The Court of Miracles

by Kester Grant

  I nod. “We don’t have much time.”

  “But what about the gendarmes?” St. Juste asks.

  I wink at Montparnasse. “Forget the gendarmes.”

  On the way across the city, Montparnasse leaves us, but Gavroche, my ever-silent shadow, remains. He takes my hand and stretches up to whisper in my ear.

  “He has her,” is all he says.

  My heart contracts.

  Focus, Nina. It’s all part of the plan. Don’t think of Ettie now.

  The City knows something is coming and lies silent, waiting. Like a cemetery, the streets are empty, wrapped in thick fog. All around there’s a metallic tenseness to the air, the breath drawn by the crowd before the hanging man steps off the platform.

  Those Who Walk by Day cower behind their locked doors.

  The City has a long memory. The people don’t forget. The last time the children of the City rose, when their numbers were great and their hearts burned for change, there was no mercy for them. Neither woman nor child was spared. The streets ran red with blood.

  I shudder.

  We take the back way, knowing that the army is probably already on the march. We choose alleys and narrow roads where soldiers would find it hard to walk two abreast. But we can’t avoid the smell of saltpeter, and the eerie soundlessness of a city that usually roars with life, even in the latest hours.

  St. Juste suddenly comes to a halt. I don’t need to look up at the street signs to know where we are. I can tell by taste, by touch. I wear this city on the soles of my feet.

  “Rue Villmert,” St. Juste says. His eyes narrow. “We’re near the first cell. There should be more noise than this….”

  He’s right. From all the talk, I expected a barricade manned by students drinking and cheering. There should be anything but this unnatural silence. Still, I shake my head.

  “Perhaps they heeded Orso’s warning and called it off,” I suggest, not believing my own words.

  St. Juste frowns at me, then makes up his mind and sets off down the street toward the avenue Ficelle, where the cell should be.

  At least the flag still flies, red as the blood of angry men—or so Grantaire informed me one particularly drunken night. It protrudes from the top of an impossible structure built of barrels, tables, and chairs, anything that could be spared or ransacked from nearby houses.

  “No…,” St. Juste says, and I hear the unfiltered rage in his voice.

  For this is not the sight of a waiting protest, of young men preparing to fight. A smell hangs in the air—it is a smell of slaughter and death, the air foul with human waste and blood. And when we go closer, we see them: the dead festoon the barricade like garlands, the bodies of men, women, even children tossed up against the structure at awkward, unnatural angles. They lie at our feet, a carpet of ruined flesh. Their shattered remains are not tragic figures made beautiful in paintings, but the bleeding, open corpses of true battle, guts, excrement, and all.

  I bend down and force myself to gently touch the corpse of a small girl. She is not yet cold. They have been dead for scarcely an hour.

  “Monsters,” St. Juste says. “We will show them no mercy.”

  I glance around, my heart heavy. The barricade stands, not dismantled or burned or broken in any way; there are no soldiers’ bodies. The enemy took the cell completely unaware, trapping them against their own wall and killing them where they stood, as they could have done only if they knew where the barricade was going up.

  “I told you, St. Juste. Orso told you. You are betrayed! We must get back and call off the uprising. It has no chance of success.”

  St. Juste’s gaze sweeps the dead, the barricade that rises behind them.

  “We must recover the flag,” he says, an edge of certainty creeping back into his voice.

  Gavroche perks up beside me.

  “What?” It’s such a ridiculously St. Juste thing to want to do. “We don’t have time! We must warn the others.”

  “The flag is the symbol of what these men and women died for,” he says, his voice rising in anger, anguish pouring out of him.

  “St. Juste, please,” I say desperately, fear welling in me, tears in my eyes. “It’s a piece of cloth! I’ll steal you a hundred flags!”

  I don’t understand why I’m shaking, or so angry, or so afraid. He is one of Those Who Walk by Day, and a means to an end….Surely it shouldn’t matter to me if he wants to pluck flags from barricades and march off to his death.

  But I can’t turn away from his face, so earnest, even with a long smear of dirt across it and rage burning in his eyes.

  Time seems to slow. I see St. Juste’s eyes widen in horror. For there, behind us, is Gavroche, high on barricade, reaching for the flag. He’s almost got it, just a bit farther to go, but that distance is enough to expose him to any soldiers who have been ordered to remain behind….

  I scream for Gavroche and leap at the barrier, but St. Juste is closer. He hurls himself upward. Gavroche has the flag wrapped in his hands now, and he turns and smiles triumphantly at us.

  Gunshot pierces the air as St. Juste collides with him, and time speeds up again as they fall and I fall. There is the sharp shock of ground, the rattling of bones, a promise of future pain. And a heap next to me—a small gray boy and a young man in a coat of scarlet.

  I wrench myself up and drag myself toward them. Gavroche is facedown, tucked into St. Juste’s arms. My heart thuds in my ears; the air is thick with the smell of saltpeter, gunpowder, dust, and sweat. I turn him over. There is blood everywhere.

  Gavroche blinks at me. He’s still holding on to the damned flag. I grab him, checking him for a wound…checking him for any sort of injury. I feel a terrible relief flooding over me. He is not hurt; they must have missed! But where did all this blood come from? Then I notice that Gavroche is looking at St. Juste, his large eyes full of fear.

  St. Juste is marble white, the elegantly carved angles of his face in stark relief against the brightness of his blazing eyes.

  He has a hole in his side, small and black, and the dark blood blooms around it. I can barely hear my voice shouting at him as I tear a length of his shirt and press it to the wound. I scream at Gavroche to get help. I manage to bind the cloth tight, pulling it all the way around him, and tears start to blur my vision.

  “Look at me, you stupid, useless, pointless…” My words fail me, but the venom in them snaps him out of his dream and he focuses on my face.

  “Nina,” he says, lifting a trembling hand to my cheek.

  “Don’t you ‘Nina’ me. You’ve got a bullet in you, and we have to get out of here, because there are soldiers and they are going to kill us.”

  He smiles then, and it is like the rising sun. Even in the chaos it takes my breath away.

  “Here, lean on me…,” I say. I try to raise him as I stand, but his body slumps. “St. Juste, for Rennart’s sake!”

  He blinks up at me.

  “It’s raining,” he says. His voice has lowered to a delirious whisper.

  The drops fall gently at first, washing the grime and blood from his face. The City is weeping for her children.

  “Rain will make the flowers grow…,” he murmurs in a singsong voice.

  “Are you singing?” I say in horror.

  I slap him hard across the face. And he recoils in shock. He stares at me with wide, focused eyes.

  “So help me, St. Juste, if you don’t get a grip and stand up, I will shoot you again myself.”

  He gives a gurgle of weak laughter at that. “You wouldn’t,” he says with assurance.

  “Don’t tempt me—it’d be a whole lot easier to get out of here if I weren’t dragging a useless Frenchman with me.”

  “No,” he insists. “You wouldn’t shoot me because you don’t have a gun.”

  “Of course I do. I stole you
r pistol ten minutes ago.”

  I manage to drag St. Juste down two roads before Gavroche returns with le Maire. The giant takes one look at St. Juste and gently hoists the boy over his shoulder, ignoring his complaints of pain. Le Maire is a machine, and both Gavroche and I jog to keep up with him as he speeds down alleyways to the rue Musain.

  Grantaire answers my thundering at the door. There are dark circles under his eyes, and he’s got a pistol stuffed untidily into his breeches. He takes one look at St. Juste and yells for Feuilly. Suddenly the students are everywhere, wresting St. Juste from le Maire’s grasp and carrying him away.

  “Grantaire, you must call it all off!”

  The words come tumbling out, though I know that with them I might be losing the boys’ aid.

  “The palace knows your plans, and the army has been dispatched to all of the cell positions.”

  I follow him like a shadow, almost tripping over the stacks of rifles piled up in the corridor.

  “We just came from the avenue Ficelle. The cell has been wiped out.”

  Feuilly has set St. Juste up in the kitchen and is shouting orders, getting others to boil water and cut sheets into bandages.

  “You can’t all be tending to him,” Grantaire snaps. “I want the first ten of you ready to go on ahead.”

  The students break away from St. Juste and rush back into the salon, leaving me alone with Grantaire, St. Juste, and Feuilly. Feuilly has St. Juste sprawled across four chairs. He looks half dead; his eyes are closed.

  “Grantaire! Did you not hear what I said? You are not still sending them out? The Société is compromised. You must abort the plans.”

  Grantaire frowns at me and says firmly, “We shared Orso’s suspicions with the Société, and the courier has just this minute brought word back that the plan is to proceed. Barricades are set up around the city. Our time has come.”

  I gape at him in amazement.

  “We’ve been planning this for years. We know what they’re doing,” he finishes, slight worry punctuating the veneer of his confident words.

  They don’t believe me.

  They killed one-third of the mice for reason, and one-third for sport. Then the cats hanged the six little mice before all of their brethren to teach the mice fear. The guillotine is for those the City loves; Montfaucon is for the rest of us. These boys will surely hang.

  Desperately, I swing around to St. Juste.

  “Wake him up!” I tell Feuilly.

  Feuilly shakes his head as he ties off the length of cloth around St. Juste’s middle. “He’s in shock. He needs to rest.”

  In one movement I grab a bucket of water that Feuilly had the students fill earlier and unceremoniously dump it over St. Juste’s head.

  He sits up, spluttering, as Grantaire grabs at me.

  “St. Juste, tell them the Société is compromised,” I demand. “Tell them what we’ve seen.”

  St. Juste can barely focus. Feuilly props him up and glares at me.

  “Tell them what we saw at the avenue Ficelle,” I say again. “Everyone was dead, Grantaire. It’s a trap. You are betrayed.”

  “Betrayed? Yes,” St. Juste says, color rising in his cheeks. “But the question is, Who has betrayed us?”

  I frown.

  “You and your allies took our money and provided us with weapons and information, and just when we needed you most, you backed out.”

  “Wh-what?”

  I stare at St. Juste, remembering with sudden clarity how he showed up at the palace with the flimsiest of excuses, how he asked me why I was talking to the Sûreté officer.

  “The spy in the Société, the reason the Guilds won’t back us. The ambush on the street. Did you do it all?” St. Juste asks me.

  “Is that why you followed me to the ball? You think I am the traitor?”

  “You cannot deny that you’re known to Sûreté agents and royalty alike. Curious, is it not? We all know you have other priorities. Perhaps we too easily forgot that you and your kind are criminals after all,” Grantaire finishes.

  You and your kind.

  And I thought for a moment that perhaps I could be one of them. Clearly, they never thought so.

  “Do you really think I could betray you?” I ask.

  “I think you would do anything to find that girl.” Grantaire’s words are like knives. “She’s all that matters to you.”

  He thinks that I lost her; they all think so. I’ve played my part so well that nobody believes anything other than what I have shown them.

  I snap. With one swipe I pull out the pistol I stole from St. Juste and point it straight at his heart.

  “There is no time for these histrionics,” I say sharply.

  He takes a second to realize what I’ve done. They all freeze, and I look at them grimly.

  “Are you going to shoot me again?” His voice is like ice.

  “Again?”

  “I didn’t see who shot me at the barricade—were you trying to make sure I wouldn’t come back and warn my brothers that we had been betrayed?”

  “The day I shoot you, St. Juste, it won’t be a flesh wound. My kind are unlikely to miss. Being criminals, we tend to have very good aim.” I yell for one of the students to come. “Joly!”

  Joly enters the kitchen and, seeing me with the gun, stops and stares.

  “Where is this courier? Find the courier or I’ll shoot St. Juste. You know I’m capable of it. Me being one of those criminal elements.”

  I press the gun deeper into St. Juste’s chest. He barely flinches, measures me up with his eyes, and nods at Joly.

  Joly goes thundering off, his footsteps echoing as he scarpers to the back of the house.

  In seconds the doorway is full of anxious and curious boys. Some have weapons in their hands but hold them in a halfhearted manner, not sure what to do. Then Joly is back, pushing past them and dragging someone with him.

  I turn my gaze from St. Juste to the doorway as the boys part to let the courier through.

  I stare for a full trembling minute. Then I start to laugh, great belly-shaking, exhaustion-laden laughter that hits me like a wave. I lower my weapon.

  Seeing my weakness, St. Juste tackles me, wresting the gun from my loose grasp, and we land in a heap on the floor. The boys are all shouting, but I can’t stop laughing.

  St. Juste has me pinned to the floor, his body holding mine heavily in place. Mostly because I’m too busy giggling to struggle. With one free hand he passes Grantaire the pistol. Grantaire takes it and trains it on me. Enraged at the tears of laughter pouring down my face, he demands to know what’s so funny.

  “D-don’t you know who that is?” I splutter, trying desperately to calm myself.

  They all look at the courier, a woman in a dingy, patched oilcloth coat with a single untidy tendril of red hair spilling from her cap.

  “Rennart’s balls, St. Juste. You’re all fools. That’s Inspector Javert of the Sûreté.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Grantaire retorts. “This is the courier. She’s been bringing us messages from the Société for months.”

  Of course she has. Her mouth is a grim line, and a vein at her neck throbs angrily.

  “She was there at the ball tonight, in the Salon de la Reine with the queen. The dauphin told me that the Société was created to flush out the enemies of the Crown. The Société itself is a lie.”

  St. Juste looks at the inspector.

  “She’s lying,” Javert spits, but I see her eyes darting around, measuring the distance to the door, counting the people in the room.

  “You don’t have to believe me. Ask Orso. Ask any of my people. They all know who she is.” I grin maliciously at her. “Or you can ask the gentleman I arrived with.”

  St. Juste orders them to call my companion in.

 
There are footsteps and a deep voice. Then le Maire enters, his form filling the doorway. He takes in the scene and stops when he sees Javert.

  Her eyes widen. Her face blanches.

  “You,” she says.

  Le Maire looks at her. His face is a strange war of emotions. “Inspector.”

  She lurches at him, but two of the students catch her between them.

  Javert lifts her chin defiantly. St. Juste takes his pistol back from Grantaire and trains it on her.

  “You stupid children. You will never succeed.” Javert’s face wrinkles in a sneer. “We know your names, your associates, each member of your family. There’s nowhere you can hide from us. We are coming for you.”

  St. Juste’s face is a mask of rage. His hand trembles, but he cocks the pistol.

  For a moment I think he’ll shoot her. Then he lowers the gun.

  “Take her away,” St. Juste says.

  An unrepentant Javert is led out, with le Maire following slowly behind.

  Grantaire suddenly realizes that I’m still lying on the floor, and he tries to help me up. I push him away.

  “You should have shot her,” I say to St. Juste as I sit up.

  “She’s a woman,” St. Juste says.

  I look at them in despair. Their illogical upper-class breeding so often overrules common sense.

  “She was going to lead you to your deaths.”

  St. Juste’s brow is furrowed. He’s trying to regroup his thoughts.

  “All the information,” he says. “All of our orders have been compromised.” He looks at me like a lost boy. “She and other couriers from the Société have carried messages to our brothers throughout the city. They’ve all gone out to fight.”

  “Then they’re all betrayed,” I say quietly.

  “We can’t let them stand alone.”

  “All probability says they’re dead,” I say, repeating his words back to him. “If you go out there to join them, you’ll die too.”

  “What else would you have us do?” he asks. His eyes are haunted. “We cannot leave our brothers to lie broken in the streets while we sit here in safety.”