Free Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan Page B

lacked the robe or puffed clothing that would mark an old courtier or a young one. Nor, he reminded himself, did he have anything to feel guilty about; he had done nothing more than what he was ordered to, and no one, servant or otherwise, could hear the covetous thoughts in Deven’s mind.
    But that recalled him to his duty. Though the Queen was not present, surely he also had a duty to defend that which was hers. “Stand fast,” he said, raising the candle, “and identify yourself.”
    The stranger bolted.
    Deven gave chase without thinking. The candle snuffed out before he had gone two strides; he abandoned it, letting taper and holder fall so he could lunge for the door through which the stranger had vanished. It stood just a short distance from the Paradise Chamber, and when he flung himself through it, he found himself on a staircase, with footsteps echoing above him.
    The stranger was gone by the time he reached the third floor, but the steps continued upward in a secondary staircase, cramped and ending in a half-height door that was obviously used for maintenance. Deven yanked the door open and wedged himself through, into the cold, drenching rain.
    He was on the roof. To his right, low crenellations guarded the drop-off to the lower Paradise Chamber. He looked left, across the pitched sheets of lead, and just made out the figure of the stranger, running along the roof.
    Madness, to give chase on a rooftop, with his footing made uncertain by rain-slicked lead. But Deven had only an instant to decide his course of action, and his blood was up.
    He pursued.
    The rooftop was an alien land, all steep angles and crenellated edges, with turrets rising here and there like masts without sails. The path the stranger took was straight and level, though, unbroken by chambers, and that was what oriented Deven in his fragmentary map of Hampton Court: they were running along the roof of the Long Gallery, back the direction he had come.
    In his head, he heard the usher say,
The quickest path would be through these chambers . . .
    The gallery led straight toward the room where Elizabeth sat with her ladies, whiling away her sleeplessness with music.
    Deven redoubled his efforts, flinging caution to the wind, keeping to his feet mostly because his momentum carried him forward before he could fall. He was gaining on the stranger, not yet close enough to grab him, but nearly —
    Lightning split the sky, half-blinding him, and as thunder followed hard on its heels Deven tried too late to stop.
    Brick cracked him across the knees, halting his stride instantaneously. But his weight carried him forward, and he pitched over the top of the crenellations, hands flying out in desperation, until his left fingers seized on something and brought him around in a shoulder-wrenching arc. His right hand found brick just in time to keep him from losing his grip and falling a full story to the lower rooftop below.
    He hung from the crenellations, gasping for air, with the rain sending rivers of water through his hair and clothes to puddle in his boots.
    His left shoulder and hand ached from the force of stopping his fall, but Deven dragged himself upward, grunting with effort, until at last he could hook one foot over the bricks and get his body past the edge. Then he collapsed in the narrow wedge where the pitch of the roof met the low wall of the crenellations and let himself realize he wasn’t about to fall to his death.
    The stranger.
    Deven twisted to look over the wall, onto the roof of the chambers where Elizabeth listened to the virginals. He saw no sign of the intruder anywhere on the rain-streaked lead, and no hatches hung open in the turrets that studded the corners of the extension; through the grumble of the storm, he heard a faint strain of music. But that meant nothing save that no one had been hurt yet.
    Even if Deven could have made the jump down, he could not burst in on the Queen, soaked to the bone and with his doublet torn, its