Page 53 of The Song Rising

“I won’t make her go.” I lowered my voice. “I want to give her the option. She might be safer with the toshers than she is in here.”

“It would be for a lifetime. That was what Styx demanded.”

“I will get her out,” I said.

“How?”

“However I can. She will not stay there forever.”

She returned her attention to my palm, her jaw stiff. The needle shoved into my skin.

“You know how frail she is,” Wynn said, with unusual softness. “She doesn’t sleep. Her stomach won’t take much food. And you ought to see the scars her keeper gave her. She has been punished more than enough for what she did.” Her shoulders pulled back. “Ivy is like a daughter to me. All the Jacob girls are. Send her, and I’ll go to Scion with our whereabouts myself.”

“Wynn.” I grasped her wrist. “You wouldn’t. You’d kill all the vile augurs in here, as well as the rest of us.”

Her lips pursed. She cut the thread and enfolded my hand in a clean bandage.

“I don’t know what I’d do. You know I’ve no love for this syndicate, Paige. My loyalty was only ever to you.” She secured the dressing. “Go on, now. I have another patient.”

Her face had turned to stone. I left.

The next patient was outside. Ivy. She was standing with Róisín, who seemed to have taken on the role of bodyguard.

“Paige,” Ivy said, but I ignored her. My footsteps matched my heartbeat as I walked away. “Paige?”

It would sate their bloodlust to give Ivy to Styx, and it would keep her out of danger. Every minute, I expected to hear that someone had snapped and takenjusticeinto their own hands, and I feared it.

Ivy was a survivor. While I was in Manchester, however, I wouldn’t be able to protect her. I wanted to see her settled in a safe place, somewhere where she could mend, where she would be surrounded by people who cared about her, and that place wasn’t here—but if she was ever going to reach it, she had to last for the next few weeks.

For now, the decision would have to wait. It was time for the séance.

I joined my mollishers in the cross-tunnel, all three of us silent and tense as we waited. Eliza worried a lock of her hair, while Nick, who stood with his arms folded, was statue-still. I knew that the thirty members of the Unnatural Assembly who had arrived had been summoned to an empty stretch of the upper deck, where there was enough room to form a circle. Their voices mingled in the darkened space. They must have come willingly, but even so, I had no idea what sort of reception awaited us.

“Nick,” I said, watching his closed face, “you don’t have to do this.”

His gaze was distant. “It’s time I faced it.”

A few more mime-lords and mime-queens trailed into the chamber. I watched them out of their sight. No sign of the Pearl Queen.

When the three of us stepped into the tunnel, their voices slammed into me like a wall: shouts for justice for their missing sensors, for explanations, for evidence of a plan to get rid of the army. Some of them bawled that I was a murderer and a turncoat. I watched as this ostensible Assembly collapsed into a snarl of cavilling, shrieking, and fist-shaking while Eliza and Nick moved in front of me, calling for order. Spirits quavered nearby, ready to attack. When one of the new mime-queens punched Jimmy O’Goblin, I brought them all to heel with my spirit. A wave rolled through the æther and broke against their dreamscapes.

They quietened, their expressions wary.They need to be afraid of you, or they will never respect you, Glym had told me.All you have to do is show them what you can do, if you choose.

Several of them had souvenirs from the scrimmage: scarred faces, burns, missing fingers. Others had more recent wounds. I spotted Jack Hickathrift, who smiled at me with one side of his mouth.

“The Underqueen,” Nick called.

I stepped forward. Eliza and Nick flanked me, both forming spools for my protection.

“Members of the Unnatural Assembly,” I said, “as you’re all aware, we are facing a crisis on an unprecedented scale. With the call for martial law and the increased presence of Senshield, I have had no choice but to order the syndicate into the Beneath.” A few mutters, but I was holding their attention. “After years of threatening us with Senshield, Scion has not only installed hidden scanners across the citadel and recalibrated the technology, but combined the threat of it with the presence of ScionIDE—their army.”

“Because ofyou!”

“Go to hell, dreamwalker!”

“We should have never let you have the crown. This wouldn’t have happened under Binder!”

Others chimed in with their agreements. My commanders were at the back of the gathering, watching tensely, but I’d told them not to leap to my defense. I needed to handle this on my own.

---