The Master of Misrule (5 page)

“Yes. Whatever needs to be done, I’ll do it. I swear.”

She nodded. “I believe in you.” Mischief hovered at the corners of her mouth again. “Though I’m sorry about the sphinxes.”

“Oh, this version’s more festive.” Confidence was suddenly bubbling inside him, and he realized that he wouldn’t want to change anything—not the mocking Christmas jingle, or the shopping mall, or even those absurd reindeer. Everything was as it should be. Because although the Game worked in crooked ways, his faith in it had been proved right. What should have been an appalling blow—he’d been cheated and exploited, disaster had struck—had instead given him new strength and purpose.

Toby, the hero, had a wrong to right.

F
LORA’S CELL PHONE BEGAN
to ring. Insistently. She looked at the screen and saw that it was Cat.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Charlie asked.

“No. It won’t be anything important.” She shrugged sweetly at him, though what she really wanted to do was stamp the phone into silence beneath her heel. Flora had already had an incoherent voice mail from Toby, rambling on about quests and sacred duties and Saving the Game. And now this. Why couldn’t these people just leave her
alone
? Of course, that was unfair of her—unkind, too—but knowing she was being unreasonable only made everything more frustrating.

Part of the frustration was at being at this stupid benefit luncheon, the latest in the round of seasonal parties. Her parents avoided being left to their own company as much as possible, and it seemed her every moment had been taken
up by some enforced festive gathering since … well, since the events of Boxing Day. She felt another jab of anger.

“Flo, are you all right? You’re looking a little stressed out.” Charlie was leaning over her solicitously.

“Oh, it’s just the post-Christmas grumps. Mince pie withdrawal syndrome.” Remembering where she was—who she had to be—Flora twirled a strand of honey-blond hair and sparkled up at him in her best party manner.

Charlie grinned back, a little sheepishly. He was a nice boy, she thought, as if considering someone much younger and not particularly connected to her. If she’d been in a better mood, she would have acknowledged that it was a nice party, too. The Avoncourts’ large drawing room was filled with the contented hum of people relaxing into well-established social routines. From where she was standing, she could see Georgia and Tilly, two of her best friends from school, gossiping in a corner. Her father was holding court on the other side of the room, where he was laughing at something Lady Swinton had said, all crinkly-eyed amusement and easy charm. And there was Mummy, with a glass in her hand—of course—but, thankfully, without that over-bright, brittle look that meant danger. Perhaps today was going to be one of her mother’s good days, when the drink worked its old magic of making the world a kinder place.

Flora’s phone beeped. Cat had left a message. She ignored it and forced herself to look as if she was paying attention to whatever Charlie was saying. She wondered what Georgia and Tilly were giggling about. It might well be to
do with her; she and Charlie had kissed on a couple of occasions, one fairly recently, and it was becoming harder to ignore the expectation building within their group.

Well, it made sense. They had known each other forever; in fact, his older brother, Will, had been friends with Grace, and was one of the few people outside the family who—very occasionally—still visited her. Moreover, they shared the same kind of unassuming good looks, both being blue-eyed and fair, and he was popular in the same steady, unshowy way that she was popular. Two sides of the same coin, Flora thought with black humor. Because of course she and Charlie were nothing alike. How could they be? Neither he nor anybody else here could possibly imagine the things she had seen, and what she had done.

But if the secret of the Game was lonely, it could be exhilarating, too. Sometimes, when she was with the others in the school common room, or at their favorite coffee shop, she would be laughing at the jokes, joining in with the stories, and still feel the tug of her other life, like a dark ripple through her veins. Then she would look at Charlie, or Georgia, or whoever it was, and think with a disdainful thrill, You don’t know me at all.

Right at the moment, her sense of displacement was excruciating. Grace was waiting. Grace! Her sister, the miracle, the prize that would make their family whole again. The only thing Flora needed to do was to bring her home. For what felt like the hundred thousandth time, her hand moved to touch the card in her pocket. The Eight of Swords
depicted a young woman, bound and blindfolded, inside a cage of swords. A cliff-top castle loomed behind her. It was the same card Grace had been holding when her ten-year-old sister had found her in her scarlet evening gown, splayed across the snow. That first card had been taken away from Flora, but this one was new, and hers to play.

And with each further delay, it became harder not to twist her bland smile into a snarl, to keep from screaming curses in the midst of this complacent crowd, to stop herself kicking and scratching until she drew blood, lashing out at anyone who got in her way.…

She took a deep breath.

“Charlie,” she said after patiently waiting for the end of a rugby match anecdote, “I’m frightfully sorry but I’m afraid I’m going to have to take off. I’ve started to get a splitting headache.”

Of course he was the perfect gentleman, and offered to make her excuses to the relevant friends and family without even having to be asked. The Avoncourts were neighbors, only five minutes down the road from Flora’s house, and so she felt quite able to turn down his proposal to walk her home. His kindness made her feel both undeserving and exasperated.

No sooner had Flora left the house than her phone began to ring. Again, she ignored it. “What does everyone
want
from me?” she said aloud. The more quickly she walked, the more quickly their faces seemed to crowd around. She thought of
her mother after she’d come back from visiting Grace, and how she’d never asked Flora anything or even said a word, but after reapplying her lipstick with a hand that trembled, she’d topped up the glass by her side. She thought of the look her mother had exchanged with her father: his contempt, her appeal, their shared helplessness. She thought of Charlie, so considerate and so clueless, and, like everybody else, wanting what she couldn’t give.…

By the time Flora reached the end of her street, she was practically running. She forced herself to slow down and breathe normally. It was important to be calm. She had plenty of time. Her parents were bound to stay at the Avoncourts’ for a good while yet, as it was their last social engagement before they left for a New Year’s skiing party tomorrow. Flora wasn’t going, pleading the pressures of coursework and plans with friends. Of course, the trip would be off as soon as they got the phone call from the clinic, but— No, don’t think ahead, she told herself with a kind of panic. The swell of expectation was almost too much to bear.

The Seaton home was part of a row of tall white Regency mansions that backed onto one of London’s loveliest parks. When Flora let herself into the house, she could hear Mina, the housekeeper, moving about upstairs, but she didn’t stop to say hello. Instead, she walked—neat, calm, purposeful—straight through the ground floor to the garden, and the door in the wall that opened directly onto the park.

It was a dank, raw day, and there weren’t many people
about, just a few dog walkers and, in the distance, a halfhearted football game. Near the main gates, three teenage boys were bickering over something.

“I’m telling you, if it comes up tails, you’re
doomed
,” one of them was saying. “Some random disaster hits you out of nowhere and—
bam!
”

“Yeah,” said his mate. “And if you win heads, it’s the opposite. Like having all your Christmases come at once.”

“You two’ud believe any old crap,” the other boy jeered. “Everyone knows those rumors are a windup. It’s just some dumb publicity stunt.”

“So why haven’t you scratched your coin off, then?”

“ ’Cause I’m not bothered.”

“No, ’cause you’re chicken.”

“Screw you—”

Idiots, thought Flora, walking briskly by. She was headed toward a summerhouse set on a small hill. In warmer weather, there were often people relaxing on its steps, but today she had it to herself. It was designed like a miniature classical temple, and there was the sign of the wheel worked into the base of one of its columns.

Flora had no need to use a die to play her card. The threshold to Grace’s last move was already in place, and had been ever since the winter’s night five years ago when her sister had used it to enter the Arcanum and had never come back. Or rather, only part of her had come back: the inanimate doll in the hospital bed, as much a captive as the prisoner on the card. But Flora knew that the real Grace—the living, laughing Grace—was somewhere in the Arcanum
still. And it was this hope that kept Flora returning to the Game, as if each new move she entered would bring a fresh clue, another chance.

But today was different. Today, she would go into the Eight of Swords and find her sister waiting. That was the promise.

Flora bent to sketch the lines of the wheel, the coin heavy in her palm. When she tossed it, it felt as if her heart was leaping into the air along with the metal, up and up, so that the whole world seemed to be soaring with her.…

Because as soon as the scene flipped sides to the Arcanum, she knew that everything was going to be all right. It was as if she’d stepped back in time to that snowy evening five years before.

The Arcanum’s landscapes were frequently silent and lifeless, but here the city’s lights glittered above and behind the fringe of trees, and traffic still purred at the park’s rim. She could even hear a distant echo of the football game. And, most wonderful of all, there was a skein of embroidery silk looped around one of the summerhouse’s columns. It was red, just like the thread she had found tied to Grace’s finger, and snaked invitingly down the slope from the column and along the line of a path.

Flora touched the card in her pocket, with its picture of the caged woman and the castle behind. “Grace,” she said aloud. “Grace, I’m coming.”

The snow was several inches deep and as immaculate as sugar frosting. As she took the thin red thread in her hand and followed it across the folds of glistening white, the sense
of familiarity receded until, a little after leaving the park’s main thoroughfare, Flora looked behind her and saw that the city’s rooftops had vanished from behind the trees, along with the traffic’s hum. She was in a landscape of rolling hills and tree-furred hollows.

It was bitterly cold. She was wearing a wool coat and scarf, but she’d forgotten her gloves, and her shoes were unsuited to wading through snow. The drifts were getting deeper, and new flakes were already beginning to spiral through the darkening sky.

I’m coming.

I’m coming
.

She reached the foot of a steep hill. Through the lace of trees above, there were windows shining, warm as syrup, and she saw a house of high gray walls and wide lawns. It was Grace’s clinic, an old country mansion that had been converted into a center for long-term care. Here in the Arcanum, it was larger and grander than on the other side of the threshold, its roof higgledy-piggledy with new slopes and turrets. Moreover, it was blazing with light, every chimney smoking, every door flung open in welcome.

The embroidery silk was still in her hand, a fragile scarlet filament winding through the white-dappled dark. Flora began to stumble up the hill. Her feet were numb and clumsy; her eyes watered and cheeks stung. It didn’t matter. She drew in jubilant gulps of icy black air, laughing giddily as she slipped and scrambled through the drifts and along the tunnel of trees leading up to the house. Grace was inside,
talking, dancing, sparkling.… Grace was waiting at the end of this thread. Above her head, branches creaked under their burden of ice.

The smell of the clinic, a mixture of expensive flowers and antiseptic, was as familiar to Flora as that of her mother’s perfume or the school dining hall, and she automatically braced herself for it as she went through the main entrance. But the building had reverted to its plush country house interior and all its hospital trappings were gone. Furthermore, it seemed that she had arrived at the late, disorderly stages of a black-tie ball.

The crowd was grandly dressed, yet in a state of considerable dishevelment. The women’s hair straggled around their faces and their lavish makeup was smeared. The men weren’t much better: flushed and moist-looking, with ties and collars askew. People were greeting each other with bellowing enthusiasm, bawling jokes and waving their glasses so wildly that the drink sprayed everywhere.

Flora hovered at the edge of the crowd, with a backward look at the silk strand zigzagging down the steps. She was used to the Arcanum’s crowds; in fact, there was a pleasurable recklessness in being swept up in gatherings conjured by the Game. Afterward, she would tell herself that none of it mattered because it was all illusion anyway.