The Last Princess Page 9

  “Get up,” the sergeant snapped, pulling me to my feet and shoving me forward.

  They prodded me with their sevils, herding me forward across the palace grounds into the stark fields that led to the Death Camps. The sounds that had haunted me, the agonizing cries of pain and rattle of chains, grew louder as we marched. As we approached the gate, I saw a long line of people shuffling out into the field, bound at the ankles. A soldier handed each of them a shovel.

  Why don’t they use the shovels as weapons? I thought. But these prisoners were skin and bone, dragging their shovels behind them despondently. There was no fight left in them.

  “Start digging!” a soldier shouted, walking behind them and hitting the slower ones on the head with the flat of his sevil. The sound of the metal against their skulls echoed in the night. I watched in horror as the soldier lined up the prisoners and proceeded to fire at their heads, one after the other. They fell into the shallow holes like human dominoes.

  I put my hand across my mouth as the truth hit me. These men had been forced to dig their own graves. Once I walked through that gate, I would never get out.

  Another soldier stood guard at the gate of the Death Camps. I blinked in the sudden light of the coal lantern, certain that my eyes were deceiving me. It was Wesley. He met my gaze, then looked quickly away.

  “Barth and Harbor,” he addressed them. “Aren’t you on front gate duty?”

  “We have an escapee,” Sergeant Barth said.

  “Hand her over,” Wesley ordered, without so much as looking at me. “And get back to your posts now.”

  “Sir!” The two soldiers saluted him and turned to jog back toward the fields.

  When they were gone, he loosened his grip on my shoulders and turned me to face him. I stared down at the ground, but I felt his eyes burning into me like the wire of the clothes hanger. I had never felt so ashamed—of my face, of my decisions, of how stupid I had been to think I could come here and kill Cornelius Hollister. Instead, I had been branded with his symbol.

  “Who did this to you?” he asked quietly. “Was it Portia?”

  I said nothing. Tears pooled in my eyes, blurring my vision.

  “Move quickly and don’t say anything,” Wesley ordered as he pushed me forward. The steel wire fence of the Death Camps rose up sharply in the light of the moon. I stopped, whirling around to face him.

  “How can you live with yourself, working for this army?” I asked in a trembling voice, staring deep into his eyes. “If you’re going to kill me, go ahead and do it now.”

  He pushed me forward. “Didn’t you hear me?” he hissed. “I said, don’t speak. Keep walking.” The moonlight fell across his angular cheekbones and lit up the dark hollows of his eyes.

  We had passed the camps and were now walking down the dark field toward a windowless brick building. “Where are you taking me?” I said through clenched teeth.

  He pulled me to a stop and began to untie the rope binding my wrists.

  “You’re not taking me to the camps?” My voice was filled with confusion.

  He took a second gun from his uniform and placed it in my palm. “Do you know how to shoot?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a full round in there. Don’t let go of it. If we get separated, if the Roamers get you, just shoot them. Don’t hesitate or they’ll kill you first.”

  I nodded mechanically and wrapped my fingers around the grip, wincing at the pain as I placed my finger experimentally on the trigger.

  “I’m taking you somewhere safe, but we have to go through the woods to get there,” Wesley went on. “And we need to be quiet and careful. If I’m caught helping you, we’ll both be killed.”

  I raised my eyes to his. I wanted to trust him, but what if this was just an elaborate trap? “Why are you helping me?” I asked.

  He looked toward the Death Camps in the distance. “You’re not the only person here with something to hide, Eliza.”

  18

  THE SOUND OF MY REAL NAME MADE ME FREEZE. AN OWL HOOTED overhead, perched like a statue on the limb of a tree. Everything was in slow motion, as though time had come unhinged.

  “You know who I am,” I said, but my voice was scarcely audible. The night air chilled my skin. It was so dark I almost couldn’t see Wesley in front of me.

  “Yes.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  I stumbled back a step. “How? When…?” I shook my head before asking the question that had plagued me for weeks. “Why did you let me escape that night in the palace?”

  He nodded, as if he had expected this. “I looked in your eyes, and… I just couldn’t do it.” He paused, fumbling for words. “Please trust me.”

  I thought about the times he’d been alone with me, with a weapon, when I’d been unarmed. If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have done it by now. Finally I nodded. “Where are we going?” I asked, still dazed, as we walked together back toward the center of camp.

  “You’ll see,” he said somberly.

  Inside the windowless cinder-block building, Cornelius Hollister’s warhorses thrashed behind the thick bars of their stalls. They stood at least a full head taller than regular horses, and their eyes were bloodred and filled with rage. Their steel-shod hooves pawed the ground angrily. They butted their heads against the railings of their stalls, so hard some of them had worn the skin bare, the bone coming through.

  Wesley saddled a black-and-white mare while I hid inside the shadow of the doorway, keeping guard. The saddle and reins hung from posts in the wall, so thick and plated they looked more like armor than riding gear. I thought of Jasper and shivered. These creatures had been bred for war, beaten since they were born. They were machines of anger and destruction.

  I watched Wesley put a spiked bit in the mare’s mouth and stifled a cry of protest. “You can’t use that!” I whispered loudly. “It’ll hurt her!”

  “I know.” He nodded sadly. “But they don’t respond to the regular bits.” He pulled the huge horse out of the stall and into the courtyard, hoisting me up onto the saddle. “Her name’s Caligula,” he said. “She’s one of the fastest.”

  He jumped up in front of me, and Caligula took off in a sudden gallop across the fields. I grabbed him tightly around the waist.

  As we melted into the woods, Caligula slowed to a canter, gliding easily over root beds and fallen tree trunks. The sounds of the forest at night filled the silence that fell between us. A family of bats flew past like a small dark storm, screeching as they glided by.

  After what seemed like an hour, Caligula finally fell back into a trot, picking her way carefully around the edge of a shiny silver lake. Wesley frowned in confusion. “Strange,” he murmured. “I haven’t seen this water before.”

  “It looks like a loch where we used to swim in Scotland,” I said, thinking of the lake where Mary, Polly, and I had spent so many carefree summer days. We would pack a picnic and play games, and practice diving off a high tree branch that hung over the water. Jamie would sit, a blanket covering him because he shivered even in the summer, scoring our dives.

  “Let’s stop here,” Wesley said. “We need water anyway.” He dismounted and tied Caligula’s reins to a branch. “And we should put some cold water on your burn,” he added, making his way down the path.

  A ripple in the water dipped, then vanished before I could even be sure I had seen it. Was it a fish? I hadn’t seen a live fish in years. I could spear it and cook it over the fire—Polly’s father, George, had taught me how to spear salmon when I was little. I followed Wesley down to the edge of the lake, watching for another ripple. As I moved closer I saw the water was a strange and beautiful silver, reflecting the light as if it glowed from within.

  Wesley knelt down and cupped his hands to drink. I suddenly realized why the water had a silver sheen.

  For a split second, I considered letting him drink. One sip was all it would take to poison him, and I still didn’t
know whether I could trust him or where he was leading me.

  “Wait—stop!” I cried out at the last moment. “That’s a mercury pool! It will kill you if you drink it. We shouldn’t even be breathing this close to it.”

  Wesley stepped back quickly, his eyes wide as he looked at the silver poison. At the water’s edge I saw what I had missed: the deformed and dead bodies of water creatures floating in the shallows. Fish with fins where eyes should have been, frogs with no legs, eels with heads at both ends.

  I looked up through the woods across the lake. Hidden within the overgrowth of vines was a windowless cinder-block structure with the enormous CX logo. One of the thousands of Chemex plants, where everything from shampoo to lawn fertilizer to Death Clouds had been manufactured before the Seventeen Days. In the wake of the destruction, their deadly chemicals had leaked out to poison the earth for miles around.

  “I was thinking that it was the most beautiful water I’d ever seen,” Wesley said, his voice quavering. “I would have drunk it if you hadn’t warned me.” He looked up. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” I said, ashamed I had even considered letting him drink. “Thank you for…” I wanted to say sparing my life, but instead I said, “For keeping my secret.”

  I looked out at the lake. Wesley was right. It was the most beautiful water I had ever seen. Beautiful, yet deadly. Like so much of the world.

  My face still hurt, but it was now my hands that were throbbing with a deep and painful intensity. Blood was seeping slowly from the places where small shards of glass and bits of steel mesh had dug into my skin. We had been riding for at least an hour since the mercury pool. I hoped we didn’t have much longer to go.

  “Almost there,” Wesley said, answering my unspoken thought. He leaned to the left and pushed aside a thick clump of bushes, revealing a narrow path between the heavy walls of vines. Caligula walked through carefully, her breath making small puffs in the frosty air.

  In a clearing ahead was a stone cottage with a thatched roof. Moss covered the outside walls, the paint peeled in sheets on the front door, and the iron casement windows were covered in spiderwebs and vines.

  “Does anyone… live here?” I asked quietly. I’d heard that the Roamers had a dark, isolated house where they kept their captives alive, locked up and waiting to be eaten, like a human refrigerator.

  “No one’s here. It’s safe,” Wesley assured me. But I held tight to the gun, ignoring the pain in my hand, as he tethered Caligula to a post and drew her a bucket of water from the stone well.

  “How did you know this was here? How can you be sure no one is hiding inside?”

  “No one else knows about it.” Wesley took a key from his pocket and unlatched the front door. I hesitantly followed him inside.

  The air in the cottage was cold and still and smelled of mildew and damp earth. I stood in a small sitting room, where a faded, rose-patterned loveseat and two wicker chairs faced a stone fireplace. Wesley reached down to light a wax candle sitting on the coffee table. A few brown moths circled the firelight, flying dangerously close to the flame.

  “I’m going to make a fire,” he announced. “It’s cold in here.” I held my hands in front of me, nervous about being in the woods at night. I looked at the windows and door. The glass panes could easily be broken, the door smashed with a few blows of an axe. I still clutched the gun, almost for comfort, the way a child might hold their mother’s hand.

  “You can put down the gun, you know.” He gestured to my hand. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I hesitated a moment, then set it on the table. “I know.” And I realized that I believed it. I was safe here with him. “I was worried the Roamers might come.”

  Wesley looked at me thoughtfully, as though considering whether I was telling the truth. “They won’t come. I promise.”

  I sat down on the worn loveseat, glancing around for some clue as to where we were. Cheerful cherry beams crossed the low ceiling and a warm oval rug covered the floor. The windows were hung with dusty, pale yellow half-curtains trimmed with lace. In the circle of candlelight, I saw small rosebuds on the tablecloth.

  “Whose house was this?” I asked.

  “My mother’s,” he replied as he fed twigs and branches into the fire. I waited for him to go on, but instead he looked at my hands. “You should wash out those cuts. I’ll heat some water—go look in the kitchen cupboard and see if there’s any salt.”

  When I came back into the sitting room holding a box of salt, Wesley had drawn another pail of water from the well and was heating it in a pot over the fire. The shadows cast by the red and yellow flames danced around the room. Even though it was clear that the cottage hadn’t been used in years, it seemed lived in and well loved.

  “Did you read the Peter Rabbit books when you were young?” I asked. “That’s what this place reminds me of—the Rabbits’ burrow.”

  “I’m glad.” He began to smile. I realized it was the first time I had ever seen him smile.

  “You look different when you smile,” I said softly.

  His eyes caught mine, resting on them for a moment before looking down at my bloody hands. “Come here.” He gestured for me to sit on the carpet in front of the fireplace. “This is going to sting, but it’s the only way to clean out those cuts.” He poured salt into the now-hot water and crouched down behind me, reaching around to circle my wrists and lower my hands slowly into the pot. I gasped at the shock. I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the pain. As the clear water reddened with blood and the bits of glass and metal loosened from my skin, I began to feel acutely aware of Wesley, still kneeling there behind me, his breath tickling my ear.

  He stood up abruptly. “Stay here. I’m going to see if I can find us anything to eat.”

  After some searching, Wesley returned with several cans of vegetable soup. “Expired, but they should still be good,” he said quietly. He moved aside the pot of water to place the soup over the flame. When it was hot, he ladled it into two wooden bowls. I wrapped my hands in the makeshift bandages he’d cut from a sheet, hopeful at how clean the wounds looked, and sipped the steaming broth directly from the bowl. Already I felt stronger.

  Wesley was heating a fresh pot of salted water over the fire. When it was just about boiling, he dipped in another strip of the torn bedsheet. “Okay,” he said. “Now the burn.”

  He reached out and cleaned my cheek with the warm cloth, his touch gentle. “I can’t believe Portia did this,” he said quietly.

  I paused and then spoke evenly. “You were together once, weren’t you?”

  Wesley started to laugh, a sad, bitter laugh, and shook his head. He looked me squarely in the eye. “Portia and I were never together,” he said slowly. “Eliza, she’s my sister.”

  My mouth opened in surprise. I thought suddenly of their matching dark green eyes, dark blond hair, high cheekbones. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. “But you’re so… different.”

  He reapplied the warm cloth. “We were inseparable as kids. But after my mother died, Portia changed.”

  I looked around, a wave of understanding washing over me. This cottage was the last thing he had of his mother. “I’m sorry,” I managed.

  “Portia thought our mother had abandoned us. But she didn’t. She would never leave us.” His expression hardened. “My father killed her and made it look like a suicide.”

  I blinked at him, startled by his honesty. I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must be—truly unthinkable—to know that your father killed your mother. He turned away from me, balling his hands into such tight fists that when he opened them, his palms were dotted with blood.

  “But why?” I whispered, unable to stop myself.

  “She… found out things about him.” He began poking at the fire, the flames jumping out in vicious reds. “I come back here sometimes, to think, and be alone. Portia never does. I’m not sure if she remembers it at all. I’m sorry,” he interrupted himself. “I shouldn’t be tellin
g you this.”

  “I’m glad you did.” I laid my hand upon his. I recognized a sadness in him, the same sadness I felt. The kind that finds you as a child and sits there forever, never leaving you.

  “Did you tell anyone?” I asked quietly.

  “No, not even Portia. If my father was put in prison, we would have been all alone. I wanted to spare her from the pain. But…” He trailed off, staring into the fire.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said again. “That must have been a terrible choice.”

  “You know the strangest part?” His voice sounded bitter. “I still love my father, even knowing what he did. And at the same time I hate him, for who he is, and for what he did to Portia.”

  I said nothing.

  “I grieved for my mother, but it was worse for Portia. She thought our mother didn’t love her enough to live for her and take care of her. She went to the barn where she had a family of baby rabbits she’d been taking care of, and broke all their necks. That was the start of the new Portia.” He gripped his hands together. “She was eight years old.”

  I sat in silence, looking into the fire and thinking of my own siblings. I wondered once more where they were buried. Were they with our parents in heaven already? As I thought of all that my family had been through, all the pain and grief and fear, the drive to hurt the man who had done this to us rose up in me once more. “Do you know where Cornelius Hollister is? Do you know where I can find him?”

  Wesley looked up at me sharply. “He’s in the Tower of London. Why?”

  “He killed my mother and father,” I said softly, “and probably my brother and sister. He’s taken everyone I love from me.”

  Wesley stared down at his hands, a grim look on his face. “Do you understand how many soldiers are protecting him? How many weapons they have?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “I know I’ll die in the attempt. I’m prepared for that.”

  “Don’t you understand?” he exclaimed in sudden frustration. “He wants your entire family destroyed! If you die, he can finally crown himself king.”