“It was good of you to agree to meet me tomorrow, here at Mother’s empty tomb.” Malcontent gives a quick laugh. “But my men said that you were obviously leaving tonight, and I wanted to see you once again.” He steps forward. Prospero’s men are still in the cathedral but haven’t left the doorway. They can still run if things continue to go poorly for the prince.
“Take him,” Malcontent says.
Two of Malcontent’s diseased men flank the prince. The prince flails as one of the cloaked men reaches up and grabs his mask. Prospero freezes.
In the silence, the crunch as the mask hits the floor is shocking. The other man, whose face is dripping with open sores, lunges at the prince, smearing the foul pus from his wounds onto Prospero’s face. The movements are practiced. He’s done this before.
Prospero’s scream echoes through the church. The bats flap above us. Malcontent’s man lets him go, laughing, and Prospero scuttles backward like a frightened crab. He’s so close now that I could almost touch him. The keys fall to the floor.
I measure the distance to the door while keeping an eye on the diseased man. I don’t want to draw his attention, but if he makes the slightest move in my direction, I’m ready to run.
Malcontent sees me and gestures for me to join him. Just hours ago I’d planned to give myself to him, but now April is on her way to the palace. I have to stay with Prospero, whether I like it or not.
A knife shines in the near-darkness. From his undignified crouch on the floor, Prospero throws the blade. It nicks Malcontent’s ear, but he keeps his chin high, even as blood drips down. The knife hits a statue behind him and clatters to the ground.
Above us, thousands of wings flutter.
“Is this . . . the same knife?” Malcontent asks, retrieving the blade. Anger contorts his face. He stares up, not at the bat-covered ceiling, but at the statues around the church, chanting something under his breath. As he toys with the knife that Prospero threw at him, I hear footsteps. Even more men are ascending from the tunnels.
Our only hope is to get back to the waiting steam carriage.
Prospero and Malcontent are eyeing each other from across the room. “Find the keys,” Malcontent says to his soldiers. No one is paying any attention to me.
I reach into my pocket, so slowly that none of them notices. The ivory handle of the gun is heavy in my hand. I pull it from my pocket, aim toward the ceiling, close my eyes, and pull the trigger.
The sound explodes and, all at once, is joined by the screeching bats and the screams from the men as the crazed creatures descend.
I put up my other arm, to shield my hair as best I can, and run. Bats careen in every direction, swooping down and then back toward the ceiling. Someone knocks into me hard, and I fall. Something touches my hair, and I scream.
Tiny pebbles rain down from above, along with bits of mortar.
I crawl across the floor, and my fingers find something cool and metallic. The gold key ring. Everyone in the cathedral is fending off the swarm. I’ve lost track of Prospero, and I don’t see Malcontent. I clutch the keys and crawl into a small chapel.
I can’t hide the keys on my body—now that I’ve revealed my gun, when one of them catches me, they’ll surely search me. Above, a gargoyle looks down from a ledge. I aim and throw the key ring up. It falls over the statue’s snout, then slides to lodge between it and the rough gray stone. It will have to do.
And I got rid of the keys just in time, because Prospero grabs me from behind and drags me out of the chapel and through a door that is so perfectly concealed in the stonework that I didn’t see it before. Once we’re outside, he shoves me ahead of him toward the covered steam carriage that is waiting.
One of the large, gruff men heaves me into the carriage, and then Prospero grabs my wrist and twists, hard, forcing me to drop the tiny gun and locking my right wrist into a restraint attached to the seat.
He kicks my ivory-handled pistol aside. It doesn’t matter; both bullets are gone.
“Give me your mask,” he says. He’s scrubbing at his face with a handkerchief, and his eyes water as he wets the cloth with wine from a bottle beside his seat and scrubs again.
“But masks can’t protect anyone except their original owners,” I say, holding tight to my mask.
He yanks it from my face. It’s too small on him, and he looks ludicrous, and as crazed as his brother.
He coughs, and even though it’s much too early for any signs of the Weeping Sickness to manifest, his eyes go wide with horror and he scrubs at his hands once again. Then he kicks at the empty gun again, mocking me and the weapon, though I saved his life with it.
“Elliott gave that to me,” I say, wanting to see his response to his nephew’s name.
He scowls behind the mask, and then, in a voice filled with childish spite, he says, “Your mother doesn’t approve of him.”
“No,” I agree. “She doesn’t.”
“She used to cry over Elliott. She didn’t understand that torture is an art. That I had to train him.”
I shake my head, willing him to stop talking, but he doesn’t.
“Do you know how I convinced your mother to stop coddling him? I told her that it might be entertaining to replace him with a pair of twins. Everyone loves twins. She never let Elliott hide in her room after that.”
Not only is this his first smile since that diseased man rubbed infection into his face, this is the first time that I’ve ever seen Prospero’s smile reach his eyes They crinkle up in the corners. I feel my hand balling into a fist.
I shift in my seat, as if trying to pull my knees into my body for comfort. But my knife is in my boot. If I can get it, I might be able to hurt him.
Elliott warned me that it would be difficult to put a knife into someone, but I don’t think it will be so hard if that person is Prospero. And I did shoot a man for the first time today.
“You killed my brother,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows in mock hurt.
“I sent the men who killed your brother, it’s true. I didn’t know Finn was among the ill. I would have preferred to have him alive.”
He pours the wine left in the bottle into a goblet and drinks without offering me anything. Not that I would have accepted. Last time he gave me wine, it was laced with poison.
“You must realize that I wanted both you and your brother,” he goes on, as if he is trying to convince me of something. “But your spineless father said that if I touched either of you, I would die, bleeding from my pores. Your brother died while your father was eating at my table. I don’t believe he has ever recovered from it. And he’s never known the truth, has he? The way your brother suffered, as he died?”
Father doesn’t know. But I do. I try to put all of my loathing into my eyes, but he won’t really know how much I hate him until my blade meets his throat.
I listen for sounds of fighting or screams. For an ambush. Surely Elliott will send his men to try to stop the prince and all of these steam carriages.
But nothing happens; no one attacks. It’s just me and him, alone.
With my left hand I push the window covering aside, fully expecting him to reprimand me, but he is silent. We’ve left the lights of the city behind.
“So this is the end, for you and the city,” I say.
“Yes.” He watches me stare out the window. “It’s a shame your father ruined my plans by creating a disease that killed everyone, rich and poor, indiscriminately. But at least I have saved a thousand of its shining citizens. They’ll have the experience of a lifetime and be safe from the dying masses.”
I have nothing left to say to this man, so we ride on in silence.
At some point he realizes that he’s lost the gold key ring. I watch him searching his pockets, but he doesn’t mention what he’s looking for.
“I thought you were giving them to Malcontent,” I say.
“Not after he tried to ambush me. Not after—” He stops talking to wipe his face once again. He can’t speak of what that diseased man did to him.
He deserved it. But he won’t live long enough to die of the contagion.
“So the keys go to something . . . a device that can save the city from the swamp?” I ask.
He shrugs. “My scientists claimed it would work. I never tried it.”
“Where is it?”
He smiles a toothy grin.
“Does Malcontent know?”
“My brother is too busy whipping his disease cult into a frenzy. But he would know if he was paying attention. I’m surprised he and his acolytes haven’t tripped over it.”
The swamp. The device is in the swamp. The doctor who escaped from the dungeon said the other scientists were heading there. But where?
If only I had paid more attention, the times I’d flown over or skirted around the swamp. Where would someone who wanted to hold back the swamp build a device? And then . . . I think of the manor house. The horror the family must have felt as the swamp approached their home. And I remember how all the doors were locked. That had to be it. The device was hidden there. Now I know where the device is, and I know where the keys are. And I’m trapped in a carriage, headed to Prospero’s stronghold.
When we pass out of the forest, the sun is rising. A figure is standing on the bluff, looking down at Prospero’s fortress. I hope it’s someone who has come to fight, but neither Will nor Elliott could have gotten there before us. Could they?
Prospero’s eyes mock me.
“You aren’t the first prisoner in this carriage who wanted to kill me,” he says. “None of the others have succeeded either.”
“Why would I want to kill you?” I ask, trying to emulate April’s sarcastic tone. He ignores my words, but keeps his eyes trained on my mouth, exposed without my mask.
“You know, I can cause you excruciating pain,” he says conversationally.
“I’ve been through excruciating pain,” I say.
He smiles, as if to suggest that he can prove me wrong. That he will.
As we approach the palace, it is evident that this is where all the smiths in the city have gone. Huge iron gates surround the palace, taller than before, forming rings around the other fences and ultimately the fortress itself.
“They sank the iron poles far into the ground, in case there are tunnels I don’t know about,” Prospero says. “And I flooded the dungeons. No one will be visiting my ball without an invitation.”
“I hope you removed the prisoners.” I wish I could take the words back the moment I say them. I keep giving him opportunities to show how frightening he is.
The fences and barricades are much too high to climb. Without the tunnels, how will I get April out of here?
The prince toys with his silver cufflinks, in the same way that Elliott does his. “I wonder which of your suitors will show up for my ball,” he says. “Elliott hates being left out. And I gave William an invitation myself.”
My heart misses a beat.
“When . . . did you see Will?”
“When I retrieved my niece from the Debauchery Club, of course. I almost thought he might try to stop me. He was prepared to fight, but he was outnumbered.”