I nodded so hard, my head hurt.
“I get it,” I said. “You’re brave. Will you let me hold your hand? Only, I’m scared.”
Don’t tell my mom I said that. Don’t tell her, but I cried.
“Yes,” he said, quite loudly, and he didn’t sound like Ethan again. He sounded mad, but what he said was nice. “I’ll hold your hand until the very end.”
The car was getting pretty close to the big square with the new things in it, like birdcages but huge and horrible somehow. They were like the stuff you see with your eyes closed, when it’s night and you don’t want to open your eyes in case you are all alone and everything you’re scared of is real.
It was daytime, and there were so many people around me. All the people didn’t make me feel better, though. They were watching us, and their eyes went right through me, like the points of scissors into paper.
I held on to his hand pretty tight, I guess. He looked down at me, and he tried to kneel down beside me. He couldn’t quite do it, because of the chains.
“Don’t look at the cages,” he said. “Don’t look at them. Can you just look at me? Look at me, and don’t look at anything else.”
I looked at him. He looked like Ethan does, but he was thinner. He looked like Ethan would if Ethan had been sick, and people had been . . . had been not very kind to him. He had a sad mouth, but his eyes didn’t seem sad. His eyes looked afraid of me, as if I was an exam and he thought he was going to fail me. I looked at him, and maybe it was a silly thing to think, but I thought I liked him just as much as Ethan.
“Yeah,” I said. “I can do that.”
I don’t know how it was exactly, if I hugged him or he hugged me, but he was suddenly holding on to me. I put my head down on his shoulder and he put his arms around me, as much as he could when we were fastened to opposite sides of the car. I held on to his shirt as hard as I could. I was crying a lot by then, and I got his shirt all wet. I don’t think he minded, though. He held me, and I felt a little bit of wet on my neck. He was crying too, even though he was pretty big. Even though he was almost grown up.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m trying not to be scared. I won’t be scared. Just don’t let me go.”
“Hush, hush,” he said. I think he tried to stroke my hair, but he couldn’t properly because of the chains. “Don’t be scared. I promise, I won’t let you go.”
“Mom says I shouldn’t ever be scared,” I whispered. “She says help will always come to me if I believe it will. Were you sent to me?”
The next thing he said was a funny thing for him to say. He was so much bigger than me, and he didn’t seem scared, even though he had cried.
He said, “Maybe you were sent to me.”
I ran faster than I had ever run in my life. The wind rushed after me, the clouds rushed after me, the sun seemed to fling its rays out like a net, the whole fierce morning seemed to be pursuing me so it could swallow me whole, but nobody else chased me. Nobody stopped my wild dash to Times Square.
Once there, I had to fight my way through a thick crowd. Nobody was expecting me; nobody stood aside for the Golden Thread in the Dark. I elbowed and shouted and struggled like a swimmer caught in a current, until I finally burst free and into the empty space where the car was only now drawing to a halt.
The cages were suspended so high above the crowd that they seemed like blots on the sun. The platform was empty save for one man in black and scarlet. He looked hesitant. He looked as if he might be waiting for my aunt’s arrival, but the crowd’s anticipation was pulsing, the very air expanding and contracting around their desire to see savage justice. He would not wait long.
“Stop!” I shouted, and held the paper up high. “I have a pardon. Stop.”
People looked at me then: people recognized me, saw my sleep-rumpled dress and my hair snarled around my shoulders. I did not care. I did not even look at the member of the sans-merci who strode toward me and examined the paper in my hand.
I was looking for Carwyn.
They had put the prisoners in one of those open limousines that politicians were driven in so they could wave to the crowd, but its soft leather seats were torn out, the whole car gutted, and those being sent to the cages were chained to the metal bars that remained, bars and chains both glistening with inky streams of Dark magic so nobody could escape.
I did not see him at first, because he was bowed over in his chains. Then I did.
Then I knew why Penelope had come for me, why she had gone after Aunt Leila and sent me running down here. I understood Aunt Leila’s plan. She had set everything up so that even if I arrived in time, I could not save him.