Page 79 of The Mad Baron's Bride
She couldn’t throw a shoe out a window. Jack wouldn’t see it. She held very still, breathing.Think.
The king under the mountain would awake one day when he was needed. She was needed. She needed to arise. How would the king know?
She held still and felt it: the cool touch of air on her cheek. Left cheek.
She turned, spread her hands out either way, and found the edge of the tunnel, the branch with the breeze. She plunged into it.
“What the devil?” Eustace cursed. “The bloody ceiling is coming down! Leda, what did youdo?”
She felt the shake and the shudder, then an odd hollow thump. There was hardly a noise as the earth swallowed. But she smelled it, heard the ground behind her collapsing, felt the dust drifting from the tunnel behind her, airy and light.
“Leda!” Jack bellowed. “The hill is caving in.You need to get out now.”
She ran. Rocks collided with her feet, the edges of flint stabbed her palms, once she hit her head on a low outcropping and saw stars dance across her vision. She paused and shook her head until the ringing cleared. But it wasn’t a ringing, just a slow rumble. Gathering behind her. On her heels.
“Leda.”
The tunnel turned sharply, and she crashed into the side. A swift, sharp slice on her cheek, a sudden sting. Her toe throbbed. She groped with her hands and saw the turn, the oval of light. She threw herself at it. And then, as the oval started to shrink, a dark curtain falling before it, she threw her arms over her face and dove through.
“My God. My darling. Leda.”
Jack had her. Jack scooped her up and before she could find her feet she was pressed against his chest. So sturdy, so firm. Sowarm. He smelled like currants. He clamped one arm like a band around her and the other pushed through her hair, then across her face. His knuckles slid through the damp on her cheek, came away bloody.
“Oh,” Leda gasped. “I’m bleeding.”
“You’re alive. Come away now.”
Before she could squeak he swept a hand beneath her legs and lifted her in his arms. Leda clung to his shoulder and watched as the hill caved in. Not a landslide, like when a chunk of sea cliff fell into the water. Just a maidenly sigh as a sinkhole formed in the green dome above, and one tunnel, then another beside it, fell in like a closing mouth.
Leda clung to Jack’s shoulders. “Eustace is in there.”
“Who?”
“My nephew.”
“How did your nephew get inthere?”
“Because he was following me. Jack, he murdered Bertram, and he was going to murder Ives, and possibly me. We have to save him.”
“What?”
She struggled against his grip. “I can’t let him die in there. He’s Bertram’s flesh and blood.”
“You stay here. Not another step.” Jack threw the words at her as he set her on her feet, his jaw clenching as he turned toward the walls of chalk. “Don’t you dare go back inside.”
“Don’t you go in, either. What if more collapses?”
“Hallo in there!” Jack framed his mouth with his hands. The shout echoed around the pit, ringing with shrubs and greening trees, the dome of the gray sky pressing down like the lid of a teapot. “Can you hear me? Any chance you survived in there, mate?”
They waited. Jack held Leda’s gaze. She scrubbed her face. Her gloves were tatters, her hands filthy, and she smeared dirtin the cut on her cheek. Brilliant. She must look a madwoman indeed.
“Leda…” Jack took a stick and tested the fall of dirt and white chalk that filled the mouth of the tunnel. “If he survived the cave in, I don’t know that we can dig him out before he suffocates.”
She curled her hands into fists, her palms smarting and raw. A great tremor seized her, like a terrier shaking a rat to break its neck. Cold followed in its wake, as if she were caught in an undertow. “We must try.”
Jack bolted forward and caught her just as she fainted.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
