My Lady Jane(70)

Gifford.

The sense of elation faded as she remembered her predicament and now that she was . . . a something . . . she would likely be burned at the stake as well.

But her animal self was small, she knew that, and maybe she could do something useful now.

She hopped over to the door. There was a large crack beneath it, not quite big enough for a human fist to fit underneath. But maybe she could fit?

Jane shoved her face into the crack beneath the door. Her head went right under, followed by her shoulders, but the rest of her body stuck a little.

That was embarrassing.

She squeezed and scrambled and pushed until she popped out of the other side.

There was more light in the corridor. Twilight to her human self, but she could see quite easily now, at least within a few feet. Everything beyond that seemed fuzzy and oddly flat. Everything was shades of gray, too, except a faint red cast to some things, like the light of a lantern on the wall.

So her vision wasn’t that great, but she was small and close to the floor, so what did she need with fantastic distance vision, anyway? She had other senses. Better senses.

Jane scurried to the edge of the first stair and paused, looking down. What was nothing particularly difficult in her human form suddenly appeared quite challenging. She couldn’t just step down.

She pressed her belly to the stone floor and pushed her front paws ahead of her, sliding down the first stair until her paws touched the next. The rest of her body followed with an awkward flop. She repeated this process a few more times until she found a better way to control her rogue hindquarters and moved down the stairs at a quicker pace.

At the first landing, she found the guards. She was the size of their boots. She resisted the urge to smell all their interesting, earthy aromas, and instead streaked past them so quickly they didn’t notice her.

Other voices below grew louder as she descended the stairs, too distant for the guards on the landing to hear, but her ears were fantastic. Amazing. Probably very cute.

One of the speakers was Dudley, she was sure of it, though in this form, the sound was overwhelming and held qualities she’d never heard as a human.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I’ve obtained a body,” another man said. His voice was familiar, too. The royal physician? She couldn’t remember his name.

“Very good.” Dudley sneezed and sniffed. “Drape a shroud over it and no one will know it isn’t Edward.”

Jane stopped moving. It felt like all the fur on her body was standing up.

They didn’t have Edward’s body?

“They haven’t found him yet?” asked the doctor. “The poison would have killed him by now. There’s no way he could survive without an antidote.”

Dudley sighed. “He was sick. Wounded. Starved. He had to have left some kind of trail.”

Their voices were fading now, as though they’d been walking by the stairs.

Jane slinked down the rest of the steps, her tiny heart racing. Edward had been poisoned? Dudley had poisoned Edward? And then Edward had . . . what? Escaped?

Her heart lifted at the idea. How easily, she thought, despair could turn to hope.

At the foot of the staircase, Jane looked around the corner. The hall was enormous, but empty for now. If she kept to the shadows, she wouldn’t be spotted. Hopefully. And then she could escape the Tower. Find Edward.

But first she had to rescue her horse.





EIGHTEEN


Gifford

Burned at the stake. A most unpleasant way to go, G thought. When he was just a boy of five, he’d witnessed a man being burned at the stake. It was 1538 and John Lambert had been outed as an E?ian when, after hearing Frederic Clarence had written a pamphlet denouncing E?ian magic, he turned into a dog and ate the papers, prompting Clarence to cry out, “That dog ate my scriptwork!”

Lambert was sentenced to be burned at the stake, and Lord Dudley had insisted that his children attend the execution. He later told G that nobody trusted those with the ancient magic, and the country would be safer if every E?ian suffered the same fate as Lambert. Which, at the time, G’s father had seemed to truly believe.

All G remembered of that day was the scream that seemed to go on for an eternity. That and the smell.

He glanced at the lone candle his captors allowed in his locked tower room, and then looked closer at the small flame on the wick. Never had something so innocuous seemed so ominous.

He held his hand over the flame.

“God’s teeth!” he exclaimed, pulling his hand back after a mere instant. He hadn’t felt so much pain in his entire life, which, in the next instant, he decided was a sad statement because what nineteen-year-old man has only ever felt the pain of a candle on his skin?

One who spends most of his nights attending plays and poetry readings.

He sighed. Usually he composed stanzas in his head to calm his anxiety, but at the moment G had no desire to find a phrase that rhymed with “charred flesh.”

He examined the palm of his right hand, expecting to see burned skin, but of course there was nothing. Not even a little red.

Now that the pain had subsided (not that there’d been very much of it to begin with) he turned his thoughts toward Jane, specifically the way she’d refused to denounce him as a heretic. He closed his eyes and remembered her confident posture as she stood by him, so sure in her decision, even though she could’ve easily sacrificed him to buy her own escape.