“Well, duh! Try to save yourself, too!” Katherine muttered. “Quick! Behind the tapestry!”
Jonah wasn’t really sure what a tapestry was, but his sister was already yanking him up, toward the huge wall hanging beside the window. Okay, tapestry, wall hanging, whatever … His mind didn’t seem capable of cranking out anything but short, jerky thoughts. Behind him he heard Chip whispering, “What about the tapestry?” like Chip hadn’t figured out the plan either. Jonah crammed the Elucidator in his pocket so he’d have a free hand to reach back and grab Chip’s arm.
“This way!” Jonah said, the words barely audible. He pressed in close, into the tight space between the tapestry and the wall, between Katherine and Chip. He hoped that Chip had grabbed Alex, or that Alex was the type of kid who’d taken home ec along with all his science classes. Is home ec where you’d learn about stuff like tapestry?
How could he be thinking about home ec at a time like this?
Er, no, Alex would know about tapestry because he can think with his fifteenth-century brain. So Alex ought to be safe. Oh, please, let us all be safe. …
On the other side of the room Jonah heard a door slam—slamming open, not shut, he guessed, because suddenly the whole room was flooded with torchlight.
Actually, “flooded” was an overstatement, because Jonah looked down instantly, at the first hint of light, and he still couldn’t tell if he was looking down at his own shoes or if he might be able to see straight to the floor—if he and his shoes were invisible. But the contrast between the total darkness and any glow at all made Jonah’s heart pound with fear.
They’re going to be able to hear me, even if they can’t see me! Jonah thought in a panic.
He felt just like he always did in language arts, his hardest class in school, when Mrs. Bodette started passing out tests. He’d get that sinking feeling that he should have studied more, should have been better prepared, but now he was out of time, there was nothing he could do. … If only we’d studied all the options on the Elucidator before we started messing around with the tracers, before the murderers showed up … if only we’d scoped out the truly foolproof hiding places … if only we’d had time to make sure that these tapestries went all the way down to the floor, that they could hide us completely …
Well, he wasn’t going to risk looking down now. If the men searching for the king and prince could see his sneakers peeking out below the tapestry, he’d find that out soon enough.
The glow through the thick tapestry was getting brighter, which meant that the torches were getting closer. He could hear the searching men muttering to one another: “Seek ye under the bed. …” “Aye, and here’s another door. …” The distorted words were even harder to understand through the sound of his pulse pounding in his ears. This was so much worse than waiting for Mrs. Bodette to slide two or three stapled sheets of paper onto his desk. At least at school he was always able to see Mrs. Bodette coming toward him, instead of just imagining, with every second that passed, that he was only an instant away from staring into the hairy face of some appallingly cruel medieval soldier. Though come to think of it, Mrs. Bodette herself could probably pass for some appallingly cruel medieval soldier. …
Oh, no! That thought was going to make him giggle!
Panicked all over again, Jonah bit down hard, trapping the insides of his cheeks between his teeth. The pain barely stopped a laugh.
Think about something that isn’t funny! he commanded himself. Oh, yeah. Impending death. Ruining history for all time. Being burned at the stake for wearing weird clothing …
At that exact moment the tapestry jerked back from in front of his face. The violent motion sent it crashing toward the floor. Torchlight flickered directly into his eyes, from a torch right before him.
Jonah and the others were completely exposed.
TEN
Nightmarishly, the torch kept coming toward Jonah, the flames leaping mere inches from his face.
These men aren’t even going to wait to burn me at the stake, Jonah thought, terrified. They’re going to set me on fire now!
He tried to peer past the flame, to the man holding the torch. Did the man have even a glimmer of possible compassion in his eyes? Would Jonah have any chance to plead his case? Jonah couldn’t tell. He could see nothing but the torch blazing toward him.
Reflexively, he turned his head to the side, avoiding the fire. He’d turned toward Katherine, but his eyes were too flame-dazzled to see her.
No. He couldn’t see her because she wasn’t there.
Thanks a lot! She went and hid somewhere else, somewhere safe—and left me to deal with Mr. Pyromaniac 1483!
Something tugged on his hand, pulling him down. That didn’t seem like such a bad idea—Jonah didn’t think there were any torches down near the floor. At the last moment before the flames touched his skin, he slid down into a crouch.
Katherine was down there too.
Or—she was sort of down there.
In the flickering light of the torches she looked as ghostly and insubstantial and nearly see-through as the tracer boys had. Actually, the only difference between her wispy frame and the way the tracer boys had looked was that she didn’t glow. So Jonah could clearly see the stone wall behind her, the dark shadows in the corner. … He could feel her clutching his hand—she’d been the one who pulled him down toward the floor. But he still wasn’t entirely sure that she was there.
Jonah squinted, trying to make out the lines of Katherine’s right arm and hand, trying to tell where her hand ended and his hand and arm began.
His own arm and hand were every bit as hard to see.
Jonah opened his mouth to ask, “What happened? What’s going on?” Or maybe, “Do we look like this because Alex pressed INVISIBILITY? Did it have the word ‘almost’ in front of it, and we didn’t see it because we were in such a hurry? What good does it do to be almost invisible? This way, we can’t even pretend to be ordinary, normal, innocent fifteenth-century kids. …”
Katherine clapped her almost-invisible-but-still-quite-strong hand over his mouth. She mouthed the words, “I don’t think they can see us!”
Jonah shook off Katherine’s hand and tilted his head back to look up. It was true that the man holding the torch had not followed Jonah’s motion—he hadn’t lowered his torch toward the floor when Jonah jerked his body down. The man was only swinging his torch back and forth along the wall, scanning every crevice and corner.
Okay, I guess that makes sense, Jonah thought. People who live in this time period can’t see the tracers, and we can. So maybe time-traveler invisibility works the same way. …
Just then, as Jonah was peering up, a charred bit of wood broke off from the torch and plummeted down.
It landed on the rim of Jonah’s ear.
Jonah barely managed not to scream out in pain. He jerked his right arm up and shoved at the burning ash—he missed it on the first swipe but got it the second time. He sent the tiny bit of ember sailing across the room, into the darkness, and his ear immediately felt better.
But his arm, flailing out to shove the ember away, had struck the leg of the man standing before him.
ELEVEN
“Eh?” the man said. “What the …”
Now he bent over, holding his torch down low, closer and closer to Jonah.
Jonah scrambled out of the way. Since Katherine was sitting on his left, he dived to his right. At the last minute, catching a quick glimpse of a shadowy outline, he remembered that Chip was on his right, so he rolled forward, barely managing to pull his legs back so he didn’t kick the torch man, too.
Jonah checked over his shoulder—now Katherine and Chip and Alex were struggling to avoid the swinging torch, with its dripping flames. They ducked down low, dodged right, then left, then right again. …
The man paused his torch, midswing, and called back to his fellow guards, “Might there be rats in these chambers? Rats big enough to hit a man in the knee?”
Jon
ah heard an answering chuckle.
“Rats that crawl out of a bottle, mayhap,” someone called back.
Jonah relaxed a little, sprawled across the floor. At least if he’d had to hit someone, he’d evidently picked the man that nobody else would believe.
And then he had to roll out of the way again, because the man was stepping back from the wall.
“William,” he called. “Come and look at this.”
“Did ye find the corpse of one of your giant rats?” another man replied from near the bed. He had mockery in his voice.
But seconds later it was his feet Jonah had to squirm around, his steps Jonah had to dodge.
“Show me,” the man called William demanded.
The first man began waving his torch near Katherine and Chip and Alex again, sending them into another flurry of dodging and darting and shoving out of the way of the flames. Jonah watched, paralyzed with fear. Could the man see Katherine and Alex and Chip somehow? Even if he just sensed their presence, was he clever enough to reach out and grab them? Was that what he was planning as he waved the torch back and forth so hypnotically?
“See?” the man said. “See how the flames turn the wrong way?”
Jonah saw what he meant. Every time Katherine or Chip or Alex darted out of the way of the torch, they sent up a tiny burst of air, distorting the direction of the flames. Jonah squinted, dimming the light coming into his eyes, so he couldn’t really see his sister and friends at all anymore. And then it truly was eerie, watching the flames jump with no apparent reason.
“There’s an evil wind along this wall,” the first man said.
“I say ’tis evil we’re out in the middle of the night looking for princes who should be snug in their beds,” William replied.
“Princes”? Jonah thought. Not “king and prince”? What does that mean?
But he didn’t have time to ponder that, because William began swinging his torch along the wall as well, sending Chip and Katherine and Alex back into their frantic motions. They couldn’t just spring out from the wall because both men were moving erratically now; jumping away could easily mean slamming into a man or a torch. So they dodged right and left, narrowly avoiding first one torch, then the other.
The first man stopped his torch midswing, barely an inch above Katherine’s shoulder.
“Do you think there’s a secret chamber somewhere, where the princes are hiding? Do you think the wind’s coming from there?” he asked.
“I think it’s dangerous when the likes of you tries to think,” the other man said.
The first man didn’t move his torch. He seemed to be waiting for an errant flicker, something that would lead him to his suspected secret chamber. The torch burned steadily, the flames flaring evenly in all directions.
One of the flames licked down toward Katherine’s shoulder. It wasn’t on her shoulder—she didn’t need to move yet. Jonah could see by the agonized expression on her face that she was trying not to move, trying not to arouse the man’s suspicions even more. But her ponytail was flipped over that shoulder, near the torch. Some force—static electricity, maybe?—was making the individual hairs reach up toward the fire. While Jonah watched, horrified, one of the flames from the torch leaped over onto one of the tiny hairs.
Katherine’s hair was on fire, and she didn’t even know it.
Jonah rushed forward, heedless of the men. He shoved Katherine down. Stop, drop, and roll, he thought crazily. The rush of air made the flame flare up. No time for stop, drop, and roll. No space, either. He slammed his arm against Katherine’s shoulder, smothering the flames with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
He looked back at the men, hoping they hadn’t noticed anything.
They were stumbling backward, looks of terror spread across their faces, which looked even ghastlier in the torchlight.
“W-witchcraft,” the first man stammered.
“Sorcery,” the other agreed.
“Or—ghosts?” the first suggested.
Jonah realized that, to them, the smoldering hair would have looked like a flame suddenly appearing from nowhere, floating in midair, and then disappearing just as abruptly.
Jonah had experience of his own with strange appearances and vanishings, out of and into thin air.
The first man turned and called over his shoulder in a slightly shaky voice, “There’s nothing to see in this corner. Nothing.”
He and William backed away, their eyes trained on the spot where the flame had vanished.
“We’re done here, too,” a man called from the other side of the room. “Back to the courtyard?”
And then the men with torches left. They pulled the door firmly shut behind them, plunging the room into darkness again.
Jonah sagged against the wall, his body limp with relief. Then a hand slammed against his shoulder, knocking him to the side.
“What was that all about?” Katherine hissed in the darkness. “Pushing me around in front of those men, hitting me—”
“Katherine, you were on fire!”
“I was?” She sounded skeptical. “How come I couldn’t tell?”
“It was just your hair,” Chip contributed. “Jonah probably just saved your life.”
“My hair?” Katherine wailed. There was a thumping sound, as if she’d slapped her hands down on her head to feel each individual lock. “How … how much? Do I have singe marks on the ends? Am I going to have to get it all cut off?”
Incredible. Katherine was almost completely invisible—and sitting in total darkness—and she was still worried about her appearance.
“It was just, like, five hairs,” Jonah scoffed. “It won’t disqualify you from running for Miss America someday.”
“If we ever get back to America,” Katherine moaned.
Jonah thought about joking, “I know of three ships that are headed that way in another nine years—and nine years has got to be enough time to get from England to Spain and meet up with Christopher Columbus!” But he didn’t really feel like making jokes right now. In the darkness Katherine sniffled. Great. Was she crying? Why did girls do that? Now what was he supposed to do?
Then Jonah heard Chip murmuring, “It’s okay. We’re all right.”
It was too dark to see anything, of course, but Jonah had the really weird feeling that Chip had just put his arm around Katherine’s shoulder.
“Alex?” Jonah said softly, to distract himself from thinking about Chip and Katherine. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yeah. Blindman’s bluff with torches is my favorite game,” Alex said sarcastically. “Aren’t most games better with the threat of total immolation? Instant death? Gotta love that adrenaline rush.”
Jonah wasn’t really sure what “immolation” meant, but he could guess.
“Well,” he said, “we all survived.”
“Barely,” Alex said. “This time. We can’t do this anymore—just react to one crisis after another. We’ve got to take charge. Be proactive, not reactive. Make a plan.”
“Okay,” Jonah said. “What do you suggest?”
“Um …,” Alex said.
“Er …,” Chip said.
Katherine just sniffled—louder this time, and much more miserably.
What were they going to do?
TWELVE
They fell asleep.
This was ridiculous, of course, because they were still in danger. They were clustered, essentially, in the middle of a crime scene. They were invisible, but they didn’t know how that worked—or how long it would last. They’d already messed up time, and fixing it seemed impossible.
But somehow, after traveling back more than five hundred years in time, coping with timesickness, witnessing what appeared to be two murders, being betrayed by JB, and barely escaping being burned to death or discovered, they didn’t seem to be capable of doing anything but sleeping. One minute Jonah was slumped against the wall, thinking desperate thoughts (We need a plan, I can’t think of a plan, this is impossible, but, oh, we need
a plan. …), and the next thing he knew, it was morning and sunlight was streaming in the window.
The sunlight was also streaming through him.
“Weird,” Jonah mumbled.
By daylight, being almost invisible meant that he didn’t cast a shadow, that the sunlight from the window illuminated the stone floor directly underneath him—and under Chip, Alex, and Katherine—just as much as it did the bare floor beside them. It was like being made of glass.
Jonah touched his glasslike leg with his glasslike hand. Everything felt normal, just like blue-jean material and—he slid his hand down to touch the gap between the bottom of his pant leg and the top of his sock—like ordinary skin. But looking at his own see-through clothes and body made him feel queasy and dizzy again, like the worst of the timesickness was back.
“Chip?” he whispered. “Katherine? Alex?”
The others didn’t budge. Deep in sleep, they looked like crystal figurines, finely crafted, with such incredible attention to detail that they each had minuscule crystal eyelashes. Each one of Katherine’s long hairs was also individually defined, tangled around her face now that the rubber band around her ponytail had slipped down. Jonah thought maybe he could even make out one strand that was shorter than all the others—the strand that had been on fire.
He closed his eyes dizzily. Last night he hadn’t had time to be scared, but now it was coming back to him: the crackling flames, the swinging torches, the danger. …
The sound of footsteps brought him back to the present. His eyes sprang open: A serving girl with a tray had pushed open the door and was approaching a table across the room.
“Breakfast, Your Highnesses,” she said, then stopped, looking toward the empty bed. The blanket on the top was mussed, part of it hanging off the mattress and dragging down to the floor. The pillows were lumps half covered by the blanket, but too small to make it look like two boys were still sleeping there.
“Strange,” the girl muttered, scratching at her head, under a silly-looking frilled cap. “They’s always abed when I come in.”