“Was that a tree falling?” Petra said uncertainly.
“Too loud.” Tomik peered up between the trees.
A flash of light stitched across the blue sky. Thunder shuddered.
“But it’s a beautiful day!” Tomik protested. “This is bizarre.”
Not as bizarre as what happened next. Light brown grains began to sift down through the trees, hissing across the leaves and settling onto Tomik and Petra.
Tomik rubbed a hand through his hair. He stared at his fingers incredulously. “Is it … is it raining sand?”
As if startled by Tomik’s voice, the sandstorm stopped.
Tomik kneeled to inspect the sand-sprinkled moss, muttering in disbelief. Petra and the spider were silent, but they were both thinking about the same thing: the prince’s clock.
7
Greensleeves
PETRA SECRETLY BEGAN preparing to leave the house at the Sign of the Compass.
She worked harder in the shop than ever before. She made sure that the gears were well oiled, with not a speck of rust. She convinced a merchant passing through town to buy the tin monkey. She felt a pang when she told him that the pets were one of a kind, and that her father would not make any more. Master Kronos was feeling better, and enjoyed sitting in the shop and chatting with the customers. He liked the merchant, who had a gloomy voice that became excited when he first saw the monkey. But after that day, Master Kronos decided that he would give the remaining tin animals to his family and friends.
Dita said, “No, thanks,” when her uncle offered her one. “David’s Stella is enough for me.”
Josef surprised them all by choosing a mouse, dipping his large hand to scoop up the one with the tiniest paws and longest tail. “Thank you, sir.” Josef put the mouse in his pocket and never said what he had named it.
Petra asked Mikal Kronos if she could give the last puppy to Tomik, and he readily agreed. “I’m not sure she’ll get along with Jaspar, though,” her father warned.
Petra had not seen Tomik in a while. They each had to work during the day. At night he was preoccupied with trying to figure out how to fix the flaw in the Worry Vials and how to make a working pair of eyes for Petra’s father. Tomas Stakan had finally agreed to let his son help him in designing the eyes, but they had no luck. Two more leather bags sat next to the first one on Mikal Kronos’s nightstand.
When Petra walked the puppy to the Sign of Fire, the pet sniffed at the wind, drooled green oil when she saw a pigeon, and zigzagged every which way to look inside a shop or down an alley. Petra was glad that she had thought to put a leash on her.
The walk to the Stakan shop seemed to last forever, but when she arrived she was rewarded by Tomik’s delighted face as the puppy wriggled in his arms and he named her Atalanta.
Soon, all the pets had been given away. Some people, like the mayor, were miffed that they had not received such a gift from Master Kronos. But those who welcomed a tin creature into their homes treasured it, treating it as tenderly as if it were a baby—which was exactly what Mikal Kronos wished.
One day, when Petra noticed the first fallen leaf lying like a flake of copper on the ground, Mikal Kronos spent the empty hours in the shop quizzing his daughter on the properties of metal. She was making an unusual effort to do well. She remembered the more ordinary properties—metal’s ability to conduct heat and cold, for example. But she also was quick to recall aspects of metal that not many people knew, because her father alone had discovered them. Astrophil sat on Petra’s shoulder. He knew the answers to all the questions, and sometimes bounced impatiently when Petra was slow to respond, but he had been forbidden to answer.
“When is iron at its most dangerous, Petra?”
“When it bears a grudge.”
“Good. How do you teach metal not to be afraid of fire?”
“You must sing to it.”
“Which metal is said to have the best memory?”
“Silver.”
“Why?”
“Because it is still in love with the moon. Silver tries to be like the moon in all things.”
“All things?”
“Well, except—”
The door to the shop swung open, and a grandly dressed woman stepped inside. As her gaze fell on Petra with her tangled hair and Master Kronos with his bandages, she instantly regretted coming here. Petra could tell from the way the two pink petals of her lips twitched. A footman followed his lady inside, and looked around the store with contempt.
The woman’s bell-shaped skirt floated across the rough wooden floor. Petra heard the clip of small shoes that were made to sound exactly like that. “Good afternoon,” Petra said.
The woman did not return the greeting. “I hear,” she said in a voice as light and delicate as a porcelain cup, “that you sell silver animals.”
“Tin, my lady,” Petra’s father replied. “But I am afraid they are all gone.”
“Can you not make more?”
“As you see, my lady, I cannot.”
She looked again at Master Kronos’s face. She turned to Petra, clearly displeased. Then her eyes narrowed, for she had caught sight of Astrophil. “But what is this? A tin spider? So you do have one such creature left.”
Astrophil immediately disappeared into Petra’s hair. Petra was about to order this graceful, horrible woman out of the shop when her father said, “Unfortunately, he is not for sale. He belongs to my daughter, and has for six years.”
“I am willing to pay a very good price for it.”
“I am very sorry to repeat that he is not for sale.”
“I will pay even more. I know how you artisans operate. You will do anything to drive up the price.”
“Perhaps I can interest you in something else? A music box?”
She waved a gloved hand. “I have many.”
“But I doubt you have a Muse Box. Petra, show her.”
Petra used a footstool to reach the row of Muse Boxes on the topmost shelf. She stepped down and thrust the box at the woman.
“It plays whatever you need to hear,” Mikal Kronos said, and nodded at his daughter. “Petra, go ahead.”
Petra opened the box. It began to play a merry jig of a pipe and two fiddles. It took Petra a moment to recognize the tune. It was called “The Grasshopper.” When Petra was nine, or perhaps ten, it had been played on the night of the annual May bonfire. Ever since Okno survived the Black Plague centuries ago, the men in the village would head into the woods on the first day of every May, cut down the tallest poplar tree they could find, and carry it through the village streets. Everyone else followed behind in a long parade, and one child was chosen to sit on the tree as it traveled through the village. When the procession reached the town square, the May Child was lifted to the ground and handed a torch to light the bonfire once the poplar had been chopped into pieces. As Petra listened to the music box play “The Grasshopper,” she remembered how everybody was dancing but her. She watched the Tree of Life burn and felt angry that yet again, one more year, she hadn’t been chosen to be the May Child. Her father asked her to dance. And she forgot her disappointment.
Petra closed the box.
“This music means nothing to me,” the woman said, and turned to leave.
“It was my daughter who opened the box. Do try it yourself, my lady.”
With a look of amused disbelief, the woman lifted the lid. A quick, longing melody flowed from the box. Petra didn’t recognize it.
The woman listened, staring at nothing.
“It is not a Czech tune,” Petra’s father said. “Am I right? I believe it is an English song called ‘Greensleeves.’”
The woman shut the box. “I know the song. But I did not wish to hear it.”
“It plays what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.”
The woman’s eyes glittered. She ordered her footman out of the shop. Then she paid much more than the asking price for the Muse Box. She gripped the box in both hands as she left the Sign of the
Compass.
That evening, when Petra bid her father good night, she hugged him and said, “You know I love you very much.”
“I do know that,” he said, and placed his wrinkled hand on her knotted hair.
“Do you know … did you hear that it rained sand last week? With thunder and lightning? On a clear day?”
“Did it?” His voice was indifferent, but in a practiced way.
She whispered, “Aren’t you worried?”
He paused, and Petra saw that he was. Still, he tried to persuade his daughter that everything was all right. “If the prince caused this, it only means that he cannot control the clock’s power. Perhaps he has been able to assemble the last part to some degree. That is possible. Lightning would be the easiest thing for the clock to produce. But I never designed the clock to rain sand. This suggests to me that he cannot assemble the last part properly.”
“But he’s trying.”
“Petra.” Her father’s voice was stern as he gripped her shoulders. “The clock is no longer our concern. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” His white bandages confronted her. She nodded, although she knew he could not see her. “I do.”
8
Firefly
A FEW DAYS LATER, when Petra was visiting Tomik at the Sign of Fire, he hissed at her so Master Stakan wouldn’t hear: “Lucie and Pavel leave tomorrow morning. Dawn. I’ll be there.”
Petra practically ran home.
Through the twilight, she saw the sign with a compass that looked like a flower transformed into a machine, or a machine transformed into a flower. Petra veered. She sprinted around the house to the back. She took off her shoes and loped through Dita’s small garden.
Petra had avoided coming here. Not because of Dita’s rows of green plants, but because of the building not far from them. It was her father’s smithy, with its forge and a water-filled slack tub for cooling red-hot iron. A little over a month ago, the sight of the smithy would have been disheartening. But tonight her mind burned as brightly with excitement as any piece of fire-tempered metal. Ever since Astrophil had suggested that her father had lost his sight while trying to secure a noblewoman’s education for her, Petra felt a heavy guilt. She wanted to turn that feeling into the glow of pride.
For twelve years, she had not been what the villagers might call an impressive girl. Petra attended classes at the schoolhouse, but found them dreadfully boring, and received average marks. She was lean, not exactly pretty—she had high, wide cheekbones and the odd silver eyes of her father. Mikal Kronos always claimed she had a knack for metalworking, but she’d never really applied herself to learning what he could do. Now that she was old enough to become her father’s apprentice, and at least learn the more ordinary aspects of his trade, there was so much that he was unable to do, unable to show her.
But these things would change.
Petra entered through the back door. She went to the library and scooped a protesting Astrophil off the pages of a book about geometry. Then she walked into her bedroom, shut the door behind her, and raised her right palm to face the flustered spider.
“Time for bed,” she announced. “We’re leaving tomorrow. Will you wake me two hours before dawn?”
He didn’t reply at first. Then he said slowly, “Your plan to go to Prague is brave, Petra, but is it wise?”
“What could happen to us? We’ll be with Lucie and Pavel. Besides, we’re just going to explore the option of rescuing Father’s eyes. This will be a preliminary investigation. You know I wouldn’t do anything dangerous.”
If Astrophil had eyebrows, he would have raised them in disbelief. “This adventure could be like a riptide.”
“What do you mean?”
“A riptide is when you swim in the sea, close to the shore, never intending to go out very far, and then an underwater current sucks you out far into the deep water.”
“How poetically grim of you, Astrophil. First of all, Bohemia is landlocked, remember? We have no seas. So we’ve nothing to fear from riptides.”
“You are deliberately misunderstanding me.”
“And second, you’re forgetting just how much we can learn from this experience.”
The spider noticed which word she had stressed. “You are deliberately tempting me.”
“Think about everything that Prague has to offer. The most learned scholars in Bohemia live there. And what about the prince’s library? Wouldn’t you like to at least see it?”
The spider was quiet, thinking. Then he said, “I suppose that someone must look after you.”
“Four o’clock in the morning, then?” Petra said cheerfully.
“If you actually manage to get out of bed at four o’clock, I will eat my spiderweb.”
Petra pulled a thick burlap sack from a drawer and filled it with a jug of brassica oil, the little wooden box containing Astrophil’s spoon, a knife, two pairs of trousers, three drawstring shirts, and a work smock. With a grimace, she added a brown skirt that was stiff from having never been worn. She thought a moment, and then tossed in clothes for winter: a hard leather coat and a woolen scarf Dita had knitted for her. Pavel and Lucie might not stay long in Prague. But that didn’t mean she had to leave the city with them.
She blew out the candle. She would pack the rest of what she needed in the early morning, when she was less likely to draw the attention of the rest of her family. David, she was sure, was still awake in his room on the top floor, above hers.
Petra struggled to fall asleep. She thought of how happy her father would be when she returned with his stolen eyes. She would suggest new tin pets to craft, like a firefly. She imagined a green light blinking on, off, on, off, and on again, until finally everything was dark and she slept.
ASTROPHIL HAD TO PINCH her several times before she sat up. “Ow! Astro! Is that really necessary?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it is entertaining.”
Petra dragged on her clothes, still sleepy. She took a sheet of paper down from a shelf, along with a goose quill and a pot of ink. She forged the note from Dita to Lucie and Pavel. She blew the ink dry. Then Petra ripped a scrap from the empty bottom of the page, and tucked the forged letter in her bag. Inking her quill, Petra bent over her desk again. On the scrap of paper she wrote:
Dear Father, Dita, Josef, and David,
I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry about me.
Love,
Petra
Petra shouldered her packed bag. She softly stole across the hall to her father’s library, then began riffling through books and papers.
“What are you doing, precisely?” asked Astrophil.
“Looking for drawings or notes about the clock,” she replied. Her father’s loss was connected to the clock, and she needed to have as much information about it as possible.
When false dawn began to brighten the library, filling it with the gray light that comes just before the sun rises, Petra gave up. Her father must have left any papers about the clock in Prague, probably in the hands of the prince.
There was one thing left for her to do. She unlocked the safe in the floor and took some krona —not much. Then she resealed the secret compartment.
She was ready to leave the room when something about the floor caught her attention. In the smooth wooden board hiding the safe she saw the pattern of extremely tiny holes. She wondered why she had never noticed them before. Perhaps they could be seen only by dawn light. Certainly she had never been awake this early to gaze at the floor of her father’s study —or to do anything at all, for that matter.
“Ahem.” Astrophil tapped one leg impatiently.
Petra ignored him. She inspected the floor more carefully. She noticed a dusty rug at the foot of one of the bookshelves. She pulled it aside and saw, to her excitement, a constellation of holes smaller than the point of a needle bored into the gleaming wood.
She climbed up the ladder to the dandelion for the second time, her heart beating. Shifting aside a book on water fountains,
she blew once on the flower. The seeds did not budge. She shook the stem, but it simply bent back and forth without shedding any of its seeds. Nothing worked.
Astrophil said, “Again I must ask: what are you doing?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. Petra glared at the dandelion. She felt like shaking it again just to relieve her frustration, but instead she pushed the book back into place.
But as she did so, something occurred to her. Nestled next to the book on water fountains was another one about precious stones. She gnawed her lip in anxious consideration, and then uncovered the dandelion again, taking in its round, silver shape.
“Petra, do you want to go or not? Because we need to leave now”
She leaned toward the flower. Then she said, “Marjeta.” This was the word for pearl. It was also the name of Petra’s mother.
The flower’s sphere collapsed. The seeds whirled down to the spot on the floor where the rug had been. Astrophil squeaked as a panel slid away to reveal a hiding place he hadn’t known was there.
That had been too easy. Petra grinned and shook her head. She would have to tell her father to change the password when she returned.
Kneeling by the hole in the floor, she stuck her hand inside and gasped when it hit something hard. She touched cloth and dragged it into view. It was very heavy to pull. It was a sack tied with twine. She opened it quickly and saw—nothing. Bewildered, she thrust her hand inside and yelped when she hit that same hard something yet again. She shook away the pain and then felt inside the bag more gingerly, tracing the outline of something long and cylindrical, with a sharp, pointed end. Suddenly she realized what it was: a screwdriver. It was one of the invisible tools her father had made years ago. No wonder she could never find them in the shop! Her hand passed quickly over the tools, feeling several of them. What were they doing here?
She had no time to consider the answer. She roughly tied the bag again and shoved it back to where it had been. Then she continued to grope for anything that resembled papers or a notebook. When her fingertips touched a smooth vellum binding, she pulled it into sight. She did not pause to look inside the book but thrust it into her pack. As Astrophil tugged at her sleeve she fumbled for the hidden brass flower, pressed it, and was already dashing as quietly as she could out of the room when the panel in the floor slid shut.
The Cabinet of Wonders Page 6