“Twice your age, anyway. Perhaps more.”
I thought of Mr. Bowditch then. “You haven’t been on the sundial, have you? You’re not, like, a hundred years old, or anything?”
She managed to look amused and horrified at the same time. “Never. No one goes on the sundial, because it’s very dangerous. When games and contests were played on the Field of the Monarchs—that will happen again, although there’s much repair work to be done first—the sundial was locked in place, motionless, and guarded for good measure. Lest someone from the thousands who came on those days be tempted. It’s very old. Elden told me once that it was here before Lilimar was built, or even thought of.”
Hearing that made me uneasy. I bent down and stroked my dog, who was curled up between my feet. “Radar’s been on it. That’s most of the reason I came, because Rades was dying. As you must know, from Claudia.”
“Yes,” Leah said, and bent to pet Radar herself. Rades looked up sleepily. “But your dog is an animal, innocent of the bad strain that lives in the hearts of every man and woman. The strain that destroyed my brother. I’d guess that strain lives in your world, too.”
I couldn’t argue that.
“No royal would go around on that even once, Charlie. It changes the mind and the heart. Nor is that all it does.”
“My friend Mr. Bowditch rode on it, and he wasn’t a bad guy. In fact, he was a good guy.”
This was true, but as I looked back, I realized it wasn’t completely true. Getting through Mr. Bowditch’s anger and solitary nature had been difficult. No, almost impossible. I would have given up if I hadn’t made a promise to God （the God of my understanding, people in my dad’s AA group always say）。 And I never would have known him at all if he hadn’t fallen and broken his leg. He had no wife, no kids, no friends. He was a loner and a hoarder, a guy who kept a bucket of gold pellets in his safe and liked his old things: furniture, magazines, TV, vintage Studebaker in storage. He was, in his own words, a coward who had brought presents instead of taking a stand. If you wanted to be cruel—I didn’t, but if you did—he’d been a bit like Christopher Polley. Which is to say, like Rumpelstiltskin. That wasn’t a comparison I wanted to make but was helpless not to. If I hadn’t come, and if he hadn’t loved his dog, Mr. Bowditch would have died unremarked and unremembered in his house at the top of the hill. And with no one to guard it, the passage between the two worlds would certainly have been discovered. Had he never thought of that?
Leah was looking at me, twirling her signet ring on her finger, and smiling her lopsided little smile. “Was he good on his own? Or did you make him good, Prince Charlie?”
“Don’t call me that,” I said. If I couldn’t be her prince, I didn’t want to be anyone’s. Nor was that even a choice. My hair was darkening again, and my eyes were changing back to their original color.
She put her hand to her mouth, then forced herself to lower it to her lap again. “Good on his own, Charlie? Or were you his mercy from the high gods?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. I had felt older during much of my time in Empis, and sometimes stronger, but now I felt weak and uncertain again. Seeing Mr. Bowditch without the softening filter of memory was a shock. I remembered how that old house at 1 Sycamore Street had smelled until I aired it out: sour and dusty. Pent.
She said, and not without alarm, “You didn’t ride on it, did you?”
“No, just pulled Radar off. And she jumped, too. But I felt its power. Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes, of course.”
“The golden platform. We went up to go down. Down those spiral stairs.”
She smiled a little, all she could manage. “We did. It was risky, but we managed.”
“Did the staircase between the walls go all the way to that underground chamber?”
“Yes. Elden knew two ways. That, and the one from the little room full of clothes. There may be others, but if there were, he never showed me.”
“So why did we go the long way?” And almost fall, I didn’t say.
“Because it was said the Flight Killer couldn’t walk more than a few steps. That made the stairs between the walls safer. And I didn’t want to chance coming onto his party, but in the end there was no choice.”
“If we hadn’t stopped at the Lord High’s apartment… Iota might still be alive!”
“We did what had to be done, Charlie. You were right about that. I was wrong. Wrong about many things. I need you to know that, and I need you to know something else. I’m ugly now from the nose down—”