“My God,” he heard the old man say as he reached the door. “My God, my boy, this is almost at its end.”
Indeed.
Nicholas wandered down the hall, past the startled guards. He walked along the carpet, not hidden in the walls like the unwelcome secret he’d been. But when he arrived at the staircase and heard the dancing, the airy melody of crystal and glass gently colliding, he turned toward the entrance to the servants’ stairwell and wound his way down it.
He was unsurprised to feel Li Min’s hands on his throat the instant the door shut behind him. Good. He could face her in the darkness.
“What is the meaning of this?” she hissed. “You’ll serve him now?”
“You heard it all?” She nodded. “Good. I haven’t much time to explain. I’ll take on the role of his heir only long enough for him to find the astrolabe, and for me to then take it from him and destroy it.”
It was an easier thing to tell Li Min, who, in her way, always seemed to see the path they undertook from several steps ahead. Sophia would have turned back and finished the old man herself.
“I did not expect you to choose artifice,” she said. “Can you maintain the deception long enough to reach your end?”
He nodded. What else did he have now but this one goal?
“Do you despise me for this? It’ll mean an end to your way of life. If you’ve accumulated wealth in other eras outside of your natural one, now is the time to collect it.”
And to prepare for the worst of it.
“If this is my last—my only—opportunity to say so, I am grateful to call you my friend. No, please hear me on this,” he said, seeing her begin to speak. “I generally consider those who save my life friends, and hope that doesn’t offend your mercenary sensibilities. I’m grateful for all that you’ve done, and that I’ve known you, even if that bond is broken by what comes next.”
“I believe that nothing breaks the bonds between people, not years or distance,” she said. “But you seem to simply take his word for it? What if his claims about its destruction prove false? I have heard—” She caught her next words, taking a moment to reconsider them. “It’s been a rumor for years that destroying it would revert the timeline back to the original. But the other points sound like fear tactics.”
He was too tired to argue this with her. As it was, he could hardly keep himself upright, and had to lean against the corridor’s wall to support his own weight. Too quickly, all of this is coming too quickly—
I need more time—please, God, more time—
“The man I saw in that room was afraid,” he said finally. “I do not know what to believe now. The world is upside down and this is the only way I can think of to right it.”
“All right, my friend,” she said. “We will follow you and assist in any way we can. If we need to meet, unknot your sling.”
Nicholas, in truth, had not expected this, and he was moved by the fact that she’d made the decision so easily.
“What if you need to speak with me?” he asked.
“We will find a way.”
“As you always do,” he said, with a ghost of a smile. “Until then.”
She raised her hand, touching his shoulder just for a moment before pulling back. His vision had adjusted to the darkness enough to make out the pale moon of her face as she stared hard at the buttonless jacket she’d stolen for him only a few hours before. “What would you have done…if she had survived? If you had found her?”
He couldn’t bear to say Etta’s name; it was a thorn on the tongue, as much as it bloomed in his heart. “I think…it does not matter much now. If the chance doesn’t present itself, tell Sophia I’m sorry it’s come to this. That I hope she’ll understand.”
“She’ll understand; she may yet even appreciate your cunning in destroying the old man,” Li Min said, drifting further from him as she found her way back to the same window she’d entered by. “But she’ll tear down the gates of hell and drag you back by the throat if you allow yourself to die.”
That, at least, was absolute in his mind. But he felt pleased in knowing that Sophia would never allow herself to be constrained by the limits of her natural time in the twentieth century. She would carve a way toward the same independence that had eluded him for so long. He had been so very wrong to assume that their uneasy alliance would rest on nothing more than a mutual hatred.
He had been wrong about so many things.
Rather than continue down the stairs, past the glittering souls dancing into the morning hours, past the cooling kitchen, he began to climb. The steps bore his weight with quiet protest, and he drifted up to the attic that had been his home for the first years of his life.
The support beam came within a hairbreadth of cracking against his temple. Nicholas sucked in a surprised breath and ducked through the entryway, bent at the waist to avoid skinning his back against the rough roof.
The old man must have completed some sort of renovation—the rafters couldn’t have been so low as this, suffocating the attic so it was little more than a crawl space. He tried to recall if his mother or any of the other five house slaves who had slept with them in this room had been forced to make themselves smaller to enter, to contract their bodies to fit inside what little space they’d been granted.
Now there was no bedding on the floor, only the bed jammed up against the wall below the window. Straw exploded out of the bare mattress through a hole some industrious rat had likely chewed in it. Dust carpeted the floor, undisturbed for many years.