“Where is the boy?!” It’s one of the King’s Knights, pulling Marlon off his feet by his belt.
“Hey!” I shout. “He’s only a child!”
Marlon’s legs pump the air like they’re treading the sea. The Knight screams into his face, “Where is the runaway?!”
“Where is the runaway?!” Marlon repeats. I cringe, afraid the Knight will slap him for this perceived insolence, but he only drops him and shoves him out of sight.
The Knight, a big man drenched through with rain, turns and faces Arnaud. I notice for the first time that the bridge has been steadily shrinking. Now it’s no wider than the shoulders of this man. I can’t remember when it last showed Jayden.
“Make a thorough search!” Arnaud shouts. Water drips from the Knight’s scarlet-lined cape, collecting into a puddle at his feet. “He was just there. I saw him with my own eyes.”
Authority guards push into the apartment, the first Knight moves out of view, and my father’s chair is knocked into the frame, spilling him to the floor. Marlon stumbles toward him, his forehead bloody. “Papa!” he cries, struggling to help him up. But Papa stays down. His only reply is a ragged cough.
“Extend the bridge!” Sir Arnaud demands, as I drop to my knees and reach for my father, but of course I can’t touch him.
All at once the Pontium bridge collapses. Marlon, my father, the Authority guards, and the Knight—they are all gone.
The room goes silent. My ears are ringing. Sir Arnaud shouts at Renya to reopen the bridge, but she shakes her head. She is ashen and breathing hard. “Out of strength,” she says.
Arnaud is not a large man. I’ve always thought of him as dignified and fine, like a sculpture of a man come to life. This may be the first time I’ve seen his hair—wavy and quite thick for a man old enough to be my own father—so disheveled and out of place. His eyes blaze, but then he runs a hand across his mouth and sets his jaw. “This is not personal,” he says to me. He doesn’t know my secret, that I have Cientia myself. That I knew at the moment Jayden slipped away and bested him, it became quite personal to him indeed.
“We know where he is, and he won’t be able to outrun us,” he says, but I know he’s not as sure as he sounds, and that fills me with hope. “We’ll get him.”
The echoes of his boots recede as he follows Lars along the corridor. Still on my knees, I cover my face with my hands.
“Not if he’s fast enough,” Renya whispers.
“Run, Jayden,” I say into my cupped palms. I know I should be quiet, but I can’t help but scream, “Run!”
One
It is decided I will wear red.
What I wear is of little importance to me, but apparently it is of great importance to Princess Renya and Sir Millicent, because they have spent the better part of the morning pulling dresses from Renya’s closet and holding them up under my chin. It’s tedious and annoying, but I keep telling myself that I can endure all this and more, because eventually they will settle on a dress, and that dress is what I will be wearing tonight when Renya finally fulfills a long-overdue promise to help my father.
But Renya and Millicent aren’t thinking about my father or how tonight will change his life. Their minds are on the fresh scabs on my back, wondering which dress would best conceal the blood if those scabs were to open up at the Apple Carnival.
I’ve pulled on and tugged off at least a dozen of Renya’s dresses, my wounds stinging as they stick to the bandages meant to keep my blood from Renya’s clothes. My hair crackles with static as the fifth red dress in a row is whisked off over my head. I ran out of patience three dresses ago, and I don’t try to hide it when Renya hands me red-dress-number-six. I watch Sir Millicent and the princess through the silky fabric as I tug it on over my head. Both girls furrow their brows.
But then I push my arms into the sleeves and the dress drops onto my shoulders and the skirt falls into place. Renya’s eyes warm. She is a girl with no hard edges, from her wavy hair to her flouncy skirts. So different from Sir Millicent, whose shoulders are always as straight as a curtain rod. She is so much like her father, Sir Arnaud. Her fake smile is not nearly as convincing as Renya’s.
“What?” I say, tired of pretending I don’t notice.
“Nothing,” Millicent says, her eyes hovering on my hair.
I shrug, glance at Renya, and steel myself to try on red-dress-number-seven.
But Renya wags her finger at me when I move to pull this dress off. “No, no . . . That’s it. I think that’s it.”
I turn to Millicent. Not that I care about her opinion of me, but I know she has one. Her eyes have finally left my hair and found the dress, and she nods. “Once she’s been tidied up a bit, I think she’ll look . . . nice,” she says, running the palm of her left hand across her own perfectly smooth, dark brown hair. It’s pinned up, as usual, in a high tight bun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Millicent’s hair down. For all I know, it’s long enough to reach the floor.
“Millicent, love,” Renya says, in the way she does when she’s about to ask you to do something she thinks you won’t want to do. “Would you mind going and checking on the departure plans?”
“We’re all leaving at six,” Millicent says. “It’s the same every year.”
“Would you be a dear and check anyway? I just want to be sure. You understand, right?”
Millicent’s face shows she understands she is being dismissed. For a moment, her gaze lingers on me, and I can sense her resentment the way a sheep can sense the coming rain. “Of course, Princess,” she says, as she pulls the door closed behind her.
“Sit down in front of the mirror,” Renya says as soon as we’re alone. “I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to make your hair look nice.”
I drop into the chair and try not to feel insulted. Renya takes a couple of swipes at my jumble of hair and mists it with some sort of spray. Like the hair of all indentured Outsiders, it’s required to be kept short, to expose my two blinking embeds. In Renya’s mirror, under the silky fabric of the red dress, the one at the base of my throat is barely noticeable. But not the one in the back. I can see its blinking reflection in the window behind us.
Watching Renya hover over me in the mirror, I can’t help but notice how much we resemble each other—we both have wavy hair, both have brown eyes. Except I look strained and exhausted, and she looks bright and alive. Plus I have embeds. But really, if not for those few things, we could be sisters.
Renya sets down the brush—I think she’s satisfied, but it’s possible she’s given up—and opens the top drawer of her vanity. She lifts out a small scroll tied with a blue ribbon. “Would you like to see the royal order?” she asks.
“Is that it?” When I see it in her hands, my stomach flutters like it’s full of hummingbirds. Renya slides off the ribbon and unrolls the paper. Like all royal orders, it’s written by hand in a flourish of black calligraphy on faintly rose-colored paper. My eyes devour the words:
Be it known to all citizens of Lanoria that the holder of this order, the indentured Outsider Oscar Jael, is granted the right and privilege to seek and receive treatment for any and all of his personal medical needs, present and future, at the Citizens Hospital of the King’s City.