A Sliver of Stardust

by Marissa Burt

  Wren looked over at Simon, who was studying the door thoughtfully, and pressed closer so that her ear was almost up against it. She was so busy straining to hear what they were saying that she wasn’t prepared for it to swing open. She sucked in a gasp as she, with Simon behind her, tumbled into the kitchen.

  “Stop! Don’t! It’s Wren!” Jack held one hand out to where Jill stood with a frying pan raised above her head.

  “What are you guys doing sneaking up on us like that?” he continued, his face the angriest Wren had ever seen it.

  “I thought you were Elsa,” Jill whispered, sinking back against the kitchen table.

  “And you were going to whap her with this?” Simon plucked the frying pan from her hands and set it on the stove.

  Jill shrugged. “Getting knocked on the head will hurt a Fiddler just as much as an ordinary person. Stardust won’t help when you’re unconscious.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.” Simon moved to the fridge and started pulling out sandwich makings. A loaf of bread. Mustard and mayonnaise. Some sliced cheese.

  Behind him, Jack stood near the table, feeding dried meat to his falcon. He hadn’t wanted to leave it at the mews, and Wren didn’t blame him. If the Fiddler Council showed up, a speedy getaway could be lifesaving, and if her falcon didn’t despise her, Wren would keep it close, too.

  “So what were you saying about the Land of Nod?” Wren asked, watching Jill’s face carefully, but she seemed superfocused on spreading mustard on her piece of bread.

  “Nod?” she said, reaching for the cheese. “What’s with all the sudden interest in—”

  There was a clumping sound from the pantry and then a groan. “Ooooh.” Jack came out rubbing his head. “How did I miss seeing that shelf in there?”

  “You are in rough shape,” Wren said, dumping the contents of her pocket onto the counter. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better.” Jack squeezed some of the ointment onto his finger and rubbed it on his forehead. “Except for the what-do-we-do-now part.”

  “Right,” Wren said, grabbing a piece of bread and eating it plain. “So. What do we do now?”

  “As I see it, we have three options.” Simon folded some cheese into his sandwich. “One, we return to the Crooked House and talk to the Council about what we know. Or at least talk to Mary, Liza, or Baxter.”

  “No way,” Jill said. “We go back there and Elsa will have us locked in the dungeons for a century. Besides”—she folded her arms across her chest—“now that Wren lit the M’s candle, the Council will never let her out of their sight. They need her.”

  “Need me for what? I didn’t even mean to do anything!”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Jill shrugged. “You think they’ll believe that you—the first Weather Changer to appear in hundreds of years—accidentally opened a gateway with the M’s mark on it?” She took a bite and talked around it. “They’ll have you under lock and key until they figure out what they want to do with you.”

  Wren slid onto a bar stool and leaned her elbows on the counter. “I wonder if we could send word to Mary without actually going back to the Crooked House. How long do you think it will take her to figure out we came here?”

  “Who knows?” Simon ran his hands through his hair and shrugged. “I haven’t seen her at all since that day she sent us to the repository.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Nice how Mary’s always abandoning us. It would have been great for her to stick around for two seconds before she left us on our own in the Crooked House.”

  “Mary’s our friend,” Wren shot at him, not bothering to hide the irritation she felt at discovering Jack talking to Jill about her behind her back. She took a deep breath. It wasn’t Jack’s fault she had a no-win situation to deal with. Either Wren risked being trapped at the Crooked House for a lifetime or she waited for Mary to come home and had no way of acting on Robin’s warning.

  “We’ve got to think,” Wren said, propping her chin up in her hands. “What does this all mean? Mary, Baxter, and Liza are there, but we’ve no way of contacting them without getting trapped by Elsa. I need to talk to Mary, or at least somebody does. She needs to know that we found the star map and candles in Boggen’s lab. We need to tell her she was right—Boggen probably is working with someone here to find the key.” Wren didn’t want to tell them about her latest dream—not with Jill standing right there—which would confirm for them all that there was no probably about it.

  “What key?” Jill said.

  “We’re not exactly sure.” Wren watched Jill’s face carefully to see how she would react. “He would have had to hide it before they all passed through the gateway. It won’t be hard for him to open the gateway on Nod’s side, but he needs someone here to find the key to unlock this side.”

  Jill looked genuinely puzzled, like this was all new information for her. Either she was a very good actor or she really knew nothing about the key.

  Wren folded her arms and laid her head down on them. “Maybe the rest of you could tell the Council. They might not be so interested in you since it was me who lit up the gateway.”

  “Fat chance. On what planet do you think they’d believe we all weren’t involved?” Jack said, his falcon underscoring his words with a squawk. “There’s no way I’m going back to the Council until I can prove I’m on the right side.”

  “That’s a brilliant idea, Jack!” Wren gasped. “All we need to do is prove we aren’t involved. If we can reveal who’s really been communicating with Boggen, they’ll know it wasn’t us.”

  “And how exactly do we do that?” Simon said.

  “Unless you hand deliver the person who’s found the golden key or whatever, I’d say you’re stuck.” Jill popped the last bite of her sandwich into her mouth.

  “Of course!” Wren said, latching on to the idea. Even better than delivering the culprit, she could bring the Council the key itself, and they could destroy it or do whatever they needed to do to stop Boggen. If she did that, surely they’d know she wasn’t on Boggen’s side. “What about your grandpa, Jack? He helped you find the message stone, right? Maybe he has something else about the key in all his conspiracy stuff.”

  Jack’s face looked uncertain. “I don’t think so. I’ve looked through it all already. Besides, Grandpa wouldn’t like to, um, see me like this.” He shook his head and gave a little moan, wincing. “Can you give me a hand, Jill?” Jack tossed Jill the bandage, and she began to wrap it carefully around his head.

  “What about the rhyme?” Jack said. “If we found the rhyme Boggen made for the gateway, that might be enough to prove which side we’re on. Any ideas about that?”

  “So that’s what they were after,” Jill said meditatively. She secured the final length of the bandage behind Jack’s ear. “Ever since the summoning, all the Fiddlers have ordered their apprentices to look for old rhymes, ones that the Ms modified. They did that, you know, changed the rhymes to make them do what they wanted. Elsa even had me skip a couple of workdays to hunt.” She chewed her lip. “If there was a rhyme like that in the Crooked House, someone would have found it.”

  “That’s it!” Wren stood up, knocking over her glass of water in her haste. “The rhyme isn’t in the Crooked House!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The strangest things are there for me,

  Both things to eat and things to see,

  And many frightening sights abroad

  Till morning in the Land of Nod.

  A policewoman was setting out traffic cones to block off reserved spaces when they arrived at the town park. SPRINGFEST CENTER STAGE, a sign proclaimed, MOTHER GOOSE RETOLD. Wren could see the main performance area and the temporary shelter that served as the theater’s backstage. When she knocked on the makeshift door, a woman dressed in a pink flowery dress and blue cape opened it. She was holding an oversized wooden cane. “May I help you?”

  “I’m Suzette Matthews’s daughter,” Wren said. “And these are my friends.” She nodded to Simon, Jill
, and Jack, who stood a little behind her. Jack had used stardust to cloak his falcon, so even though it fluttered its wings and resettled onto Jack’s shoulder, the lady in front of them didn’t blink an eye.

  “You must be Wren!” The woman’s stage makeup creased into a huge smile. “So you’re the one we have to thank for the Mother Goose theme!” She grinned. “Your mom’s not here yet, but you can wait for her if you want. Our last dress rehearsal starts soon.”

  “That sounds good.” Wren peered behind her at the bustling theater. “I wouldn’t mind having a peek backstage anyway.”

  As they followed the woman, they could see a man wearing a flannel shirt teetering on a ladder and fidgeting with lights that hung from the two-by-fours serving as scaffolding.

  “That’s too bright,” an actor who was standing in the center of the stage and wearing some sort of poufy trousers and green tights said. “And it’s off center. Angle it more to the left.”

  Behind him, two women were rehearsing their scenes. Something about three blind mice and how nameless corporations were going to cut off all their tails.

  “So it’s an interpretation of the rhymes, I guess,” Simon said, and their guide nodded.

  “Yep. Irony is the main selling point. The tame nursery rhymes set against corporate greed and how it’s destroying our environment. Your mom’s a genius, Wren.” She pointed to her dress. “My character, for instance. I’ve lost my sheep, because they don’t have clean grazing land anymore.” She waved her crook up at the ceiling. “Take that, Monsanto!”

  “So does my mom have an office here or something?” Wren felt the urgency of their search twitch between her shoulder blades. Who knew how long it would take to go through her mom’s play notes?

  “You could call it that,” Bo-Peep said as they skirted some actors wearing hazardous waste suits. They pushed past a rack of costumes to find the chaotic backstage area.

  “Stop moving around,” said a woman kneeling to adjust the hem of an actor’s ball gown. “Your costume doesn’t need to be perfect. I’d settle for it not falling off, but if you keep squirming, you’re going to have neither.”

  There were volunteers moving props into place and others using paint to touch up set pieces.

  “One hour until go-time.” A stage manager dressed all in black swooped through with a clipboard, and the volume of the frenzied activity tripled.

  “Over there.” Bo-Peep pointed to a curtained-off area in the very back. “Y’all can be here if you keep quiet, but you’ll have to leave before curtain call.” She turned to go.

  “Thanks,” Wren said, pushing aside the fabric and spying the familiar sight of her mom’s coffee thermos on an old folding table in the corner. The surface was covered with three-ring binders and file folders wedged neatly between bookends.

  “Thank goodness my mom is a neat freak,” Wren said, handing several binders to Simon and a file to Jill. Little Post-its stuck out to catalog things by theme. “The rhyme we’re looking for will be in a section on mysteries or historical basis for the rhymes. Something like that. Or she could have a section on conspiracy theories.” She shoved a folder at Jack. “You should be good at looking for those.”

  Wren flipped through the pages. She found rhymes about porridge and others about hens. Blackbirds and sheep and cows. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, but no keys. She wasn’t misremembering, was she? Her mom had distinctly said “forgotten key” when she was talking about the goose that laid golden eggs. That had to be it.

  The stage manager was calling for quiet. They were getting closer to go-time.

  “Hurry,” Wren told the others. “We’ll have to leave before they start performing.” Jill sat cross-legged with her back up against the wall, Simon next to her. Jack was pacing back and forth, his falcon twitching nervously on his shoulder. Wren wondered what all the theater people would say if they could see it. Her eye caught the back of an actor carrying a chicken under her arm. With all the craziness, they might not even notice.

  Wren skimmed her mom’s loopy handwritten notes, wondering how many rhymes she had actually transcribed. Most were labeled, a few flagged for use in the play. At first, it seemed that her mom had organized them by subject, but then she found a folder where they were cataloged by rhyme. There were only a few notes here. The King and Queen of Hearts. The Old Woman from France. And Wren’s gaze stopped fast on the last one: The Land of Nod.

  She ran her finger down the page.

  From breakfast on through all the day

  At home among my friends I stay,

  But every night, I go abroad

  Afar into the Land of Nod.

  All by myself I have to go

  With none to tell me what to do—

  All alone beside the streams

  And up the mountainsides of dreams.

  The strangest things are there for me,

  Both things to eat and things to see,

  And many frightening sights abroad

  Till morning in the Land of Nod.

  Try as I like to find the way,

  I never can get back by day.

  Nor can remember plain and clear

  The curious music that I hear.

  Wren’s heartbeat quickened. This rhyme explained what she’d experienced with the weird visions. Seen in that light, what Robin had told her made more sense. Perhaps she wasn’t getting messages in her dreams. Perhaps she was actually seeing what was happening on Nod. What else had her mom found about Nod? Something about Boggen? She flipped through the pages. She had to be getting closer. She read a different poem about three old witches, mainly because they were sleeping in it, but it referenced nothing remotely close to keys—and then she found it.

  “Guys, I think this is it,” Wren said in a shaky voice. Jill stopped reading and looked up at her, and Simon reached for his own notebook, pencil ready to write down whatever Wren was about to say. Jack was over at her shoulder in an instant.

  “You found the rhyme?” he said, his eyes wide with excitement. “Lemme see.”

  “Listen to this,” Wren said, running her fingers along the words as she read the rhyme aloud:

  I had a little treasure tree,

  Nothing would it bear,

  But a silver lockbox,

  And a golden key;

  The King of Nod’s daughter

  came to visit me,

  And all for the sake of my little treasure tree.

  So I danced over water

  I hopped by the bay

  Forty laps of moonlight

  Will open up the way.

  “I wonder what the forty laps of moonlight means,” Wren said, skimming the poem again. “It’s got to be tied in to the amount of stardust used somehow. What do you guys think?” she asked, but no one answered. In that moment, Wren realized that the room had gone eerily quiet, too quiet even for the minutes before a performance, and that she no longer heard the familiar scratching of Simon’s pencil. She glanced over to see him fast asleep on the floor, one arm curved protectively around his notebook. Jill slumped down next to him, snoring softly.

  “Simon?” Wren said, taking one step forward before the room began to spin around her. She reached for the table to balance herself, but managed to catch only the edge of the folding chair, sending it crashing down as she stumbled to the floor, right before everything went black.

  Wren woke to find herself standing in a silent hallway. The air hummed with the sound of a million wings. What had just happened? Was she having another vision of Nod?

  She moved down the hall, and she could hear voices, the man’s and woman’s, the same ones she heard in her very first dream. This time, the woman sounded terrified. Her tone was shrill, and every word came out sharp. “We have to hurry!” she said. “What will we do if we run out of time?”

  Wren quickened her pace. She needed to find them, ask them about Boggen and what was happening on Nod.

  The man’s voice was a low rumble, but even he sounded f
rightened. “You worry too much, Elsbeth. We have to do what we have to do.”

  “He has Robin,” the woman nearly shrieked. “There’s no more time for her. Or the rest of Nod.”

  What had happened to Robin? How were these people connected to her? Wren sped her steps toward a door. The voices were coming from behind there. She had to find out what Boggen was planning to do. If someone at the Crooked House was working to help him come back to Earth, the worst possible thing would be to deliver the rhyme into the wrong hands. She had to know who was helping Boggen. The urgency of her need took hold, and she felt the same shifting sensation, the one that took her different places in the dream world, and the voices were gone.

  She pushed open the door, but the owners of the voices weren’t behind it. The sound of their argument cut off into silence, and instead, she was faced with a long hall, glowing on either side with blue fire and marked with the rows of U-shaped lines bent in on each other, matched up to look like pairs of wings. Her heart thumped loud. She was getting closer at last. She began to run, hurrying around the twists and turns, each footstep taking her closer to where she felt she was supposed to go.

  She trailed her hands along the walls, the rough edges of the pattern marking her skin. The humming sound grew louder, urging her on with a pulsing intensity. Up ahead, she could see a glow of brighter blue, and she was a few steps away when it snuffed out like a candle, and she was alone in a dark passageway.

  She felt empty inside, as though all hope had drained away, and her body refused to move. She wondered if she would stay planted there forever. She reached out a hand to touch the wall next to her. Perhaps she could still feel the carvings. She instinctively knew they would take her where she needed to go.

  But the walls were smooth, damp to the touch. Besides, the humming was gone. In its place, Wren heard a strange rough sound, like someone sawing on a piece of wood.

  It was coming from behind her, and Wren retraced her steps. Nothing was the same: no tunnel, no glowing walls, no sound of the man and woman talking. She was in a stairwell. An old building, she’d wager, with a pipe-lined ceiling above and weathered stone beneath her feet.