“Do you”—Silas closed his eyes and twisted his face like he was suddenly in pain, his fingers close to his temples like he was trying to focus on theinsideof his head—“feelthat?”
I squeezed March’s hand as we all started to look around.
No, I didn’t feel anything. I only felt the loud beating of my heart and the chaos of my thoughts and every instinct in my body that wanted me to somehow sprout wings and fly right out of herenow.
“I don’t feel anything,” March said.
“Fuck feeling—we need to run!” Russ.
“Let’s go, go, go!” Anika.
But Silas opened his eyes and said, “Something’s wrong.”
He turned slowly, his gray eyes scanning the tree line, the palace beyond, the dark shapes of the buildings in the distance. His body was tense, every muscle locked in, his hands fisted tightly.
“The blast,” Master Talik said.
“It wasn’t random.” Silas.
My stomach fell, and March pulled me closer to where Reggie lay, and all the others were already there, moving closer on instinct…
“A perimeter ward. It must have been a perimeterward…” Master Talik’s voice trailed off as he, too, came toward us, arms out, shaking.
“It wasn’t.” March.
“How do you know?” Levana asked from his other side.
His answer was simple: “Nobody’s running.”
Holy Hour, nobody was running. Nobody was coming toward us.
How fast had those Timekeepers found us last time when we came here?
And…whyhadn’t they been anywhere in the palace, or when we ran outside, or when we were knocked out cold by the blast and apparently lay here unconscious and unprotectedall night long?!
“An explosion that size, in the middle of the Labyrinth grounds, and not a single soldier has come to investigate,” Silas said slowly.
The silence that followed was one of the loudest sounds I’d ever heard because in it we realized just how screwed we were.
“She knows,” I whispered, even if a part of me insisted that words so awful shouldn’t be said out loud. “She knows we’re here.”
“Of course I do.”
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once—the hedges and the trees and the sky and the ground. That’s what it felt like to me at first.
Until the shadows peeled like ribbons from the brass trees that still stood, though ruined, and slithered all around. Until a woman stepped through them, her white dress catching the first gray light of dawn like she’d been sewn from it.
The White Queen was here.
40
She was more petite than she’d looked in those scenes while I was stillward—or maybe it was just my perception, the idea of her I’d created in my head? After everything—the stories, the stolen time, the way she turned time backward—I expected agiant. A monster. Something that matched all she’d done, but no. She was just a woman. Average height, white hair cut below her chin, the edges of it turned outward, a crystal crown glistening on her head, a face that looked forty, smooth and sharp and controlled. Her every feature was arranged in an expression of mild, almostboredamusement.
She wasn’t alone.
Soldiers, dozens of them, stepped out of the trees on all sides, surrounding the garden in a ring of silver armor. They had their hands on their weapons, and the plaques of their armor made that awful sound with every step they took—perfectly coordinated as they closed in.
And behind the soldiers, standing slightly apart, her face half-hidden by a veil of deep red, was the Red Queen.
