I only wanted to save you.
The cathedral of hope in his heart, which he’d carefully crafted each day since he and Etta had been torn apart, burned down to its foundations of desperation and despair.
Oh God. Oh God.
“Carter,” Li Min said. “I think perhaps we should continue through the passage, find a place to sit, and take some water, yes?”
He shook his head, straining to get away from her. He began to stalk down the hall again, reaching for doors, tearing them open. It couldn’t be right. Her earring was here. Hemlock must have been mistaken. He would have felt it, wouldn’t he? He would have felt the world crash down upon itself if she’d passed on. The bell of his spirit would have been silenced. “She’s—”
She had been dead, nearly the whole time he’d been searching for her.
He had been chasing a ghost. A memory. No.
No.
Sophia stood there watching him, letting the death notice slip from her fingers. Li Min finally caught his arm, and this time she didn’t let him shake her off. “I know what it is you think, but consider the possibilities.”
“They said she died in Texas, two days after she disappeared, but then—then, how is her earring here?” he demanded.
Li Min’s response was as infuriatingly calm as always. “Someone might have taken the earring from her, or traded her for it. Or this earring, this version of it, might be from a past time in her mother’s life, before she ever gave them to her daughter. It might have been you, in the future, who returned here.”
Her words dripped through him one by one, poisoning that last small hope moving beneath his skin. He did not know Etta’s father from Adam, but he knew Li Min now. He trusted Li Min.
His stomach rioted. He raised his hand, pressing his fist against his mouth. Time travel. Bloody impossible, bloody unmerciful, bloody befuddling time travel.
Why had he ever accepted Ironwood’s job? Why hadn’t he just listened to Hall when he’d advised Nicholas to steer as far away from the family as he was able? Why hadn’t the sea been enough for him? He never should have allowed himself to be drawn back into this web. It was only ever going to catch him, wrap around his throat until it strangled him.
But it wouldn’t have stopped Ironwood.
He still would have stolen Etta out of her time. She would have been sent on the search alone. Nothing, and no one, was ever going to stop Ironwood until he had the astrolabe, and everything he’d ever desired.
“She’s not here,” he rasped out, trying to grasp the meaning of those words.
Li Min nodded.
“She…” Nicholas forced himself to say, “…was most likely never here at all.”
Sophia looked away. Pride warred with humiliation in him, before both were sunk by a devastation that left him breathless. It stole the years of experience he’d collected in steeling himself to the world, took even that small measure of dignity he’d eked out from his existence. And what was left inside him was that same pain he’d felt as a child, alone in the dark cupboard of the Ironwood house in New York, waiting for some signal of when he was allowed to step outside of it.
“Thank you,” he told Li Min. “I apologize…I am…not myself…I do believe…”
“Will you find her mother, then, to tell her?” Li Min asked. “This Rose Linden?”
“No. I’m almost certain she already knows,” Nicholas said. Perhaps that was, in the end, why she had never come.
“If she’d taken her revenge we’d know by now,” Sophia said. “That bit of news would travel quickly in our circle.”
A light shone from down the hallway, marking the path of someone coming toward them. Sophia took his limp arm and pulled him toward the door they had stopped outside of. On instinct, he tried to drag his feet, as if another search might turn up a different result. Li Min lifted a candle from the wall and opened the door, then latched it behind them.
Nicholas knew the Pietà the moment he saw it, though it caught him off guard to find it in such a small side chapel. The Carrara marble was flawless, glowing like warm moonlight. The Virgin Mary, her face too young to be holding the body of an adult son, was a mysterious contradiction of sweetness and grief.
Love. Sacrifice. Release. An endless, eternal story—no, this traveler war wasn’t anything so pure. This was a story of revenge. Of families who’d warred so long that no one could remember who’d instigated the fights in the first place. An Ironwood had killed Lindens, and a Linden had caused the death of Ironwood heirs, and so the Ironwoods claimed the life of the Linden heir. The awful symmetry of it all did not stop with only those two families. There must have been hundreds, thousands of stories like it over the years. It was a cycle that he himself had been caught in.
Staring at the woman’s serene stone face, with Sophia and Li Min whispering behind him, Nicholas felt as still and quiet as if he’d become the eye of a hurricane. In the candlelight, it was so very easy to imagine Mrs. Hall’s face, warmed by the fireplace as she read to him and Chase from the Bible, as she did every night. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God….
But God had had His chance to pass judgment on the evil that lived in Cyrus Ironwood’s heart, and had failed to act. Nicholas, for the first time in his life, questioned His judgment, because it was neither true, nor righteous, nor acceptable.
It’s left to me.
“I require a path,” he said. “Back to 1776.”
Li Min and Sophia ceased their conversation.
“Look, Carter,” Sophia began. “I know how you feel—”
“Do you now?” he said coldly. “How would you feel, then, to know that Julian survived his fall and wasn’t ever lost to you or any of us?”
He was surprised how easily the words flowed out of him after being held inside for so long. Some part of him recognized how unfeeling it was to drop it on Sophia’s head like an anchor, but Nicholas found himself beyond caring. If anything, he felt his hurt should be catching. There was more than enough to be shared by the parties present.
Sophia turned toward him, her lips parting.
“I was mistaken in how I interpreted that moment on the cliff. Rose Linden was the one to correct my misunderstanding. He was orphaned by a timeline shift, and never returned to us. I apologize for not telling you sooner,” he said, his bloody guilt getting the better of him, her single dark eye burning with the intensity of its gaze. “Initially, before you told me the truth of your heart, I thought if you knew he might be alive, you’d want to find him and restore your engagement. Find forgiveness with Ironwood. And then it was only a matter of not wanting you to be distracted.”
That earned him a hard fist to the cheek, blowing him sideways.
“What I always wanted was respect!” she growled out. “Shame on me for thinking I might have found some of that in your regard. Shame on me for ever being so stupid.”
“You’re not—”
“I nearly got myself killed helping you—not because I owe it to you, but because I want to find the men who attacked me. I want to take from them what they took from me, and even our score. I want Grandfather’s rule to crumble, I want to watch it pulverized to dust, and see everything he loves ripped away from him,” Sophia seethed. “Why would I ever search out someone who abandoned me? Someone who had no regard for any of us, who ran because he’s too much of a damn coward to stand up to his family!”
“I know that now,” he said. “I’m sorry. But it felt like too much of a risk—I—”
“Needed to use me?” Sophia said. “To go after your person, to achieve your ends? My desire was to be heir, which might have gotten me treated like a whole person, not fodder for marriage. Julian was my friend. I cared—care—about him. But I decided in that desert, before you ever found me, that what I really wanted was the freedom to do as I pleased, with whomever I pleased. I wanted to move as freely as the wind, and not be called back into port against my will. That is power. Do you understand?”
He nodded, his throat tight. “Beyond measure.”
Their conversation had drawn the attention of someone outside the chapel. There was a pounding on the door, a muffled voice that called out a question. Li Min whirled back toward Nicholas.
“If you mean to complete the Belladonna’s task,” she said, “then I will be your guide.”
“No.” It was a terrible thing, and he wanted them far from it. “I need to see this through myself.”
She shook her head. “You will need someone to dig your grave, for even if you finish with the old man, the journey to that moment will end you.”
Sophia let out a harsh breath, crossing her arms.
“This is my path now,” he told her, using his left hand to lift his right, to show her the ring. “I am dead regardless. If I don’t kill him, the poison will take me; if I’m not quick enough arriving there, the poison will take me. If I succeed, at least there will be one fewer evil in the world.”
At least this way, I might yet live long enough to return to Hall and die at sea.
The pounding on the door grew louder, as if someone was throwing their weight against it.
“You’re not leaving us behind to sweep up your mess after you,” Sophia snarled, pulling him toward the shivering air of the passage. “You’d just better pray I don’t kill you first myself.”
THEY PASSED THROUGH A SERIES OF PASSAGES COBBLED together from their combined memories, leading, at various points, to a rather treacherous section of the Australian outback, a pristine glacier, and the most dire year of the Middle Ages that Austria had to offer, with countless small insignificant connections between each. When they encountered anyone, he and Li Min shrouded themselves, letting Sophia speak in the rare instances speaking was necessary.
Nicholas wondered several times over the course of this journey if a man could feel so hollow as to become invisible, or if people only saw what they expected to see—which, in the case of their situation, was not a Chinese woman or a black man. In any case, the silence suited him well enough. It was easier to keep his mind still and focused on the days ticking down.
On the night of the sixteenth, a few miles from the last passage on the outskirts of Mexico City, Nicholas began to sense Li Min and Sophia slowing, eating away at his own pace. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the young women exchange a look; not wanting to confront it, he dug his heels into his horse’s side to urge it forward. Before the mare could work herself back up to a gallop, a small hand lashed out and ripped the reins from his hands.
“What the devil—?”
“You will do what you have now attempted three times—you will ride that animal until it collapses and dies beneath you,” Li Min told him sternly, pulling the reins further out of his reach. “I do not intend to share my horse. Do you, Sophia?”
“Certainly not.”
“I have not—” he began.
“We haven’t slept in two days, Carter,” Sophia interrupted.
Surely not. “We stopped a night ago.”
“No. That was Austria. That scenic little spot you picked by the rancid moat. I’m sure one of us picked up the Black Death as a parting gift.”
Christ. She was right.
“Let’s move off the road. Camp for a few hours,” Li Min suggested.
Revolt surged inside of him, and must have been clear from his expression, because Sophia turned her horse and led them off the worn road and onto the lush, green earth. Somehow, Nicholas had always pictured this part of the world as entirely desert. But even this late in the year, there was life and vegetation sweeping up from their valley to the peaks of the mountains around them.
He counted the paces under his breath, from the road to where Sophia decided was far enough to drop her saddlebags, and decided it was two hundred paces too far.
He could go ahead. Let them rest and catch up to him later.
Before he could devise a course of action, Li Min led his horse forward toward the others and began to unhook its harness.
He breathed sharply out of his nose, but finally dismounted. “I’ll hunt.”
Shooting something sounded marvelous, now that he had gunpowder again. He could not shoot with his right arm, useless as it was, but he wasn’t a terrible shot with his left.
“Li Min is already going,” Sophia said, from where she was laying out the bedding. He turned, then turned again, surprised to find Li Min’s small form retreating into the distance. “You can find the firewood and kindling.”
“All right. But I’ll cook.”
Sophia made a face he didn’t understand.
“And water?”
“We’re fine for now,” she said, tossing away the wide-brimmed hat she’d found abandoned on the road. “Go. Before your expression finally does me in. For someone out for cold-blooded revenge, you’ve got the look of a sad, sorry bastard about you.”
Somehow, he didn’t doubt it. Nicholas gave her an ironic little bow before setting about the task in front of him. Li Min had not returned by the time they had started the fire and brought the little pot they’d acquired to boil. Rather than try to talk to a stone-faced Sophia, Nicholas slid his right arm from the sling Li Min had knotted for him and lay down with his back to the fire.
His eyes felt too gritty to shut, but he tried. He tried relaxing his body against the unyielding dirt, and he tried to clear the swirl of dark thoughts rising up inside of him before they pulled him under. One hand dipped inside his loose tunic and closed around the string of leather. When he felt brave enough, he opened his eyes to study the bead in the image of a man and Etta’s earring.
He was seized by a compulsion he didn’t understand. He yanked hard on the cord, trying to rip it off by force, then reached back to fumble with the knot.
“By doing that, you’ll only feed the fire of regret that burns in you,” Li Min said from nearby, having returned from her hunt. “Not extinguish it.”
His hand relaxed, but didn’t fall away. Nicholas shoved himself up off the ground, intent on cooking now that she had returned.
“This reminds me of a tale,” Li Min said casually, before he could fully stand. She sat between him and the fire, casting a long shadow over him. “Would you care to hear it?”
Not precisely, but he grunted, knowing she would tell it regardless.
“It goes as follows. Many, many years ago, Emperor Yan had a daughter, Nüwa. She was as lovely and elegant as a crane, but stubborn as an ox. More than anything, she loved to swim, and often chose the East Sea for its wild beauty. I think you understand the impulse, no?”
He only seemed to be capable of grunting. His chest was too tight to manage actual words.
“But tragedy struck. One day while swimming, she drowned. Her will, however, was strong, and she would not give in, not completely. She broke the surface of the water and transformed into a Jingwei bird—have you seen one? They are quite striking. A gray beak, red claws? Well, regardless, she sought out her vengeance for drowning. Every day she flew to gather stones and sticks from the Western Mountains and dropped them into the East Sea. Her desire was to fill it, to prevent others from drowning. She never rested in her task. She continues to this day.”
He turned over fully, when it was clear her story was at an end. “Then it was an impossible task. What meaning am I supposed to derive from this?”
Li Min shrugged. “You may make anything of it you wish, Carter. The purpose of that tale was to distract you long enough for dinner to be served, and that has not been an impossible task after all.”
Nicholas sat up straight, outrage burning through the gray haze around his mind. “I told you I would do it!” What good was he if he couldn’t contribute his share of work?
“This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t actually prefer my meat shriveled and charred so far beyond recognition I mistake it for old firewood,” Sophia told him, turning the skinned rabbits over on the spit.
“That’s how you know it’s cooked!”
Both women gave him their variations of a pitying look. His stomach rumbling, he took his share of the meat with a reluctance that could only come from pride. When he finished, he accepted Li Min’s suggestion that he rest first, and take the later watch. On his bedding once more, he turned his back to the fire, resting his head on his arm and staring out at the dark mountains. He drifted to sleep, ignoring the warm grip of the gold band around his small finger.
A clang cut through the darkness, followed quickly by another.
“—better, better, but do not lean in so much as you thrust—no! To your left! Yes!”
Nicholas fumbled his way back to awareness, unsure whether he was hearing Li Min’s voice or dreaming it. Turning onto his back, he looked toward the fire, watching as two slight, shadowy figures sparred with swords.
“It’s useless,” Sophia said. “I’ll never get it right, not really.”
“You’ve done it perfectly, as well as you have everything else I’ve shown you tonight,” Li Min said, a smile in her voice. “You move through the world like a cat, all silk and sinew. Soon you’ll be better than me, and then I’ll really need to watch my gold.”
“No chance of that,” Sophia said after a moment. Frustration edged into the words.
“You are a superb fighter,” Li Min said, settling on the ground and resting her sword across her legs.
After a moment, Sophia lowered herself to her knees, placing her weapon down on a nearby blanket. “It’s just…I used to be better, before this.”
She gestured absently to her eye patch.
“Ah,” Li Min said.
“The world looks different,” Sophia said. “At first I thought it was only my imagination, self-pity, what have you. But the truth is, the shadows and highlights have peeled back. Colors seem flat. And my perception of how near or far something is from me is occasionally a little off. But the biggest problem is the blind spot.”
He closed his eyes, sighing. He’d expected as much, and felt rightly worse for not trying to help her overcome it in any way he could. Whether or not she would have accepted his help was debatable, but he should have tried, dammit.