Suddenly Johnny looked offended as he spun his device around his hands. “Of course, I do.”
“Then tell us,” said Helen, and he actually flinched.
“Why in Time’s Temper would I do that?!”
“That’s enough,” Calren said, and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “We have things to go over.Go.”
“I was—” Johnny started, but Calren gave him a nice shove on his shoulder, and almost threw him to the floor.
“Leave,Johnny.Now.”
I’d never heard Calren sound more…dangerous.Like he wasn’t himself at all. It was worse than when we heard him lose it underneath the mechanical garden that night.
For a second, Johnny looked at him—angry, outraged, shocked, and then…afraid.The expressions on his face changed right before our eyes.
“Very well,” he then muttered, and raising his chin, he turned around, pulled down the edges of his vest, and walked out the door.
“Thanks,” Reggie muttered when Calren turned to us again—smiling, like always.
“He can really be a pain,” the Timekeeper said.
“Doyouknow about the trial, though?” Mimi asked him.
“I don’t. Neither does he—he just likes to pretend,” Calren said. “You will be all right.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one about to enter a trial where there could be timewraiths waiting to suck our time dry,” said Seth. “…are there?”
“No. No timewraiths in this trial, either,” Calren said without hesitation, which was why I believed him. “Just keep your head about you.Thinkbefore you act. You will be okay—you are all brilliant girls and boys.” His smile this time was genuine.
Not that it mattered, though. Not when the soldiers came through the doors and nodded at him to say that it was time to go.
It really was time for the fourth trial.
The sun shone outside, though it couldn’t have been later than ten s.b. It was especially hot today, or maybe it was just the suit. Suddenly it felt really tight against my skin, sucking the air out of my lungs. March stayed by my side, though, my hand in his at all times, and that made it a little better.
Calren took us to the side of the palace and all the way to the arena, the same arena where we’d held the other two trials. Nothing about it had changed much—except the audience.
They lost their minds when we entered. There were so many people, a lotmore than before, possibly over two hundred. The screens behind the tiered seats where they were cheering and applauding showed the four symbols of the courts. The queens were there too, both of them in their glass box, surrounded by the screaming crowd—together with them, but separate.
And ahead, there were no dark clouds, no domes, no gigantic trees attached to towers—only a forest, denser than any I’d seen before, the trunks barely feet apart, their branches intertwined so you couldn’t tell which belonged towhich. By now, though, I was used to things disappearing and appearing again in the morning in the Labyrinth, so the view didn’t surprise me.
What scared me timeless was the darkness between the trees.
It was so thick, so all-consuming, like the light from the sun couldn’t peek through the canopy at all.
“Your Royal Clocklinesses, ladies and gentlemen from all over the finest realm in the universe—welcome to the fourth and final game of the 31st Turning Trials!”
That voice. How I’d come to hate that voice.
My eyes closed and I tried to breathe in deeply where we’d stopped, between the seats of the audience, and the entrance of the unusually dark forest.
How come the fresh sunlight couldn’t slip through anywhere? It lookednighttimebetween those trees, and it made no sense.
The shadow from the tower of the Great Clock to its right didn’t help, either.
“March,” someone said—Calren. I opened my eyes to find him looking at March, waving for him to approach Levana and Helen.
My heart fell. Ireallydidn’t want to have to walk in there by myself, but…
