She looked around, her gaze veering toward Jonah and the others. Jonah froze momentarily, but she looked right past him.
“Must be in the privy,” she concluded, looking toward the door into the other room, the one Jonah and the others had arrived in the night before.
The privy? Jonah wondered. Is that, like, the restroom? No wonder it stank in there.
The girl shrugged, put the tray down on the table, and left.
Almost without thinking, Jonah stood up and walked over to the table. Food … When was the last time he’d eaten? Breakfast yesterday—well, yesterday more than five hundred years in the future. Mom had made French toast and bacon, one of Jonah’s favorite meals, as a special treat because she thought he might be nervous about going to an adoption conference.
If only I’d known what was really going to happen to me that day, Jonah thought, I would have eaten six slices of French toast instead of only four!
He looked down at the food on the tray—two mugs, two bowls of something that looked like oatmeal, two bowls of something that might be stewed dates, a charred hunk of something that might be meat, and a loaf of bread that looked hard enough to break a tooth on.
It all looked disgusting, but Jonah’s stomach growled anyway.
Nobody would be able to tell if I just took a bite or two of the oatmeal, Jonah thought.
He reached for one of the spoons and scooped up a tiny amount of the runny, grayish cereal. It steamed as he brought it up to his mouth and hesitantly maneuvered it toward his tongue. He closed his lips around the spoon. …
And immediately began coughing.
Did they use a whole jar of cinnamon in this one bowl? And then a whole jar of cloves, too?
He coughed, gagged, coughed again. He spit the oatmeal back onto the spoon.
When he finally stopped choking, he realized that Katherine, Chip, and Alex were all awake now, and staring at him.
“What are you doing?” Katherine demanded.
Jonah felt a little bit like Goldilocks, except he’d gotten caught eating the porridge, instead of sleeping.
“I just took one bite,” he defended himself. “I was hungry, and I didn’t think anyone would notice. I just didn’t know it’d taste so awful.”
Chip stood up, stretched, and wandered toward the table.
“I bet it’d taste okay to Alex and me,” he said. “You’re right—nobody would miss just a bite or two.”
“Plus,” Alex said, joining them as well, “it’d be an interesting experiment. Visible food being eaten by an invisible kid—can you see the food all the way down the digestive tract? Or does it disappear once it’s in your mouth?” He looked over at Jonah. “I don’t see the food in your stomach.”
“Didn’t swallow,” Jonah muttered.
Chip reached for the spoon in the other bowl of oatmeal.
“One small bite for man, one giant science experiment for mankind,” he said, dramatically lifting the spoon toward his mouth.
As soon as his lips closed around the spoon, he began gagging too.
“Ugh! That’s nasty!” he screamed, spitting even more emphatically than Jonah had. “Water! Must have …”
Jonah lifted a mug from the tray.
Chip took a huge gulp—and then spit that out too.
“That’s beer! Beer and oatmeal—blech!”
“The king of England drinks beer for breakfast?” Jonah asked curiously.
“Ale,” Alex corrected him. “Everyone drinks a lot of ale, even kids. The water isn’t always safe.”
Jonah shook his head in amazement. Chip was still spitting and moaning.
“Are you guys crazy?” Katherine demanded, coming over to the table to join them. “Making all this noise, spitting things everywhere—do you want someone to catch us?”
Chip stopped spitting long enough to say, “Well, we are invisible. They have to see us before they can catch us.”
“That’s not invisible,” Katherine said, pointing at the tray, with its pools of beer and oatmeal spittle.
“Sorry,” Chip said meekly.
Katherine swayed, then dropped down into a chair beside the table.
“I just want to go home,” she moaned. “It feels like the whole room is spinning, my stomach hurts, my head aches—and I bet no one’s invented aspirin yet!”
“Well,” Alex said, “people do know that they can chew on the bark or leaves of willow trees, which contain salicin, which is related to aspirin, so—”
“Shut. Up,” Katherine said fiercely.
Alex did.
This was Katherine at her worst: Katherine grumpy, Katherine embittered, Katherine mad at the world and ready to blame everyone else for her problems. Jonah’s usual strategy when Katherine was like this was to avoid her like the plague.
(The plague! Oh, no—had that happened yet? Was it happening now? Were they all going to get bubonic fever because JB had refused to let them go home?)
To Jonah’s surprise, Chip and Alex weren’t rushing to get away from Katherine in her venom-spewing mood. Chip actually went over to stand beside her and pat her shoulder. Alex picked up the loaf of bread.
“You would probably feel better if you ate something,” he said in a low, comforting voice. “We’ve already messed up the breakfast tray, so we might as well get some good out of it.”
He pinched a piece of bread from the bottom of the loaf, where it wouldn’t be so noticeable, and handed it to Katherine.
She put it in her mouth—Jonah saw that it disappeared instantly, as soon as her almost-invisible lips closed around it. But he decided this wasn’t the right moment to point out the results of that science experiment.
Katherine chewed, swallowed, and then managed a weak smile.
“That wasn’t too bad,” she said. “Not as good as Panera or Einstein Bros., but edible at least. Just a little hard and salty.” Alex handed her another chunk of bread, but she hesitated before putting it in her mouth. “Maybe we should all eat? So we can keep our energy up and think straight?”
They ended up hollowing out the loaf of bread, so that, on the tray, the crust still looked domed and firm and whole. They also cleaned up the beer and oatmeal spills.
“Okay, so we changed time, but there aren’t going to be that many people who notice,” Katherine said. “Not because of this tray, anyway.”
She sneaked a doleful glance at Chip and Alex. She didn’t have to say it out loud, that hollowed-out bread didn’t matter when a king and a prince had vanished.
Chip clenched his jaw.
“It could have been rats that ate the food,” he said in a hard voice. “Those guys were talking about rats last night.”
Rats, Jonah thought. Bread. Oatmeal. Aspirin. Even the bubonic plague … It was so much easier to think about and talk about things that didn’t really matter right now. But that left them stuck in a stone room in the fifteenth century forever.
He sighed.
“About last night …,” he began. “Was it just me, or did none of that make sense?”
“What do you mean?” Katherine asked in her snippiest voice. Jonah happened to know—only because he’d been living with her his entire life—that she sounded like that only when she was trying not to cry.
“You know,” Jonah said. “I’m not exactly an expert on assassination attempts, or the fifteenth century, or anything else. But why were those guys trying to kill Chip and Alex by throwing them out the window? Wouldn’t it be easier to just stab them? Or—if you really want to be secret about it—just suffocate them with a pillow?”
Chip and Alex both winced. Katherine only stared down at the secretly massacred bread.
“Those guys were only trying to keep things a secret when they first came into the room,” Alex said. “If you want to keep things a secret, you don’t stand in a courtyard in the middle of the night yelling, ‘Where are the bodies?’ You don’t storm up the stairs with torches and search the royal chambers.” He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe … mayb
e they wanted to make it look like we fell to the ground accidentally. Like we died because we were trying to escape.”
“Died trying to escape,” Katherine said. “Of course!” She looked up now, as if it made her feel better to know at least some information. “In dictatorships, when there are political prisoners and the dictator has them executed without a fair trial, they always say they died trying to escape. We talked about that in social studies.”
Jonah thought that sixth-grade social studies must have gotten a lot more brutal since he’d taken it. Oh, wait—Katherine had the really hard teacher, Mrs. Hatchett, the one everyone tried to avoid getting.
“England isn’t a dictatorship,” Chip said stiffly, almost as if he was offended. “A monarchy, sure, but we have Parliament, too. Representative government.” Something like surprise spread over his nearly see-through face. “That’s weird. I can still think like him.”
Nobody had to ask. “Him” was Edward V.
“Did he know what was going on last night?” Jonah asked. “Or …” He glanced over at Alex. “Did the prince know?”
Alex and Chip exchanged glances.
“Things have gotten very weird lately,” Chip said slowly. “It’s complicated.”
“Maybe if you tell us—when did things start getting weird?” Jonah suggested. He looked down at the trayful of beer and oatmeal, at his own virtually transparent hands. “What’s normal around here, anyway?”
Chip frowned.
“It was normal that I became king when my father died,” he said. “Everybody expected that.”
Katherine opened her mouth, and Jonah thought she was going to object to Chip’s talking about the king as “I” again. But she only said, “Go on.”
“When I heard the news, I was at home—where I lived—at Ludlow Castle with my uncle,” Chip said.
“You lived with the guy who wanted to kill you?” Jonah asked, horrified.
Chip squinted, as if remembering. Or as if it took effort to translate his fifteenth-century memories into explanations the other kids would understand.
“No, no, a different uncle,” he said. “On the other side. I lived with Lord Rivers, who’s my mother’s brother. There’s kind of … bad blood between the two sides. It’s like our father’s family thinks our mother’s family is greedy and ambitious and, I don’t know, kind of lower class and tacky.”
“But they’re not!” Alex interrupted.
“No, no, of course not!” Chip said. “On our grandmother’s side they’ve got royal blood dating back to Charlemagne!”
Jonah couldn’t remember when Charlemagne lived, but he kind of thought he was French. If they were going to skip back to a whole other king, in a whole other country, this was going to take forever.
“Let’s go back to you becoming king,” Jonah said. “What happened then?”
“Lord Rivers said I needed to travel to London for my coronation,” Chip said. “He said it had to happen fast.” Somehow Chip sounded younger now, like he really was the twelve-year-old king. And he said “Lord Rivers” in such an admiring tone—no self-respecting teenaged boy would talk that way about anyone but a sports star.
“So Lord Rivers took you to London right away?” Jonah asked.
To Jonah’s surprise, Chip’s bottom lip began trembling. This was something Jonah would have thought was impossible, when Chip’s face looked so much like crystal. But, incredibly, Chip seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“No,” Chip practically whimpered. “Not because he didn’t want to! There were … arrangements to make! Troops to prepare, to make sure I was safe. And so … nobody could steal my throne—”
“Wait a minute,” Katherine interrupted. “Are we in London now or at that Ludlow Castle place?”
It was funny—Jonah hadn’t even thought to wonder that. One scary fifteenth-century castlelike place was pretty much like another, as far as he was concerned.
“London,” Chip said forlornly. “Ludlow Castle is miles and miles away. It took five days just to get from Ludlow Castle to Stony Stratford.”
Another strange name to keep track of.
“And Stony Stratford is …,” Jonah prompted.
The wobbly lip was back.
“Where it happened,” Chip whispered.
THIRTEEN
Jonah waited. It was hard enough trying to tiptoe around Katherine’s feelings, without having to worry about Chip now too. Jonah would rather dodge flaming torches again than see Chip cry.
But, to Jonah’s surprise, Chip lifted his head, almost regally.
“We were marching with two thousand soldiers,” he said. “All loyal to me. All there to protect me. We were supposed to meet Gloucester and Buckingham”—he said these names sneeringly, without titles—“in Northampton. But Lord Rivers said we should press on to Stony Stratford, fourteen miles away, fourteen miles closer to London.”
“Gloucester is our uncle on our father’s side,” Alex contributed. “Buckingham is his friend.”
“Oh,” Jonah said. “Where were you for all of this?”
“With our mother,” Alex said. “Already in London. But I’m the younger brother, remember? I don’t really matter.”
It bothered Jonah that Alex could talk like that. But Alex only shrugged and turned his attention back to Chip.
“We stopped at an inn,” Chip said. “And Lord Rivers told me to rest for the night while he rode back to meet the others. Gloucester and Buckingham and their men.”
“Did he take the two thousand soldiers or leave them with you?” Katherine asked. Jonah was surprised that Katherine would ask that question.
Chip flinched.
“He … he left them with me,” Chip said. “Practically all of them.” He sighed.
“And?” Jonah whispered.
Chip pounded his fist on the table, so suddenly that the mugs wobbled on the tray.
“Gloucester tricked Lord Rivers,” Chip said. “They went out drinking together, all nice and friendly. And then the next morning he had Lord Rivers arrested. It wasn’t fair. It was … it was traitorous!”
Outrage gleamed in his eyes.
“But you weren’t arrested, were you?” Jonah said. “You had the soldiers.”
Chip was staring off into the distance, remembering.
“That morning I was already on my horse, ready to ride on toward London. Everyone said that we should push on, that we shouldn’t wait for Lord Rivers. That … scared me. I knew Lord Rivers wouldn’t desert me. But when you’re king, you’re not allowed to show fear. So I was sitting up straight, leading the way … and then Gloucester came, galloping through my troops.”
Jonah, who’d only ever ridden a horse once, at Boy Scout camp, could practically hear the hoofbeats.
“Gloucester’s a determined-looking man, you know?” Chip said wistfully. “He always acts like he knows he’s right. And he has a way of saying things that you know are wrong, but he makes you feel like you shouldn’t argue. You don’t think of what you should say back to him until hours later.”
“So, what did he say?” Katherine asked.
“He bowed down to me,” Chip said. “He said I was the king.”
Jonah did a double take.
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “I thought you were the king.”
He wondered if he’d missed some huge chunk of this story.
“It was deceitful,” Chip said, his voice wavering. “If Gloucester had just attacked me, straight-out, my soldiers would have protected me. My chamberlain, Thomas Vaughan, would have given his life for mine. But no, Gloucester goes on and on about how loyal he is to me, and how my father left him the task of being my protector while I’m underage, and so he’s going to accompany me to London, not Lord Rivers. And he said we didn’t need all the soldiers, because that might scare people in London into thinking there was going to be some big battle, and so all the soldiers should go home, and I should leave my chamberlain behind too and just go with Gloucester and Buckin
gham.”
“And you agreed to that?” Katherine asked.
“I’m just a kid, okay?” Chip said. “And Gloucester was saying all the right things, and I didn’t know yet that he’d had Lord Rivers arrested.” He hesitated. “It was like we were playing poker, and Gloucester could see all of the cards in my hand, and I didn’t know anything about his. But I stood up to him later! Later, as we were riding away, he said that my father had had bad advisers, and that they were the reason he’d died, because they’d let him eat and drink way too much, and that’s why he was going to protect me. And I said, ‘Sir, do not malign my father’s memory. I trust his judgment, and I trust the advisers he gave me.’”
Chip sounded so proud and fierce saying that. But then he slumped against the wall.
“That only made Gloucester say, ‘Ah, and I’m glad of that, for I am the main adviser your father left you.’ And he smiled, and it was just like a fox, or a wolf—I should have told my soldiers to attack! I should have fought for Lord Rivers!”
Now Chip was scaring Jonah. Jonah tried to think of something to calm him down, but Katherine was already begging for the next part of the story.
“So then he locked you up and wouldn’t let you act like a king?” she asked eagerly.
“Nooo,” Chip said. “I was signing documents, I was going to council meetings, we were planning for my coronation, the big ceremony when I’d get my crown. … My brother came to join me here so he could play his part in the coronation too!”
“So, what was your problem?” Jonah asked, frustrated. “What do you have against Gloucester? Just because he’s your father’s brother, not your mother’s …”
“Everything changed,” Chip said. “Nobody would tell me anything! But suddenly there weren’t any more council meetings to go to, and I hadn’t seen Gloucester in days, and the servants acted like I was sick or something, like I had to stay in my room or the courtyard … they even moved my room to another place where I’d be ‘safer.’ This is the Tower of London, you know? It’s the palace. But lately … lately it started seeming like I was a prisoner here.”
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