by April White
She scowled at me. “The Lady Elizabeth is sleeping.”
“Wake her up, Courtney. It’s important.”
She was actually going to tell me ‘no.’ I could see it in her eyes. So I narrowed mine. “This is not a game. If you want your mistress to live past tomorrow, you need to wake her up now!”
Apparently I was scary, because she spun to head into the sleeping chamber. She left the door open behind her, so I took it as an invitation. The fire in the sitting room was lit, and I huddled next to it on a low stool. I was shaking, and I’m not sure what was nerves, fear, adrenaline, or just cold. I looked down at myself and saw tear-stains, filthy jeans, shredded boot leather, and a damaged hand wrapped in blood-stained linen. Awesome. Way to dress to meet a princess.
I would have scoffed at my own joke if I’d still had a sense of humor.
“I imagine you changed nothing and have managed to bring yourselves to the notice of the guards. Well done. When shall I expect them to come for me?” Elizabeth’s voice was tired. Tired of me, and probably tired of waiting for a sword she thought was inevitable. I would be, except I didn’t think anything was a foregone conclusion. Everything could change. Everything.
“Wilder has Ringo, and he knows we’re here. Which means he’ll come for you soon, maybe even tonight.”
“You are so certain of something you did not previously believe would come true.” There. There was the sarcasm I’d been expecting from her.
“He’s being held in Bell Tower. It’s where they’ll take you. We’ve seen it’s only Wilder and Lurch in there with you guys. If you surprise them, you could kill Wilder. I could create a diversion to give you time. Ringo would help if you freed him first.” I hated the desperation in my voice, especially since it rolled right off her back.
Elizabeth was shaking her head, and there was something that looked like pity in her eyes. “We both know how this ends, Saira.”
“It doesn’t end that way!” I yelled at her. Courtney stiffened protectively in the corner. I hadn’t even noticed her there.
“Yet it is the only vision of my death I’ve ever seen. And now it’s the only thing I can see.”
“But it’s not how you die.” I could feel desperation choking me even as something tugged at the edge of my brain. “Wait. Where’s the cuff? The silver one from Aislin?”
“I’m sorry, I am not familiar with a cuff of Aislin.” Her voice got very formal, like I was giving away family secrets. I suppose, in a way, I was. Not that I cared.
“I’ve seen it in a portrait of you. Your coronation portrait. You had a silver bracelet on one wrist. Aislin’s silver cuff.”
She didn’t crack. Not a muscle twitched in her face until she spoke. “Well, since I have clearly not been crowned queen, it also may stand to reason that I do not possess this cuff of which you speak.”
I clenched my eyes shut. Crap. It was hard to think.
Then I flung them open again. “I have to go back and get you Aislin’s bracelet. You can see every possible future with it, and you need to see the one where you live!”
Elizabeth watched me for a long moment, and then finally, offered me her hand. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to shake it or kiss her ring, so I stood and took it tentatively. “You will do what you must, Saira, and so will I. And despite our differences, I know you as the woman who gave me the gift of my Robin. God go with you on your journeys, and perhaps we’ll meet again.”
It was as formal a kiss-off as I’d ever heard, and the part that really sucked was that she truly believed it.
“You’re selling out, you know. You could have a life with Dudley. You do, actually, in the version where you live. You just have to choose it.” I saw the flinch then, the very slight widening of her eyes at the mention of a future with her lover.
But I couldn’t press this point home with her because the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the hall outside her rooms was the only warning we had. I darted back into Ringo’s room just as the door swung open to Elizabeth’s. There was no time to close Ringo’s door, so I leapt up onto the table and into the rafters as extra insurance against being found.
“Lady Elizabeth Tudor.” The man’s voice was deep and gravelly and reeked of dead rat. I knew it was Lurch speaking by the shudder that went down my spine. “You will stand for the bishop.”
I hadn’t seen her sit. That was a tactical play worthy of a queen and guaranteed to remind everyone exactly who she was.
The scene unfolding in the other room was invisible to me, but the voices were clear. “My Lady Elizabeth, I would have thought you’d be surprised to find men in your rooms in the hour before dawn. One could almost imagine you expected us.” That was Wilder, and the hair on my arms stood straight up. I pictured the flash of him I’d seen out the window earlier. Unmistakably a silverback gorilla, gray and powerful, but now feral and more grizzled. The irony of his name wasn’t lost on me.
“And you are?”
“Bishop John Wilder, second to Lord Chancellor Gardiner, Milady.”
“I expect that gentlemen, even strange ones, will behave appropriately in the presence of the king’s daughter.” Elizabeth’s voice remained strong, but I could feel the force of will it took for her to keep it that way.
There was a rustle of paper. “In that case, I will most appropriately inform your Ladyship that you have this day to commit your soul to God. The time for your execution, for the conspiracy to commit treason against your rightful monarch, has been set. By order of Her Majesty, the Queen, I will escort you to your fate at sundown.”
A sudden wail of horror filled the room, and I realized Elizabeth’s ladies were there with her. I clutched the rafter for support as waves of dizziness washed over me. It was happening.
“Shall we, Milady?”
The door to Elizabeth’s rooms opened, and footsteps disappeared down the hall. The minute they were gone, Elizabeth’s ladies began wailing again. The sound of helplessness grated on my last nerves.
Just as I dropped down from the rafters, Courtney appeared at the door between the rooms.
“You and your friends will save her.” It wasn’t a question or a request. More like an expectation. I applauded her determination to keep Elizabeth alive.
“We will.”
Aislin’s Cuff
I raced down the stairs to the Great Hall, thinking furiously of a plan. I didn’t have one. What a surprise. And then I shocked myself by stopping in the pages’ annex. Archer was dead to the world as his organs stitched themselves back together, but Pancho was just waking up. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to be there.
“If Archer wakes up before I’m back, I need you to give him a message for me. Can you do that, Pancho?”
He nodded mutely, wide-eyed, and probably freaked out by the whirlwind that had just flown in. “Tell him …” Tell him what? That I’m leaving him here in the sixteenth century, and if anything happens to me he’s trapped here forever? “Tell him I’m going to bring back Aislin’s cuff, and I need him to know that whatever happens, I’ll find him.”
I looked over at Archer curled on his side, his sleeping face looking so young under the blood and fading bruise. I wasn’t alone because he really would be okay. I started for the door. “Mistress?” Pancho’s voice startled me and I stopped.
“Yeah?”
“My brother … he says a thousand thanks for the healing balm.” Pancho’s chin trembled and I realized that his night had been spent with Wyatt in his prison tower. The traitor who had sealed Elizabeth’s fate with a signature on a phony confession. The only thing I had left for Wyatt was pity.
“I just made the stuff. You’re the reason he feels better, Francis. Your bravery, and your love.”
I bolted before the tears spilled down his cheeks. I didn’t think he’d appreciate me seeing him cry.
The chapel was empty and totally dark. I needed to get a grip on all the thoughts whirling around in my brain, and at a minimum, figure out where to la
nd.
St. Brigid’s. The Clocker Tower. Okay, breathe.
With the image of the round room with the London Bridge painting firmly locked in my mind, I started tracing my candlewax spiral. The last time I’d tried to skip to another spiral hadn’t been good, and I had to force myself past the unsettling thought that I might not make it. At the last turn of my fingers I remembered to picture the modern electric lights in the tower room, just so I didn’t accidentally end up skipping over to St. Brigid’s in this time.
The hum and stretch were almost welcome as I tried to calm my nerves about this jump, but between was jarring and horrible, just like always. And just like always, I had to hold down the dry heaves as I crumpled to the stone floor in a heap. Stone floor. My eyes flew open. My tower. The painting. Electricity. The ticking heartbeat of the clock, and black night of pre-dawn lingering outside the window.
I gasped in relief and stood on shaking legs. A plan. I needed one. Badly. How long had I been gone from this time? We left Mongers at St. Brigid’s who had never been so strong. Had Wilder managed to actually split time? Had I come to the right future?
Despair seemed pretty pointless, so I chose action instead. I needed boots that weren’t torn to shreds and a pair of jeans that didn’t stink of Thames slime. And Ava. My room was a place to start.
I didn’t meet anyone in the corridors and didn’t hear anyone moving around, but I took the back stairs just in case.
The door to my room was locked from the inside. Huh? Ava didn’t lock doors. Even though I’d never used a key on our door, I swept the upper frame for one. Ava wasn’t lazy like most people who hid keys, but she could See things and might have known I was coming. There it was.
I unlocked the door quietly and slipped inside. The curtains were closed and it was too dark to see whether Ava slept in her bed.
“You came back.” Her breathy voice sounded a little jumpy, as if she hadn’t been completely sure it was me.
“Can I turn on a light?”
“No. Wait, here.” Ava fumbled at her nightstand and found her phone. She flipped on the flashlight app and propped it against a book.
“Why are you afraid?”
“They’re hunting you.”
“Who is?” It wasn’t news, but until a couple hours ago I’d stopped feeling like prey. The feeling came back full force with her words.
She stared at me. “Everyone.”
Well, that was new.
“Tell me what happened.”
Ava took a deep breath and sat up in bed. She looked tired, and scared. And suddenly I realized how much I’d missed my friend. I waved my hand at her. “Scootch.” She did, and I kicked off my shredded boots to sit next to her on her bed.
“You stink.” She wrinkled her nose daintily and I leapt off her covers.
“Sorry.” I quickly stripped out of my gross jeans and my underwear that didn’t bear thinking about and tossed them in the garbage bin. I wanted a shower, but clean clothes would do for now, so I was back on Ava’s bed in under a minute.
“Things started getting weird right around the time you guys left.” Ava’s voice had lost some of the shake, but she still spoke in low tones. “That bookkeeper, Domenic Morgan, took over as head of the Mongers, and for whatever reason, Rothchild let him.”
I stared at Ava in shocked silence. She might as well have said Rothchild’s head was cut off and Morgan’s grew back in its place. “How could that even happen? Mr. Shaw said the guy was nobody.”
“He was nobody. But now the Mongers all line up behind him. The only hold-out is Seth Walters. He’s still doing his own thing, but I don’t think it’s sanctioned by the rest of the Monger hierarchy.”
“Mongers hunting me isn’t new though. You said ‘everyone.’ Who is everyone?”
Her eyes searched my face. “You remember the conversation we had about Aislin’s cuff at my parents’ house?”
My stomach lurched with dread. “Yes.”
“The cuff is missing.”
I almost screamed, but managed to strangle the sound into a hiss. “Nooooo!”
My horror seemed to answer something for her, and the worry in her face relaxed just a little. “Saira, they think you stole it.”
“Clearly I didn’t.”
“We’ve all Seen you with it.”
“We, as in all the Seers?”
Ava nodded, the worried expression was back.
“I didn’t steal your cuff, Ava.” I twisted my braid like it was full of worry beads. “It’s what I came back for.”
She moved a little away from me. “What do you mean, you came back for it? You were going to take it?”
Now it was my turn to stare. “According to you all, I already did.”
She ignored me. “But Saira, Aislin’s cuff has been in my family since, well, Aislin. You’ve seen the coronation portrait of Elizabeth Tudor wearing it. An outsider can’t just take it.”
“That’s the thing. I need to take it to Elizabeth. She doesn’t have it.”
“Of course she does. She was the head of the Seer Family for forty years.”
I shook my head. “She showed me her death. I saw her walking to the scaffold at the Tower. Elizabeth Tudor believes she’s going to die, Ava. I need her to see a different future.”
Ava stared at me in growing horror. “What have you done?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
She backed away even further, and her voice came out in a whisper. “Did you cause a time stream split by going back? Did you change history?”
It was the thing Clockers could do that scared me the most. And hearing Ava say it out loud made me defensive and mad. “Someone else has Aislin’s cuff, Ava. Not me. But I need to find it, and I only have …” – I looked at the clock – “about eleven hours to do it.”
I got off Ava’s bed and rummaged through my dresser for things I wanted to take back. Anachronistic things, of course, but if the time stream had actually split like Ava thought, how much worse could I make things? I didn’t even bother mentally answering that. There wasn’t really a quantifier big enough. Googleplex? Apocalyptic?
I unwrapped the bloodstained linen cloth from my skin-stripped hand and winced as it peeled away the fresh scabs. Mr. Shaw made better green medicine than I did, but I wasn’t even sure he was still on my side. That thought just made me tired.
“What happened to your hand?” I was a little surprised Ava was still speaking to me, considering she had pretty much accused me of bringing about the end of the world as we knew it.
“Stripped all the skin off it trying to keep Ringo from getting captured.” I pulled a fresh long-sleeved t-shirt over my camisole and grabbed the thickest, blackest cashmere sweater I could find from my collection of Archer’s clothes. “Didn’t work. Wilder got him anyway.”
“Wilder has Ringo?”
I nodded in defeat, and Ava threw the covers off herself to get dressed. “C’mon. We’ll find Adam and figure this thing out.”
I looked at her, surprised and relieved. “I need to see Shaw too.”
“It’ll be hard to get him away from my parents and my uncle, but I’ll see what I can do.”
The Armans and Phillip Landry were here? “What do they want with Shaw?”
“They knew you’d be back.”
We agreed to meet in the Seer Tower, which no one but the twins used anymore. Because maybe the warded tower room could block the Seers’ visions. Ava couldn’t back that up, but since wards could block physical sight, maybe they could block the mental kind too.
I still didn’t have a plan, and I didn’t know where to even begin looking for Aislin’s cuff. Why couldn’t they See it with the real thief? Why was it only with me in their visions? My other giant problem was the time stream. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain I knew something was very, very wrong. I had to find my mother and Miss Rogers and Doran, if he could be coaxed out of hiding. I needed to talk to anyone who could help me figure out what was going on.
The corridors were still clear as I took every back way I knew downstairs to my mom’s rooms. Her door wasn’t locked, and she was having her early morning tea curled in a chair by the fire. She looked tired, and … fragile.
“Hi, Mom.” I made my voice as soft as I could so I didn’t startle her. She jumped anyway, and when she saw me about ten years fell off her face. She held her arms out to me and I folded myself into them.
“Oh, Saira. You’re back.”
I let her hold me a long moment before I finally untangled myself and perched on a stool near her feet. “I can’t stay long though. This isn’t done yet.”
Something flashed in her eyes as she studied my face. I braced myself for the hammer but she surprised me. A lot.
“Do you need the necklace?”
I shook my head. “I can focus without it.”
“I should have given it to you before. I’ve been so afraid you never got to where you were going because you didn’t have it.” Her voice choked and I gripped her hand. It was cold and felt a little brittle.
“I’m okay, Mom.” Then I took a breath. “Actually, maybe I’m not.”
“They think you have Aislin’s cuff.” There was no accusation in her voice. More like fear.
“I don’t, but I need it. I need to take it to Elizabeth.”
She studied me in surprise. “Elizabeth Tudor? You’ve met her?”
“I’m pretty sure by now Wilder has her. Probably for the same reason he wanted you.”
My mother gasped. “Is he bleeding her?”
“According to a vision she and Archer both had, he was questioning her about her visions. But it seems like he’s driving her toward execution. That would give him a whole lot of access to her blood, wouldn’t it?”
“When were you?”
“April, 1554.”
“So she’s a prisoner, but she still has some power. And Lord John Brydges wouldn’t have allowed unfettered access to the queen’s sister.”
“Elizabeth has seen her own execution. She believes she’s going to die at the Tower.”
Now it was my mom’s turn to stare. “But she’s a Seer.”
