“Last time we were going,” Eris said in a low voice. “This time we’re coming. I’ve got a score of my own to settle with that bitch.”
I didn’t reply. I wasn’t interested. My mind was fixed.
We went out into the rain. Radar suddenly bolted down the Trolley House steps and past one of the red and white posts with its stone butterfly on top. She nosed into the brambles. I saw one strap of my discarded backpack, then heard the last thing I would have expected but one I recognized at once. Radar came trotting back with her squeaky monkey. She dropped it at my feet and looked up at me, wagging her tail.
“Good girl,” I said, and gave it to Eye. He had pockets. I didn’t. The broad way leading to the palace was deserted but not empty. Red Molly’s body was gone, but the bones of the night soldiers who’d come after us were scattered for forty yards, most buried under heaps of dead monarch butterflies.
Leah had stopped at the foot of the steps, head cocked, listening. We joined her. I could hear it, too: a kind of high moaning, like wind gusting around the eaves on a winter night. It rose and fell, rose and fell, climbed to a shriek, then subsided to moaning again.
“High gods, what is it?” Jaya whispered.
“The sound of mourning,” I said.
“Where’s the Snab?” Iota asked.
I shook my head. “Didn’t like the rain, maybe.”
Leah started up the Gallien Road toward the palace. I put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her. “We should go in from behind and come out near the games field. I can’t find the way, a little shit named Peterkin wiped away Mr. Bowditch’s marks, but I bet you know how to get there.”
Leah put her hands on her slim hips and stared at me with exasperation. She pointed toward the sound of Hana grieving her daughter. Then, in case I was too thick to understand, she raised her hands high above her head.
“The princess is right, Charlie,” Iota said. “Why go that way if we can avoid the big bitch by going in the front door?”
I took his point, but there were other points that seemed more important to me. “Because she eats human flesh. I’m pretty sure it’s why she was kicked out of giantland, whatever you call it around here. Do you understand that? She eats human flesh. And she serves him.”
Leah looked up into my eyes. Very slowly, she nodded and pointed to the gun I wore.
“Yes,” I said. “And there’s another reason, my lady. Something I need you to see.”
3
We went a little way further up the Gallien Road, then Leah turned left into a byway so narrow it wasn’t much more than an alley. She led us through a maze of streets, never hesitating. I hoped she knew what she was doing; it had been many years since she’d been here. On the other hand, we had Hana’s howls of grief to guide us.
Jaya and Eris caught up to me. Eris looked grim, set. Jaya looked freaked out. She said, “The buildings don’t stay steady. I know that’s crazy, but they don’t. Every time I look away, I see them change out of the corner of my eye.”
“And I keep thinking I hear voices,” Eye said. “This place feels… I dunno… haunted.”
“Because it is,” I said. “We’re going to exorcise it, or die trying.”
“Exercise?” Eris asked. Hana’s howling grew steadily louder.
“Never mind,” I said. “One thing at a time.”
Leah led us down an alley where the buildings were so close together it felt like we were slipping through a crevasse. I could see the bricks of one building and the stone of the other moving slowly in and out, as if they were breathing.
We emerged on a street I recognized. It was the boulevard with the weedy median running down the middle and what might once have been high-end shops catering to royals and royal hangers-on lining the sides. Iota reached out to touch （or maybe pick） one of the enormous yellow flowers and I grabbed his wrist. “You don’t want to do that, Eye. They bite.”
He looked at me. “Truly?”
“Truly.”
Now I could see the roofpeaks of Hana’s enormous street-straddling house. Leah moved to her right and began sidling along the broken shopfronts, looking through the rain at the deserted square with its dry fountain. Hana’s cries of grief were now just short of unbearable each time her sobs rose and became shrieks. Leah looked back at last. She beckoned me forward, but patted the air with one hand: softly, softly.
I bent down to Radar and whispered for her to hush. Then I joined the princess.