The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle

by Janet Fox

  Kat reached her right hand for Peter and was struck full in the moonlight, and he gasped. Her hand was not a real hand but a clockwork, like the witch, made of gears and springs and cogs. It was, like the witch, perfection. Hideous and perfect.

  Peter stepped backward, horror etched on his face. “You! You’re like her!”

  “I’m not like her! I’m not . . .” Kat’s words faltered even as she realized how beautiful it was, how powerful, this mechanical hand.

  The Lady was laughing. “Yes! She has already betrayed you, boy, and her brother and sister.”

  The sword hung from Peter’s hand, and he stared at Kat with a combination of sorrow and horror.

  And the Lady, with astonishing swiftness, lunged.

  Peter yelled and raised the sword. Kat backed away until her heel caught on the step and sent her down on her bottom. From the floor, she watched, helpless, as the Lady caught Peter’s sword, just as she had Robbie’s, wrenched it from his hands, and sent it flying across the hall. Kat fast crab-walked across the floor after it, to have some kind of weapon, scuttling to the far side of the hall while Peter and the Lady struggled.

  Peter was strong and tall, but the Lady was stronger, with her metal arms and spiky claw-hands. He cried out in pain as she twisted his arms back, and Kat grabbed the sword by the hilt and stood to face them.

  The Lady had both of Peter’s wrists in one clenched claw, and she was forcing him down on his knees before her. With her other hand Kat saw her pull a thin chain from her chatelaine, a chain with a charm that dangled, a charm Kat could see in the full moonlight.

  An anchor.

  She would anchor Peter’s soul.

  “No!” Kat shouted, and raced back as the Lady lifted the chain with a grim smile and began to utter terrible words, words that seemed to rise from the very bowels of the earth and envelop them all, dark magic that suffocated and smothered the very light of the moon.

  A prison cold, a witch’s mark . . .

  As the chain slipped over Peter’s head, he looked from the witch to Kat and said, his voice coarse and breaking, “Pain. Cut . . .”

  And then it was done. Kat watched his eyes grow wide and then dull, blank and staring, and she swallowed a sob.

  The Lady dropped him and he crumpled to the floor. She turned to Kat.

  It seemed that with Peter’s charming she’d grown another foot taller at least. She had taken on a deep blue glow, and now she no longer needed moonlight to reveal her true form, but was exposed as a monster.

  “And now for my last charm,” she said, her words like oil oozing from between her spiked teeth. “You see, I need your soul.”

  Kat’s left hand gripped Peter’s sword, and her terrible right hand gripped the only thing she now believed in: Great-Aunt Margaret’s chatelaine.

  56

  The Eleventh Charm: The Anchor

  IT IS SO EASY. Almost too easy.

  The boy Peter, tall though he is, and strong—the Lady can feel the strength in him—couldn’t fight her. Couldn’t resist the spell. Oh, she has grown magnificent. She is mightier than even the magister now, despite the weight of the chatelaine against her hip. Soon she will be stronger than all the human frailties she despises.

  She merely has to place the final charm. Pathetic, foolish girl, Katherine. The heart charm is for her.

  The heart. Eleanor pauses.

  Hearts are about love, are they not? Hearts could be full and could be broken, hearts could be given and could be taken, could be found and could be lost. But the Lady Eleanor now has a heart that can be none of these. Her perfect, rhythmic, metallic heart beats without a waver, without a skip. It will beat forever.

  Eleanor once craved love. But her first lord took another wife, a girl so like Katherine in looks that Eleanor shudders.

  When she gives the heart charm to Katherine, will it signify anything?

  Memories: an eel slips through the child Leonore’s fingers, shiny and cold. A man shakes her father’s hand and contracts a marriage and rides away on a great stallion. A hope for a child vanishes in the cold Scottish mist. A wedding, not her own, is celebrated as her old heart cracks and shatters.

  As the Lady Eleanor makes for the girl, to cast her final spell, to charm Katherine, she hesitates, as if . . . as if the Lady sees something else in the girl, some glow, something that is heartfelt, something about a loving family, some magic perhaps greater than her own, and it has to do with heart and love and memory, and with all that the Lady has lost.

  Will the gift of the heart from Eleanor to Katherine be a gift of love? Eleanor hesitates, just for an instant.

  Then all thoughts of hesitation vanish. The Lady Eleanor, witch of Rookskill Castle, moves with swift and eager desire toward what she believes is the fulfillment of her dreams.

  57

  The Twelfth Charm: The Heart

  KAT WAS LOST. She had a sword, and she had her chatelaine, but she feared she had already lost her soul. She was already part monster.

  Then Father’s voice as he left that day, as he picked up his suitcase, came to her, so clear: “Keep calm, Kitty. Carry on. And remember, no matter what happens, keep faith.” And Great-Aunt Margaret’s voice, like an echo: “In times like these we require other, equally important qualities. Like imagination. And faith. And hope.”

  Kat raised Peter’s sword and braced. She was done for, but she still had to fight back.

  She saw nothing in the Lady but her determination to take Kat’s soul.

  Yet the Lady had raised Kat’s charm—and Kat saw that it was the heart—as she came, and only feet away from Kat, she paused. It was an instant, a flicker of a movement, but the monstrous hand that was stretched toward Kat holding the heart charm dropped just a hair, and the Lady hesitated.

  In that momentary hesitation, Kat saw the Lady and the Lady’s heart now as a perfect clockwork: how the gears meshed, how the wheels joined, how the cogs were placed. All her time spent with her father as he worked on clocks cleared her mind to see the Lady as a mechanical thing.

  And something else. The heart. If Kat had nothing else left at all, she still had her own real heart, full of love for her family. The Lady was offering her a heart, as if it was meant out of love. The offering made Kat sad; and then it made her brave.

  The Lady came on again with nothing but hatred in her one real eye.

  The Lady’s own momentum drove her onto the sword blade, and for a fraction of a second Kat hoped that it had stopped her, but no. The sword went right through some moving assemblage of gears and the Lady laughed. Kat let go of the hilt and stepped back, and the Lady took hold of the sword, slid it from her body, and dropped it to the floor.

  Kat had nothing left. Nothing except her own chatelaine, which she held in her own monstrous right hand.

  The glittering reflection of the chatelaine as Kat lifted it made the Lady pause. Hesitate again. She pointed. “What is that?”

  “It’s my chatelaine,” Kat said. “A gift to me.”

  Kat withdrew the pen from its holder; she thought of her father making a gift of the pen to Great-Aunt Margaret, and maybe, she thought, just maybe that meant it was from Father to Kat. Her left hand, gripping the pen, shook so badly, she feared she might drop it as she pointed it at the Lady.

  “Is that . . . a pen? A pen?” The Lady laughed, a long and horrible laugh, throwing her head back as her laughter echoed around and around the castle, reverberating off of bare stone. “I thought you had real magic. And all you have is a pen!”

  “Yes, my Lady. This is a pen.” Kat shifted the pen into her steady and unnaturally strong right hand and held her arm out straight and pointed the pen directly at the Lady’s heart. Yes, the Lady’s heart had a weakness, for though it was beautifully made, it was only clockwork after all, and Kat focused on that spot where the gears nicked together, forcing herself to be sti
ll and firm and keep her eyes fixed, and her own mechanical right hand tightened around the pen in a grip like steel.

  Then Kat said the only thing she could think of, as loudly as she could, her voice ringing around the echoing space of the hall: “And the pen is mightier than the sword.”

  The air seemed to shimmer just a bit, and the pen took on a strong blue glow, and Kat thought, Oh! But she held her arm out straight and true, her terrible hand firm, and she pointed the pen directly at the weak place in the Lady’s steel and silver and copper heart.

  The Lady snarled, and Kat almost shut her eyes against the sight of the wheels and gears, but she held the pen tight, and when the Lady came at her again Kat drove the pen into the Lady’s chest.

  Where it wedged between two of the gears in that steady beating heart, which ground instantly to a halt.

  The Lady froze, the pen shuddering ever so slightly in Kat’s hand as the gears meshed, locking the pen between two copper teeth.

  58

  The Pen

  THE LADY IS frozen. Stuck. That dreadful Katherine has driven something straight into her perfect heart. She can feel the gears trying to expel it, small, ridiculously tiny, but powerful, something with a profound magic even greater than her own.

  A pen. A pen! And a spell, an incantation. How could the girl have known a spell?

  The Lady hates being helpless. When she does manage to get out of this precarious situation, and she knows she will, the Lady will spare nothing, show her no mercy.

  Clever Katherine. Far too clever for her own good, and using magic to boot.

  The Lady concentrates all her mental effort on ridding her perfect body of this tiny pen throbbing against her perfect heart, this miserable nuisance, this ridiculously tiny pen.

  59

  The Scissors, and the First Unmaking: Anchor

  KAT STEPPED AWAY, her eyes on the quivering pen.

  The Lady was a statue, although her one real eye followed Kat, carrying a raging fury. She was alive, but trapped, unable to speak. The pen, wedged between the teeth of two gears in the Lady’s heart, still glowed, though now it was an almost white-hot gold. As long as the pen held the gears, kept them from working, Kat believed the Lady would remain trapped.

  I’ve cast a spell. The pen, mightier than the sword, her knowledge of clocks, and her spell, all had saved her.

  All gifts from her father, who might be lost to her forever.

  Kat shook herself. Time was not on her side. If the pen was to fall out . . . or the spell to wear off . . .

  She ran to Peter. His eyes were blank and staring, although he could move, and he pushed away from her, as if she was the menace. He’d lost a part of his mind as well as his soul, which would explain the fearful behavior of the other charmed children.

  “Peter,” Kat said, keeping her voice low and calm. He’d been trying to tell her something, before he’d been charmed. Cut . . . That’s what she’d heard. “Cut what? Cut the chatelaine?” Kat looked back at the Lady, whose chatelaine still hung from her belt, just as the heart charm still dangled from her outstretched hand. Kat didn’t want to get any closer to the Lady; she could see the gears straining at the pen as it quivered.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Kat said, turning back to Peter.

  He began to tremble violently. One of his hands clutched at the chain that held the anchor charm.

  “Wait. Cut the chain?”

  Cut the chain.

  She took the scissors from her great-aunt’s chatelaine. The chain Peter wore around his neck seemed made of silver, or maybe steel; these scissors were thin and fine. Kat didn’t see how they could cut a chain, but she remembered her great-aunt’s words: “These scissors will cut . . . anything.” Kat reached for the chain.

  Peter pulled away, his eyes wide with terror, but she put one hand on his chest and said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I just have to try . . .”

  As she took the chain in her right hand, shock zipped all through her, and she jerked away from Peter as fast as he jerked away from her. Her mechanical right hand buzzed and whirred with the shock.

  “Well, that was a bad idea,” Kat said, shaking her hand. Somehow she now knew that if she took the charm from Peter by force, he would come undone. “So.” Although she wasn’t sure he understood a thing, Kat said out loud, “This has to be done carefully. I can’t touch the chain. But . . .” An idea blossomed. “Hang on. I’ve got a way to experiment.”

  She went back to the Lady. Her outstretched frozen arm still held the heart charm—Kat’s heart charm. Kat could tell that the Lady, her one eye dilated and unblinking, knew what she was about to do. Kat held the scissors against the dangling chain, took a breath, and cut.

  Nothing. The scissors couldn’t close around the hard metal.

  Kat stepped back, her eyes brimming with tears. She met the Lady’s horrible eye. The Lady stared back with venom, an oily spittle trickling from her gaping mouth.

  A spell. Of course! Kat had to find the right spell, like she had with the pen.

  The scissors . . . Her great-aunt had quoted something from Dickens that didn’t seem at all right. Great-Aunt Margaret had said Kat had to find the right words on her own.

  So she tried, calling out loud and strong, “Measure twice, cut once.”

  But, no. The scissors wouldn’t cut.

  Then her mind leapt to what her father had said when they’d been working together and she’d swept his watch to the floor. Her father’s sad eyes watching her, her misery at having been a silly scatterbrain, and her father’s words—she remembered.

  She took a deep breath, held out the scissors, and filled the empty, ringing hall with, “Cut to the chase, or all is waste.”

  The chain, as she cut it this time, didn’t fall away; it dissolved. It vanished into smoke, leaving the heart charm to drop into Kat’s outstretched palm.

  The instant after, the Lady’s metal right hand broke off and fell clattering to the ground. A smell of burnt flesh filled Kat’s nostrils, and a sound like a pained howl rose up from the Lady’s chest.

  “That’s it then,” Kat said as she closed her fingers around the charm. “That’s how it can be done.” The charm was warm in her palm, and the scissors, like the pen, glowed gold. “I think you won’t like it when I cut these chains,” she said to the Lady’s fierce eye. “I think it’s not going to do you any good at all. In fact, I rather think you’ll be falling to pieces.”

  Kat returned to Peter now, whose eyes grew wide and fearful again.

  “Look,” Kat said, showing him her heart charm. “Just look at this for a moment.” As his eyes fixed on the heart, Kat slid the scissors under the chain around his neck and, repeating the spell, snipped the chain in half.

  The anchor fell away, and he caught it. Kat heard another clattering and howl from behind as the Lady lost yet another broken part.

  “Where is she?” Peter said, his voice a hoarse croak.

  “It worked!” Kat threw her arms around him, and just as fast, pulled away again. Peter’s face turned crimson. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I felt so alone . . .”

  He backed away from her. “You . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t tell you about how she wanted me to betray you, or about my hand. I’m sorry.” There was nothing more to say. He thought she’d betrayed him, and maybe in one sense, she had. She waited.

  “You freed me,” he said.

  She nodded and swallowed hard against the lump in her throat.

  “And the witch?”

  “It turns out the pen is mightier than the sword,” she said, and pointed.

  The Lady stood frozen, the pen quivering like an arrow point as the gears worked against it, trying to spit it out.

  “I don’t know how much time we have before it breaks or she forces it out,” Kat said. “And
we have to find the others, the other children, before she gets free.”

  “Then let’s go,” he said. He tried to rise, but fell back. “I’m a little wobbly around the knees,” he said sheepishly.

  Kat helped Peter to his feet. She said, “You were right. You were right about cutting the chain.”

  “There’s still the thimble,” he said. “I have no ideas about that.”

  A rough squeal came from the Lady, like an engine trying to start. A gear clicked and whined.

  Kat said, “We’d better hurry before she’s loose again.”

  Peter held out his anchor, still in his palm. “What about this? I don’t like touching it, truth be told. It feels . . . hot.”

  Kat had already put her own charm in her pocket. “I can take it if you like.”

  He smiled and nodded, and Kat put his anchor charm in with her heart.

  They ran down the hall toward the kitchen. It was still black as pitch, and there was no sign of Cook.

  “What do you think is happening to the witch,” asked Peter, catching his breath, “as you cut off the charms?”

  “She seemed to lose a part for each of our two charms. Maybe the charms and her mechanical parts are all tied up together.”

  As if on cue, a grating noise rose from the front hall.

  “Where to?” he asked. “We’d better hurry.”

  “Maybe try to find Hugo?” Kat suggested. “He’ll be either in the garage or the barn.”

  Peter pushed through the back door into the moonlit courtyard, Kat right on his heels. The clouds had dissolved, and it was almost as bright as day; the moonlight reflected off the puddles and wet cobbles, adding to the glow. Kat pulled the sleeve of her jersey over her right hand, not wanting to see it exposed. The castle loomed at their backs, windows dark, like gargantuan eyes. Their feet smacked against the paving as they ran, footfalls echoing off of stone and glass.

  In the deeper shadows near the door to the barn, something moved, and both Peter and Kat skidded to a stop.