Cassandra Clare - The Runaway Queen

Also, the queen herself was probably not heavy, but her dress—and whatever she had concealed or sewn into the dress for her escape—certainly was, and

Magnus had no energy to spare. He snapped his fingers, and the queen woke.

Just in time he drew a finger across her lips and silenced the scream that was about to come from her mouth.

“Your

Majesty,” he said, the exhaustion weighing his voice. “There is no time to explain, and no time for introductions. What I need you to do is —as quickly as possible—step out of that window. You cannot see it, but there is something out there that will catch you. But we must be quick.”

The queen opened her mouth and, finding that she could not speak, began to run around the room, picking up objects and hurling them at Magnus. Magnus cringed as vases hit the wall next to him.

He managed to lash the balloon to the window with the curtain and grabbed the queen. She began to pummel Magnus.

Her fists were small and she was clearly unused to this sort of activity, but her blows were not entirely ineffective. He had very little strength left, and she seemed to be running on raw fear, which quicksilvered her veins.

“Your Majesty,” he hissed. “You must stop. You must listen to me. Axel—”

On the word “Axel,” she froze. This was all he needed. He shoved her backward out the window. The balloon, bumped back by the force, shifted a foot or so away from the window—so she landed half in, half out. She hung there, terrified and grasping at something she could feel but not see, her slippered feet kicking into the air and smacking into the side of the building. Magnus had to accept a few flurried kicks in the chest and face before he was able to roll her over into the basket. Her skirts tumbled over her head, and the Queen of France was reduced to a pile of cloth and two flailing legs. He jumped into the basket himself, closed the basket door, and released the hold on the basket with a deep sigh. The balloon went straight up, shooting above the rooftops. The queen had managed to flip herself over and scramble to her knees. She touched the basket, her eyes wide with a childlike wonder. She drew herself up slowly and peered over the side of the basket, took one look at the view below, and fainted dead away.

“Someday,” Magnus said, looking at the crumpled royal person at his feet, “I must write my memoirs.”

This was not the balloon ride Magnus had hoped for.

For a start, the balloon was low and suicidally slow, and seemed to like nothing more than dropping suddenly onto roofs and chimneys. The queen was shifting and groaning on the floor of the basket, causing it to sway back and forth in a nausea-inducing way. An owl made a sudden assault. And the sky was dark, so dark that Magnus had largely no idea where he was going. The queen moaned a bit and lifted her head.

“Who are you?” she asked weakly.

“A friend of a friend,” Magnus replied.

“What are we—”

“It’s best if you don’t ask, Your

Majesty. You really don’t want the answer. And I think we’re being blown south, which is the completely wrong direction.”

“Axel . . .”

“Yes.” Magnus leaned over and tried to make out the streets below. “Yes, Axel . . . but here’s a question . . . If you were trying to find, say, the Seine, where would you look?”

The queen put her head back down.

He managed to find enough strength to restore the glamour on the balloon, rendering it invisible to the mundanes.

He did not have the energy to completely glamour himself in the process, so some people were treated to the view of

Magnus’s upper half sailing past their third-story window in the dark. Some people didn’t spare the candles, and he got one or two very interesting views.

Eventually he caught sight of a shop he knew. He pulled the balloon down the street, until more and more looked familiar, and then he caught sight of

Notre Dame.

Now the question was . . . where to put the balloon down ? You couldn’t just land a balloon in the middle of Paris.

Even an invisible one. Paris was just too . . . spiky.

There was only one thing for it, and

Magnus already hated it.

“Your Majesty,” he said, prodding the queen with his foot. “Your Majesty, you must wake up .”

The queen stirred again.

“Now,” Magnus said, “you won’t like what I am about to say, but trust me when I say it is the best of several terrible alternatives. . . .”

“Axel. . . .”

“Yes. Now, in a minute we are going to land in the Seine—”

“What?”

“And it would be very good if you perhaps held your nose. And I’m guessing your dress is full of jewels, so . . .”

The balloon was dropping fast, and the water was coming up. Magnus carefully navigated them to a spot between two bridges.

“You may get—”

The balloon simply dropped like a stone. The fire went out, and the silk immediately came down on Magnus and the queen. Magnus was almost out of strength, but he managed to find enough to rend the silk in two so it didn’t trap them. He swam on his own power, pulling her under his arm to the bank.

They were, as he’d hoped, quite close to the Tuileries and its dock. He got her over to the steps and threw her down.

“Stay here,” he said, dripping wet and panting.

But the queen was unconscious again.

Magnus envied her.

He trudged up the steps and back up onto the streets of Paris. Axel would probably have been circling the area.

They had agreed that if anything went wrong, Magnus was to send a blue flash into the sky, like a firework. He did it.

Then he sank to the ground and waited.

About fifteen minutes later a carriage pulled up—not the simple, plain one from before but a massive one, in black and green and yellow. One that could easily carry half a dozen or more people for several days, in the grandest of possible styles. Axel hopped down from the driver’s seat and rushed to Magnus.

“Where is she? Why are you wet?

What has happened?”

“She’s fine,” Magnus said, putting up a hand. “ This is the carriage? A berline de voyage ?”

“Yes,” von Fersen said. “Their

Majesties insist. And it would be unseemly for them to arrive in something less grand.”

“And impossible not to be noticed!”

For the first time von Fersen looked uncomfortable. He had clearly hated this idea and had fought it.

“Yes, well . . . this is the carriage.

But . . .”

“She’s on the steps. We had to land in the river.”

“Land?”

“It’s a long story,” Magnus said.

“Let’s just say things got complicated.

But she is alive.”

Axel got to his knees in front of

Magnus.

“You will never be forgotten for this,”

Axel said in a low voice. “France will remember. Sweden will remember.”

“I don’t care if France or Sweden remembers. I care if you remember.”

Magnus was genuinely shocked when it was Axel who instigated the kiss—

how sudden it was, how passionate, how all of Paris, and all the vampires, and the Seine and the balloon and everything fell away and it was just the two of them for one moment. One perfect moment.

And it was Magnus who broke it.

“Go,” he whispered. “I need you to be safe. Go.”

Axel nodded, looking a bit shocked at his own action, and ran to the dock steps. Magnus got up, and with one last look started to walk.

Going home was not an option. Saint

Cloud’s vampires were probably at his apartments right now. He had to get inside until dawn. He spent the night at the petite maison of Madame de ——, one of his more recent lovers. At dawn he returned to his apartments. The front door was ajar. He made his way inside cautiously.