Sophia ran the horses down a dirt road through the land the Parisians called The Désolation. The haularound rattled and bumped beneath her, the fading nethermoon a passing glimpse of white through entwining limbs, the north lights twisting like green and purple smoke in the sky. Finally she turned onto a grassy track, loose potatoes rolling from side to side, until the forest opened into a small clearing that was almost perfectly square. It was probably a ruin, this clearing, like most of them, a thick layer of concrete or asphalt close enough to the surface to discourage the trees. The haularound rolled to a stop, and behind the sudden silence ebbed a distant rush and boom. The sea.
Sophia lifted the edge of the holy man’s robes and found the little girl, soft blond hair shorn ragged about the ears, still clinging to her leg. She’d fallen asleep. Sophia disentangled the child’s limbs, ignoring her protests as she slung her over a shoulder and climbed down from the seat.
She hurried to the back of the haularound. A latch clicked, a long board went clattering to the ground, and a jumble of two dozen feet was revealed in the narrow, hidden space beneath. Moans fell from mouths like the potatoes to the ground. She’d had the space made for weapons and supplies, not people.
“Out!” Sophia commanded, voice gruff and in Parisian, one arm full of a child who was done with being still. Marie Bonnard scooted out from the space, wearing a dress possibly held together by its own dirt, tugging out her two older children before stumbling over to snatch up her little girl. When the haularound had emptied there were thirteen faces turned to the holy man, all showing differing levels of desperation, hope, and inquiry. And then, like puppets on the same string, every head jerked to look back down the grassy track. Another rhythm had joined the remote sound of surf, a thunder that resolved into the harsh tattoo of hoofbeats, coming fast and closing in on the clearing.
Panic moved through the group like contagion. Ministre Bonnard’s hollow eyes darted to the woods and back, chest heaving beneath a once-fine vest, then five gendarmes burst from the trees, sword hilts winking in the moonlight. Ministre Bonnard let out a yell like an animal. He went for the holy man’s throat with surprising speed, crying out as an even quicker hand shot from beneath the black robes, catching the man’s wrist and twisting. The ministre gasped, clutching his wrist to his chest.
“Friends,” Sophia whispered. “They are friends.”
Ministre Bonnard gaped incoherently while his wife sank to her knees, trying to bounce and shush their little girl. The gendarmes dismounted and without a word began putting the former prisoners of hole 1139 in the saddles. One of them, tall, blond, and with broad shoulders only just stuffed into the short, tight coat of an officer, tossed his reins around a limb and approached the holy man.
“You’ve left your feather behind you, then?” he asked, Parisian accent thick.
“Of course,” Sophia replied, grinning as the heavy robes came off, showing a slim figure in leather breeches and a vest. A wig of thick, dark hair was thrown with the robes into the bed of the haularound.
“The Red Rook!” they heard one of the thirteen whisper. “Le Corbeau Rouge!” Their murmurs of fear had shifted instantly to excitement. Sophia glanced once in their direction and switched to a softer voice and the language of the Commonwealth.
“Is all well? You got my message?”
The gendarme who was not a gendarme stepped closer, taking his cue for the change in language. “Yes, and it scared the life out of us. Cartier agreed to man the second boat. How did you manage?”
“Waited until the alarm sounded and the gendarmes had gone running, then took them all out Gerard’s office window and left the coffins behind. We were lucky to switch the wagons. The child came out under the robes. The poor holy man developed an abscess in his leg, I’m afraid. A horrible infection. The watchman at the prison said he must have sinned.”
The tall man’s face broke into a brief, perfectly formed smile, then fell back into worry. “We’re late, and there are too many. You shouldn’t have taken them all. I don’t think we can be out of sight of the coast by dawn.”
Sophia frowned, running a hand through curling brown hair still damp from the wig, shaking it out once like a dog. A girl of seventeen or so, one of the Bonnards, had been watching this intently, her eyes large and staring through shorn strands of dingy blond hair that was much like her little sister’s. She stood so close, the starlight showed a spatter of freckles through the prison dirt on her nose.
Sophia turned away, quickly tying her brown curls back in the way of an Upper City man as the girl was bundled onto a horse. “It was not possible to take some and turn the key on the others, Spear,” Sophia hissed.
“Not possible for you,” Spear sighed, clicking the loose board into place across the back of the haularound. The horses with the Bonnard family and two other prisoners cantered away from the clearing. The other six residents of hole 1139 clung to one another on the ground, family or no, waiting for their turn.
“Send the twins to lay the usual false trail,” Sophia said, climbing up into the seat, “though it may not help us this time. If LeBlanc is clever, he’ll ride straight to the coast. And I think he is clever. Don’t try to leave together. Push off and get them out to sea as soon as you can. Have them lie down in the bottom of the boats. And tell Cartier to use the fishing nets. Maybe LeBlanc won’t know what he’s seeing. You’ll …”
“Wait.” Spear’s chiseled face, level with her own despite the climb into the haularound, narrowed to a scowl. “You’re not coming in the boats?”
“No room.” Sophia lifted a brow at his expression. “You think I can’t get back to the Commonwealth on my own?”
He stepped closer to the haularound. “I know you can. I just don’t like that you have to, that’s all.”
Sophia picked up the reins. “As if I’d be late to my own engagement party!” she whispered. “What would the neighbors say?” But this only made the young man’s face darken further. “Move them as fast as you can, Spear. LeBlanc will be on your heels. Be careful.” Leather snapped, and the horses jerked forward. “And save me some cake!” she said over her shoulder as the haularound lurched away down the track.
When the woods ended, Sophia took the turning to the sea and picked up speed. The Désolation had not been desolate for many generations, not since the turbulent centuries following the Great Death, and for two miles the horses ran past harvested fields on one side, cliff and booming sea on the other, any ruins long ago hidden by time and turf. Then the haularound turned back inland, drove through a small, sleeping village and straight into the open shed behind a wheelwright’s house. It was not dawn but the sky was paling over the roof tiles, the north lights gone, a sea fog wisping past dark and silent windows. Sophia hurried.
The horses were left to hay and water on one end of the shed, where a fresh, bridled mare stood waiting, already hitched to a tradesman’s cart. The robes of the holy man came out of the haularound, now turned inside out to show a soft green cloth, and the pins of the wig were pulled, releasing a woman’s long, dark curls.
Soon after the arrival of a haularound full of potatoes, a trader’s daughter drove out of the wheelwright’s shed with a cart full of lettuce. Long, dark hair, honey-colored skin, wearing the distinctive green of one with permission to barter in the Sunken City. Sophia clucked to the mare and took the fast road to the coast.