Chapter 14

Nico entered the castle walls around dusk, making sure there were no servants coming in and out. As the sun began its descent toward the horizon, he crept into the clock and waited there, sweating in his cloak, itching underneath his mask, watching through the tiny keyhole in the door. No one had entered the great hall in all the time he’d waited, and he could understand why.

Someone had draped black curtains along all the windows. Black flowers filled ebony vases, sending a putridly sweet smell to him in the clock. He’d heard tales of men being buried alive, and he couldn’t help imagining their final moments now, the terror of that impenetrable darkness. Every hour the clock struck three—which he found particularly disorienting—and the great chimes seemed to shake his entire body. He would have liked to have a look at the gears, clockwork being something of a fascination of his, but it was too dark to see anything beyond his own beak.

Finally, when he was beginning to doze off, the clock had chimed again, scaring him half out of his mind. He was about to burst out of the clock, entrances be damned, when he saw someone come into the room.

For a brief, disorienting moment, he thought he had died in the clock. How else to explain the angel before him? In the moonlight she seemed to glow in her simple white gown, her skin nearly as pale as the fabric. Her hair was curled and pinned half up around a gold circlet, while the rest hung in gleaming spirals nearly to her waist. Nico had never seen any of the royal family before, but he had heard about Princess Imogen’s infamous auburn hair. He wanted to hate her. But she was the most beautiful thing Nico had ever seen in his life.

Nearly as quickly as she had appeared, she saw that the room was empty and turned to leave. She seemed a bit unsteady and lost, and before he knew what he was doing, he had pushed open the clock door. It made a horrendous scraping noise as it went, and he winced as the girl turned back toward the clock. It took a moment for him to register the horror on her face. Of course she was afraid! He must look like a monster in the dark. He was about to go to her when she gasped and spun away, her bare feet tangling in her skirts. She went down almost in slow motion. By the time her head hit the black marble floor, Nico was beside her.

And she was unconscious.

It was only hours ago that they had returned to their abandoned camp, where Colin had cursed Branson so creatively Nico might have been impressed under other circumstances.

“Look, nothing’s changed,” Nico had said as he joined Colin near their fire, which Branson hadn’t even bothered extinguishing. “We didn’t have a chance to assess the situation before going after Crane, true, but Branson hasn’t a clue how to navigate. If anything, we’re lucky to have him off our hands. I doubt he’ll even make it back to the manor.”

“He took Wolfbait,” Colin grumbled, his chin tucked deep into the collar of his coat. Perhaps the thing that had angered him even more than being down a horse was that Branson had taken the white sable cloak. That left them with only the black cloak, which they’d agreed Nico needed for his costume.

“We didn’t have any horses when we started this journey, so we’re no worse off than when we began. Besides, I didn’t like the way Wolfbait was eyeing Locket,” he added with a smile.

Colin glared at Nico for a moment before nestling back into his coat. “What if he does make it home? Then what?”

“It’s four days by horseback for a strong rider, which Branson is not. And then another four or five days back. We can certainly come up with a plan in that amount of time!”

But in the great hall, as Nico removed his mask, which they’d covered in a combination of dark mud and charcoal from the fire, he knew that their meager plan wasn’t going to cut it. Underneath the cloak, which was shabby enough from days of riding that it was starting to look like feathers, Nico could never be mistaken for royalty. He touched one of the princess’s bare feet with a work-worn hand and recoiled. They were as cold as ice. Where on earth were her slippers? He pulled the fur cloak over her and tapped her cheeks delicately.

Nico had spent his hours in the clock imagining hordes of frightened people to whom he would deliver an eloquent and forceful diatribe on what had been going on outside the castle walls for the past four years. He would talk about how he’d had to witness his entire family bleed to death; had spent years burying the bodies of the dead; how people who hadn’t died of the plague had starved to death; how vandals and looters had destroyed homes all throughout the country.

Instead, he leaned down and whispered, “Hello? Are you all right? Please don’t be frightened.”

For a moment he was worried she was dead, but he leaned closer and felt a small puff of warm breath against his face. He should run and find help, but how would he explain himself? Her halo had been knocked askew in the fall and he carefully removed the few remaining pins and set it aside, checking her scalp for any lumps. Remarkably, there were none, but he smelled wine on her breath. She was probably more drunk than injured.

He removed his coat, placed it underneath her head, and rose. She was so much smaller than he would have imagined; not just petite but thin, as if she wasn’t getting enough to eat. Her skin was pallid, highlighting the few freckles spattered across her nose. Her eyelashes were long and dark against her cheeks. A small, thin scar ran along her jawline on the left side of her face. How does a princess get a scar like that?

One of her fingers twitched. He picked up her hand, turning it over so he could check her pulse, but he needed to move one of her gloves to expose it. He pushed it back carefully and caught his breath at the bruises there. It looked as if someone had grabbed her or restrained her. Could this really be Princess Imogen, the spoiled, selfish girl the servants had described?

He checked her other wrist and noted that there was no telltale branching mark there, either. But then, no one here would have been exposed to the plague. It would be impossible to know who was an immaculate and who was immune. He was scanning the rest of her body, or what little he could see of it, for more injuries when suddenly he had the feeling he was being watched. He turned toward her head and saw that her eyes were open. And they were the saddest eyes he’d ever seen: wide and downturned at the corners, fringed with those long lashes.

“Who are you?” she asked.

And Nico, the fool who had once fancied himself a poet, found he had no words.

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