The Glas s Town Game

Charlotte had only a little sword they’d scrounged up for her out of the Quartermaster’s trunks. It was rather pitiful when guns fired all around her. They hadn’t meant to fight. They’d meant to run right into the prison to Branwell and Anne. She didn’t care. It was something. She kicked Copenhagen’s ribs and they were off, galloping down the field toward the dancing, exulting Napoleon, dodging muskets and frogs and lime-men, her sword and voice and soul drawn out and pointed at the tyrant’s heart. He turned just as she was upon him and laughed in her face.

“You are a very bad kitten,” Charlotte told the Emperor of France.

Copenhagen heard and understood. The lion snatched Napoleon by the collar and bit hard. He dragged him off his rooster backward through the fighting. Boney spluttered and shouted, but everyone was far too busy trying not to get themselves killed.

Charlotte and Copenhagen bore down on the far end of the courtyard. A great cage waited there, stashed in the back. When Bonaparte saw, all his cursing and yelping stopped. Copenhagen kept on growling. Then, he flung him at Josephine. The bone-man landed in a heap against the barred door. It groaned inward and sprang open. The rose-lady wrapped her love in her arms and spit out a stream of French so quick and fierce Charlotte couldn’t follow.

“It’s her!” Charlotte cried. “It’s her. Her roses. It’s always been her. Take her and go somewhere else, somewhere far away. A rocky island in the middle of nowhere. Just take her and go be happy away from everyone else!”

“I’m happy here!” Bonaparte bellowed. “I will fight on forever! I will fight and I will win until everyone is tired of winning and then I will win again! You think you can tell me what to do? You are nothing! I am Napoleon! I am no one’s toy!”

“You will NOT!” Charlotte roared.

Napoleon and Josephine flinched. Bonaparte’s face fell. His jaw dropped low.

“The Genii!” he whispered.

>

A crown of lightning flickered faintly around Charlotte’s head. Not the vicious lightning of the bat-tree men. The lightning of a storm that brings rain and turns the world green. She didn’t notice. She didn’t notice one thing different about herself. She hadn’t changed at all. It had always been true.

They had made this world. They were its gods.

“If I am to be a governess,” she bellowed, “then I will GOVERN. The game ends when all the players are called in for the night and IT IS TIME FOR BED. What do you do with broken toys? You put them on the shelf and forget about them! You throw them AWAY.”

“I am the Emperor! The Genii should bow before me!” squeaked Napoleon, shocked at his own daring. But he was frightened. He trembled from head to toe.

“You put them in a BOX marked OLD RUBBISH and you leave them in the attic!” Charlotte shouted back.

Her armor fell off.

More exactly, Bestminster unfolded and unlatched and undid itself until it wasn’t armor anymore. Until it was the same scuffed, worn suitcase it had been when Charlotte had packed it for Cowan Bridge School.

Then Bestminster opened its lid impossibly wide and ate Napoleon and Josephine. It packed them, as its ancestors had done all the rude and rough owners of yesteryear. It burped slightly and settled down on the cold ground, as pleased as a cat.

“What did you do, Charlotte?”

Charlotte whirled around. Branwell and Anne stood there among all the screaming chaos of the battle, staring at her.

“I won! I think I won. Didn’t I? What are you doing here? How are you here?”

Anne started to tell it honestly, that a Princess made out of a wedding dress had kicked them out of the Parsonage because Branwell had been such a vicious little snot to her like he always was, and so they’d had nowhere else to go, really, but down into the courtyard to find their sisters and try not to get blown to bits in the process. But the look on Bran’s face stopped her. She’d never seen him look like that. He’d gone so pale he seemed to have no blood at all in him. And the way Charlotte had looked a moment ago . . . Anne felt terribly small between the two of them.

“But you killed them,” Branwell said, dumbfounded. He felt a shiver of terrible responsibility at the numerous wars he had sent his wooden soldiers to with glee, designing each of their deaths like suits.

Anne’s lip trembled. She was afraid of her sister. How could anyone be afraid of their sister? But then . . . had anyone ever seen their sister crowned with lightning and riding a lion before? “Charlotte, you killed somebody. Two somebodies! And only one of them was bad. Josephine was just a pretty lady with magic roses in her hair!”

“You know about the magic roses?”

“What magic roses?” said Branwell.

Anne shrugged. “I saw her in the portrait in our cell. The roses in her hair. They’re just the same color as the stuff in Crashey’s flask. The oddest color, really. And they all said the ingredients only grow in Gondal. I didn’t know. But I thought. I had a long time to think up there.” Anne the spy had solved the mystery of two kingdoms from a locked room, and there was no one who had enough of their senses about them to applaud.

Branwell stared at Bestminster, sunning himself in his victory. “No,” he whispered, and began to cry a little. “No. It’s my fault.”

Anne turned her head on one side. She narrowed her eyes.

“Why would you say that, Bran?” she whispered. “Why would you even think it?”