Rook(80)

“You should feel privileged, Monsieur, to call this place your final home. Not many have seen it.” LeBlanc’s smile was long and wide.

He watched Tom push himself upright in the dirt, panting from where he’d landed on his broken ribs, then frowning as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. The room was circular, but the walls were made of bones. Old and yellowed, stacked in rise and fall patterns like layers of continuous waves caught in cross-section. The bones rose higher than could be seen, to a vast ceiling that was in shadow, hundreds of thousands of them. LeBlanc’s smile lengthened. This was a place strong with those who had accepted Fate.

Two gendarmes, still with their training patches on their uniforms, fastened Tom Bellamy’s chains around a stone pedestal in the center of the room. They backed away quickly, obviously wishing to leave.

“Where is Jennifer Bonnard?” Tom asked. His lips were cracked.

LeBlanc shook his head. He was not going to tell him that.

“Tell me where she is!”

LeBlanc turned and walked away with the lantern, the gendarmes behind him.

“Tell me!”

The echoing words gave chase as LeBlanc reverently walked pathways thick with Ancient dust, the shouts eventually dying on the air. He made a slow way back to the Tombs, the young gendarmes following soundlessly behind him. LeBlanc ordered them to stand, and when he finally stepped out of the lift and into the upper level of the prison, Renaud was there, waiting.

LeBlanc nodded. Renaud drew a sword and a knife and walked into the lift. LeBlanc listened as the young men died. Now let the Red Rook try to find her brother, he thought. And when she tried, he would have her. Exactly where she was supposed to be. As Fate had decreed.



Sophia smiled when Madame Hasard showed her to her room. It was huge and also sparsely furnished, the bed an afterthought in an ocean of pale gold carpet and a beautiful view of the Upper City. It also had an interior door. Connecting with Madame Hasard’s. Benoit brought the rest of her luggage a short time later, but before he left he stopped, turned, took her hand, and kissed it. Sophia was so surprised she said nothing, only watched as he inclined his head just a little and shut the door softly behind him.

She opened her suitcases and hung her clothes, including the underskirt with its extra weight sewn inside, humming while she did it. She put both her knives and her sword under her pillow and climbed into bed, but she had not put on a nightgown. She was wearing breeches and a loose shirt of Tom’s. She looked through exactly twenty pages of the Wesson’s Guide, flipping them regularly before she blew out the light.

She stared into the dark, motionless, envisioning again the reaction she’d seen when Madame Hasard told René that the money was gone. The way his fists had clenched on the back of his neck, the roughness of his voice that had not been from the rope. It had taken her a little time to analyze, but now she knew. What she had seen was more than shock or the loss of money. More than just pain. What she had seen was the loss of hope. And to lose hope, you must have had hope in the first place. René had been hoping to pay the fee. He’d been hoping to have her. And without the money, he thought he’d lost her. How ridiculous. What could the money have to do with it? How could René Hasard think any such thing, when it was perfectly clear that he belonged to no one but her?

Sophia ran her fingers through the ringlets, letting her hair go back to some of its natural wildness. Now, finally, after all this, she knew exactly what she would risk. Not for any certain kind of future she might prefer, or Bellamy House, or even the Red Rook. She knew what she would risk to have him. And it was everything.

She threw off the blanket, picked up the dead candle, went softly to the door, and opened it. She knelt on the carpet, looking carefully in the light from the wall sconces in the hall, and there, at about the level where her knees would have been, was a single thread. She smiled, stepped lightly over it, shut the door without noise, and went down the silent hall to the last door on the left. But she didn’t have to knock. René was coming up the stairs from the lower corridor.

He stood on the last step when he saw her, waiting for her to come to him, away from the closed doors of the bedrooms. “What is wrong?” he asked. He’d washed out his hair. It was loose and russet and still a bit damp, and he was back in his linen shirt, like at the farm, like the ones she’d ruined. He smelled of outdoors, and chimney smoke.

“Have you been on the roof?”

“Yes.”

She could see him being careful. Afraid of her, because to be near her was pain. She knew exactly what that felt like. Only she wasn’t going to be careful anymore. “Would you look at my stitches?”

He shot a glance down the dim corridor. “I thought perhaps you had taken them out yourself.”

“No. But I think they should come out. Before tomorrow. And I can’t see.”

He hesitated, looking again down the hall with its rows of occupied bedrooms. Then his shoulders slumped a little and he said, “Come with me.”


He went back down the stairs, Sophia pausing only to light her candle with one of the wall sconces, then moved quietly along the lower hall, opening the door across from the water lift. They stepped inside a storage room the size of a large closet, sheets and towels and tablecloths stacked on the shelves.

“The linen room?” Sophia said, a little amused. She set the candle on a small table for folding as he shut the door. “Couldn’t we have just gone to yours?”