Page 32 of A Slipper in the Smoke
Her mind wandered to Pip again, and she wondered if there was anything she could make out of her scraps for him, but she doubted he wanted a roving doll, and at the moment all she knew he liked was tea and stars.
Someone banged lightly on her half-open door, and she looked up to see Snowdrop standing there, escorted by two other people.
“I haven’t learned anything—” Elena started.
“That’s not why we’re here,” Snowdrop rushed. “We’ve just intercepted intel from Sparta. Tell me, how do you feel about kidnapping a prince?”
Elenablinked.“I’msorry?”
“This is Dandelion and Clover,” Snowdrop continued, pointing to the two men behind her. One was a skinny teenager, with hair the colour of straw, the other a silver-haired man with one of those faces that could have been twenty-four or forty-two. Both smiled weakly in greeting.
“We’ve just come from the Outlands,” the younger one—Clover—reported. “We’ve got word that Sparta is planning to assassinate one of the princes on the night of the grand ball. We want to kidnap him instead.”
“But—I—” Words, questions, and tangled thoughts spiralled in Elena’s mind. She took a minute to force them into a sentence. “Which prince? Nero, or—”
Snowdrop pulled a face of disgust. “If he was the target, I’d let Sparta have him. No. It’s the Toulousian one. Phillippe.”
“Why?”
“That’s what we want you to find out. Does he know something we don’t? Does he take a different stance in the war? We need to know. He could be an ally.”
“Or a powerful political hostage,” Clover added. “Been a while since we had one of those.”
Snowdrop elbowed him in the side, before turning back to Elena. “Can you help us?”
“I—”
She thought of Pip’s comments about his concerns that Petragrad’s rumours were true. Was this a fear he shared with the prince? Was that why Sparta was after him? If so, she wasn’t the only spy in the palace.
Snowdrop raised an eyebrow. “You know something.”
“I… I met a boy. Toulousian. One of the servants the prince brought with him.”
“What did he say to you?”
Elena repeated what little she knew, even though it felt somehow disloyal to drag Pip into this. She didn’t know why; she’d known him even less time than Snowdrop.
The three rebels cast silent looks between them.
“You should get closer to this boy,” Snowdrop advised. “Find out what else he knows.”
“I…”I don’t want that to be the reason I get closer to him.
At the same time, she was fairly sure Pip wouldn’t want anything to happen to his prince. In fact, trying to save a life was a more noble endeavour than the simple spywork she’d initially signed up for.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Snowdrop beamed. “Excellent. This could be just the opportunity we need.”
“Why… why do we need to kidnap him?” Elena asked. “Why not simply warn him—”
“If Sparta are going to break into the palace on the night of the grand ball, we aren’t going to waste that opportunity. If we can get him instead, if we can give Toulouse their prince back, without Mira… they might ally with us.”
“You want to start a civil war.”
“We’re already at war,” Snowdrop snapped. “Just the people on the losing side are dying in the slums rather than on the battlefield.”
Elena buckled. It was hard to disagree with that. And she wanted to help them, she did, it was just…
