Nat paled. We hadn’t put iron down there, only on the brick part of the wall. “How do we stop it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure we can. Tell the men to warn the neighborhood. Get everyone out.”
Nat shouted out the command, and within a minute, the rainy waterfront was all but empty. Only a couple of the younger masons remained, determined to show their courage.
“Let’s see if we can save the wall,” Nat told them. Together they probed the water with their spears, but the river twisted the staves and wrenched them away.
“Nails,” Nat called out. “And the leftover spikes!” We hurled them in, but the water must have carried them off, because the kraken kept pulling at the pilings.
While Nat and his men cast around for other things to try, I sang to the water, pleading with it to turn against the kraken. But I wasn’t surprised when the water ignored me. I put my hands against the wall and felt it tremble.
“It’s about to go down!” I shouted to the others.
As they turned back to look at me, the wall cracked.
“Run,” I screamed.
The masons were already sprinting inland, but Nat waited for me, pacing himself to my stride. Through the deserted, rain-soaked streets of Westminster we ran, past the abbey and its great Tudor chapel, and the ancient Gothic arches of the old palace. But we still hadn’t quite reached the embanked wall around the precincts of Whitehall when we heard a terrible groan and crash behind us.
Had the kraken succeeded?
I couldn’t help it. I glanced back through the sheets of rain, only to see the river streaming down the street behind us. And was that a gray tentacle?
Nat yanked me forward. “Run.”
Breath burning in my lungs, I raced up the street with him, my ankle jolting in pain. The dank smell of the sea was everywhere.
By the time we reached the embankment, the gates were shut tight. Shouting for help, Nat and I scrabbled at the rough wall, trying to find footholds before the waters closed in.
Spying us, the King’s guards threw down some ropes. When we grabbed them, the guards hauled us up and over to safety, just as the tidal river raced in behind us.
Standing with the guards and the masons who had reached Whitehall before us, we watched the Thames take Westminster. The first waves rippled out, swirling around corners, filling every path and inlet, until the abbey and the palace and all the ancient buildings were nothing more than islands in the midst of churning waters.
Here and there, in the stormy gloom, lights burned in windows. Did they mark people left behind? Or were they untended candles and lamps that might catch fire, compounding disaster on disaster?
I saw no sign of the kraken.
I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until Nat answered, “It’ll be out in the deeper reaches of the river, I expect, looking for more walls to pull down. We’ll need to warn the riverbank patrols to watch out for it. Maybe they’ll land a blow where we failed.” He turned to have a word with one of the King’s guards, who went running back into the palace.
We failed. It was not a thought I wanted to dwell on. But the evidence was pooled out in front of me.
As I stared at the churning expanse of water, I heard the furious song again, faint and horrifying. Only this time, as I listened, the song swelled, stronger than ever, and I heard an eerie counterpoint beneath the angry music:
Come, Chantress. Come into the water . . .
Who was singing? Wise women? The Mothers that Melisande had claimed were coming? Whatever the source, it was menacing. I backed away.
Nat must have seen the distress in my face, though he didn’t understand its cause. “Remember, the tide will go out soon,” he said. “In just a few hours, we’ll be able to start rescuing people and putting up new defenses.”
I tried to nod, but the song was still there, calling to me, no matter how hard I tried to block it out.
“Never mind that now. You’re shivering.” Nat drew me toward a door. “Let’s get you indoors.”
Once I was inside the thick walls of Whitehall, the music dimmed until it thinned out altogether. I came back to myself, and the first thing I noticed was that Nat was still there, only inches from me. I raised my head, and when I met his warm hazel eyes, it was as if we were standing by the wall in Westminster again, lost to the world. . . .
“Lucy.” There was a tender edge to his voice that made my heart turn over. “I—”
“Chantress!” The cry came from the far end of the passageway.
I whirled around. A palace guard trotted toward me, iron pike in hand. “You’re needed at the Tower,” he called out. “Your prisoner has escaped.”
The world rushed back with a vengeance.
There was no time now to talk with Nat, no time to find out what he had been about to say to me. I said a distressed good-bye to him and rushed off to the Tower.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PERFECT CIRCLE
At the Tower, Knollys met me with a look of chagrin on his broad, ruddy face. “I’m sorry, Chantress,” he said as we touched iron—my bracelet to his hand, his ring to my palm. “We’ve been searching for Melisande for almost two hours now, and there’s no sign of her.” He added, with gruff hope, “Unless you can detect something?”
“No.” Ever since I’d heard the news, I’d been sniffing the air for magic and listening for singing. Even here at the Tower, however, there was nothing. If magic had been involved in Melisande’s escape, I had missed it. Though I knew I ought to check her cell as well.
When I suggested as much, Knollys offered to take me there, and we crossed the innermost ward in the rain.
“How exactly did she escape?” I asked.
Knollys told me that they’d kept a close watch on Melisande until a sea monster had been sighted from the Tower walls. “We rushed out to defend the Tower, of course. Melisande was still unconscious, so I thought there was no danger in leaving her, especially as I left young Barrington on guard.” Knollys shook his head in frustration. “But when we came back, she was gone.”
“And Barrington?” I said as we entered the tower where Melisande had been kept.
“Left his post, the young fool,” Knollys said with a flinty gaze that did not bode well for Barrington. “Says he heard singing outside and he went to see what it was.”
“Singing?”
Knollys shrugged. “That’s what he says. But he can’t describe it, except to say it didn’t sound like any singing he’d ever heard before, including yours. When I questioned him, he admitted that it might have been the echo of all the shouting and screaming out on the river while we fought the monster.”
I made a mental note to question Barrington myself.
“I take it you drove the monster off?” I said.
“Uddersby drove a spear right through it,” Knollys said with grim satisfaction. “It turned as clear as ice and sank like a stone. And here we are.” He unlocked the cell door and pushed it open.
I looked around the stone-walled room, bare of all but a rumpled straw pallet and some blankets. “This isn’t where I left her.”
“No, we moved her on Lord Gabriel’s advice. He thought she’d recover more quickly in a warmer room.”
As indeed she had. “You’re sure you locked her in?”
“Yes. Indeed, the door was still locked when Barrington returned.”
“Then how did she get out?”
Knollys’s voice was tight with frustration. “I don’t know, Chantress. It’s possible she had help from someone else. Some tradesmen made deliveries to the Tower kitchens just before the monster was sighted, and we’re trying to find out if they had anything to do with it, or if they saw anything amiss.” He walked over to the cell’s tiny barred window. “And some of the men have another theory.”
“They do?”
Knollys pointed to a damp corner of the room. “See the rainwater coming through there? It comes down from the roof, then drains out of the room through tiny cr
acks in the stone.”
I looked. The cracks were minute.
“They think she found a way to magic herself into the water and leave the room with it,” Knollys said. “And who’s to say she didn’t?”
Had Melisande used magic to escape? Or had someone come to her aid? Either way, I was determined to hunt her down. Over the next few hours, I questioned everyone involved, and I led another full search of the Tower. I sat for a long while by the dripping corner of the room, listening to the water’s songs, in case they held a clue of some kind. But none of it was any use. Melisande had well and truly vanished.
“What now?” Knollys asked me.
“We return to Whitehall.” Much as I hated to concede defeat, it was time to go back. In another hour or so, it would be nightfall, and the Thames was still high and swollen. I hated to think what Westminster looked like now.
Before we left, Knollys and I discussed how best to deploy the men. Some had been stationed in and around Melisande’s rooms since the morning, searching for information about her and her followers; they needed to be relieved. I dispatched other men to various points around the city. The rest of us went to Whitehall.
It was a long trip. An edict had come through from the King, forbidding boats from taking to the river, so the warders at the Tower had arranged for us to travel by carriage instead. Even at the best of times, I was not fond of carriages, and this journey seemed endless, for we stopped frequently as the wheels became mired in muck. By the time we finally jounced through the palace gates, my head was pounding.
Gritting my teeth, I made a last few arrangements with Knollys, then jumped out of the carriage, my mind full of all I must do. Deciding to check in with the King first, I made my way toward the State Rooms. Torches had been lighted against the encroaching twilight, but they were smoking and fizzling in the rain, and the courtyard stones were dark and slick. When a guard loomed out of the next passageway, pike in hand, I nearly slipped in front of him.
“Begging your pardon, Chantress,” he said, blocking my way, “but I have orders not to let anyone through.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Why ever not?”
“Evacuation orders, my lady.”
Blast. I’d forgotten about the evacuation. “Where would I find the King?”
“Couldn’t say for certain, my lady. The whole place is topsy-turvy today. But the Royal Steward’s set up a station by the Banqueting House with lists of all the changes, and if you go there, I’m sure they’ll help you.”
Pulling my hood tight against a particularly ferocious burst of rain, I started off for the Banqueting House, only to find myself in the midst of widespread chaos. At the Banqueting House itself, scores of people pleaded for directions. When I finally attracted the attention of a guard and asked him for the State Rooms, he was kind enough, offering me a lantern to light my way. But he must have misunderstood what I wanted, for when I reached the door he’d sent me to, I found nothing but my own belongings behind it, mixed up with Norrie’s.
In the flickering light of the lantern, I stared around the room in dismay. Norrie’s and my possessions were heaped in piles on and around the bedsteads. Evidently guards had been detailed to move us, but they hadn’t set anything in order. Probably there had been no time.
I was about to pull the door shut on the mess and start again on the wearying hunt to find the King. But what did I have to tell him, except bad news? Now that Melisande had escaped, I truly had no idea how to get to the root of these attacks and put a stop to them.
I knew Sybil would help me if she could, and so would Gabriel, but talking with them hadn’t done any good so far. None of us had any real idea what magic was at work here. All I knew for certain was that it was somehow connected with water and the sea, and it was stronger than me.
If only the water itself could tell me what was happening! But it wouldn’t or couldn’t speak to me of that. It was as if the element I best understood had become my enemy. It was even worse than last year’s silence, when I’d been hardly able to hear anything at all, and the only way water had spoken to me was through scrying.
Scrying.
Now, that was something I hadn’t tried. In fact, I hadn’t done any scrying at all since I’d gotten my powers back. At best, it was a poor substitute for singing and listening, yielding mysterious images that were more riddles than answers.
But even a riddle was better than no clue at all.
I rose and started to paw through the piles behind me. A bowl, that was what I needed. I could fill it at one of the outdoor troughs down in the courtyard. And perhaps I should light a fire, too.
It took me an age to get everything ready.
At long last, however, I was sitting before the flames, my blue-and-white delftware bowl brimming. The room was perfectly quiet, except for the crackle and sigh of the fire. The perfect conditions for scrying, except that my mind was restless.
Clear your mind. That was the first rule of scrying.
Instead my mind flitted to the wall I’d called up around Melisande . . . her strange keening in the Tower . . . the spiraling tentacles of the kraken . . . Nat’s strong hands pulling me to safety. . . .
Concentrate.
I stared hard at the water. Too hard. Now my eyes were picking out every detail of the bowl’s decoration—the dark blue blossoms, the curving latticework, the swirling vines along the lip.
The magic isn’t in the bowl, I reminded myself. It’s in the water. I could hear it there, a swirl of playful melodies, but that only made my task harder. Last time I’d scried, I hadn’t been able to hear magic. Now I had to tell myself sternly that I wasn’t here to listen but to look.
I blinked, softening my gaze, and pushed the bowl an inch closer to the fire. This time it caught the flames in just the right way, drawing my gaze under the shimmering surface. All at once the water was like a river running through my hands, carrying me down to the sea. And as it swept me along, I heard a music I’d heard once before, a music that horrified me: Come, Chantress. Come into the water . . .
My first instinct was to fight free of it, but I was in too deep for that. The water and the music wouldn’t let me go. They spiraled around me, pulling me down and down, until everything blurred—sea-green to deep blue to black. And yet still I went down, plunging headfirst, until far below me I saw something at the murky bottom of the sea—a stone wall even broader and stronger than the one I’d destroyed on Lord Charlton’s lands, a wall that stretched out into shadows. Along one section of it, two massive green serpents spun round and round, chasing each other until they formed a perfect circle, tongue to tail.
As I plummeted toward them, the circle began to glow with an unearthly green light. Except now I saw that it wasn’t a circle but a hole—a hole in the vast wall. And it was from that hole that the music was coming. I flung out my arms, trying to stop myself from falling into it. But with a flick of their tails, the serpents caught me around the ankles and started to pull me through.
Come to me . . .
I couldn’t breathe, I was drowning, and still the serpents wouldn’t let go.
Kick.
I jerked my legs as hard as I could. Something cracked, and the song and the serpents vanished.
Blinking, I saw my feet splayed out in front of me, soaking wet, and the bowl in pieces on the clay-tiled hearth. An expensive accident—delft bowls were not cheap—but what I felt as I stared down at the shards was relief. I was no longer at the edge of that terrible hole.
It wasn’t a real hole, I reassured myself, head spinning. And the serpents weren’t real either. They were only symbols and signs. That was how scrying worked.
But what did it all mean? As I sat there by the dwindling flames, trying to work it out, I felt more and more confused. Melisande had worn a necklace with tongue-to-tail serpents, and the hole in the wall might have been the crack that she had talked about. With scrying, however, things were rarely what they seemed. My vision might mean something else
entirely.
Perhaps Sybil could help me make sense of things. Although she didn’t have the power to scry, she was the one who’d introduced me to the technique, so there was a chance she’d know how to read the pictures I’d seen, or at least have a guess about how to interpret them. Cheered by the thought, I pushed the shards of the delft bowl to one side with the coal scuttle, then rummaged in the nearest pile for dry stockings.
Five minutes later, lantern in hand, I was on my way out the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY
IRON CROSS
Where exactly I was to find Sybil, I didn’t know. The Banqueting House seemed a good place to start asking for directions, but I wasn’t even halfway there when Sybil’s maid Joan spotted me.
“My lady!” Wizened though she was, her voice was strong, and evidently the rest of her was too. She pushed through a throng of bemused courtiers and came up to my side, holding out an iron amulet.
“So it really is you,” she said with satisfaction as my fingers brushed against it. “The Queen’s been wondering where you were at. There’s horrible stories about the kraken—”
“I’m fine, truly. What about the Queen, and you, and Norrie?”
“The Queen?” She gave me a pockmarked grin. “She’s running the entire outfit, she is, with Norrie’s help. We’re all taking orders from them, over at the Great Hall.” She drew her scarf tighter. “I’m off to the kitchens right now, but you should go in and see them. They’ve been that worried about you.”
She disappeared into the crowd, leaving me mystified. What on earth were Sybil and Norrie up to?
Only when I reached the Great Hall did all become clear. The huge space was rigged out like an infirmary, with pallets laid out everywhere, and men, women, and children crowding onto them. Many of them wore plain iron crosses, or clutched amulets like Joan’s in their hands.
“See if you can find me another dozen blankets,” Norrie was saying to a young woman as I walked up. “More if you can get them.”
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