‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘I want you to tell me what it’s all about,’ he answered.
He said it as a simple statement of fact and that annoyed her.
‘Don’t have to tell you a thing,’ she said.
She had meant to sound defiant, but even to her own ears the words had only sounded petulant.
‘If you tell me,’ said Koenig, ‘then these people can look after you both until the boy’s better – believe me, they’re very good at it. If you don’t’ – he shrugged – ‘I just take you back where I found you.’
She saw straight away that she didn’t really have any choice. Even if she lied, what would she say? There wasn’t that much she could tell him anyway. But it was still something he wanted and that had to be worth keeping.
‘How do I know you won’t take us back anyway?’ she said.
‘You don’t. But you were right in the wood. He might be worth something. How much all depends on what you tell me, and what I find out. But if you don’t tell me anything, then he’s worth nothing at all. Just the ride back to where I found you both. And I’m not sure that you really want that.’
Katta looked at the fire, and at the steam rising from the front of her skirt, but she wasn’t seeing it. In her mind’s eye she could still see the dwarf sitting on Mathias, pressing his thumbs into the boy’s eyes; see the moon-faced man with the silver-topped cane. No. She didn’t want to go back.
‘There’s not much to tell,’ she said.
‘Then there’s no point in not telling it,’ said Koenig.
10
The Piece of Paper
It was hard to say what dark dreams were tumbling through Mathias’s head while he slept, but there were many of them. Sometimes he would call out, but Katta, who stood and watched him, couldn’t make sense of anything he said. He had grown hot and feverish and his words were confused. The Burner woman sat beside him, wiping his head with a cloth. She poured something onto it first, held it to his face and made him breathe it in. It smelled bitter as wormwood, and was as black as nightshade. Katta didn’t know whether he was being healed or poisoned, but there was little she could do anyway. She stood inside the door and watched. Once or twice, Burner children looked in to see the boy who had been knifed, but Katta stared at them with such hard, implacable hatred that they backed away and didn’t come again.
She had told Koenig all that she had seen and done. He had listened to her without saying a word and she was not sure whether he believed her or not, but she didn’t care. Then he had got onto the big horse. He had spoken a few words in Burner to the woman before he left, and she had nodded. What he’d said Katta didn’t know, but she could guess. When she tried to stand outside the door of the hut, the Burner woman had called her back in. Hearing their voices, one of the men in the clearing had looked up from his work and stood watching until Katta had done what she was told. If she had had any thought of slipping away into the wood, that had been enough to show her that they wouldn’t let her.
Besides, there was the boy.
She had nothing to do but wait either for Koenig to come back or for Mathias to wake up. Waiting wasn’t something that she was very good at doing. At the inn she’d had to work all day; every single minute was filled. Now she had nothing to do but stand by the door and wonder what this was all about, and she would have to wait if she was going to find out.
As the day wore on, the sky slowly went the colour of dull lead. Then it began to snow. Large, lazy flakes that feathered through the high branches of the trees and began to settle on the ground beneath. Thinly at first, but steadily more and more until the stacks of chopped wood grew fat with snow. Katta breathed in the air, it felt wet-cold and clean. Only the earthed mounds, hot on the inside, were not white – the flakes of snow vanished the very instant that they touched, as though they were sharp and had sliced straight through.
And Katta had nothing to do but stand, and watch, and wait.
The afternoon was just growing dark when suddenly Mathias sat up. The lamp had been lit in the hut. He stared with wide unseeing eyes into the shadows of the bracken roof above him. Katta hadn’t seen him stirring. For a while he watched her as she stood, arms folded, looking out of the door at the falling snow. He didn’t know who she was. Then she turned and saw him.
‘Am I dead?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘Not yet,’ she said.
The Burner woman heard the sound of their voices. She stopped what she was doing and, going to the bed, gently laid Mathias down again unprotesting. He was asleep at once.
It was not until the middle of the next morning that he woke again, but this time the fever had broken. His eyes, though sunken, were bright and clear. The Burner woman had made some broth. Katta had eaten hers before Mathias woke. Now she sat beside him while he ate his and told him what had happened in the tunnel, about Koenig and how they had come to be where they were. He listened intently. She watched his grey face as she spoke, desperate to ask him the two questions she most wanted the answer to, but not sure how to choose the moment. In the end the words just slipped out.
‘Why did they try to kill you? What were they looking for?’
Mathias glanced quickly at the Burner woman and back at Katta.
‘Don’t mind her,’ said Katta. ‘She only speaks in Burner.’
For a moment he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t yet decided whether to trust her. Then he remembered the dwarf and the tunnel and what she had already done.
‘I think they want a bit of paper,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it’s about.’
He told her what he did know – how Gustav had had a secret. How he had found the paper sewn into the old man’s coat. How the man with the silver-topped cane had tried to find it. He looked at the Burner woman again, but she hadn’t looked up. She was busy in the corner of the hut.
‘It’s in my coat pocket,’ he said. ‘Or it was.’
Katta had used the coat as a blanket in the night. Now she picked it up from the floor where she’d slept and made a fuss of spreading it on the bed, tucking it in around Mathias, but as she did so, she put her hand deep down into one pocket and then the other. She sat back down on the edge of the bed and carefully, so that the Burner woman couldn’t see, pressed something small and hard into Mathias’s hand.
‘This?’ she said.
He looked at it and nodded. ‘I wish I’d never found it,’ he said.
She took it from him and slipped it safely into her apron pocket with the stone. They might need that as well before long.
It snowed through the night, but it had stopped before Koenig returned the next morning. Katta watched him arrive. The big horse was steaming as though it had been ridden hard. There was snow on the shoulders of Koenig’s coat. He beat it off with his hat as he got down from the saddle. The Burner men were already working, but he didn’t stop to talk to them. He walked straight across the clearing towards the hut. When he came in, he saw that Mathias was awake.
Koenig looked cold and hungry. The Burner woman filled a bowl with hot broth and set it at the small table. She tore a loaf of bread in half and gave that to him as well. It wasn’t until the very last scrapings were gone that he pushed the bowl away and spoke.
‘Who is Doctor Leiter?’ he said.
Mathias looked at Katta. She gave the smallest shake of her head.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘He seems to know you,’ said Koenig. ‘He’s left money at the inn for anyone who finds you. Quite a lot of money, actually.’
‘So you’re going to take him back,’ said Katta. Her voice was full of contempt.
Koenig smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t left nearly enough for that. Your tunnel came down on all my things – I’ve been back to see it. There’s no digging them out. Even if there were, they are no good to me now. I can’t sell spoiled goods at a profit.’ He shook his head. ‘No. It would have to be a great deal more than that.’
; ‘How much more?’ said Katta.
She could see where Koenig was leading. He would beat Leiter’s price up as high as he could, then sell Mathias for that.
But he shook his head and looked at her with bright, intelligent eyes. ‘That’s the wrong question,’ he said. ‘The question should be, “Why does he want our young friend back at all?” The story in the stables is that he stole something from this man and you ran away together. So what did he steal that could possibly be worth so much trouble?’
‘I didn’t steal anything,’ said Mathias.
‘It’s a piece of paper,’ said the Burner woman quietly. ‘The girl has it in the pocket of her apron.’
Only then, too late, did Katta realize that the woman had understood every word they had said – understood every word, all the time. She had been tricked by a stinking, filthy Burner. She didn’t think. She leaped at the woman’s face with her fingers crooked but Koenig caught her – which was fortunate because, quick as a snake, the woman had the small sharp knife in her hand. Koenig pushed Katta away roughly.
‘Tashka did no more than I asked her to,’ he said. ‘And she’s fed you and seen to your friend. He’d be dead without her. So you stay there and shut up!’
She knew he was right, but she wasn’t going to let him see that, thief that he was, setting this woman to spy on her, so she stared right back at him and spat at the woman. It was a mistake. With fierce coal-black eyes the woman stepped towards her, the blade of the knife held flat between her thumb and finger. Koenig put his hand out and touched the woman’s arm. She stopped at once. Still holding onto her, he lifted his other hand to Katta and slowly, so there could be no misunderstanding what he meant, he said, ‘Don’t ever do that to her again, or she will kill you and there will be nothing I can do to stop her. She will wait until I am gone and then, if you are still here, she will kill you. Do you understand?’
‘Give it to him,’ said Mathias quietly. ‘It’s more trouble than it’s worth.’
Katta looked at Mathias, then at the hard-faced woman, and her mouth was suddenly dry as ash.
‘Please,’ said Mathias.
Slowly Katta put her hand into the pocket of her apron. She could feel the sharp edge of the stone, hard and heavy. She looked at Koenig, then at the woman again. But there was nothing she could do. She let the stone drop through her fingers and, drawing the folded paper out, gave it to Koenig. He took it from her, and the woman stepped back and put the knife away.
Carefully Koenig teased one end of the paper open, then, where the shaft of light fell through the door onto the tabletop, he unrolled it and flattened it out between his hands. For a while he said nothing. Then he looked up at Mathias.
‘Tell me about this piece of paper,’ he said. ‘Whose is it?’
‘It was my grandfather’s,’ said Mathias.
‘Was?’
‘He is dead.’
‘Do you know what is written on it?’
Mathias shook his head.
‘Then come and see,’ said Koenig. ‘This is what you nearly died for. It must be worth seeing for that alone.’
Mathias didn’t move. Koenig held his hand out to him.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come and see.’
‘He can’t stand,’ said Katta.
‘He can stand,’ said Koenig.
Mathias put his feet on the ground and stood up. He felt so giddy. There was a buzzing in his ears. He shook his head to clear it. Koenig held out his hand and steadied him.
The piece of paper on the table was no wider than a small letter might be, and not as long. It had been torn off halfway, so that the bottom edge was deeply ragged and uneven. It still had the crease marks from where it had been folded tight and sewn into Gustav’s coat. There were other marks too that Mathias knew were from when Gustav had put it in his mouth. For a moment he was in the dark stable again beside the dying man, with the dirty straw on the ground and the bowl of milky white water. It was the same piece of paper, he had no doubt about it, but there was something that made no sense, made no sense at all. He picked it up and turned it over, but it was the same.
On both sides, the piece of paper was completely blank.
11
The Torn Edge
‘I don’t understand,’ said Mathias.
He thought that he was missing something obvious and looked at Koenig, expecting to see the answer, but Koenig didn’t understand either. He was holding the paper, a puzzled look on his face.
Katta came and stood by the table. ‘All the writing’s come off,’ she said.
Koenig lifted the paper up to the daylight. Each different town made and marked its own paper. Where the light showed through, he could see the watermark of the Guild of Paper Makers for the town in which it had been made, but there wasn’t even so much as the ghost of any writing to show that there had ever been anything written on it at all.
‘It can’t be this that they want,’ said Katta. ‘It must be something else.’
In that moment it crossed her mind that Mathias had taken something else, something that he hadn’t told her about. She looked at him distrustfully, but he shook his head. He knew that whatever this paper was, it was what Gustav hadn’t wanted anyone else to find.
‘It must have some trick,’ he said.
Koenig looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.
Mathias faltered under the scrutiny of those hard grey eyes. ‘It’s a conjuror’s piece of paper,’ he said.
He looked at Katta as though she might be able to explain it better, but she didn’t know what he meant either.
‘He was a conjuror,’ he said. ‘There must be some trick to it. Maybe you have to hold it in a special way before you can see the writing.’
‘How?’ said Koenig, tilting the paper so that the light fell onto it at different angles. ‘What sort of thing might he have done?’
Mathias frowned. He tried hard to think but nothing would come. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe you have to hold it over a flame.’
It was possible.
Koenig lit the stub of a candle and they watched as he carefully passed the paper to and fro above the flame. Katta stood waiting for words to appear but nothing happened.
‘It’s just a bit of paper,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You want it to be something else, but that’s all it is.’
Koenig didn’t look up. ‘Things aren’t always what they seem,’ he said. ‘You should have learned that lesson by now.’
He turned and spoke in Burner to the woman. Then he listened to her long answer. Katta guessed that he’d asked the woman to tell him what she’d heard Mathias saying and tried to follow it, but the words were just sounds to her. Sometimes Koenig would interrupt with a question, and then the woman would think about it before saying some more. Finally, when she was done, Koenig picked up the piece of paper again and looked at it carefully.
‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,’ he said.
Then Katta had an idea. It came to her so suddenly that it slipped out before she could stop it. ‘Maybe it never had writing on it at all,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s only half—’ She shut her mouth tight. But she’d already said enough for Koenig.
‘Half,’ he said, turning the new idea around in his head.
He put the paper back down on the table so that the torn, jagged edge that had been at the bottom was now at the top.
‘What if there is another piece,’ he said, ‘that matches this tear.’ He drew his fingernail along the odd, ragged line. ‘Matches it exactly.’
Katta looked down at the paper. Turned like this, it did look like the bottom part of something, not the top part of it at all. Her idea had been that maybe the writing was on the other part, but then why keep the wrong bit, the bit that was blank?
Now, turned the other way, the tear had a meaning. Even if you were in a hurry, you could tear paper much neater than that if you wanted to. This tear was quite deliberately done. Koenig was right. It wasn’t jus
t a tear at all. It was meant to match another piece.
‘What if it never had writing on it at all,’ he said quietly, weighing that thought. ‘What if all it was meant to do was fit?’
Mathias had stopped thinking. His shoulder throbbed and his chest ached. All he wanted to do was lie down. ‘What good would that be?’ he said, and sat on the bed.
Koenig glanced up at Katta. She’d already worked out the answer to that, but she wasn’t going to say.
He took a flat leather wallet from inside his riding coat – Katta caught the flash of a fine silk waistcoat beneath. Carefully folding the paper so that the edge was safe, Koenig put it into the wallet.
‘That’s his,’ said Katta fiercely. ‘It’s not yours to keep.’
‘No,’ said Koenig, putting the wallet back inside his coat. ‘But if his friends come by, they will have a little more trouble taking it from me than they would from him.’
Katta looked at Koenig – at his slate-grey eyes and hard-edged face – and knew that he was more than probably right.
He stood up, put his hat on and buttoned his coat.
‘What will you do to us now?’ said Mathias.
His head had drooped and he was staring at the floor. Katta put her hand into her apron pocket and gripped the stone.
‘Nothing,’ said Koenig. He patted the front of his coat where the wallet lay. ‘This little riddle needs solving. You have been the cause of more trouble for me than you know. Let’s hope this piece of paper turns out to be worth enough to put it all to rights. Then we shall see.’
He went through the door and whistled for the big bay horse to come to him. It trotted out from the shelter of the trees on the other side of the clearing, shaking its head and mane. Mathias felt so very tired. Tashka must have seen. She came across and, laying him down, covered him over with his coat, but as she did so, she didn’t take her eyes off Katta, and Katta found herself wishing very much that Koenig had not gone quite yet, and that he had not left her alone with this Burner woman and her sharp knife.
Toymaker, The Page 7