“SUSURRA!”
“Susurra’s back!”
“The Night Hag has returned!”
The cage had disappeared and the secret oubliette with it, silicate walls atomizing into mists. When the mists had cleared, both from Desdemona’s eyes and from inside her head, she saw that the four of them were standing, not in the forgotten sub-cellar of Dark Breakers, but in the royal courtroom. Right in the writhe of a riot.
The Gentry Sovereign sat on its silver-sickle throne as if trying not to sink into its hundred welcoming razors. Its hands were clenched whitely on its knees, two great golden cuffs with emeralds the size of alligator eggs clamping its wrists like shackles. If statues could sweat, Desdemona imagined the Gentry Sovereign would be perspiring like a prisoner put to the question. At the foot of the dais, the gentry mob was shouting, jostling for a better look at Susurra and her rescuers. Thankfully, they did not collectively swarm the little group, which had emerged—out of the floor? Out of the very air itself?—on the wide bottom step of the dais, where they hunkered down in a protective huddle, Susurra at their center. This was too near the Gentry Sovereign for its subjects, even riled as they were, to dare venture.
But they wailed. They screamed. They reached for her.
“Nyx’s heir!”
“The Dreamer!”
“Susurra, save us! Save us!”
Objects rocketed overhead and splatted down on the platform above them—nothing that could hurt or harm the Gentry Sovereign; its subjects were not yet so far gone as to risk their own lives like that—but globs of refuse, raining down. Mostly they were soft, rotted things like the faceted fruit of the orchard, jewels melting to slime; a spotted salmon wheezing dire prophecies as it drowned in air; wailing mandrake rootlings, bleeding from mouths and eyes; small winged bodies, limp and broken; more, so much more, all dead or dying, evidence of the Valwode failing, of the senescing dream. Some of the mess fell at the Gentry Sovereign’s feet. Most slapped its sculpted chest and chiseled face, dripping down to mound on the green velvet and yellow satin of its robes. One tiny corpse was caught on the tines of the Antler Crown, where it slumped like a convict on a pike amidst the ivy leaves and honeysuckle entwined there.
“Alban Idris! Abdicate now!”
“We don’t want you! We don’t need you!”
“Susurra has returned!”
Desdemona covered her head and ducked an ill-lobbed papery meat-corpse just in time. But the Gentry Sovereign, on whom several simultaneous missiles actually made impact, did not so much as twitch a toe. If it did, Desdemona guessed that its older, scarier, brutal-looking policemen siblings would unsheathe their edged weapons and make short work of turning the royal courtroom into an abattoir. Cold fury rose off their bodies, but they grimly held their positions, their dank chill like something seeping up from sinkholes in the earth.
“Des!” Chaz whispered. “Where’s the exit?” She was hunched under Farklewhit’s protective arm, cradling Susurra close to her chest. The goblin girl was still asleep, face buried in Chaz’s neck. Desdemona was anxious about this instantaneous intimacy; Elliot Howell’s painting had hinted at Susurra’s profusion of piranha teeth, and right now they were all too close to Chaz’s veins.
“I don’t think we’re getting out of this,” she answered, “until Alban Idris gives us leave.”
This was something she thought unlikelier by the minute, as the calls for abdication and Susurra’s coronation swelled to an ecstatic shouting, an orchestral chorus of song. There was a movement like a great wave when, as one body, all the gentry in the room surged forward.
At last the Gentry Sovereign sprang from its throne.
“SILENCE!”
Silence exploded into the room like a bolide fireballing from the sky.
Silence and stillness.
Desdemona hardly dared breathe. Next to her, Chaz crushed Susurra closer, hiding her face in all that strange hair. Farklewhit was making low “whup whup whup whup” noises, like a goat preparing either to scream or fall down in an angry faint.
The only thing that moved at all was the Gentry Sovereign—except, alarmingly, for the black-lit eyes of its viciously still siblings, which tracked that magnificent figure as it brushed fish scales and gem rot from its robes, shook its massive head until the corpse impaled on the Antler Crown flew across the room, and walked away from its silver throne, down the steps of the dais. The gentry mob remained frozen in bewitched watchfulness.
Stepping quickly down the steps, the Gentry Sovereign bounded down the last three with arms outstretched, demanding, “Give the girl to us! She must be brought to safety. She is our last hope—but we fear she might become an unintended casualty of the violence about to break.”
But Farklewhit interposed himself between Susurra and the Gentry Sovereign, lowering his head with its hard-curled ivory horns and whup-whup-whupping some more. “You’re not touching her,” he snarled. “She’s ours. You want to tangle with me, Alban Idris? I’ll ram you into the sixth hell, where demon queens chew up rocks like taffy candy!”
“Ambassador.” The Gentry Sovereign passed a hand briefly over its flickering, wounded eyes. “Your princess is not safe here. None of you are. The egg of this world is cracked. The Valwode is running to yolk between our fingers. If we cannot patch it . . .”
In Chaz’s arms, Susurra stirred.
As she did, so did the gentry court, despite their enchanted stupor. The moment she opened her eyes, the first of the gentry unfroze and immediately began to rush toward her.
One of the policemen, a red-caped giant with an unfinished-looking face and a green flash in its eyes, drew a saw-toothed crystal sword from the silver-wrought sheath on its back and began wading through paralyzed gentry, the impact of its body sending them spinning and colliding.
Desdemona was the final impediment in its path. She could not get out of the way fast enough; the giant all but bulled her to the floor, closing in quickly on the runner. But the Gentry Sovereign caught the down-swinging blade in its hand, shouting wrathfully, “Cease this!”
The giant protested, “Sibling, we cannot allow . . .”
Seizing this moment of distraction, the gentry runner—a creature whose top teeth had apparently never stopped growing, for they brushed his concave belly and had been carved and colored as elaborately as scrimshaw, except for the roots, which still sported an inch of canvas-blank enamel—ducked beneath the Gentry Sovereign’s arm to fall at Chaz’s feet. Reaching up to take hold of Susurra’s ragged cobweb hem, he pleaded through his teeth, “O Night Hag! Save us! Save our world! Dream this dictatorship undone! Free us!”
Sleepily, Susurra blinked down at him. Just as sleepily, she turned her face away, smiling up into Chaz’s eyes instead with those purple-green-gloss lips—just as Howell had painted them—the color of cobra lilies.
“I woke up free,” she whispered, “with your hair warming me. The way I dreamed it.” Swiftly kissing Chaz on the mouth, she ordered, “Set me down, beloved. I am ready.”
Chaz did not obey right away. After her first astonishment at the kiss, she bent her head and returned it, as Desdemona—and all the gentry court—watched. Even when their lips parted, their gazes remained locked, a wordless kything passing between them, such as Desdemona and Chaz had shared from their earliest years of friendship. Jealousy and bewilderment burbled at the back of Desdemona’s throat but did not quite evolve into a noise of protest.
Chaz released Susurra to the floor, and she floated down as if suspended on threads of gossamer, landing like a water strider on the surface of a pond and glancing idly around the courtroom. Her gaze fell on the Gentry Sovereign. Her eyes glinted with arachnoidal amusement as she took in its stained opulence, the golden shackles on its wrists, the golden torque upon its throat, and at that look Desdemona recalled that Susurra was the twelfth daughter of Erl-Lord Kalos Kantzaros, and that tricks and treachery flowed through the green goblin ichor of her veins.
“You,” the Night Hag said to the Gentry Sovereign, “are wearing my crown.”