Kepler squeezed his lids shut. His left hand grasped for his Marti medallion, but found nothing. His breath grew so wheezy, Niklas was sure the skullbeak would hear. But it didn’t. It turned back and headed for the docks.
“That was lucky,” Niklas muttered as they clambered up on the far cliff.
“Very,” Secret said. But the look she gave Kepler was full of worry.
CHAPTER FORTY
The ledge wound along the base of the cliff at the high tide mark, no more than a foot wide and near impossible to find if you didn’t know it was there. Somehow Kepler had discovered it anyway on his previous expedition, and he led them now, inching along the ledge with his back turned to the Frothsea.
Below them, sharp rocks jutted out of the roaring water, and they felt the spray of each wave. Every four feet or so there was a hollow in the rock near their shoulders. They could easily be mistaken for natural cracks, but when you stuck your hand inside, the hollows curled inward to make a concealed handle, perfect for holding on to when the wind gusted or a big wave came in.
Someone had crafted these handles, as well as the path they secured.
Niklas tilted his head back. Far above, the mountain gave way to smoother stone. The castle leaned out over the edge, and he could see the Nighthouse as a black half-moon. A flock of skullbeaks wheeled over the tower, but whether it was luck or the smuggler’s cloaks that kept them hidden, they still went unnoticed.
Kepler sidled along with his eyes shut, as if his fingers knew more than he did. Suddenly he stopped by a narrow opening in the rock. It looked like just another weather-worn crack, and the ledge continued on. Kepler slipped into the opening, spidering along by way of crude footholds. Niklas had to shout to be heard above the din of the ocean. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
Kepler pointed at a blotch in the cliff wall. Niklas had thought it was a patch of lichen, but when he bent down to inspect it, he saw that Kepler was right. The gold leaf of Jewelgard.
The crack turned out to be a cove that curled in on itself like a spiral, and at the deepest crook nestled a staircase. The steps rose beyond the funnel of the cove and climbed wildly along the face of the cliff lined with old seagull nests and tufts of bleached grass. There was no railing and after a while, Niklas decided to stop looking down at the foaming waves. When they took a rare moment to rest, he asked, “How come the skullbeaks haven’t found this?”
Kepler put a finger over his lips and pointed up. “Better be silent.” The castle walls loomed taller now, cut from dull, black glass. The ever-present Nighthouse fog trailed down like hanging moss. It smelled sweet and rotten. Niklas couldn’t see any sign of life, and the skullbeaks had not been out for a while. Yet the nightmare feeling had never weighed as heavily on him as on these stairs. The shifting, brooding quality of the air sent prickles down his back.
At last the steps ended with a door in the mountain wall. It was made of weathered wood and reinforced by metal scrollwork of entangled thorns. There was no handle or keyhole, but a single thorn poked out in the middle. Kepler nodded at Niklas, and whispered, “Let it taste you.”
“You’re sure?” Secret frowned at Kepler. “That’s what you did last time?”
“Yes.” Kepler clutched at his chest where Marti’s medallion belonged, his fingers searching until the other paw came up to stop it. “It’s just like the gate thorns of the Nickwood. I’m worried it will taste that disgusting troll poison in my blood. But it will let you in. You’re a Twistrose.”
“Not a real one,” Niklas said. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the tip until a drop of blood came out. The door swung open with a creak. A passageway continued upward into the mountain, dark but for glimmering tiles of glass on the steps.
A sound whispered down to meet them: a swooshing swelling and dying down, as if the sea had a brother deep in the castle.
Kepler swayed slightly. Niklas was none too certain that their guide could manage more stairs without falling backward, so he put his arm around Kepler’s shoulders. “Let’s go together.”
Kepler didn’t protest. “Careful,” he said. “The door is heavy.”
It slammed shut as soon as Secret had passed the threshold as the last of the three, leaving them in the ghostly sheen. The inside of the door had no handle, no thorn.
Secret’s tail thumped against Niklas’s legs. “I hope no one heard that boom.”
Kepler turned back. The light picked out only the stripes of his face. “The trolls don’t know about this passage, or we would have smelled them.”
“Let’s keep going,” Niklas said.
They emerged through a slim, concealed door behind a pillar in the corner of a courtyard. A wooden gallery enclosed the yard, but the rest was all smoky, dark stone. The massive walls had turrets at each corner, and in the middle of the west wall, the hulking round tower of the Nighthouse disappeared into thicker mist. All of it was covered with creeping dark vines.
Niklas had the strangest feeling he had seen this before.
He turned in a circle, taking in the flagstones, the crenellated curtain walls, the gatehouse in the east with the drawbridge raised against the lowered grate. But the pieces didn’t click into place until a gust of wind lifted the fog around the Nighthouse. The dome had a wraparound balcony and a wide band of windows under ridged half-moon tiles that looked like fingernails.
“It’s my mother’s bird castle!” He rubbed his forehead. How could she have known exactly what it looked like? Somehow the Nighthouse had made it into her dreams with photographic precision.
“What are you doing?” Secret’s voice was not her normal calm or even flat. It sounded slurry with uncertainty. She wasn’t talking to Niklas. Her eyes were trained on Kepler. The ferret had slipped away from them and made his way to the gate. Next to the gate hung a large bell with a clapper for gripping. An alarm bell.
“Nothing.”
“Then why do you reek like a coward?”
Kepler grasped and grasped at his chest, leaning against the wall. “I . . . I. Ngh.” His other hand flew up to stop the clawing.
“Kepler,” Niklas began, but then he stopped, staring at Kepler’s hand in horror as it moved slowly toward the bell. “What are you doing?”
Kepler glared at his fingers on the clapper. His eyes bulged. “It . . . It’s my task to ring the bell now.”
“But they’ll know we’re here,” Niklas said.
“The Sparrow King already knows. He knows everything.”
“I actually trusted you,” Secret said. “So stupid.” She turned to Niklas, eyes watering. “What should we do? Attack him before he rings the bell?”
“No!” Niklas touched her scruff. They’d never reach him in time to stop him. And this was Kepler, brave, hopeful Kepler, who dreamed of freeing Broken.
“Have to . . .” Kepler almost gagged to get the words out. “Ring the bell!”
His hand swung the clapper hard against the metal of the bell. The noise rolled around the courtyard, rose up along the tower of the Nighthouse, and fled into the sky.
The skullbeaks answered, letting their hooooowooooo break loose over the ruin city. Inside the castle sounded a long, shrill troll cry. And up in the Nighthouse, a tall shape stepped in front of the window, beak curved like a plague-doctor.
The Sparrow King was watching.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Kepler kept the bell ringing, ringing. The peals thundered in Niklas’s head, making it impossible to think. They had to hide, but where? The door where they had emerged from the sea stairs had closed. The only other exits from the courtyard were the drawbridge and the castle door, behind which thundering footsteps approached. The trolls were awake in there. Outside the walls, the skullbeaks howled.
Hooooowoooo.
Secret turned her mangled ear to him, as if to say, You decide our next move.
Niklas couldn’t think of any moves. There was nothing to do but wait to be captured.
Dark vine was creeping up where the concealed door had been, smothering the wall with its thorny web, exactly like the roses his mother had carved on the Summerhill birdhouse.
Wait.
If this was his mother’s Nightmare castle down to every detail—if she had really dreamt about this place back in her bed in Summerhill—then maybe she knew more about it than what the surface showed. In the birdhouse, she had hidden two secret compartments. One at the top of the tower, and one beneath the round flagstone! Niklas searched the courtyard, and there it was: right at the foot of the Nighthouse, a round stone etched with a thorn.
He sprinted over to it. The flagstone measured two feet across. It lay completely flush with the rest of the courtyard. He needed to spring it open, but how?
He pressed the stone. Nothing.
He knocked on it, stepped on it, scratched the thorn, used his fingernails to dig into the surrounding mortar. Nothing.
Hooooowooooo.
For a short, desperate moment Niklas wished Lin were there. She solved riddles all the time, like it was nothing, but he had never been able to figure out the answer to anything.
Except he had. This past week he had. He had found out his mother’s secrets.
Exactly how the worlds were connected, Niklas had no idea. But maybe there was some of Erika in this place, too? With her, things always moved in circles: The spire must be screwed off, the statue spun around, the medallion twisted to open the secret chamber of her heart.
He put the heels of his hands on the stone and used his whole weight to turn it around. It moved with surprising ease. When it had turned full circle, it lifted two inches out of the ground, revealing a handle along the edge.
“Quick,” he said to Secret. “Help me get it out!”
Secret lifted the hatch, but at the last moment, she glanced across the courtyard at Kepler.
Tears leaked down the ferret’s face as he rang the bell harder and faster, filling the castle with a mad clangor. His eyes were shut. He couldn’t see where they were going.
Niklas and Secret jumped through the hatch.
• • •
The cellar echoed with sounds: hooting and screeching from the courtyard above, footsteps pounding through hallways. Doors slammed and voices shouted, but no one came running down the same tunnel as Secret and Niklas. He almost dared hope they moved in a separate, concealed grid, until they found a lone, lit lantern on the wall, sputtering with rancid oil.
The trolls had been here not too long ago.
Niklas patted Secret on the back. “At least we’ll see where we’re going. Maybe we’ll luck out again and find another exit.”
“We’re moving deeper into the mountain.” Secret turned away from the flickering light. “And it was never luck. Not Kepler’s rescue, not the sneaking. Odar was right. It was too easy.” She hissed. “I shouldn’t have trusted him.”
“We shouldn’t have brought him in the first place. He changed after the barracks, Secret. They broke him.” And it was my fault he ended up there, Niklas thought. They couldn’t hear the bell anymore. Either they had come too far belowground, or Kepler had stopped. But the desperate ringing still played in Niklas’s head.
“Not so soft-hearted, cub,” Secret said, but the angle of her neck was anything but hard.
Dirt and half-gnawed animal bones lined the hallways, and the sour-milk stink wafted out of the stairwells. Secret sniffed the empty frame of a door that had been torn clean off its hinges, revealing a nest of dirty beds within. “Used to be oak.”
Niklas grimaced. “Rafsa is nothing if not thorough.” He could very well imagine the troll witch striding down these tunnels, bone armor clattering, claws scritching against the stone, ordering doors to be removed.
Secret stopped, nostrils flaring.
“What is it?” Niklas couldn’t smell anything other than troll stink.
“Fur and old piss,” Secret said. “But something else, too. Something sweet and burnt, like in Kepler’s pen in the barracks.”
They turned the corner.
“Oh no,” Niklas whispered. “No, that can’t be right!”
Kepler hadn’t lied about everything, not about the troll conversation he had overheard. But he had guessed wrong about the prisoner. It wasn’t Marcelius.
They stood on the doorway of a dank cell, full of filthy rushes. Behind the bars, the sole prisoner slept in the middle of the floor. He was hooked up by needles and long, snaking tubes to a flask mounted on a hospital rack. The flask contained a black liquid that dripped, dripped, dripped into the veins of a bone-thin dog.
Niklas knew this dog: the floppy ears, the black patches, and the gentle curve of his snout. And not just from the figurine in his pocket. From his dreams as well.
“Sebastifer?” Niklas took a step forward. “Can you hear me?”
Sebastifer whimpered in his sleep. Just like Kepler had done.
“Don’t be scared,” Niklas said. “I’m Erika’s son. Your girl Erika? I’m going to help you.” He tugged at the heavy padlock on the cell door. “Just please wake up?”
But Sebastifer didn’t stir. The liquid dripped and dripped. Troll poison, Kepler had called it.
“We have to get in there,” Niklas said. “We have to get that stuff away from him.” He began kicking around in the rotten straw.
“What are you doing?” Secret murmured into his ear. “We won’t be able to break that lock.”
“We won’t have to.” Niklas found what he was looking for. Trolls were messy. Of course they had tossed discarded needles on the floor. They were gooey and horrible, but they would work. He wiped them off on the rushes and stuck them into the padlock.
“You know how to pick a lock.” Secret couldn’t hide the pleased smirk on her face.
“I borrowed one of Lin’s dad’s research books. How else would I get into the Fale cellars for plum jam?” Niklas wiggled the final needle into the hole. “Don’t tell Mrs. Fale. Or my grandmother.”
The lock sprang open, and the cage door creaked on its hinges.
Sebastifer still didn’t move. When Niklas unhooked him from the needles and untangled him from the tubes, he kicked and yelped in his sleep. He was dreaming. Niklas tried shaking him and even pinched his wet black nose, but no matter what he did, Sebastifer would not wake.
“I don’t think he can.” Niklas felt his chest clench. “Look at his fur.”
Sebastifer had been marked, top to bottom, with troll runes. Niklas recognized the one from the sleeping stone trolls in the cave, the eye that meant awake. He had to use his mother’s rune book to decipher the others: Sleep. Dream. A long fang meant obey. And one he had only seen twice before, on the lid of his mother’s troll-hunting casket. And on Rafsa herself, cut deep on her entire lower arm. A four-pointed star that meant power.
“They’ve bound him with magic.” Niklas closed the book. “We’re going to have to lift him up and take him with us.”
“And go where?” Secret’s bad ear drooped. “We don’t know where we are, and we may have to bolt at any moment. You know we can’t outrun the trolls if we’re carrying him between us.”
She lifted her paw and put it gently on Sebastifer’s shoulder. At the touch, Sebastifer turned over in his sleep and whined. “The night grows dark, Erika. But I can’t find you!”
That’s because she’s gone, Niklas thought. She can’t help you, or us, or anyone. His eyes stung.
As his vision blurred, Sebastifer’s whimpers filled his head. There was something about them. They were just snippets, but there was a pattern. A melody. One Niklas had heard before.
“Wake now, little rose,” he sang, trying to fit the song over the sounds. “The night grows dark and old . . .” He faltered. It was all he could remember of his m
other’s lullaby. But for a brief moment, Sebastifer’s tail and ears had twitched. Had he heard?
At the bottom of his satchel Niklas found a wrinkled sheet of paper and smoothed it out on his knees. He had jotted down the words from the tape in Morello House, only a few days ago, although it seemed like a thousand.
He couldn’t bear to look at Sebastifer as he sang, so instead he watched Secret, and her golden eyes rimmed in black and white, and her lone ear tuft and spotted fur, so out of place in this cell.
Wake now, little rose,
The night grows dark and old.
Your feet must find the trail tonight,
To Sorrowdeep the cold.
Wait now, little dog,
Your voice will carry through.
The key lies in her hand tonight,
Sebastifer the true.
Sleep then, ghost of thorns,
If you can’t play the part.
Your love will lead you nowhere when
It’s locked inside your heart.
Somewhere during the second verse, Sebastifer fell silent, and when Niklas finished the last line of the song, he turned back, expecting to see the dog resting peacefully. Instead Sebastifer sat upright, staring right at him. Clouds of black drifted across his eyes, but his nostrils flared.
“Erika, is that you?”
“No,” Niklas said. “She couldn’t come. I’m sorry.”
The dog scratched his ear, and when he looked at Niklas again, his eyes were weary, but clear. “You smell like her. Like woods and night mist and fun.”
The black liquid leaked down his face like ink tears.
“Here.” Niklas held out his water bottle.
Sebastifer drank in big gulps. He looked terribly weak. Secret gave him her loaf of aniseed bread, and it was gone in two bites.
“Thank you.” Sebastifer sighed. “It’s been a long time since I had fresh bread.”
Very long, Niklas thought, since before Erika carved the bird castle, at the very least. How else would she know where to place his prison? Suddenly he remembered what Kepler had said: The prisoner would destroy the Sparrow King’s plans if he escaped. “Do you know why they kept you down here?”
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