Rook(21)

Sophia scrambled to her feet and her vision blurred. She swayed. There was pain in her head, a horrible pain in her side, and a commotion starting in the inn, sleepy voices raised in alarm. The foxes would be loose any moment. She grabbed the knife and wrenched it from the dead man’s chest, thrusting it quickly through her belt. Then she picked up her boots and ran, hand pressing her side, blood running through her fingers as she slipped and stumbled across the muddy yard of the Holiday inn like a drunkard.





Sophia slid down from the saddle, the jar of landing making her skull ache and her stomach sick. She was back in the woods of the Bellamy estate, she realized, in the little shelter she and Tom had created for stashing a horse. The horse had known to go there even if she hadn’t. Her head was fuzzy, the trees stretching and bending in odd ways, the light of a yellow sun cresting the horizon behind ragged clouds. There was something about dawn that needed remembering, something Tom had said, but she couldn’t think what.

She threw the reins over a post, and noticed that something was wrong with one of her hands. She opened her palm. Red. And sticky. Her whole left side was wet and stained, and it hurt. She left the mare to its hay, breaking out of the tree line in a slow, lumbering walk.

Bellamy House rose up before her in a mist, a mismatched hodgepodge of stone and concrete built around decorative arches of red and white brick from the Time Before, a building mostly made beautiful by its age. She could see the roof, and the ledge and lattice path that led to her bedroom window, but for some reason the drainpipe seemed daunting. She would climb it later.

She chose an unobtrusive little door instead, sunk into the wall stones around the corner of the house, its weathered wood half-hidden by ivy. Slowly, and with panting breath, she drew out a loose stone from the house wall and retrieved the key beneath it. She unlocked the wooden door, replaced the key and stone as she always did, ducked beneath the ivy, and pushed the door shut behind her.

Stairs twisted downward, spiraling round and round in the dark. She took the steps one by one, unaware of time, until they ended in a room that was a cold blackness, smelling of earth and underground, wind moaning from blocked tunnels beyond the walls. But she didn’t need a light; she could walk this room blind. She knew exactly where the little cot was, and that there would be a blanket. Tom always had a blanket. It would be a good place to rest. Just for a little while. She sank down onto the chilly straw mattress and closed her eyes.



When she opened them again she knew immediately where she was. Tom’s sanctuary, as he called it, deep beneath Bellamy House, a room that was nothing but Ancient. Light moved over walls tiled with white and artificial red—the red seen only in artifacts from the Time Before—arched doorways blocked with gray stone making dull, ugly scars in the otherwise bright surfaces. The pillars that held up the ceiling were also arched, some with their steel exposed beneath chunks of missing concrete. Tom was very careful with that steel. He oiled it regularly, so it couldn’t, after all this time, decide to rust and let the roof collapse.

Sophia let her eyelids fall shut again. Her head, her side, everything hurt. She tried to move but there was a heavy blanket covering her, and something tight around her middle. And then she stopped any movement at all. There had been light. And she smelled fire. Her eyes flew open.

Flames were dancing in the little brick hearth just a few feet away, driving away the chill, and across the expanse of cracked and patched floor, a little farther down the tiled walls, there was a star of light flickering in the dimness. A man stood with his back to her, tall and lean, illuminated by a candle, white shirt untucked over brown breeches, boots to his knees, and hair loose to his shoulders. He was running a hand over the display shelves, where Tom stored the objects he’d dug up from the grounds around Bellamy House.

The man picked one up, such a vivid blue it could be seen from across the room, bat-shaped and the size of a hand, with some sort of knob on one side, a gray cross, and four small circles inlaid with yellow and unnatural red on the other. She’d watched Tom puzzling over this item many times. He thought the cross and brightly colored pieces were meant to be pushed, though for what purpose neither of them could imagine, and he’d had no success looking for the word “Nintendo” in the university archives. It was beautifully worked, though. Like a piece of art.

The man held up the artifact, examining it carefully from all sides and underneath. Then he looked over his shoulder.

“Bonjour.”

Sophia sucked in a breath. It was René. The René who was her almost-fiancé. The René who had come here to catch the Rook. And his hair, she saw, was indeed red. A dark russet in the candlelight. She hadn’t even recognized him. She turned her head on the pillow, making it ache. Some of her memories were clear, straight lines; others were blurred and smudged around the edges like cheek paint.

René laid the blue object back in its box and picked up the artifact next to it. He held up a round, flat disk, speared on his finger by the hole in its middle, flashing like a mirror as it caught the glow of flame. Sophia clutched harder at the blanket, torn between the desperate need to know what René knew, and hoping he was not about to break one of Tom’s precious things.

“Do you know what it is?” René asked without turning around.

“No,” she replied. Maybe she could get rid of him before he discovered she was hurt. She needed to get to Orla. And Tom. She struggled to sound more like herself. “But you should put it down. It’s made of plastic, and it’s delicate.”