“Come on, you sons of bitches!” I screamed.
I tossed the useless gun away and spread my arms wide. Behind the line of blue shapes, Kellin had stopped his little bus. Content just to watch me killed, I thought at first, but it wasn’t me he was looking at. It was the sky. The night soldiers stopped, still seventy or eighty yards away. They were looking up, too, with identical expressions of amazement on the gauzy human faces that overlaid their skulls.
There was enough light to see by even though the two ever-racing moons were hidden. A cloud below the clouds was coming over the outside wall. It was unrolling toward the Gallien Road, the fancy shops and arches, and the palace beyond, where the three glass-green spires shone in the lights ringing the field.
It was a cloud of monarchs, the sort of group known as a kaleidoscope. They flew above me without stopping. It was the night soldiers they wanted. They halted, circled, and then dive-bombed en masse. The soldiers raised their arms, as the Flight Killer was said to have done after his coup, but they didn’t have his power and the butterflies didn’t die. Except, that is, for the ones that struck those high-voltage auras first. There were brilliant flashes when they hit the blue envelopes. It was as if a crowd of invisible children were waving Fourth of July sparklers. Hundreds burned up, but thousands more followed, either smothering the deadly auras or shorting them out. The cloud seemed to solidify as it engulfed the night soldiers.
But not Lord High Kellin. His little electric bus made a tight U-turn and headed back to the palace, making good speed. Some of the monarchs broke off and chased it, but it was too fast for them, and the roof would have protected the son of a bitch anyway. The night soldiers that had been chasing us were finished. All of them. The only movement where they had been was the flutter of delicate wings. I saw one bony hand rise… and then sink back into the orange-red mass on top of it.
I ran for the outer gate. It was open. My party of prisoners had gone outside, but something else came in at a dead run. Something black, low to the ground, and barking like hell. I had thought the only thing I wanted was to get the hell out of the haunted city of Lilimar, but now I realized there was something else I wanted more. I thought of Dora, when she’d caught sight of my dog, how she had called to her as best she could in her broken voice. My voice was also broken, not by some degenerative curse but by sobs. I fell to my knees and held out my arms.
“Radar! Radar! RADES!”
She collided with me and knocked me over, whining and licking my face from top to bottom. I hugged her with all my strength. And I cried. I couldn’t stop crying. Not very princely, I suppose, but as you may have guessed already, this isn’t that kind of a fairy tale.
6
A bellowing voice that I knew very well broke up our happy reunion. “SHARLIE! PRINCE SHARLIE! GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE SO WE CAN SHUT THE GATE! COME TO US, SHARLIE!”
Right, I thought, getting to my feet. And strain your pooper, Prince Sharlie.
Radar danced around me, barking. I ran toward the gate. Claudia was standing just outside of it, and she wasn’t alone. Woody was with her, and between them, astride Falada, was Leah. Behind them were the remaining escapees from Deep Maleen, and behind those were others—a crowd of people I couldn’t make out.
Claudia wouldn’t cross into Lilimar, but she grabbed me as soon as I came through the gate and pulled me into a hug so strong I felt my spine creak.
“Where is he?” Woody asked. “I hear the dog, but where—”
“Here,” I said. “Right here.” This time it was my turn to hug.
When I let him go, Woody put his palm to his forehead and dropped to one knee. “My prince. It was you all along, and you’ve come just as the old stories said you would.”
“Get up,” I said. With tears still pouring from my eyes （plus snot from my nose that I wiped away with the back of my hand） and blood all over me, I never felt less princely in my life. “Please, Woody, get up. Rise.”
He did. I looked at my group, watching with awe. Eris and Jaya were hugging each other. Eye had Freed in his arms. It was clear that some of my friends, maybe all, knew exactly who these three people were: not just whole people but whole people of the true blood. They were the exiled royalty of Empis, and except perhaps for insane Yolande and Burton the anchorite, they were the last of the Gallien line.
Behind the dungeon refugees were sixty or seventy gray people, some carrying torches and some with torpedo lanterns similar to the one Pursey had left for me. Among them I saw someone I knew. Radar had run to her already. I went to her, barely aware that the deformed people who had been cursed by Elden—or by the being that had used him as its puppet—were falling to their knees all around me, their palms to their foreheads. Dora also tried to go to her knees. I wouldn’t let her. I embraced her, kissed both of her gray cheeks and the corner of her crescent mouth.