46

“SOPHIE!” THE ROARING IN MY EARS WAS DISPLACED BY A SINGLE voice, repeating my name over and over. I wallowed in blackness, groping for something familiar, something to hold on to. That voice was familiar. “Sophie!”

I forced my eyes open, leaving the darkness and seeing instead a face, very close to mine, hazel eyes wide with concerned fear. Theodor.

I remembered in a rush where I was—still hidden behind the centaur statue, his wide flank shielding us from the ballroom beyond. The shawl, the carefully unpicked curse, the cloud of darkness. I sat up through a wave of vertigo and scanned the room. No dark glitter remained—it had dissipated. I breathed relief.

“It’s gone. It’s done. I did it,” I whispered.

“You’re all right?” Theodor asked.

“What?” I glanced down at myself. I looked no worse for the wear, aside from a few fresh wrinkles in the cream silk gown. “I suppose so.”

“Thank heaven—I saw it, Sophie. I saw that black thing—like the light from the violin in reverse. I thought for sure you must have been—”

“I wasn’t.” I gathered myself and stood, shakily. “I couldn’t control it and it …” The room tipped and wobbled, and my legs felt like a pudding that hadn’t set properly. “I feel a little woozy, though.”

“No wonder.” Theodor looked around. “What now? Just go back to our seats?”

“I hadn’t thought that part out,” I said. “Anything else would be suspicious, wouldn’t it?”

“We’ll give you another minute to recoup,” Theodor said, and I couldn’t argue.

I leaned against him, flexing my hands to take the numb buzzing sensation, blinking to regain my focus. I gazed up at the dome. I could see where it had been recently repaired, lighter colored new mortar bisecting huge chiseled rock. Square panes of stained glass created a ring of windows in the dome itself. The moon was pure and full outside, and I saw the stars winking through the glass, alongside fluttering wings. I squinted. There were birds outside, too—fluttering past the windows. Scrabbling claws licked the glass and wings silhouetted in black against the windows.

And a figure that looked very much like a man, crouched away from the crows.

“Theodor,” I said, pointing with a shaking hand. He followed my outstretched finger.

“I see him,” he said.

I looked again at the new masonry. Fine particles of dust hovered against the new mortar, and I thought I could see cracks forming. I wanted to believe it was just my light-headed eyes and brain seeing things that weren’t there, but a dark thought seized me. “Are there any points of entry in the dome?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, royal architecture can be eccentric, but I’ve never—” He glanced again at the dark figure on the other side of the stained glass. A few crows flew away, and I noticed another pair of dark figures.

My mouth was dry, and the words scratched it as I spoke. “Theodor, it was repaired recently.” I pointed to the new mortar, recalling Viola’s joke about the palace needing a construction permit with an empty satisfaction of finally piecing together the whole puzzle. “What if—what if they did something to the dome? A fault in the dome? Some entry point? It wouldn’t be hard, for a Red Cap to be on the masonry crew.”

Theodor’s face whitened and he looked as ill as I felt. “You think that this could be it—invading the ballroom through the dome could be his plan?”

Suddenly I heard a distinct cracking noise, even over the noise of conversation and music. Some of the guests had heard it, too—they looked up from their plates of roasted pheasant and chestnuts, looking from the birds on their plates to the cacophony of live birds above.

The mortar around a pane of glass trembled, the garnet-red glass shivering for a moment in the starlight before it plummeted to the floor below, shattering into blood-colored shards on the stone.

Birds plummeted with the debris, saving themselves at the last moment by spreading their wings and swooping over the tables. Winter crows—they migrated to the city from fall until late spring, badgering each other all day in small flocks, gathering in the late evening in larger night roosts.

I stood as though rooted on the spot, watching as one of the figures leaned into light. He was dressed in a dark jacket and trousers, cut slim, a brace of pistols slung across his chest. Another pane of glass trembled. The mortar was faulty, I realized, strong enough to hold the glass until someone tested it, and then it would collapse. Amethyst glass plummeted and shattered on a table, sending splinters into plates, goblets, and shocked faces.

Panic flared in the ballroom as the assembled crowd of nobles realized that something was amiss. A tide of silks and velvets rushed toward double doors that blocked the staircase, the only exist, from view. I wondered what they thought—did they know this was a grand-scale assassination plot? Women stumbled on overturned chairs in their delicate slippers, and men tried in vain to shove tables out of the way to make room. Family crests winked through the dust as guests ran, and shouts and screams punctuated the chaos. I saw a group of women cluster underneath a table.

As the glass gave way, I assumed that the failures in the dome were focused on those brilliantly colored panes, that the open holes where the windows had been provided the entry point that the assassins needed. A crash of sapphire and gold glass, however, was accompanied by a deeper cracking, a grating that set my teeth on edge and made me shudder.

A section of the dome itself was disintegrating, the mortar that bound the stones together developing myriad spreading veins in mere seconds. The pale stone trembled and, in a rush, fell into the far end of the ballroom.

I choked on a scream as I saw, in the cloud of dust, silk and velvets and, nauseatingly, what I realized were limbs, tangled in the broken mass of stone.

The reason for the collapse was soon apparent. The occupants of the ballroom had been moving toward the sole exit point, the king among them. Now there was no way out.

The panic was palpable. The crowd nearest the stones clawed at them, heaving them out of the way in an effort to clear the exit. The King’s Guard, positioned around the room, wavered. “Get to the king!” Theodor shouted at the nearest pair of guards. They bolted into action. My heart thudded in my throat as Theodor pressed me to the ground. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “Stay down and stay safe.”

I spotted the abandoned musicians’ corner, the music stands and instruments left behind. A violin sat ajar in its case. I pushed Theodor aside and ran toward it, shoving ladies in bejeweled gowns and men in richly embroidered suits as I ran. The fabrics, silk and velvet and brocade, were like a puddle of spilled paint to me, running together and blocking my way. I dodged a shower of mortar and pebbles that peppered my hair, but I reached the musicians’ risers. The violin. I nabbed it and the bow and turned back toward Theodor.

I shook my hemline free from the corner of a music stand just as a pane of emerald glass fell inches from me. I traced the embroidered flowers on the gown, imbued with charms, feeling oddly euphoric and empty at the same time.

I dashed back to Theodor.

“Play,” I said, forcing the violin into his hands.

“What?”

“Play a charm. A protection charm.”

“I don’t know if I can—”

“You don’t have a choice,” I answered.

He lifted the violin from the case with absurd care, given the circumstances, and began to tune it.

“Are you insane?” I handed him the bow. “Just play. The music is a vehicle for the charm—it doesn’t have to be perfect.”

“What do I do?”

I wished we had taken more time to practice, but at least he had managed to sustain one charm. “Think about safety, about life. Put those thoughts into the music. Just try,” I begged.

The figures in black above us had shifted their positions, clearing the glass and the remains of the windowpanes. They were repositioning to get a clear shot, I saw with dark understanding of the entire plot. The assassins couldn’t be guaranteed a clear shot at the king, or that their pistols would fire true to aim, but with a curse sitting right next to the king, it would draw ill fortune to him, and with it, the assassin’s bullets. The first drew his pistol.

Theodor began to play, a delicate melody like a cathedral hymn. It was a hymn, I realized—a hymn for New Year in spring. Familiar and gentle—it even felt like safety. The charm bloomed around the bow as he played.

The first pistol shot rang out, briefly silencing the room before fear took over again. Theodor faltered, and the white light flashed out. A trio of noblemen ran past, giving Theodor a strange look. He must look like a madman, drawing music from the violin while the roof collapsed around us. I pulled his arm and made him face me.

“Try again,” I said. “It’s working.”

He resumed the melody and the charm.

A tenuous string of light expanded out into a soft wave. The undulating cloud hovered above Theodor’s head, growing as the melody grew, and I reached out with my thoughts and captured a strand. I imagined one hand holding it firmly, and then caught another strand.

In my mind’s eye, they tugged and pulled and danced beside one another, alive and unused to being constrained. I concentrated as hard as I could, and drew them together, tying them into a knot.

It held. I wove them quickly, pulling more strands into the web I created as Theodor played. I pushed the woven end away from us, casting the net over the staircase. As if testing my ability, another shot rang out. It ricocheted above the golden canopy, chipping stone and shattering glass high above us. I couldn’t be sure—perhaps the charm net had prevented the shots from passing through, but more likely the charm for safety had countered the assassin’s aim. I kept weaving. The king and queen stood surrounded by more guards—though what the guards expected to do against shots fired from above, I didn’t know. I could protect them better than a guard, I thought grimly, casting the net Theodor and I made wider and wider. Swiftly, I covered the king and his family, and the guards around them.

Two more shots rang out. I risked a glance upward, even though my concentration was wavering as it was. One of the men had disappeared, and the second followed him. I heard a telltale scrabbling on the roof that told me they were descending quickly. A throng of nobles in court dress crowded the fringes of the room and pressed against the blocked doors. Several watched Theodor, the violin’s high notes piercing even the shouts and clamor. I didn’t have time to wonder what they might think of us. Some of the guards had begun to attack the rubble, too, clearing it more quickly. I covered more and more of the ballroom with the net Theodor and I wove together, edging the perimeter where most of the nobles stood.

I glanced up again as the final assassin readied his pistols. He took aim—directly at the king, I saw—but the report was so loud when he fired that I flinched. He fired his second pistol, and I thought I could hear the clattering din of servingware hitting the floor above the shouts and cries of the nobles. I looked to the king. They had missed. They had all missed.

“It’s open!” An authoritative voice rang out through the dust and debris, and the sea of brightly colored silk and velvet moved from the edges of the ballroom toward the staircase, a path carved through the fallen stone. Theodor slowed his bow, but I shook my head.

“Until they’re gone,” I managed to say in a hoarse croak. The cleared section of staircase was narrow, and it would take time to move everyone out. Perhaps the assassins were reloading. I looked at the empty windows, the darkness outside pressing into the dome, but didn’t see anyone outside.

Holding the net we had woven together was easier than the creation of it, and I looked around the room. I spotted Annette and Viola, hands clasped together, moving with the king and queen down the stairs. Pauline and a knot of sumptuously dressed women were close behind. There had been some hurt in the panic and by the falling mortar and glass. Those who couldn’t walk unassisted were supported by others; I saw a serving boy in livery carried by a duke in black velvet, and several servants struggling to move a corpulent countess to the stairs. Those beneath the heaviest stones were, I knew, lost. They had been left where they lay. When the last of the guests and servants began to descend, I nodded to Theodor.

He stopped playing. I let the charm settle to the ground, where it swiftly pooled into a sea of gold over the bodies and the stones. Theodor gripped my hand in his and we ran for the staircase, running through a cloud of stale dust. I slipped and Theodor caught my arm, holding me up. We were safe—here I was, his arm in mine. His eyes met mine and he leaned toward me.

A scream from the atrium below stopped us before his lips found mine. Several nobles in front of us started as well, jostling each other to see what was happening below. I looked down, craning my neck to see around the nobleman in front of me. The nobles crowded into the atrium below, but they were still panicked. Swords drawn, screams, clattering shoes, and then I saw it—flashes of red. Red wool caps.

Before I understood what was happening, I watched as a Red Cap ran a nobleman in a deep brown silk suit through with a scythe. He collapsed as lifeless as my dressmaker’s mannequin.

The dome was only the first stage in Pyord’s assault on the palace. I saw it in a flash, the brilliance of the plan—the nobles who survived the dome collapse would remain concentrated within the palace. The king would be, per his plan, dead, but there would be nobles who would, of course, contest any revolt Pyord put into action. There would be—I gripped Theodor’s hand—heirs to the throne. The assassination, my part in casting a curse, was only part of the plan, and not even strictly necessary. If the king hadn’t been killed in the ballroom, he could easily be killed here alongside his nobles. The plan counted on this—that the guests would all converge at the atrium, driven by fear from the ballroom. Gathered like cattle in a stockyard. It was a simple, brilliant, and horrible strategy. How the Red Caps had overrun the palace guardhouse, how they had gotten into the palace itself—questions swirled but had no time to find any purchase in my mind.

Before I could even think of what to do next, there were three of them mounting the stairs.

Theodor pressed me behind him, but there was nowhere to go. I scrambled up a few stairs, instinct fueling my motions. Get away from them. Away from the steel in their hands and the hate in their eyes.

Two of the three Red Caps were already fighting with nobles farther down the stairs. The third advanced on us. Theodor’s hand was on his sword, but it stuck in the scabbard as he tried to draw it. I backed up another step, and fell, my dainty slipper finding no traction on the dust-covered stairs. I pressed myself backward, hands grappling to steady myself.

My hand curled around a large rock.

I brought it with me as I rose, wavering, to my feet. The Red Cap, a stocky blond who looked like any of a dozen dockworkers Kristos had worked with, had nearly reached Theodor, sword still sheathed. He retreated until he was standing beside me, frustration and fear contorting his face.

I gripped my rock tighter.

The Red Cap was armed with only a large knife, but it looked deadly enough. Decisive anger surged through me. I couldn’t let this man hurt Theodor. I wouldn’t let him touch me. In the few seconds it took him to ascend the final steps separating us, I lunged forward and swung at the side of his head with the rock. His eyes locked with mine for the briefest moment before my makeshift weapon made contact, and my chest tightened. Then the rock cracked against his skull and he fell to the ground, a thin trickle of blood coursing down the side of his head and onto his white shirt.

I dropped the rock with a strangled cry, and Theodor grabbed my hand, pulling me toward him. The stairs were clear, but the fighting continued below, on one side of the atrium. Nobles with ceremonial swords fought Red Caps armed with scythes, knives, cudgels. The guards who remained inside the palace formed ranks with the nobles. The melee was already too cramped for them to use their rifles. Instead, they fought with their hangers and long knives.

My breath caught in my throat as Theodor finally wrenched his sword from the sheath and squared his shoulders. He squeezed my hand. “Stay behind us. You’ll be safe.” Then he ran down the stairs to join the fighting that concentrated on the far side of the atrium, near the servants’ entrance. The guard and nobles combined held the Red Caps back, undulating in a line of fighting like waves pressing further up the shore. I watched Theodor join a line of palace guards, not taking my eyes off his honey-brown queue until the press of fighting forced me to retreat down the stairs.

I clattered the rest of the way down the staircase, veering away from the fight and toward the crowd of women pressed against the far side of the atrium. My hands shook, and I wished, absurdly, that I’d kept the rock. I nearly tripped over the foot of a Red Cap who lay sprawled over the landing, blood pooling beneath him. As I stumbled away from him, I saw his upturned face.

Jack.

I screamed, not in fear or grief but pure anger. He wore a red sash across his chest, like an army sergeant would—this was his role in the Midwinter night’s attack. Leading the assault on the palace. I wondered if this was part of what he had disagreed with, or if he was proud to don the sash and lead a charge against the first wave of nobles to emerge from the ballroom.

I tore myself from looking at his glassy eyes. Jack was a good man—I had never known him to hurt anyone. Had my brother and his pamphlets turned him into this, first a fighter, now a corpse? I struggled down the remainder of the stairs, furious at the revolt that had set my friends to killing one another.

Viola met me at the bottom of the stairs and caught my arm. Her vibrant purple gown had a large gravy stain down the front, and she was missing one earring. “I couldn’t have believed it of her,” she said, and I followed her gaze past the fighting to the open servants’ door.

It was held open by Miss Vochant, and a ring of keys hung from her hand.

“She knows the servants here. She must have gotten a set of servants’ keys somehow. That little …” Viola’s voice faded into anger. “That’s how they got into the palace, all of them. Through the servants’ entrances.” I remembered the labyrinth of stairs and hallways connecting the servants’ chambers by which I had entered the palace.

The ringing of metal on metal and shouts spread over the atrium, and the fight spread farther into the atrium. The noblewomen wouldn’t be safe for long. Soon Red Caps would break through, and they were here intent to massacre any nobles they encountered. I’d seen that in the face of the man I’d hit—probably, I thought with a sour feeling creeping into my gut, killed. They weren’t here for a mere fight, but extermination of as many of the nobility as they could. “There are rooms all along this hallway, aren’t there?” I said.

“Yes,” Viola answered. “But what good does it—”

“Barricading themselves inside would give them some time,” I answered, my voice wooden as I watched the bright tip of a rapier delve into the chest of a dark-haired Red Cap. Bile rose in my throat, but I clamped it back. “And time is what we need—eventually more soldiers will come back to the palace, and these men can’t stand against more soldiers.” They had relied on two separate but simultaneous plans—assassinate the king in the ballroom and then bloody as many nobles as possible in the atrium. Perhaps they intended for their fight to target other heirs, but I doubted it, watching the melee on the blood-slicked marble floor. My part in the plot felt suddenly small, and any sense of triumph still resonating from drawing the curse from the queen’s shawl swiftly faded. Having failed in the ballroom didn’t mean they couldn’t still succeed overall.

Viola nodded and pushed her way through the crowd to Annette and Mimi, who were remarkably calm, reassuring the noblewomen around them. Viola whispered to Annette, who began herding the women toward the long corridor. The queen took the arm of an elderly gentleman who trembled with the indignity of being led away from the fight.

I pushed those nearest me toward the mass of silk and velvet moving down the hallway. Rooms filled, doors closed, and I heard the scrape of furniture on the floor as it was moved to block entrances.

The fight continued, the ranks of soldiers and nobles tightening to prevent any more Red Caps from breaking through. But their ranks were thinning, and though Red Caps had fallen as well, their numbers had been greater. I wondered if they were reinforced, more Red Caps spilling through the warren of servants’ stairs and hallways into the atrium. The front doors remained closed, and I didn’t see any Red Caps spilling into the atrium from other entry points. Miss Vochant had provided a single point of entry, but the servants’ keys apparently only worked for the servants’ quarters, and the rest of the palace remained locked. Though we were trapped, the Red Caps were bottlenecked. This was, at least, one mark in favor of surviving the night.

Most of the women were hidden in the rooms lining the hallway, Mimi and Annette ushering the last of the women into the first room on the left, a salon alive with peacock-feather-hued tapestries that winked absurdly bright and cheerful in the reflections of candlelight on flashing steel.

“You, too,” Viola said, looking at me.

I followed her into the salon, cramped with bodies and smelling of sweat and sour spilled wine. One woman, in pink brocade, clamped part of her skirt to a slash wound in her leg. I looked away, to the diamond-clear windows overlooking a dark lawn. We were trapped on the first floor of the palace proper, but it rose twenty feet over the ground below, perched on an elevated foundation and the servants’ quarters beneath. If the palace had been less grand, an ordinary house not built on an artificial rise and the servants’ floor below, we could have escaped through the windows.

Maybe, I thought with trepidation, we could. Not all of us, I was sure; the wounded woman in pink and the frail elderly duchess whose dress seemed to weigh more than she did wouldn’t be able to climb down, but perhaps, I thought, the idea crashing to the forefront of my mind wildly, I could. It was a gamble, but if the Red Caps had breached the fence instead of the guardhouse, it was possible that there were more soldiers there who didn’t realize that the palace had turned into a battleground. Reinforcing the nobles could be the difference between being massacred in these grand parlors and salons, or escape.

“Viola,” I said quietly, my voice surprisingly even, “do the windows open, or would I need to break one?”

“They open outward, to let in—you can’t be serious.” Her painter’s gaze took in the dimensions, the height, the full scene at once. “It’s twenty feet down.”

“There’s yards of curtains here,” I suggested. “If I can get out, I could bring reinforcements.”

Viola screwed her mouth into a knot, but agreed. “I hope you’ve a good luck charm as strong as mine,” she said as she discreetly elbowed her way through the crowd. “And if you’re caught?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to consider that possibility, or the horrible choice an open window would give the besieged noblewomen if the door was breached—jump or be killed inside. “Just help me with the curtain.”

If the queen and the others guessed at what we were doing, they didn’t say. They stood with attention fixed on the door, pressing their ears to the seams in the doorframe, trying to guess at what was happening outside. Viola and I tore a curtain down, and she helped me knot it to a heavy settee by the window. I tied the second curtain to the first.

“Do you have any idea how to climb down a rope?” Viola joked wanly.

“I’ll find out. There may be more of them outside,” I thought aloud. With some difficulty, I pulled the wire supports for my skirts from underneath my gown. I wouldn’t fit them through the narrow window opening.

“Well, we shan’t all follow you,” Viola replied darkly, watching me kick aside my skirt supports with the realization that I was really going to do this drawn all over her face.

I tested the knots with a sharp tug, as I’d seen sailors do on the ships in the harbor. Viola helped me sling the curtains through the window, and we waited, inhaled breath choking us, for some reaction from the lawn below, for a Red Cap to run out and shoot at the window, for one to wait at the bottom with cutlass drawn. No one came.

I gripped the curtains, a thick silk velvet, and slid out the window. My arms protested immediately; I didn’t have a dockworker’s corded muscles to help me, and I slid more than climbed down to the snow below. Swiftly, I ducked behind a topiary that barely concealed my skirt, the pale silk shining like a beacon in the moonlight. The snow-covered lawn beyond it was silent. An imposing fence ran the perimeter of the grounds, and I didn’t see any activity along its metal length.

Just ahead, a man in palace guard uniform lay facedown on the cobblestone path. Probably a sentry, I thought, fear curdling my stomach. Probably someone who could have warned us or brought reinforcements.

No time for that. I shook myself.

The guardhouse interrupted the fence, and the only way to reach it was to cross the wide expanse of open lawn. If there were any Red Caps patrolling the palace grounds, I would be seen. And if the guardhouse had been overrun, there would be no escape. I ran a finger over the charmed pink flowers embroidered into my gown and exhaled. There was no other way. I took as large a breath as the tight bodice afforded me and took off at a sprint across the snow.

My breath came in great white clouds, and I barely felt the snow seeping through my impractical slippers. I slammed into the wall of the guardhouse—no point in subtlety now—and pounded against the windows, the doors, everything I could find.

A man in a soldier’s uniform opened the door, and I almost started crying with the relief that rippled through my tightly coiled nerves.

He looked me up and down once, bewilderment clouding his craggy face. “What in the …?”

I choked on the words. “Palace attacked. Red. Caps. Came in servants’ entrance.”

He turned back to the interior while I swayed against the door. “Hey! Gear up. Problem at the palace. Get her inside.”

He pulled me inside, and I let out a shuddering breath when I saw the full unit of men in the guardhouse. Two dozen, all armed better than the Red Caps. Someone had thought to station extra men here. I sank against the wall, letting the gown crumple beneath me.

“You stay here, miss. You’ll be safe so long as—”

“Go!” I shouted at him. He followed the last of his men outside, toward the manicured lawn and the fight beyond.