Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  Just because the world likes balance doesn’t mean that the weights and the counterweights are always good ones.

  George didn’t worry about that. He put all his energy into trying to work out how to keep that knife from cutting into the fragile pulse pumping in Edie’s neck.

  Little Tragedy walked past him, toward the Walker. He was holding something down by his side, slightly behind his back, something shiny.

  “No,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come here, because it’s the first place he’d look, innit? And now he’s got you again, and I’m sorry he got you the first time. . . .”

  It was the Walker who realized it first. It was the Walker who saw that the moisture on the boy’s bronze cheekbone was real tears, and knew that the catch in the voice was crying, and it was the Walker who understood, just fatally too soon, that Little Tragedy was going to try to rescue Edie.

  “Get back!” he shrieked, pointing the dagger at him.

  “No,” said Little Tragedy, and leaped for him.

  The shiny thing he had been holding at his side was a gin bottle he must have taken from the Black Friar’s pub. He moved surprisngly fast, and got his wiry little body between the dagger and Edie. He grabbed the Walker’s wrist with one hand, keeping the blade away from her as he smashed the bottle on the side of the Walker’s head with the other.

  “Leave her alone!” he yelled.

  It almost worked. But the Walker hacked Tragedy’s legs from under him with a brutal kick, and as the boy fell, they all saw the speed with which the Walker freed his knife hand and slashed the blade through the falling figure, in a movement that was almost balletic in its elegance and power.

  Before Edie could make even one step away from the Walker, he had the knife back at her throat, and Tragedy was sprawled at her feet, looking in horror at the terrible wound that had almost cut him in half.

  “Look,” he said, his eyes dimming. “Look. I’m hollow. I knew it. I ain’t . . . there’s no . . .”

  “Stop your whining,” spat the Walker, and kicked him so hard that his torso hinged back off his legs and sprawled on its back.

  George saw Tragedy staring at him in shock, upside down.

  “I told you I was made wrong. . . . Nothing in there. No heart . . .”

  And then his eyes rolled back, and he died.

  “Poor little bugger had a heart in the end,” growled the Gunner.

  “Oh do shut up your sentimental claptrap,” hissed the Walker, seemingly oblivious to the damage Little Tragedy’s attack had done to the side of his head. “Where is this stone arm you say has the darkness in it? I would enjoy having the darkness in my power for a change. I’m sure I could encourage it to lift my curse. I imagine we could even enter into a more beneficial partnership.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first,” said the Gunner.

  “You will all do exactly what I tell you, or I shall open her smooth little neck and we shall all see the color of her blood on this white, white snow.” The Walker smiled. “Where is this stone arm?”

  George looked at Edie. She tore her eyes from Little Tragedy’s broken body at her feet.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Whatever you do. It’s okay.”

  “Go and get it for me, boy,” said the Walker licking his lips as if he could already taste the power he was about to get control of. “Give me the darkness and I will let the girl go free.”

  George spared a quick look at Tragedy’s lifeless eyes.

  “All right.” He nodded.

  “Wait . . .” said the Queen.

  “You can’t trust him,” agreed the Gunner.

  “Have you got a better plan?” said George, looking at them both. He could see they didn’t. They looked as frozen by this as he felt. And so he knew what he had to do.

  “Don’t,” said Edie.

  “I’m not going to watch him kill you just to keep himself amused,” George said flatly. “Not amused.”

  “Very sensible,” spat the Walker. “Go get it, boy.”

  George turned and walked past the shocked faces of the Gunner and the Queen, over to the chariot. He reached behind the front wall and hoisted out a bundle and walked across to the Walker.

  “Don’t hurt her,” he said, his voice trembling a fraction. “Please don’t hurt her.”

  “George,” pleaded Edie. “Don’t . . .”

  “Just don’t hurt her,” repeated George, the tremble growing as he avoided Edie’s eyes. He looked like the frightened boy she had seen from the very beginning. He looked tired and beaten. “Really. There are better ways . . .”

  “Of course I won’t hurt her,” lied the Walker. “Not if you give me the bundle and stop your whining.”

  He reached for the bundle. George let him have it.

  And as the Walker scrabbled the wrapping open, George straightened up and looked Edie right in the eye, all the trembling and illusion of weakness suddenly gone.

  “Edie,” he said. “You know how you never do anything anyone tells you?”

  She looked straight back at him.

  “Close your eyes.”

  And she did.

  The Walker laughed as he unwrapped the bundle.

  The sudden shriek of terror with which he greeted the contents was cut off as abruptly as it had begun, frozen on his snarling lips as they and the rest of him instantly turned to stone.

  The glare of the Gorgon’s head, which George had handed him instead of the bundle with the arm in it, literally petrified the Walker, changing flesh and blood into a rough granite, greasy and crazed with flaws.

  “It’s the Medusa, isn’t it?” said Edie, her eyes still shut. “Not ‘amused.’ Medusa.”

  “Yup,” said George as the Gunner stepped across and covered the Medusa’s head. “The Sphinx told me to remember that riddle.”

  The Queen met his gaze and smiled. “I’m glad you did,” she said.

  Edie opened her eyes and twisted out from the Walker’s grip, and they all stood and looked at him. He had been turned into a grotesque statue, eyes ripped wide with horror, mouth rictussed into a scream, long coat dramatically whipped back as if blasted by a great and sudden wind, his naked fear and weakness immortalized in stone for all the world to see.

  “I’m not much of one for poetry,” said the Gunner, “but that’s the kind of justice I like.”

  “The world balances stuff out,” said George. “Let’s get this finished.”

  He and Edie walked back to the chariot and got the other bundle containing the stone arm. And while the spits watched, they worked quietly together, freeing the sword from the Stone and pulling apart the crack wide enough to put the arm in. Then they closed up the crack, so that the London Stone looked as it always had and always would.

  And if the Stone was a bit larger in the days to come, no one would notice because no one ever saw what was important about it anyway, if they ever noticed it at all.

  “He, um . . .” began Edie, nodding toward Little Tragedy.

  “Yeah,” said George, standing decisively and pulling her to her feet. “Absolutely.”

  The Gunner, the Queen, and the two soldiers watched George and Edie work on the broken boy. Because they were not close enough, they didn’t see the small shape that Edie outlined inside the boy’s chest before she and George closed him up and made the join smooth with their hands.

  “I know,” she said quietly, seeing George’s smile. “Sentimental claptrap. You’re smiling because you think I’m being stupid. But he tried to save me. And yeah, I know none of them have really got them. But it’ll mean something to him because he cared about not having one.”

  “They may not have them that we could see if we cut them open, but they’ve got them where it counts,” said George. “And you know why I think that is?”

  “Why?” she said.

  “It’s what my dad used to say: If you’re going to make anything good, anything worthwhile, you have to put your heart in it. That’s why I’m smiling. Not becaus
e I think it’s stupid. Because you knew that without being told.”

  And once more he hoisted her to her feet, and they stretched and looked around them.

  “What are we going to do with that?” said Edie, nodding at the new statue of the Walker.

  “Leave him to rot,” said the Gunner.

  “No,” said George. “I think everyone should enjoy this. Bring him.”

  “Where?” said Edie.

  “I know just the place,” said George. And as the Gunner loaded the Walker’s statue onto the chariot, they handed Little Tragedy and the remains of the Duke to the two soldiers, who carried them away with a smile, promising to get them back on their plinths by turn o’day.

  “So. You are both master makers,” said the Queen quietly, sounding impressed for the first time ever. “That has never happened.”

  “No.” The Gunner grinned. “Mind you, there’s a lot of that about.”

  “How can that be?” the Queen said, looking from one to the other.

  And as they rode slowly back through the snow, Edie told her. When she got to the bit about seeing her mother and George’s father on the bridge, the Queen stopped the horses and looked hard at them both.

  “So you think this man, this man who was George’s father, is your father too?”

  Edie looked at George. “Feels about right, yeah,” she said carefully.

  He gave her a complicated look, as if saying it out loud had jerked things to a level he hadn’t quite got a handle on yet. Probably because he hadn’t known it was there in the first place.

  As they walked on to Trafalgar Square, they passed other spits returning to their plinths, often carrying the broken bodies of others who had fallen in the great battle so that they could be healed by turn o’day when it came.

  At Trafalgar Square they picked up a chariot load of shattered bodies that needed to be taken in the direction they were going. They saw that some spits were returning for a second load and were now carrying dead taints as well. This was because Bulldog had persuaded them that most of the malice in them had been whipped up to an unaccustomed frenzy by the darkness and the Ice Devil, and that London would be a drearier place without them.

  Edie caught George looking from the Walker’s statue in the chariot to the empty plinth on the northwest corner of the piazza.

  “George . . .” she began, realizing what he had in mind.

  “Why not?” he said. “Every victory needs a monument.”

  “He’d hate it,” she said, grinning slowly. “Everyone seeing him scared and beaten.”

  In no time, George organized a line of spits to pass the Walker from one to the other and up onto the empty plinth, and they all stood for a moment, enjoying the sight.

  Then the Gunner hoisted the lifeless body of the Officer onto his shoulders, and George and Edie walked between him and the Queen, who led her horses on foot.

  “What are we going to do now?” asked Edie as they walked along the Mall.

  “We’re going to the Natural History Museum. I’m going to mend the carving I broke,” George replied. “And then we’re going home.”

  “George . . .” said Edie.

  There was so much that was impossible about the last sentence that she didn’t know where to begin. She just ran right out of words and shook her head.

  “I know,” he said. “But after everything we’ve done, everything we’ve seen, everything that’s impossible, explaining you to my mum is only going to be . . . difficult.”

  He looped his arm companionably over her shoulder. She let it ride for a couple of steps.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “My arm,” replied George. “Get used to it.”

  And he left it there.

  As they and the Red Queen and the Gunner walked together into the west, and the sun ahead of them lowered into an increasingly golden sky, time started again, not in a jerk, but slowly: the snow seemed to melt away gently before their eyes, and as the whiteness disappeared from everything, the color bloomed back into the city around them, like spring returning. Movement began as people slowly appeared again in this layer of London. First they faded back in slow-motion, almost like animated watercolors of themselves—pale opaque ghosts that slowly became denser and richer as they passed.

  “George,” said Edie. “The black mirrors turned white.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “I was thinking about that.”

  “The black mirrors led to the outer darkness,” she said. “What do you think happens if you go through the white mirrors?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, yawning. Edie saw it and caught the yawn herself.

  And it seemed the most natural thing in the world when George looked down and saw that she had snaked her arm easily around his waist.

  The Gunner grinned and stole a look at the Queen. She raised an eyebrow, the merest hint of an answering smile twitching the side of her mouth before she got it under control as they all walked together into the bustling life and color that was returning to warm the stone heart of the city.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Just as George and Edie might not have found their way safely to the end of their journey without the help of a strong mentor like the Gunner, I wouldn’t have got their story into print like this without the help of my own extraordinary friend and guide Kate Jones. Kate was without doubt one of the all-time good guys, someone who got the joke (and greeted it with a gurgling and deeply infectious laugh). She had a really great mind and an even bigger heart. She died with terrible suddenness just as I was setting off on the third leg of this trilogy, and I still find it hard to write about her in the past tense. So, Kate, I’m going to use the present tense, not just out of denial but because you are in my heart as I write, as you are in the hearts of so many of the large tribe of friends and colleagues: I owe you more than I could ever repay, for which—now and forever— thank you.

  I am also very grateful for the good-humored and painstaking care taken by everyone at Hachette, especially my excellent editor Anne McNeil, who, along with Rachel Wade, helped me to get out of my own way more times than I am comfortable remembering.

  As I began, so I end: Mom and Dad, thank you again for all you’ve given me, especially for passing on the love of stories. Jack and Ari, these books are for you. I hope you go out into the world and find the magic all around you. It’s just a matter of looking with an open heart.

  And finally, Domenica, thanks for everything, especially for being the magic that I found.