The Witch's Glass

by Holly Grant

  “I like to think so.” Gisela sniffled. “Ah, well, we mustn’t dwell on sorrows of yesteryear. Won’t you stay for a nice fondue? I have a delicious new Stinking Bishop—”

  “Perhaps next time, Gisela,” Penny said. “We’ve promised to take the children sledding.”

  “Well, enjoy yourselves, liebchens,” Gisela said. “And, Penny, you must come round for dinner sometime soon. It—it does my heart good to see you. Even if Klaus is gone, I still think of you as a daughter.”

  The sledding party clamored through the front door of the cheese shop and out into Dinkledorf’s snow-bespangled backwoods.

  It was Anastasia’s first time abovecaves in months. She inhaled deeply, and thousands of pine-tree-scented molecules flooded her nostrils and jozzled her lungs. Gus and Ollie and Quentin and Pippistrella whuffled in tandem beside her.

  “Fresh air!” Quentin sighed.

  “And I smell fresh pastry!” Ollie cried.

  “Ah! Well sniffed, my lad!” Baldwin praised. “That’ll be the illustrious Zucker Weg or, in English, Sugar Way. It’s the pastry district of Dinkledorf!”

  Ollie gripped Anastasia’s arm in a swoon of delight. She smiled at him, and then she turned to see Gus. He was hunkered in a pillow of snow, scooping up handfuls of flakes and peering at them with the intensity of a jeweler examining diamonds. He lifted his shining eyes to Anastasia’s.

  “Snow is beautiful,” he said.

  “Lucky for you, there’s plenty of it around here.” Baldwin galumphed down the cheese shop’s snow-laden stoop. “Onward ho, troops! To Zucker Weg!”

  Even though the Merry Mouse nestled on the outmost fringe of Dinkledorf, the village was so itty-bitty that tromping to the village heart would take no more than fifteen minutes. Baldwin and Ollie and Quentin frolicked through the frosty drifts, and Pippistrella wheeled between pine boughs, and Gus stumbled along with his face tilted toward the sky. Anastasia fell into step beside her aunt.

  “Aunt Penny,” Anastasia said quietly, “why would Gisela think of you as a daughter?”

  Penny blushed. “Klaus and I were engaged, you see.”

  “You were engaged ?” Anastasia exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Penny said. “He was a wonderful man. A brilliant cheesemonger, and clever and sweet. And brave. Perhaps a bit too brave. He died in the first battles of the Perpetual War.”

  Anastasia stared at her, astonished. “Oh, Aunt Penny! I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked—”

  “No, dear, it’s fine,” Penny said. “Perhaps, one day, someone will tell you, ‘It’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’ Perhaps I am telling you, now. And it is true.” She reached out to tug the end of Anastasia’s scarf. “Nonetheless, losing love is a horrible thing. It’s the most horrible thing in the world. That’s why I’m so protective of you.”

  “But you’re letting me come abovecaves today,” Anastasia said.

  “Yes.” Penny smiled. “There’s another wise saying: ‘A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.’ And I don’t want you to spend your entire childhood feeling like a fugitive and missing out on pleasures like sledding and sunshine and starlight. That said,” she added, “we still have to be careful.” She let out a low whistle, drawing Pippistrella from her loop-the-loops. “We’d better get you undercover, Lady Bat. We’re getting close to the village proper.”

  Pippistrella squeaked and dived to burrow in the hood of Anastasia’s coat.

  The pine trees petered out into snowcapped cottages trimmed with lacy shingles and candy-colored shutters. As the little troop of Morfolk neared downtown Dinkledorf, the cottages clustered closer and closer together until they were squeezed eave to eave, cheek to cheek. It reminded Anastasia of a song her father used to sing (off-key and botching the lyrics), sweeping her into his flour-dusted arms and waltzing around the McCrumpet kitchen:

  Heaven! I’m in heaven…

  When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.

  Anastasia wondered, now, about her mother. Anastasia had grown up with a horrid woman who lay about in bed all day and complained of headaches and tummy aches and toothaches and shin splints. She had never said a kind word to Anastasia or to Fred, and Fred had certainly never danced cheek to cheek with her. That woman had been Anastasia’s stepmother, and she had run away with a podiatrist after Prim and Prude snatched Anastasia and Fred disappeared. Anastasia did not spend much time thinking about Trixie McCrumpet. She did, however, think about her mother, who had died shortly after Anastasia’s birth. Anastasia did not even know her name. No one in the Merrymoon family did except for Fred.

  Had Fred waltzed cheek to cheek with Anastasia’s mother? Or at least clog-stomped with her? How had they met? Why hadn’t Fred ever told Anastasia anything about her? Anastasia wished she could ask her father about her never-known mom. If—when—she found him, she vowed, she would.

  Tromping through the winding Dinkledorfian alleys, the sledding party passed a toy shop and a bookstore and a florist’s. The perfume of piping-hot pastry grew stronger and stronger with every snow-upholstered step, until at last they turned down a lane lined with steamy windows chock-full of pastries. Strudel! Plump turnovers oozing hot applesauce! Donuts and éclairs and cupcakes! Linzer tortes and butter tarts! Sweet buns and sticky buns and cinnamon buns and hot cross buns!

  “Remember,” Baldwin cautioned them, “pace yourself. This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon.” He swung open the nearest door, and a cloud of warm, sugary steam puffed without as though tootled from a sweet-toothed dragon within.

  The merry band of Morfolk chomped their way through the confections of Zucker Weg until even Ollie hesitated outside the last bakery in the row, clutching his stomach. “Give me half an hour,” he groaned. “I’m sure I could eat another piece of cake in half an hour.”

  “Amateurs,” Baldwin chuckled. He checked his pocket watch. “Oh, splendid! We’re right on time to pop into Die Kuckucksnest as the clocks strike six!”

  “Kuckucks…what?” Anastasia echoed.

  “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Baldwin said. “The most illustrious, marvelous, gobsmackingly glorious cuckoo clock shop in the world. And it’s right around the corner…see?”

  Penny smiled. “Dinkledorf is so small, everything’s right around the corner.”

  “Look at this!” Gus cried, dashing up to the clock shop’s mullioned windows.

  “Ah, yes,” Baldwin rhapsodized. “The cuckoos within that hallowed nest are—”

  “No,” Gus said. “Look at this icy stuff on the window! It’s like fancy, squished snowflakes.” He bent close to peer. “This is frost, isn’t it? I read about frost in a book.”

  Anastasia sidled up beside Gus, her mind flashing to a puzzle left over from St. Agony’s: she had—or she thought she had—breathed frosty pictures onto various glassy bits and bobs around the chilly asylum. After stumbling upon the Morfo branches of her family tree, she had wondered whether frost breath was a Morfolky peculiarity. Penny and Baldwin assured her that it was not. They hypothesized Anastasia had, in her lonely distress, imagined the frost pictures. And Anastasia had been unable to prove otherwise: ever since escaping the drafty, gloomy, silver-crammed asylum, she had not breathed a single glimmer of frost.

  Anastasia narrowed her eyes, thinking about the silver in the asylum. Silver, as you know, affected Morfolk badly. It sapped their strength. It made them sick. Anastasia wondered now whether spending so much time amidst Prim and Prude’s silver forks and spoons and candlesticks and jewelry and other doodads might have affected her mind. Had all that silver made her hallucinate?

  It was an unpleasant idea. Anastasia now puffed experimentally upon the window, but her balmy breath simply fogged against and melted part of the icy patterning.

  “Quickly, now,” Baldwin urged them. “It’s nearly six!”

  An entire village-worth of cuckoo cottages wallpapered the narrow shop. Some were big as steamer trunks and others were no larger than matchboxes. A
clock clucked at the heart of each cuckoo chalet: tick tick tick tick tick.

  “Gosh, it’s noisy in here,” Gus observed.

  “Just wait till the clocks strike the hour!” Baldwin said. “Oh, what a sublime rumpus that shall be! It’s different in here than back at the palace, you understand. Our clocks in the library are spread out over a great long cavern. The cuckoos in here are packed together tight as sardines, and so are we. Their singing will rattle you silly.”

  “It’s almost six now!” Ollie shouted.

  “Prepare yourselves!” Baldwin yelled, grabbing Anastasia’s and Gus’s hands. “It’ll be like a bomb going off!”

  Cuckoo! Cuckoo! The shop erupted in a cacophony of metallic twangs and piping hoots. Little wooden shutters beneath the eaves of each cottage snapped open to release carved cuckoo birds. Cuckoo! Miniature peasants twirled; waterwheels spun; Lilliputian woodcutters snapped their axes toward wee tree trunks. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

  And then, with a clockwork hiccup, the cuckoos retreated. The shutters clicked closed, and the clocks fell back into ticking.

  “Egads!” Baldwin said. “That was transcendent! My eardrums are properly cuckooed!”

  A door at the back of the shop thwacked open, and out bustled a roly-poly fellow with yellow whiskers and a nose as red and round as a cherry lollipop. “Is that Baldwin Merrymoon I hear?”

  “Franz!” Baldwin cried. “Oh, Franz, you’re a sight for sore eyes! No offense to the rest of you,” he added quickly.

  “None taken,” Penny assured him.

  “Children, this is the great Franz Winkler,” Baldwin said, reaching across the counter to tweak one side of Franz’s bow tie. “You’ll never find a finer clock than a Winkler cuckoo. His family practically has a monopoly on the cuckoo market!”

  Franz beamed. “My father and grandfather were two of the original Black Forest cuckoosmiths. Ah! You should have seen our village then! The houses of Winterwalzen were so crammed with cuckoo clocks, we had to start hanging them from trees! There were more wooden birds in that forest than real ones.”

  “It sounds like heaven,” Baldwin breathed.

  “It was.” The cheer faded from Franz’s round face. “Alas, we had to flee Germany after the Red Riding Hood scandal.”

  “You mean Little Red Riding Hood?” Ollie exclaimed. “Like the fairy tale?”

  “Indeed,” Franz said. “But those Grimm bumblers got the story wrong. Little Red was no cute moppet delivering sweetmeats to her sick oma. She was a teenage hoodlum and a common burglar, to boot!”

  Ollie gasped, and Franz nodded gloomily.

  “Heidi Honigbär was her real name,” Franz said. “The Honigbärs were competing cuckoosmiths. They were after our trade secrets, you see. And Heidi broke into our home in the hopes of sneaking a peek into our workshop. But she instead wandered into one of our bedrooms, where Granny Winkler was taking a nap. After one look at Granny, that meddlesome snoop started shrieking her fool head off.”

  “Why?” Anastasia asked.

  “Because Granny liked to snooze in wolf form.” Franz heaved a deep sigh. “Perhaps we could have convinced the Winterwalzers that a wild wolf got into our house, except Granny fell asleep with her spectacles on. And her nightcap. And she talked in her sleep.”

  “Crumbs!” Anastasia said.

  “Croombs, indeed,” Franz agreed. “After Heidi Honigbär went screaming into town with stories of witchcraft and werewolves, we Winklers had to flee Winterwalzen at once.”

  “How terrible,” Penny murmured.

  “It was.” Franz removed his spectacles and wiped at his eyes. “Anyway, over time, the story somehow got twisted into the Red Riding Hood hooey you’ve heard. Ach.” He shook his head. “Now, what can I do for you? Are you in the market for a new cuckoo, Baldy, or is this just a friendly visit?”

  “Both,” Baldwin declared. “Always both. Do I see a new specimen over there—?”

  As Baldwin darted to examine a model in the corner, Gus leaned across the counter. “Why does that clock have rocks hanging from it?”

  “Ah!” Franz said. “This is the modern cuckoo’s ancestor, so to speak.” He lifted the timepiece from its hook and swiveled it to display the exposed wooden cogs. A chain snaked through the gadgetry to hang down about twenty inches on either side, like skinny brass braids on a clockwork head, and attached to each end of this chain was a rock. One of the rocks was bigger than an orange, and the other was the size of a hen’s egg.

  “This is how you wind it.” Franz jerked the smaller stone, pulling the chain through the mechanism. Gzzzzt! Now the big rock dangled only a few inches from the gizmo’s base, and the little rock hung down perhaps three feet.

  “Over the course of the day, the big rock falls,” Franz said, replacing the clock on the wall. “But it falls very, very slowly. It pulls the chain through the clockwork, driving the movement for twelve hours until it falls to the end of its length. Then you have to wind it again.” He smiled. “New cuckoos operate on the same principle. That’s why they all have weights.” He tapped the metal pinecone of one of the fancier ticktockers.

  “Ingenious!” Penny enthused.

  “You think that’s ingenious? Look at this!” Baldwin crowed, dancing a jig before a timepiece in the corner. “This clockwork man drinks beer every hour, on the hour! Oh, Franz, I must have it!”

  “Speaking of beer, Baldy, we’ll have to pop into the pub soon.” Franz winked. “It’s been far too long since we’ve shared a pint. In the meantime, I’ll wrap up this clock and have it delivered down to the palace.”

  “Goodbye, Franz,” Penny said. “It was lovely to see you.”

  “Farewell!” Franz cried. “Farewell! Down with Little Red Riding Hood!”

  “Down with Little Red Riding Hood!” Baldwin whooped, pushing the door open for Penny and the Dreadfuls and ushering them out into the snow and twilight.

  “Is that story about Franz’s wolf-granny really true?” Ollie asked. “Was Little Red Riding Hood a spy?”

  “You better believe it,” Baldwin said. “Ah, children! You wouldn’t believe the sordid truth behind most fairy-tales-as-you-know-’em. But enough about scurvy little red-riding-hooded snoops. Night is nigh and the moon doth rise and the sledding hour is upon us.”

  THE SUN SETS quickity-quick in winter, and it slinks out of sight especially fast in places surrounded by tall mountains. The sky shook off its lavender dusk and its mantle of clouds to reveal night, ink-black and star-freckled. From halfway up Mount Dinkle’s hip, the lights of Dinkledorf looked like a smattering of fallen stars. The Dreadfuls pressed against the funicular window, watching as the miniature galaxy receded into the distance.

  A funicular is a bit like a funny little train. Funiculars travel up sheer mountainsides, so imagine a cable car with a base slanted to fit snugly against a track as steep as a steep staircase. The benches inside are graded to fit this crooked floor, much like the bleachers at a sports stadium, or the seats at a top-notch movie theater. The Dinkledorf funicular moved slowly indeed, creaking and groaning as it went.

  “This funicular dates from 1860,” Penny said. “Then, as now, it was primarily used to carry cheese.”

  “Cheese?” Anastasia echoed.

  “It’s dicey getting in and out of Dinkledorf in the winter,” Baldwin explained. “The roads are too snowy—cars nowadays can’t even manage it. Imagine how rough it would be for a horse-drawn carriage!”

  “Too rough,” Penny agreed. “And much of Dinkledorf’s income comes from cheese, you know. The cheesemongers needed a way to get cheese up the mountainside even in the snowiest months of the year. They used to have dogsleds carry out cheese, but the invention of the funicular made things much easier for everyone.”

  “Especially for the dogs,” Baldwin said.

  “I think I might throw up,” Gus reported, swooning against the window.

  “Oh dear,” Penny said. “All those pastries made you sick, I’m afraid.”

  “Non
sense!” Baldwin said. “Pastry never made anyone sick. The lad has a touch of vertigo, that’s all. Close your eyes and you’ll be sound as a pound in no time.”

  Ollie edged as far away from Gus as was possible in the cramped cable car. “Vomiting in a funicular seems precarious,” he said. “Do these windows open?”

  “Ollie,” Gus muttered, “you aren’t helping.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Baldwin reassured him, but he scooted over, too, and everyone disembarked in a jiffy when the funicular finally clattered to the top of its track.

  The moon was round and white as a scoop of celestial vanilla ice cream, and just as delicious, too. How, you might ask, could the moon be delicious? You and I, human Reader, cannot taste the moon. We might gaze upon it and think it beautiful. We might acknowledge that the moon commands the earth’s oceans. We might even use it to navigate at night. But we cannot taste it, or smell it. Morfolk, on the other hand, can.

  Anastasia, you will remember, had been deep in the Cavelands for several months, untouched by moonbeam since before her eleventh birthday. Age eleven is very special for Morflings, because the eleventh birthday is like an alarm clock waking up the wonders and powers sleeping in a Morfo’s blood.

  Beneath the moon now for the first time since turning eleven, Anastasia felt the moon as surely as you would feel velvet on your skin. She smelled it: a smell of cinnamon and vanilla and honey and fresh, fresh milk; the loveliest, freshest milk you can imagine. And she tasted it, not with her tongue but with her bones. Her bones guzzled the moonlight and converted it into pure effervescence. She laughed! She jumped! She spun and she spun and she spun beneath the sublime, splendiferous, spellbinding moon.

  “That’s the spirit!” Baldwin cried. He rounded his mouth and let out a howling yodel that echoed and shivered across the valley below. “AWOOOO! AWOOOO! AWOOOOOOOO!”

  “Baldy,” Penny said, “mind your howling, dear. You don’t want to start another werewolf rumor down in Dinkledorf.”