Ironhand (24 page)

Y
ou can’t change the past. Even if it hasn’t happened yet.

This was the thought going around and around in Edie’s head as the Walker led her from the House of Pain toward the frozen Thames. She scarcely noticed anything except the snow in front of her and the strap binding her wrists together. Her vision was restricted by the bonnet the Walker had tied around her head. It jutted forward on either side like blinders. Her bound hands were hidden in a muff: a roll of padded rabbit fur that hung from the front of what she assumed was the Blind Woman’s cloak.

She knew what the Frost Fair would look like when they escaped the narrow warren of snow-deadened streets leading down to the river’s edge. She’d seen it all before when she’d glinted her own death.

You can’t change the past. Even if it hasn’t happened yet.

The thought kept whirring ’round and ’round. If she was going to be able to escape, then she wouldn’t have seen herself in the ice hole. If she wasn’t going to be able to stop this from happening, why try to escape? But if she didn’t try to escape, how could she stop this from happening?

Edie was a fighter. She knew one of the reasons she was beginning to spin loose in her mind was that she didn’t have her heart stone anymore. But neither did the Walker. That was something. It probably wasn’t enough to keep her alive by itself, but it was enough of a spark to keep her trying to figure out how to.

“Cheer up, girl. This is a sight rarely seen.”

If she hadn’t already glinted it, the sight that met her eyes as the Walker led her on a plank over a narrow open channel of icy water onto the frozen surface of the river would certainly have amazed her. Having previously seen it as a background for her own murder took the edge off, somehow. But it was an extraordinary sight.

Below the looming span of Blackfriars Bridge, the entire width of the Thames was iced over and covered in snow. The night was banished with the light of hundreds of lanterns and flaming torches that illuminated the ramshackle street of makeshift tents and shelters, which had been set up on the center of the river. There was music and laughter and the sounds of a holiday crowd enjoying itself, mingling with the smell of roasting meat and wood smoke. London’s tavern owners and cooks had taken to the ice, selling their wares and hospitality out of hurriedly built temporary premises decorated with garish signs and billboards. And it wasn’t only food and drink that were for sale.

There were souvenir shops and portrait painters, there were jugglers and acrobats, there were fairground games and a huge swinging boat full of shrieking men and women of all ages. There was even a printing press being cranked by hand next to a man with a monkey and a barrel organ. A huge painted banner straddled the street, reading FROST FAIR—COME ONE, COME ALL!, and from the numbers thronging the icy street, it would seem all of London had responded to the invitation.

Again, if Edie hadn’t already seen all this before, she would have been captivated by the magic of the sight. As it was, seeing it all, especially the monkey and the barrel organ, just terrified her. She remembered all of this, but the monkey and the organ were a very specific part of what she had glinted. She had seen and heard them and then noticed how their music had been drowned out by an approaching sound of bagpipes as a parade moved down the street, led by a white elephant, which had stolen everybody’s attention.

On cue, Edie heard the warning rattle of snare drums as a bagpipe band skirled into life in the distance.

The Walker was pushing her ahead of him, one hand firmly on her shoulder.

She needed to stop her mind from unraveling. She knew she needed to think fast and move before everything closed in on her and her diminishing series of options disappeared altogether, leaving her with nothing. She needed to choose something, and she needed to do it now. Even if it didn’t work, she would go down fighting.

The flash of the knife blade caught her attention and gave her the something to focus on. A cook was serving slices of beef from a joint turning on a spit in the entrance of a booth just ahead. He had stabbed his blade into a wooden carving block as he took a customer’s money.

The sharp steel blade was her way out. In the absence of any other options, this was the one she was going to choose.

She pushed the muff awkwardly up one arm, shoving it against her stomach, disguising the wriggle with a cough. The Walker just shoved her forward, not noticing that she had exposed her wrists to the cold night air and the cruel blade beckoning just a few short steps away.

She held her breath, and then, once the blade was in reach, she threw herself forward. Her hands chopped through the air on either side of the blade, slamming onto the red juices covering the carving surface. The blade was not as sharp as the obsidian razor she had used to slash the Walker, but it was sharp enough to give her the escape she wanted.

It cut through the strap that was binding her wrists together, and as soon as she felt the constraint part, she pulled her hands back up and grabbed the handle of the knife, yanking it out of the wooden block.

And as the Walker grabbed for her, she ducked and spun. His arm swung over her head, just missing, knocking the bonnet awry. She kept spinning and slashed the carving knife into his leg, catching him behind the knee.

She heard a yell of pain and fury, and left the knife in his leg. As he buckled forward clutching at his knee, Edie saw the bright blaze of the Blind Woman’s heart stone in the chest pocket of his coat. Without thinking, she plunged her hand in, grabbed it, and just ran, cannoning off people, heading for the open ice.

As she ran, she remembered that when she had glinted this scene before, she had seen the bonnet fall in front of her face as she’d tried to escape. That had been the thing that had done her in, because she had run blindly into an ice hole, where the Walker had caught up with her. So as she ran, her first thought was to get rid of the stupid bonnet before it killed her.

Her fingers fumbled at the ribbons, which was a good idea but a bad mistake: because fumbling at full tilt, trying to get the bonnet off, turned out to be the very thing that made it fall in front of her face and blind her in the first place.

You can’t change the past.

Even if it hasn’t happened yet.

“H
ow’s this going to work?” asked George.

Its working didn’t seem likely from where he was standing. Mind you, he was standing in a pretty unlikely place, in a chariot being driven by a queen of the ancient Britons, next to a World War I gunner, cantering toward two small mirrors being held parallel to each other by the Queen’s daughters.

“I touch the mirrors as we pass, and we will go through,” said the Queen, lowering her spear.

The mirrors seemed impossibly tiny, and then they were right on them, and the Queen jabbed with her spear point and missed.

“Okay,” said George, looking across at the Gunner. “We don’t have time for target practice.”

The Queen circled the chariot so tightly that it turned on one wheel, and for a moment George and the Gunner could do nothing except hold on to avoid being spun out onto the grass. Then the wheel landed with a thump, and the Queen raced back at the mirrors.

“Just getting her eye in,” said the Gunner.

The mirrors approached again, and the daughters didn’t flinch as the whirring blades on the wheels whipped past, inches from their knees. The Queen jabbed her spear—and missed again.

“Third time’s the charm,” she said, reining the horses into another tight turn.

“There’s no time for this!” said George, and he leaped clear of the chariot. He heard the Gunner shout after him, but he ignored him and ran toward the Queen’s daughters.

They looked at him in shock.

“How does it work?” he said, hand grasping the hammer tightly.

“Just step in,” said the daughter to his left. “Either mirror. The Walker has set them to bring you right to him.”

It didn’t seem likely to George that this was going to work either, but he remembered how he’d seen the Walker step into the mirrors and pull the Gunner with him; and he thought of Edie, and the urgency of that thought made him reach into the mirror and step impossibly into it.

He felt the surface tension give, and then he was falling through layers of blackness that strobed at him, making him feel suddenly nauseated with plunging vertigo—and then the fall ended abruptly and he was facedown on the ice with a mouthful of snow.

He looked up and saw the lowering black wall of a barge in front of him, a boat that had been frozen in the ice. He turned around and saw, a hundred feet away, the lantern-lit carnival of the Frost Fair, and a parade with a white elephant wending through the tented street.

He had dropped the hammer as he’d landed, and he scrabbled in the snow for it. He had just found it when there was a popping noise from behind him, and the Gunner tumbled out of nowhere. He looked at George with a short grin.

“She’s going to take forever getting through.”

“We don’t have forever,” said George, getting to his feet and pointing. “The elephant’s already here.”

He started to move forward. The Gunner’s hand stopped him.

“George. Thought just hit me. I broke my oath. The Walker’s got some power over me. He used it. Couldn’t control my arms.”

“What?” said George, eyes raking the distant crowd for signs of Edie.

“I’m thinking if he saw me, he could make me do something bad.”

The Gunner looked shamefaced. “Shoulda let the Officer come instead.”

“No,” said George decisively. “Someone had to stay behind and watch for us coming back in case the Walker’s on our tails when we do. Someone’s got to be ready to shoot him down.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No buts,” said George, kicking into a sprint.

He’d seen Edie.

“Just don’t let him see you first.”

He tore across the expanse of snow toward Edie, who was running away from the crowd at an angle. He yelled as he ran, trying to cut her off.

“Edie! Over here!”

She didn’t seem to hear him. Maybe because she was fumbling with her bonnet.

The Gunner started running too. He saw the Walker break out of the crowd at a fast hobble. The Gunner saw him turn and shout at something in the darkness on the other side of the river. Heard the words:

“Get the girl! Icarus! Where’s the Bull? Get the bloody girl!”

The Gunner saw what was going to happen before George did. He stopped going for Edie and ran toward the side of the river, where the Thames boatmen had cut a wide channel between the shore and the ice so that they could charge people for crossing over on planks they had erected. He saw a portly father quibbling about the fee, while his beribboned daughter jumped excitedly up and down at his side and pointed to the ice beyond. Her voice was sharp enough to cut straight through the sound of bagpipes and drums and into the Gunner’s ears.

“Oh, Daddy. No, Daddy, please, pay the little man! It’s there and we’re missing it! The elephant—”

George heard the voice and remembered Edie saying she’d missed seeing something because of the elephant, and he raised his hands like a megaphone and yelled at Edie, who hadn’t seen him yet.

“Edie—don’t look at the elephant!”

And then he hit an ice hummock and tripped.

But not before Edie saw him. As she was about to shout back, the Walker hit her from behind, and they fell to the ice. Edie kicked and hit and bit like a wildcat, without thought, as furiously brutal as any animal fighting for its life. She smashed the Blind Woman’s blazing heart stone into the Walker’s good eye. He managed to close his eyes and duck his head away just in time, but the searing light temporarily blinded him.

“Now you die, girl!” he screamed.

She booted him in the chin and tumbled backward onto her feet and ran, while he swiped at her through his stone-dazzled vision.

He pulled the long burnished dagger from inside his coat and ran after her.

Edie was struggling with the bonnet that had been mashed forward over her face in the struggle.

Her heart was pumping so hard from the adrenaline of the fight, she forgot to look out in front of her.

Her foot hit water instead of hard ice, and she plunged forward, straight into the hole. The shock of the cold and the water in her mouth hit her simultaneously, and she scrambled up through the icy Thames. Her fingers clawed onto the edge of the ice, and she tried to pull herself out of the hole. As her face broke into the air, covered in hair like a thick flap of seaweed, she remembered that she must be watching this happening as she glinted this past death in a future and faraway London. She screamed a warning to herself as she tried to scramble out of the water’s icy grasp:

“Edie. The Friar’s okay! Don’t trust Little Tragedy! He’s not what he seems! Tell George! Walker’s trying to open evil—”

And then a rescuing hand reached over and grabbed her hair; only it wasn’t rescuing at all. It was pushing her back under, and there were bubbles and splashing and black water, and then she broke free for an instant and fishmouthed for air and used her last words to try to complete her warning:

“—gates in the mirrors—”

The Walker’s hand grabbed the bonnet and plunged her spluttering face under the water for the last time. She carried on shouting as her lungs filled with water, and the last thing she saw as she sank into the inky blackness was the Walker’s face, lit red by the distant lanterns, grinning down at her through the floating tangle of her own hair.

In that terrible last moment, Edie wanted everything. As she started to fade, the years of her life peeled away, and she became younger and younger. All the layers of toughness she’d had to put on to survive dropped off and left her feeling helpless and young and tiny. As she hurtled toward the full stop of her life, she felt outrage that this should be so, and she just wanted to start everything again. She wanted her mother before she had changed, before she’d gone strange, before she’d become mad, before she’d just gone away and never come back. . . .

—And more than anything, she wanted that child’s first and best sanctuary, the heart’s last ditch—the warm embrace of her mother telling her it would be all right, that today’s pain would fade and tomorrow the sun would shine.

But her final thought was the desperate despair of knowing it wouldn’t be all right, as her eyes dimmed and the freezing blackness took her, alone and in the dark.

And then Edie died.