“Astro!” Neel shouted. “Astro, please answer me!”
Faintly, the spider said, “I appear to be missing a few legs.”
“You’ll be all right,” Neel told him, because he refused to believe anything else.
* * *
“GOOD!” SHANDOR SAID, watching the battle below.
“Good?” said Tomik. “How can that be good?” He couldn’t see any details from so far away and didn’t know enough about war to judge what was taking place before him. He saw a bewildering, disastrous mess.
“Didn’t you notice what your Marvels did? The Roma are eating up the front lines, and Rodolfo’s artillery has been destroyed. We’re in as good shape as we’ll ever be. Time to go.”
Tomik closed his eyes. “Straight for the Gray Men?”
“That’s right. Rodolfo’s army has turned to face Neel’s, so we can come at the Gray Men from the side. Ready?”
No, Tomik thought. “Yes,” he said.
The force of about a thousand horses started down the steep slope.
“Stay right behind me,” Shandor said, and Tomik did just that, his stomach plunging every time his horse slipped. Behind him, he heard a yell of fear, and a horse came tumbling down. Its legs buckled beneath it, and the rider spun over its shoulders. The woman’s neck broke.
“Right behind me,” Shandor said again.
Tomik followed.
His nerves were frayed and his legs were shaking by the time the horses reached more even ground. I’ll be no good when it really matters, Tomik thought. He could barely see straight through his fear. But Shandor kicked his horse into a gallop, and Tomik’s horse followed. The cavalry was streaming around him now, heading straight for the knot of gray. The Roma drew closer, and Tomik had just enough time to spot a cage and narrow his eyes at it when a monster lifted its head and stared at the Roma cavalry. It opened its mouth in a toothless grin. It broke from the pack and ran toward them.
“Shandor!” Tomik shouted, but the creature had already leaped through the air to wrap its arms around the Roma. Shandor kept his seat, but the Gray Man clawed at his face, ripping away skin.
“Now, Tom!” the man yelled. “Do it now!”
Tomik pulled the smoky Marvel with the Gristleki cure from his pocket. He cocked his arm back and prepared to throw.
* * *
“LOSING? We are not losing,” Petra heard Rodolfo shout at his general. “Where is the rest of my army?”
“They went south, to cross the Dalo Bridge. They’ll be here to reinforce us, but it will take time—”
“Time?” Rodolfo slapped the soldier with his metal glove. The man reeled, his face distorted. His jaw had been broken. Several Gristleki glanced at Rodolfo as he listened to the general groan. The monsters’ hollow faces were eager.
“Isss he oursss?” one of the monsters asked. “Can we have him? Pleassse?”
“Oh, fine,” said Rodolfo, and a cluster of Gristleki fell on the man and dragged him down.
Petra saw yet another fireball Marvel sail through the air and smash into the infantry. The earth shook with the explosion.
“You!” Rodolfo had turned his horse toward Petra’s cage. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. This was supposed to be easy!” He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the cage. Then he climbed off his horse and through the cage door to grab Petra by the neck. He dragged her out and threw her to the ground.
“Isss she oursss?” a Gray Man asked.
Rodolfo jumped back on his horse and grinned. “Ye—” he started to say, when an invisible force grabbed the reins of his horse and hauled him away from Petra. She looked up from the dirt. Beyond the twisting bodies of the Gristleki surrounding her, she could see Neel, a hand stretched out in front of him, his ghostly fingers dragging Rodolfo and his horse toward him.
A Gray Man hissed, “I think that was a yesss. Did our massster not sssay yesss?”
“Yesss,” the Gristleki answered, and closed around Petra.
She could see nothing now but gray skin and leering faces. Her heart shuddering, Petra searched for the silver eyes of her father. Then a thought struck her, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to see him, not like this. She didn’t want her last memory to be this.
She heard a howl—not of pleasure, but pain. Her eyes flew open, and saw a sword slicing through the neck of a Gray Man. The head rolled onto the earth, spitting black blood. The headless body crumpled, and in the space it left stood John Dee.
He sliced the throat of another Gristleki, reached into the circle of monsters to grab Petra’s arm, and dragged her to him. “Come with me,” he said. “There’s a Loophole right behind me. Come!”
But Petra had frozen, astonished that he was here, that he would do this, and that she wanted, suddenly, to embrace him.
A Gristleki leaped at them, and Dee raised his sword.
“No!” she shouted. “Don’t kill them! One of them could be my father! They’re people!”
“Not at the moment.” He chopped off the monster’s head. Dee started to say something else when Petra snagged his sword arm and pointed. There, beyond the Gray Men, and far to the right of Rodolfo’s horse as it was dragged over the ground toward Neel, was Tomik.
The Marvel in his hand caught the light of the sun. Tomik drew back his hand and threw.
48
Monsters
THE MARVEL SMASHED on the ground exactly in the center of Rodolfo’s Gristleki army. Thick, bitter smoke flowed from the shards. A nearby Gray Man gagged, and soon the air was filled with the sound of retching as the monsters bent double. They coughed, choked, and vomited black blood. It gushed from their mouths, pouring onto the ground. The Gray Men sagged and fell. They lay still.
Petra started to cry. Fiala’s cure had not worked, it had not worked at all, and the woman had probably never intended it to work. The Gray Men were dead.
“Petra, stop,” Dee said roughly. “This isn’t like you.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe it wasn’t like her to weep, but who was she, without a family? Who would she be, without her father? She could not stop the tears. Dee kept speaking to her, but she didn’t listen. She heard Rodolfo shouting somewhere in the background, telling the Roma not to touch him. She heard Tomik pushing his way toward her side, and he was telling her not to cry, too. Then Neel was standing in front of her, and she could see his dark face and strange yellowy eyes through her tears. He didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t weep. He simply held out his hand, and opened it.
Astrophil lay crumpled and still on his palm. Petra looked at Neel, remembered him saying he would hate her forever, and wondered if this was his revenge. “How dare you?” she whispered. “How can you show me this? How can you show me that I have nothing left?”
“Petra,” squeaked the spider.
She gasped.
“I find it very insulting that you are so quick to assume I am dead,” Astrophil continued. “Have you no faith in my survival skills? I am only a little damaged.”
“Astrophil!” She started to take him from Neel, then stopped, worried she would hurt him further.
“Everyone is trying to tell you to calm down. Why, if Iris were here”—the spider’s voice hitched, then continued—“she would tell you to stop your hysterics. Take a deep breath and look around you. Just look.”
Petra did. Somewhere up ahead, the battle was still raging, but in a muted way, and in the spot where the Gristleki army had stood there was a soft quiet, like the kind that comes when you wait for the stars to appear. Petra forced her gaze to fall on the gray bodies around her, and her eyes widened. A change was creeping over their dead skin. The scales were fading. Color flushed along the limp limbs. Chests rose, then fell, then rose again. Finally, someone stood.
The people who had once been monsters shakily pushed themselves off the ground and looked around them.
“Petra,” said Dee, and pointed.
It was her father. He was gaunt and hairless. His si
lver eyes were large in his thin face. Yet he smiled at her.
She ran, and threw herself into his arms. She pressed her face against his chest, and didn’t see what the others saw.
They saw the skeletal, changed people look at each other, and remember everything that had been done to them, and everything that they had done. Then they turned toward Rodolfo, who had been taken from his horse by the Roma cavalry. They moved toward him, their feet slow but determined as they picked their way across the battlefield.
Rodolfo had never shown an ounce of fear toward the Gristleki when they were monsters. Now, though, he stumbled back from their human forms. His eyes widened at the sight of their faces. He retreated. He scrambled over a smashed wagon. He fled across the ravaged ground until he tripped over the body of his general, and fell on the dead man’s sword.
49
A Gift
AFTER THE BATTLE, Master Kronos repaired Astrophil. He offered to replace the spider’s two missing legs, but Astrophil declined. “I am proud of my war wounds,” he said, and did not mind that he limped.
Even with only six legs, he proved himself very skilled at sewing up wounds, and in the days that followed the Battle of Zim Bridge, he received a lot of practice. There were not, however, as many dead and wounded as had been feared, particularly since Rodolfo’s reinforcements, once they had crossed the Dalo Bridge and rode to the rest of the army’s rescue, had decided there was little point in fighting. Rodolfo was dead, as was their general, and a bloodied blond man soaked with river water had joined the Roma to face the reinforcements. Many Bohemians recognized him as Lucas December, the duke of Moravia. Enough of them realized that if Rodolfo was dead, they had a new ruler. The reinforcements laid down their weapons.
As agile as Astrophil’s legs were, there were things he couldn’t mend. Nothing could replace the skin torn from Shandor’s face, although Dee applied leeches to suck the Gristleki poison from his wounds and saved his life. Yet Treb could not be brought back from the dead, nor Iris.
No one wore black to her funeral. Zora, who had inherited Krumlov Castle, hung banners of bright fabric from its windows, and if her poppy-colored dress brought out the red of her eyes, it did not matter. There were many people with red eyes in the crowd gathered in the Krumlov cemetery. The stone that marked Iris’s grave sparkled in the light.
“I know you wanted the Bohemian crown for me,” Lucas whispered to the gravestone when the rest of the people had begun filing out of the cemetery. “But I don’t think that was such a good idea.” He thought of everything he would have to do. Fiala Broshek would be put on trial. He would have to work to replace the things he himself had destroyed—the Academy, bridges, and a good deal of brassica oil. Most important, he would have to gain the trust of people who had lived under Rodolfo’s rule. Lucas didn’t think it could be done.
“Iris had faith in you,” someone behind him said. It was John Dee. He had quite a talent for sneaking up on people.
“She was crazy. Look what she did,” Lucas added in an angry voice. “Riding into battle at her age. I shouldn’t have let her. I should’ve—” he broke off, and pressed the heel of his hand against a fresh flow of tears. “I am going to make a mess of everything.”
“Let’s look on the bright side,” said Dee. “After Rodolfo, you cannot possibly do worse.”
Lucas looked at him. He couldn’t quite tell, but he thought Dee was trying to be funny. If so, it was a bad, dark joke. Lucas laughed anyway, because if he didn’t he would have kept crying, and sometimes you have to accept what people give you, even if the gift comes badly wrapped. Dee was trying to cheer him up. Lucas let him.
John Dee would depart soon for England with his daughters, once the Roma army had left for the Vatra and Margaret had closed the Loophole behind them. His stay in London would be a brief holiday. He was, after all, the English ambassador to the Vatra, and he had every intention of returning to that country and fulfilling his duties.
Petra was among the last to leave the cemetery, and when she did she fell in step with John Dee. They took a path that led away from where the Roma army’s tents still spread over the land, and toward hills where the battle hadn’t taken place. A light green was creeping over the earth.
Petra had gotten into the habit of taking walks—usually with her father, but sometimes with John Dee, which surprised many people, including herself. On the day of Iris’s funeral, Petra was silent as they wandered to a narrow bend in the river. She was trying to understand the source of her surprise. It wasn’t so much due to the fact that she enjoyed spending time with John Dee. She remembered their conversation the night before the battle, and how a knowing look had sharpened his eyes when she had questioned him about mind-magic. He had known what she would do. He might not have known the details, but he had understood that she would go to Rodolfo, and might never come back. Yet he had not tried to stop her.
Some people might have interpreted this as a lack of feeling on his part, but Petra remembered how Dee had risked his life to save hers and knew this couldn’t be it. It must be something else. As Petra tried to identify it, she understood what was odd about her walks with him. What possible interest could he have in her, now that her magic was gone? Petra’s surprise lay not in the fact that she walked with him, but that he walked with her.
She told him so. “I’m not useful to you anymore, you know.”
“Useful?”
Petra looked at the muddy swirl of the river. “I keep thinking about the letter you gave me saying that Rodolfo had no magic, and about how this meant I was stronger than him. But I’m not anymore. I’m ordinary, just like he was.”
“Petra, you’re still one of the strongest people I have ever met. That hasn’t changed.”
“Everything has changed.”
Dee slipped his hands into his deep pockets.
“I would like to know why you’re here, talking with me,” said Petra.
He frowned, and seemed to consider his words carefully. “Despite what Iris would say”—Dee glanced at Petra, and kept speaking as if he hadn’t seen the pain flash across her face—“I still think that my definition of friendship is a good one.”
Petra’s brow furrowed. “You mean that friendship is a partnership based on mutual interest?”
“No,” he said. “Mutual respect.”
She looked at him. He smiled, then added lightly, “Don’t worry, Petra. I’m sure I’ll always be able to find a use for you.”
When Petra returned to her room in Krumlov Castle, she found Astrophil reading a book on the identification of different diseases. His missing legs didn’t seem to make him race any less quickly down the page.
“Astrophil,” she said.
He looked up from his reading and slid down the crease in the center of the open book to be closer to her.
“Does it bother you that my magic is gone?” she asked.
“Does it bother you that my legs are?”
“No, of course not. I mean, yes. I worry that your missing legs bother you. But…” She grew frustrated with her inability to explain. “We won’t ever be able to talk the way we used to, Astro. We won’t be able to talk secretly. We won’t talk silently.”
“Well, then,” he said, “we will have to whisper.”
* * *
A FEW DAYS LATER, Petra looked out her window, toying with a wooden practice sword. She had asked Shandor to make it. He had been glad to see her when she’d walked into the castle ballroom, which was now filled with beds for injured soldiers. When she had told him what she wanted, he smiled with the good half of his face and started to say yes. Then he paused. The half smile still lingered, but had grown thoughtful. It looked like he was hiding something. But he often looked this way now. The mass of scars had turned the left side of his face into a hideous, immovable mask. When one half of him couldn’t show an emotion, and the other half wouldn’t, Shandor was a daunting man to face. “I can’t make you a wooden sword,” he said. “It’d be agains
t the rules.”
“Rules? What rules?”
“All weapons in the Roma army are distributed or approved by the general. We don’t have one right now.”
Petra bit her lip, remembering Treb’s grin when he announced her Coming of Age, so many months ago on the deck of his ship.
“That means,” Shandor said slowly, “that you should ask the king.”
“I’m asking for a wooden sword. It’s for learning swordplay. It’s not a weapon.”
“Hit someone with it hard enough, and you’ll see that’s not true.”
“Fine,” said Petra. “I’ll make one myself.”
He stopped her before she could whirl away from the side of his bed. “I’ll break a rule for you,” he said, though Petra suspected that no such rule existed in the first place. Then she reminded herself that different cultures had different rules, and so did people, and sometimes they were hard to know until they’d been broken. I will hate you forever if you do this, Neel had told Petra, and if his attitude toward her since the end of the battle was anything to go by, he had meant it.
Petra sighed, and laid the wooden sword lengthwise along the windowsill. She turned away from the view, which showed thousands of tents still surrounding the castle. She told herself she was turning away from the sword she had just set down.
Petra was pathetic at fencing. She hadn’t realized until recently how much of her former skill had relied on magic. She had found Nicolas, the Maraki who had trained her on board the Pacolet, and asked him for a lesson. He had come through the battle without a scratch on him, and was fidgeting for something to do. “Sure, I’ll teach you,” he said. “Better than sitting around doing nothing. What’re we waiting for, anyway? Lucas has already commanded the release of Roma prisoners in Prague, and we can heal our wounded just as well in the Vatra. It’s time we Roma went home.”
During their lesson, Petra stumbled and had trouble holding the wooden sword straight. Nicolas, who had loved her deadly grace, couldn’t quite hide his shock. It would be a long time before she used her father’s invisible rapier again.
The Jewel of the Kalderash Page 27