They left you. The people you loved always left you.
“I would have nowhere to go,” she said, and in that space he said:
“You would have me.”
They were near his quarters then; she recognized the brick wall in the dim glow of his flashlight. And she dropped his hand and pulled back and said, “You do not mean it.”
“I do.”
“You think you do. But I would be a burden to you. And besides. You promised you would obey my wishes. What happened to all the business a few minutes ago about your left hand?”
“Difficult to stick to,” Rook said with a faint laugh.
But Helen rose up, her thoughts ballooning out as large as the room, encompassing everything, and she said in a way that would roar and echo, “You don’t even know me. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
He opened his mouth, but she went past him like an ocean.
“I changed my husband,” she said. “I manipulated him. I took the power of my face and I changed him. Now what do you think of me?”
“What do you mean, changed him?”
Helen touched the chin of her perfect face and said, “With this I changed him.”
“You mean the fey allure?” said Rook. “It makes people be drawn to you, want to like you, sure. But it isn’t your fault beyond that. You didn’t change him.”
“Yes, I did,” she said, and she told him exactly what she had done to Alistair.
A strange light came into his eye. She recognized it as the same way she had looked at him after the trolley crash. Diffidence. Suspicion. Trying to pull back, trying to let go. She saw all those things, and she saw, too, that she could change him as easily as she had changed Alistair and the thought of it made her gasp, miss a beat.
“What else?” Rook said.
“You,” Helen said, and it came out all strangled-sounding. Was she worried that he would leave her? Well then. She could make it so he never could. And she looked at his dear bright hazel eyes in the light of the flashlight, dimmed now with worry, with concern, with trying to let her go and failing and trying to understand what she was saying. “I could change you,” she said. “I could make it so you thought I was the most wonderful woman in the world.”
“I do,” he murmured, and she gasped, and laughed, and steamrollered over that:
“The most sensible woman, then. I could change you and you would not know you had been changed. I could fix you.”
He shook his head at her. “But you wouldn’t.”
“No,” she said wildly, and clutched his shoulders, startling them both. “You don’t understand. I could have already done it. You wouldn’t know. What if I made you follow me. What if I made you protect me that night on the trolley. What if I spotted you at the Grimsbys’ the night this all started and said, you, you will do this thing for me and turned you then.”
“But you wouldn’t,” Rook said. “You didn’t.”
She looked at him. “Help me,” she said, echoing what she had said to him three nights ago when she had thought he was Alistair in the confusion after the lights went out. And he had.
His hazel eyes looked lost.
“You can’t be sure,” she said. “You never will be sure. That would poison us even if there could be an us.”
“I wouldn’t let it,” he said.
She laughed at him—a dry, brittle sounding thing—and drew back. “Go, find your dwarvven warrior and stand at her side,” she said. “I must take Jane to safety before your people turn on her.”
“Helen,” he said and one hand, two, seized her shoulders, so lightly.
“I fixed him,” she said, raising her hands as if to escape. They landed on his chest; she tried to make them obey her, and push him away, but they only lay there. “Don’t you see, I fixed Alistair. Everything will be all right.” Her voice rose in hysteria, drowning Rook out. “He will be all right, forever and ever, for he can be fixed, he can be like you, I can make him be whatever I want—”
In pure disbelief he said, “Be like me?”
She stumbled over her rising hysteria, incoherent babble, “I didn’t mean, really—”
Rook pulled her close and kissed her.
It felt like flying, like falling. Like being taken over by the fey. Like dissolving from her own self, which she knew she shouldn’t want but oh she did.
And then there were shrieks and shouts, and everything went pure white, white with intense light. Floodlights shrieked through the tunnels. Their moment was torn away.
Rook grabbed her fiercely and quick and intense he said in her ear, “Listen, you don’t know. I was supposed to—they wanted me to kill—”
“Who, Grimsby? You’d be doing everyone a favor, almost—”
“Listen, Helen. No. All of them. They wanted me to kill all of them. All the men of Copperhead. That was what I was doing as a double agent. Not just spying.”
She stared at him in disbelief, her lips forming the single word “Alistair” to his silent, unreadable expression. The floodlights swept over them as humans in black stormed down the stairs, through the halls. Shouting, running, chaos. The barricade had fallen.
Rook shoved her behind him and shouted in her ear, “Behind the quilt!” and then she was through the entrance into his bedroom and the door was closed behind her, and he was gone. Jane and Tam stood there, blinking at her. Tam was bleary-eyed but awake. Jane was vacant.
“Come on,” Helen said, and, grabbing their things, flung aside the brown quilt to reveal the hole in the wall. It was very short, and she could see lights just beyond it—a drop-off. “Hopefully not too far down,” she muttered, but she was sure Rook wouldn’t have sent them through it if they were all going to break legs.
She lifted Tam up, and he slithered through and called back, “It’s fine; come on!” and so shortly they were all through and then pounding down an escape tunnel marked by red sigils, splashing down tunnels and ducking under grates. They were met by other dwarvven children and elderly at various intervals, caught up in a sea of them running to safety, until at last they reached the point where the old sewer tunnels had poured into the river. The thin water trickled past the grate, out into the cold of the rushing river. There were narrow steps there leading them up to safety, and they scrambled up and tumbled out into the snowy dark at the waterfront, by the statue of Queen Maud.
The freezing air was bracing after the tumble through the tunnels. Helen kept a tight grip on Jane and Tam, searching through the confusion for a way out, a way somewhere.
Helen saw Nolle in the midst of chaos, calmly directing refugees to a line of barges. A small smile warmed her face as she saw Helen. “We’d been planning for this eventuality,” Nolle said. “The dwarvven are going home. Every last one. Leaving the city for good. But I wanted to thank you.”
“I hardly did anything,” protested Helen.
“You stood with us,” Nolle said, “and I think you will in the future. I will not forget my debt.” A short nod and she turned back to her work. “Goodbye.”
Helen pulled Jane and Tam through the crowd, out of the way. If everyone was going to insist on believing the best of her, she might have to actually live up to it.
“Where are we going?” said Jane absently.
“Frye’s,” Helen replied, and they tramped through the snow.
It was only during that cold black walk back to safety that she finally let herself think about the moment that had just happened, ever so briefly before everything ended. Not the moment itself. She couldn’t quite think about that; it was too fine, too vivid. But the moment before, the moment when she rattled everything off hysterically, when she had said she could make Alistair be like Rook. Helen closed her eyes against her mouth’s foolishness. For then there was the moment after to deal with, too, when Rook said what he had been sent to do.