The Seven Markets (15 page)

The first thing she did every morning was roll over in the hope of finding him there, their separation revealed as a trick of the Market, a dismal fantasy, even a malicious plot engineered by his enemies. He was her questing hero, leading his men in tireless pursuit of his lost love. Whatever the scenario, not a morning had passed that she did not search for him on the empty pillow beside her own.

She would bathe and dress, always asking herself,
what would he think of this skirt?
or,
would he prefer these shoes to those?
For Ellie there was no doubt he would find her, only how long their separation would last.

Through those years she would have lost herself if not for Rossi’s company. It was nothing the man did so much as knowing that the Prince had tasked him with her well-being. If her love existed as a constant presence in her mind and heart, Rossi was the physical proof of that. Not that she needed any proof; she had all she needed in the gem beating in time with her own heart. Her Prince’s love made solid, binding her to him for all time.

Still, without Rossi she might have been lost. She might have forgotten to eat for days and weeks at a time, wasting away to nothing. She might have gone mad, holing up in her room, curled up in the corner with her eyes closed, lost in dreams and imaginings of her Prince come home at last. Rossi kept her grounded, kept her from sliding too far into the black hole of their unending love.

It was this that fueled her hatred now. She saw the Prince’s face, handsome as ever, but terrible in its beauty. His eyes flashed brilliant gold, capturing her heart. Only now, instead of surrendering to him, she was brought back to the deck of his ship, to the sight she could not unsee no matter how she might wish to.

No! She did not wish to unsee it. She burned it into her memory. Held the thought of him professing his love for another as an anchor to drag herself back to earth. She collected the disparate strands of herself, calling them back, wrapping them up in her impenetrable hatred of her vile betrayer. Love? How dare he speak of love? She would hold his heart in her fist and squeeze until it burst. Let him see the effects of a love strong enough to stop a heart. Let him bear witness to the thing he had created with his false promises of love.

She held the thought of him in her head—and it became easier by far to pull herself back together. She scraped against the shells of ruined, smashed buildings, her body became the burning wave of destruction. She saw the swath she’d cut through the city. It was as if an arrow had fallen from the heavens, scorching the streets and their inhabitants. The air was filled with twisting wisps of dust, the fading remains of those unlucky enough to have fallen in her path.

Ellie pictured him again, imagined digging her fingers into his neck, imagining what it would be like to squeeze and squeeze until his eyes bulged and she felt his throat crush beneath the strength of her fingers. It focused her, visualizing his pain in this fashion. It drew up a wall between Ellie and the Prince, armoring her against further incursions into her will.

So long as she held her hatred close he could not get to her again.

She felt the last of the blazing energy draw back into the shattered gem. It fizzled like a fork of lightning crossing the sky and was silent.

All about her was evidence of the damage she’d done. Shattered buildings, jagged fissures in the snow-covered streets, helixes of dust and ash where people had been. How many had died during her childish tantrum? How great had grown the price the Prince now owed her?

She followed the path of destruction. It led back the way she and the blue dragon had come, back to her and Rossi’s hotel. With a start she remembered the kind dragon. She’d been kneeling in the snow, but now she shot to her feet and spun in place, searching for its quizzical face, the spread of its tattered wings.

The dragon was nowhere to be seen.

She returned to the stoop, dreading what she might find there. An azure-tinted mound of ash, all that remained of her new friend? No. Apart from several patchy remnants of snow, the stoop was clear. If the dragon had been here, it had gone, fleeing her fury. Would it return? Did she dare to wait?

No. She refused to offer her neck up for the noose. For when the police arrived—she could hear their sirens already—what else could they think but that she was to blame? They would see her, untouched in the midst of so much destruction, and they would decide the fault was hers. They would lock her up, perhaps unsure of why, exactly, they were doing so, but unable to see such tragedy and not levy blame on someone. And she would rot away in a cell, never knowing the feeling of squeezing the life out of the Prince who had taken so very much from her.

Ellie began walking back to her hotel. Gazing skyward, she saw the top few floors had been raked as if by an enormous claw. Through one of the jagged fissures she saw a glow like flickering flames. This evoked a thought in her mind that she couldn’t place, a memory of something that hadn’t happened yet. Déjà vu in the worst possible way. All around her were the ruins of brownstones and storefronts, but not a one caused her the same sense of foreboding, of abject dread, as staring up at the broken hotel. She thought of Rossi, told herself that Prince or no, he would be able to help her sort it out. And with an almost audible click, she realized the cause of her distress.

Their room was on the top floor. The top floor she had destroyed.

Ellie broke into a run, uncomfortable boots be damned. A crowd of hotel guests, some of them Market travelers with their glamours thrown off, milled about on the cracked street. All eyes were directed to the smoking ruins high above. Murmured voices spoke of lightning strikes, freak fires, and—yes—of the Prince and of his family, and how wrathful they could be when they did not get their way.

She dashed past them, pushing through the double doors into the hotel. It was dark inside, a low haze hanging over the lobby. She could make out shapes, but not much more. Through a combination of memory and trial-and-error she was able to find her way through to the elevators.

“Oh, foolish girl.”

Of course the elevators were not running. The left-hand pair of doors was shattered beyond repair, the car having obviously plummeted from a high floor when her wave of destruction hit. The right-hand doors stood open, their car undamaged but plainly not moving.

After stumbling many times and once falling flat on her face, Ellie found a door that led into a stairwell. As she felt her way through the darkness, she cursed the Prince for his selfish ways. At this moment, it was easier to hate than to hope. She was already blaming the Prince for what she knew she would find. Blaming him for what she had done.

The stairs ended abruptly in a wall of iron and debris. Ellie tried pushing on it to no avail. She’d lost count of how many flights of stairs she’d climbed, but surely she couldn’t be too far from the top. She backtracked to the closest intact floor and let herself out to investigate. The ceiling was missing, and as she’d climbed, the sun had risen high enough that she could make out her surroundings. She tripped over a prone body that ended up being nothing more than an ordinary hotel guest who’d knocked her head in the commotion. Ellie shook her awake, directed her to the stairwell, and promptly forgot about her.

The floor was a rectangle. Ellie was able to walk all the way around and return to the door opening out to the stairwell. She found no sign of Rossi or their new friend Mister Beesix.

“Wait,” she said. How early was it? Rossi had always been an early riser. Even turning in as late as he had, his fortune in matchsticks depleted, he’d have been up with the sun. Especially for a Market day. And then? Wouldn’t he have come to wake her so they could get an early start? Wouldn’t he have woken their guest, who’d need to get an early start himself with the first batch of Market-goers?

“You woke up, didn’t you? And you’re downstairs. I bet I ran right past you.” She turned to retrace her steps back to the lobby, back to the street. Before she could exit, though, she heard her name being called from above.

“Hello?”

“Ellie . . . Ellie?”

“Who are you?” she sad. “Where are you?”

“Up . . . above . . .”

She craned her neck, and saw blue sky and plumes of dark gray smoke rushing up to fill it . . . and the corner of a boot, hanging just over the edge of an outcropping in what was left of the ceiling.

“Help me,” he said.

Ellie hunted through the debris for something to stand on. She found a cushioned bench and dragged it over so she could climb up and reach the owner of the boot. With no small amount of difficulty she was able to reach and pull on it until she could haul its owner down. She told herself it might be Rossi, but she knew better.

“Thanks,” Mister Beesix said when she had him propped up against the wall. His beard was singed, the festive red turned a sooty black. His eyes were bloodshot, his pajamas burnt all over. And his left arm was gone from the elbow down. Ellie bent to care for the wound, to tie it off and stanch the bleeding. It was smooth as a skipping stone. He might have lost the arm ten years earlier.

“Tried t’get me. Not tha’ easy, m’afraid. Took a nip just th’same.”

“Your arm,” she said.

“Got another, near as good an’ twice as pretty. Ellie, what happened?”

“What happened?”

“Yer . . . Rossi, he woke me up. Said I had t’leave right away. Said t’just go, just run fast as I could. Kep’ lookin out th’window. Kep’ tellin me to go. Just go. What was it? What’d he see?”

She shook her head. Of course Rossi would recognize the Prince’s power coming for him. How many times had he seen it through his custodianship of her? She imagined him waking, early as always, and finding her bed empty. A look out the window at the advancing wave of pure white would have told him in an instant what had happened. Not the details, no, but the fact that her careful control had finally slipped. He’d have seen that at a glance.

“He gave me this,” Mister Beesix said, holding out a small pouch. “Said t’give it to you if I saw you. Said you’d keep it safe for him.”

“He didn’t flee with you?”

The short man couldn’t meet her eyes. “He tole me to go, then slammed the door behind him. Said he had somethin’ t’do but that I shouldn’t wait. ‘Be right along, just you see,’ he said, then slammed the door on me. Thought he was a nutter, I did, right off his rocker. Tell me, girly, please, what was it? What happened?”

“Me,” she said.

His eyes grew wide and she saw the question on his lips as surely as if he’d spoken it aloud.
How? All this destruction come from a slip of a thing like you?
If she’d had the strength to explain she might have tried. Then his eyes tracked down from hers to the fractured gem hanging around her neck. And impossible as it was for her to believe, she saw recognition flash across his features in an instant. He knew. Maybe not everything, but enough to put the pieces together.

“Poor thing,” he said. “Truth, I never wanted this. None of it.”

“You never—what?”

“Still?” he said. “C’mon an help me down an I’ll tell you what I can. Tell you what y’told me the first time we met.”

“Tony Hart, you’ve just been dragged halfway across the country on a wiiild goose chase—what’re you going to do next?” Hart paused, plastering a movie-star smile across his craggy face. “Why, I’m going to Disneyland, Ed!”

Major Presley swatted the back of Hart’s head. “Stow it, Captain.”

“Yessir, Major sir, consider it stowed, sir.”

“Wiseass.”

A rumble of laughter passed through the other men. Presley glowered at them, daring them to add to Hart’s insubordination, quieting them down in a hurry. “Captain, if it’s not too much trouble?”

Hart straightened up. He zoomed the display and highlighted a few key landmarks from their briefings. “Target’s most likely location is here, at the inn, name unknown.” He looked up a moment at the silent old woman at the head of the table. “He’ll take supper there, sir. Intel says he always does, first night.”

“Very well. Proceed.”

Hart ran them through all the landmarks, one by one, highlighted in green on their display. He felt like a king idiot, reviewing data on a bakery, a beer garden, a haberdashery, and other similar businesses. Were they going to storm the bakery, commandeering the hot cross buns for use against the target? Was the haberdasher going to provide them with cover-fire as they advanced against the enemy’s lines? It was ludicrous. It was idiotic. It was a game they were playing for a wealthy, senile fool, and every one of them knew it.

But hey, the money was good. And crazy cash spent just as green as the regular kind.

“Target’s rooms are on the sixth floor, accessible via the main stairwell, which is in turn accessible from the inn’s common room. Which is also where target will take supper, if intel is correct. No other points of ingress, but we have visibility from here, here, and here.” Hart highlighted the rooftops adjacent to the inn’s location. “Any one of which makes an excellent sniper’s perch should the need arise.”

“Excellent, Captain. Anyone have anything to add?”