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“Her Royal Highness is being seen to,” he says, and this is so infuriatingly vague that I can’t even begin to interpret what he’s really saying. “I’m afraid we must go.”
For a split second, I think he’s going to pull me out the window. Instead, he leads me and my mother through the sitting room and into the corridor, which is already hazy with smoke.
“Maisie!” I shout down the long gallery. “Maisie!”
“This way, Miss Bright,” says the protection officer, and he all but jerks me in the other direction. The exit and the safety that comes with it aren’t far, but I can hear other panicked voices call to one another in the distance, and adrenaline spikes through me.
“Let me go,” I say, trying to free my arm, but his grip is impossibly tight. “I said let me go—”
Out of instinct, maybe, or pure fear, I twist my wrist in the way Ingrid taught me, pushing against his thumb, and I finally break loose. Instantly I take off deeper into the gallery, toward the thickening smoke.
“Evie!” cries my mom as a crackle of radio static fills the air. “Evie, get back here!”
It’s irrational—I know it’s irrational. But after nearly losing Alexander, the thought of my sister, trapped and frightened and gasping for air, drives me forward as fast as my legs can carry me.
The shouts grow louder as I dash toward my sister’s apartment. But I don’t know where I am, exactly, not with the smoke so thick now that I can hardly see, and I’m coughing as I stumble directly into someone’s arms.
“Found her!” calls a man whose voice I don’t recognize, and before I know what’s happening, he picks me up around the waist and carries me around the bend in the corridor.
“Maisie!” I yell, but her name dissolves into another coughing fit. Suddenly ruddy orange flames flicker through the haze, and I see the outline of a doorway—the entrance to Alexander’s apartment.
“This way,” booms another voice nearby, and just as I spot a second door—Maisie’s, which is wide open as smoke pours from her sitting room—my so-called rescuer veers to the left and out into the freezing courtyard.
Almost instantly, the air clears, and I suck in a deep breath between coughs. Dimly I hear my mother calling my name nearby, and within moments, her arms are around me.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” she gasps, clutching me so tightly that I really can’t breathe. “What were you thinking?”
“Maisie’s still in there,” I wheeze. Sirens sound nearby, and blue lights reflect off the walls of the courtyard as several fire trucks appear, along with multiple ambulances.
“And you were going to rescue her yourself?” says my mom, but she holds me even closer. “Come on—let’s get you checked out.”
I don’t want to go anywhere without knowing my sister’s all right, but another pair of protection officers usher us both toward the center of the courtyard, where an ambulance has parked. I crane my neck as we go, anxiously watching the doorway closest to Maisie’s room, but no one comes or goes for nearly a minute.
“She probably went out through her window, sweetheart,” says my mom as a technician presses a stethoscope to my chest, half an inch from my healing wound. “She’ll be in the garden, no doubt.”
“But it’s a drop,” I manage. “And if she jumped out the window—”
Suddenly the doors burst open, and a protection officer with an ash-streaked face barrels out of the castle, cradling a bundle with strawberry-blond curls.
My sister.
“Maisie!” I cry, even though my throat is raw from the smoke. This time, I dodge both my mother and the protection officer hovering nearby as I race across the courtyard toward a second ambulance near the doors. My lungs are on fire, but I don’t care. All I can focus on is the fact that she isn’t moving.
I reach the ambulance just as Maisie’s rescuer sets her on a stretcher, and I skid to a stop a couple yards away. “Maisie?” I say as terror spreads through me, rooting my bare feet to the ground. “Maisie.”
She’s still—too still. The sleeve of her flannel pajamas is scorched, and her arm is red and angry, but the paramedics pay it no attention as they place an oxygen mask over her face. They move over her, listening to her heart and her lungs with calm urgency, but just as tears sting my already-watering eyes, hers fly open.
“Get—off—me!” she gasps, and my legs damn near give out from relief. But as soon as these three words escape her, she dissolves into a coughing fit so violent that I half expect her to expel a lung. She sits up, hunching over as her entire body contracts with each rattle, but even as the crowd around her gathers, she looks at me.
“Maisie,” I choke out, only partially because of the smoke now. “Are you—”
She pushes aside a paramedic who has to be twice her size, and despite the way she’s shaking, she slides off the stretcher and crosses the narrow distance between us, her hand pressing the oxygen mask to her face. I meet her halfway, and without a word, she hugs me fiercely, once again clinging to me like I’m the only thing keeping her standing—which, after a second or two, might actually be true.
“I’m sorry,” she wheezes as she pulls her mask away. We’re surrounded by protection officers and paramedics alike, but she shrugs off their touches as she holds on to me instead. “What I said—”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Let them take care of you, okay? I’ll be right here.”
At last she allows the officers and medics to lift her back onto the stretcher, but as they tend to her, her gaze doesn’t leave mine. And while the words she said and the accusations she slung hours earlier still hang between us, with the smoke rising from the castle and the flames flickering toward the night sky, they seem to fade until they, too, drift away on the wind.
