“Never mind.” Henry refolded himself so he was once again sitting by the silent, swiftly moving river. Suddenly he looked defeated, and Po could see the darkness eating at the edges of his shoulders now, and down around his arms—could tell that the Everything was already starting to pull hard on Henry’s soul. “Leave me now,” Henry said. “I’m very tired.”
“Okay,” Po said, and then, remembering the other thing Liesl had taught him, said, “I am sorry you are tired.”
“That’s okay,” Henry said. He did not look again at Po. He stared off at the stars, at the sky, at the universe bending and unfolding. “Once Liesl brings me home, I will rest.”
Chapter Eight
MEANWHILE, IN THE DARK, TWISTED ALLEYS OF the Living Side, Will was running for his life.
He ran without knowing where he was going. He ran blindly, impulsively, cutting left and right, down foul-smelling alleys and streets so close and shadowed he could hardly see.
Plan, he thought. I need a plan. But his heart was beating so loudly in his ears he couldn’t think.
He knew one thing for sure: He could not go back to the alchemist’s studio. He could never, ever go back to the alchemist’s studio for as long as he lived, because the alchemist would kill him, and that would be the End of that.
Will was used to the alchemist’s temper. He had seen the alchemist scream many times, and go purple from fury, like he did the time that Will confused arrowroot for gingerroot in an extremely complex protection powder, thus rendering it completely useless except for the thickening of soups.
But he had never, ever been so terrified of the alchemist as he had been tonight, when the Lady Premiere had swept into her private apartments and commanded her attendants to “Leave us,” seeming to bring to the room an arctic chill with those two words.
It had been clear just from the tone of her voice and her dark, furious, glittering eyes, that she had not summoned the alchemist to congratulate him, or thank him, or make him Official, and the alchemist had turned to Will with a look of such withering anger and hatred that Will had felt the very center of his being quiver and go limp. And though there had been a fire blazing in the corner of the room, his teeth had started to chatter again.
“Useless!” the Lady Premiere had thundered at the alchemist. Normally hearing the familiar insult turned against his master might have struck Will as amusing, but not at that moment. At that moment he knew only that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong, and that he would be blamed.
“Excuse me?” the alchemist had spluttered, eyes bulging from his head.
“I said, useless! I ask you to bring me the greatest, the most powerful magic of all, and instead you bring me a pile of ash.” And she had snapped open the wooden box and revealed the pale ashes inside, as dead of magic, as cold, as the coldest, deadest root in midwinter.
That was when the alchemist had gone the white color of the very hottest part of a flame. For a moment he had been unable to speak. He had stood there and stared at the wooden box in her arms. Then he had turned to Will and pronounced a single syllable: “You.”
And yet in that tiny, nothing word, five years’ worth of hatred and disappointment and dashed hopes and blame had been compressed, so Will had felt as though he had been hit with a physical force, as though the word were a fist straight to his gut. And he had known then that his life with the alchemist was finished. That he would never again sleep in the cold, narrow cot directly underneath the chimney, or get up in the half-light to feed the fish with tadpoles, or grind dried mullet into a powder under the alchemist’s watchful gaze, or measure a goat’s tears into a beaker and then add exactly two drops of moonlight, no more, no less, to make a cream that could cure even the biggest pimples.
The alchemist had tried to explain: The Lady Premiere had received the wrong wooden box, obviously. The one she was holding was most certainly not the one he had sent her. And it had all come out—that Will had not gone straight to the Lady Premiere’s, as he had been commanded to do, but had instead gone to Mr. Gray’s first; that he had fallen asleep by the fire; and afterward, his dim and bleary recollection of the large sack pressed into his arms and the wooden box on the table (no—boxes—there had been two of them, almost identical), and how he had gone stumbling outside, eyes half-closed, without checking to see that he had the correct one.
But it had not been enough. The Lady Premiere had screamed, the alchemist had cursed Will to damnation, and Will had known that if he stayed, he would most certainly be killed.