And then a voice cried, “Wren!” and someone’s arms went round her and held her tight, and it was her father, and he was hugging her, laughing and saying, “Wren!” over and over, while tears made white channels through the ash and dust that smeared his face.
Chapter 36
Strange Meetings
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, I’ve been so stupid—” and after that she couldn’t speak; she couldn’t think of a single thing more to say.
“It’s all right,” Dad kept telling her. “It doesn’t matter; you’re safe, that’s all that matters…”
Then Dad stepped aside, and it was Mummy hugging her, a harder, tighter hug, pulling Wren’s face against a bony shoulder, and Mum’s voice in her ear asking “You’re all right? You’ve not been hurt?”
“I’m fine,” sniffled Wren.
Hester stepped back and cupped Wren’s face in her two hands, surprised at how much love she felt. She was crying with happiness, and she almost never cried. Not wanting Tom and Wren to think she’d gone soft, she looked away and noticed the tall black boy hanging back behind Wren, watching.
“Mum, Dad,” said Wren, turning to pull him closer, “this is Theo Ngoni. He saved my life.”
“We saved each other,” said Theo shyly. He was crying too, imagining how his own mother and father would welcome him if ever he found his way home to Zagwa.
Hester looked suspiciously at the handsome young aviator, but Tom shook his hand and said, “We’d better get aboard.”
He turned away toward the waiting airship and Theo went with him, but as Hester started to follow them, Wren said, “No, wait; Pennyroyal…”
Tom and Theo didn’t hear her, but her mother did.
Wren hurried through the trees to the fountain. Pennyroyal, revived by the sound of aero-engines, was struggling to his feet. He grinned as he saw Wren, and said weakly, “What did I tell you, eh? Never say die!” Then, recognizing the figure who loomed behind her, he added, “Oh, Great Poskitt!”
The last time Hester had seen Pennyroyal, he had been running away into the snow and dark of Anchorage the night she’d killed the Huntsmen. The last time she had spoken to him had been shortly before that, in the ransacked kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Aakiuq’s house, when she had told him how the Huntsmen had come to be there.
Pennyroyal backed weakly away, his face a dead, cheesy white beneath the crusted drizzles of blood. Hester caught him with two swift strides, knocked him down, drew her knife as he groveled and pawed at her feet.
“Please!” he whined. “Spare me! I’ll give you anything!”
“Shut up,” said Hester, baring his throat to her blade, bending so the blood wouldn’t splash her new coat.
Wren hit her from the side, shoving her away. “Mummy, no!” she yelled.
Hester grunted, winded and angry. “You stay out of this…”
But Wren would not stay out of it. She had seen the look in her mother’s eye when she saw Pennyroyal. Not hate, or anger, or a thirst for revenge, but fear. And why would Mum be frightened of Pennyroyal unless the thing that Pennyroyal had said about her was true? As Hester started toward him again, Wren leaped between them, spreading her arms to protect him. “I know!” she shouted. “I know what you did! So if you want to silence him, you’re too late! If you want to keep it secret now, you’ll have to kill me too.”
“Kill you?” Hester grabbed Wren by the collar of her jacket and pushed her hard against a tree. “I wish you’d never been born!” she shouted. She turned the knife, changing her grip on the worn bone handle. The blade filled with firelight. Reflections slid across Wren’s appalled, defiant face, and suddenly it seemed to Hester very like the face of her own half sister, Katherine Valentine, who had died defending her from their father’s sword.
“Mummy?” asked Wren, in a tiny, shocked voice.
Hester lowered the knife.
Tom and Theo came hurrying through the trees, slithering down the steep lawn. “What’s happening?” shouted Theo, who was in the lead. “Wren? Are you all right?”
“She’s trying to kill him!” Wren had sunk to her knees. She was crying so much that they could hardly make out her words, but she kept repeating them until they understood.
“She wants to kill Pennyroyal!”
Tom looked down at Pennyroyal, who raised a trembly hand.
“Tom, my dear fellow, let’s not be hasty…”
Tom didn’t answer for a moment. He was remembering how it had felt to lie on his back in the snow of Anchorage, sure that he was about to die. He could still feel the hole in his chest, and taste the blood. He could still hear the fading throb of the Jenny’s engines as Pennyroyal made off with her. For a moment he felt as fierce as Hester, ready to seize the knife himself and finish the old scoundrel. But the feeling passed quickly, and he reached for his wife’s hand. “Het, look at him. He’s old and helpless and his palace is going down in flames. Isn’t that revenge enough? Let’s get him aboard the Jenny quickly, before this place sinks any lower.”
“No!” shouted Hester. “Have you forgotten what happened last time we let him aboard? Have you forgotten what he did to you? He nearly killed you! You can’t just forgive him!”
“Yes, I can,” said Tom firmly. Kneeling beside Pennyroyal, he nodded to Theo to help lift him. “What’s the alternative? Murder him? What would that achieve? It wouldn’t change anything…”
“It would,” said Wren, and there was such an odd sound to her voice that Tom looked up at her. She was crying with big, unladylike sobs, her face wet with snot and tears. She scrambled away fearfully when her mother turned toward her, and shouted out, “If she kills him, he won’t be able to tell you how she sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen.”
Hester jerked her head as if the girl had hit her. “Lies!” she said. She tried to laugh. “Pennyroyal’s been filling her up with his lies!”
“No,” said Wren. “No, it’s true. All these years everybody’s been so grateful to her for saving us from the Huntsmen, when all along it was her who brought them down on us in the first place. I wanted it not to be true. I told myself it couldn’t be. But it is.”
Tom looked at Hester, waiting for her to deny it.
“I did it for you,” she said.
“Then it’s true?”
Hester took a step backward, away from him. “Of course it’s true! Where do you think I went to, that night I took the Jenny? I flew straight to Arkangel and told Masgard where he’d find Anchorage. It was that or lose you, and I couldn’t have—I couldn’t have! Oh, Tom, for the gods’ sakes, it was sixteen years ago; it doesn’t matter now, does it? Does it? I sorted it out, didn’t I? I killed Masgard and his men. And I only did it for you…”
But it had been a different Tom Natsworthy whom she had loved enough to betray whole cities for. That Tom had been a brave, handsome, passionate boy who might have forgiven her; but this older Tom, this timid Anchorage historian who stood staring at her with his stupid mouth hanging open in dismay and his stupid daughter sniveling beside him, would never understand what she had done. Neither of them would. She was nothing like them. She had been a fool to believe that she could live in their world.
“All these years,” she said, flinging her knife away. “All these years in Vineland,” she said, watching it flash as it stuck quivering in Pennyroyal’s lawn. “All these years with you both… Gods, I’ve been so bored!