.
When I reached the tree, Roland flung his arm around me, and I thought this must be the afterlife, this moment, as the sunlight streamed down in heaps through the meadow and wind shook his hair.
Roland and Hal were older and stronger and taller, and both of them would be men, yet for once, I hadn’t lost.
Hal arrived panting, hands braced on his knees.
“I told you,” Roland sang.
“Thank you,” I said to Hal.
“For what?” His brow lifted. “Allowing you to cheat?”
Roland snorted. But secretly, I knew he was impressed with me. Proud, even. He didn’t understand Hal’s insistence on fair play. It separated the prince from both of us. We were willing to cheat, lie, and swindle to win, but Hal was not.
“For coming back for me.”
“And I shall never do so again.” Hal scraped grass off his shirt and pouted for a moment before wrestling Roland to the ground.
On the way back to the palace, Hal lifted me onto his shoulders.
Roland walked beside us, hair burnished by the setting sun.
I felt a cool layer of sweat where my thighs touched Hal’s skin.
Dirt caked my bare feet. It had been a year since Prospero brought me to the palace.
My loneliness was tender. I was often by myself, and that morning, I’d stumbled upon them racing down the corridor.
Most days, they sprinted by me. But today, they’d shrugged.
Today, they’d said, “Come along.” I had no idea why.
The decision must have been hastily thrown together, a quick look exchanged.
A year ago, when I first laid eyes on them, I’d loved them in that same way—instantly, without cause.
I manipulated the memory, twisting it into a new scene, a new ending. Clapping his hand on Roland’s shoulder, Hal said, “Caught with a blood cipher, caught in the noose.”
I ran my small fingers through Hal’s hair. “Caught with a blood cipher, caught in the noose.”
“What are you saying, you loon?” Roland peered up at me. “Caught with a what?”
My younger self chanted it, and Hal followed suit. Roland shook his head, muttering that we’d both gone mad.
I slipped out of his mind and pressed my cheek to his chest. “Please, please,” I whispered, my lips against his sternum. “Please wake up. You’ve won.”
That was when his heart started beating frantically, as if he still raced us to the tree.
Lifting my head, I whispered his name. His lashes fluttered. I forgot all decorum then. I kissed his brow again and again, I smoothed his hair back behind his ears. “Thank the Planets. Thank you, thank you.”
I sent Oliver a watery smile and wiped my eyes.
“How did you do it?” he asked, somewhat awestruck.
“I repeated your phrase in a memory. He was still alive. And he heard me.”
Oliver handed me wine, but I waved him away. Unspoken between us was how we had found the blood cipher to begin with, and how fortunate we were that a Mercury had been in the palace. Something in his expression told me he would come to collect answers.
A brassy dusk advanced across the floor.
I sat with Roland in my lap, my forehead resting against his, listening to his breathing and the rhythm of his pulse.
Stroked his hair until voices resounded through the halls, the jousting tournament concluded.
The crowd tracked mud all over the floors, bringing the storm with them, too.
There was the laughter of courtiers, and then the collective shock at what they found: the great hall empty but for us three magicians and the gaping twin page boys, Roland with a trail of blood down his chin, limp in my arms. They probably assumed it was the jousting injury from Tom Guildford, the defeat washed down with too much wine.
I was too stunned to explain myself, or to care what the ladies thought of the lord chancellor cradled in my lap.
Eleanor’s book lay cracked open beside me like a taunt. I tucked it away beneath my gown before anyone recognized it. Her blood cipher had done the opposite of what she’d intended: Now I knew the book held information she and Prospero would kill to protect.
I was not afraid. I was no trembling rabbit. Now I was even more desperate to read it.