Pain shot through the core of me. For a moment, I couldn’t move. How could she have claimed him so fast? How could he forget me so quickly?
Clemence murmured something to Nat. As they bent toward each other, heads almost touching, I found myself suddenly gripped by fury. It enveloped me like red flame—anger with him, with her, with myself, a lashing desire to hurt others as I was hurt.
But the fury wasn’t only inside me. It was outside, too. Through a gap in the window, I heard it clearly—a faint cry from the river, echoing with the terrible frenzy that had driven the waters wild.
Nat looked up and saw me. “Lucy?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was already running full tilt, headed to the river. What if the Others were coming back?
Outside, the street teemed with people, most of them as jubilant as the courtiers I’d seen inside. But as I skirted around them, I heard worried voices at the edge of the crowd.
“Better safe than sorry,” a frowsy woman in moth-eaten wool advised her neighbor. “There’s something not right when it looks like that.”
A child tugged at the woman’s skirts “Where did it go, Ma? That’s what I want to know. All that water. Where did it go?”
“We all prayed for it to go down, but not like this,” said a sober man in plain brown garb.
I wanted to ask what they were talking about, but at best that would delay me, and at worst it might lead to trouble. Behind me, I thought I heard Nat’s voice, but I didn’t turn for that, either. Instead I drew my hood up tight and pressed my way through the multitudes, aiming for the river.
The crowd soon thinned out, and as I picked my way down the last lanes to the Thames, I saw not a soul. By now, I’d expected to hear the river clearly. To my consternation, however, I could not hear it at all.
The houses here had borne the brunt of the flood, and the streets were filled with the muck and wrack left by the sea. I plowed through them as best I could. High-water marks were etched on the walls around me. Broken windows revealed rooms filled with mud and pools of stinking water.
When I finally reached the Thames, the sights were even more shocking. Across from me, entire sections of Southwark had been gouged out. Gray earth yawned where solid houses had once prospered, and the remaining buildings stood in silt up to their windows.
Just as distressing was the sight of mighty London Bridge to the east. For five hundred years, it had spanned the Thames, and in that time it had survived fire and flood and rebellion alike. But no longer. Its central arch had been swept away, along with all the shops and homes that had rested upon it. Several more arches had sustained damage. How long could they remain standing?
It was a nightmare London. But what made the scene even more unreal was the river itself. The people on Cornhill had been right. There had been low tides before, but not like this. The Thames had all but vanished, leaving a wide expanse of oozing mud flats with a mere trickle of yellow water wandering through the center. It was as if someone had pulled out a plug and the river had drained away.
Small wonder people had run away in terror.
Small wonder I had not been able to hear anything.
No, the miracle was that I’d heard that faint, furious echo up on Cornhill. Had I caught it only because I’d been gripped by fury myself and open to its influence? Perhaps. Or perhaps the tune hadn’t come from the river after all. Perhaps it had rung out only in my imagination.
Still, whatever I’d heard, something was very wrong here. And I was determined to find out what it was.
Hitching up my bespattered skirts and cloak, I leaped from the steps down onto the riverbed. My boots, already covered in muck, promptly sank ankle deep into it.
Ordinarily I’d have sung to the water in the mud, asking it to bear my weight, but I was leery of working Wild Magic near the Thames now, especially when it was behaving so strangely. Keeping quiet, I pulled myself step by slurping step toward the last vestige of the river.
When I reached what was left of the Thames, I bent down to listen. A blast of pure