The Twistrose Key

by Tone Almhjell

  They stopped. Lin thought they must be close to something massive, because she felt it brooding over her, at once sound-stealing and full of faint echoes. A door creaked open. Figenskar dragged her off the sled and across two thresholds before he dropped the sack to the floor with a snicker. “Success.”

  Lin could tell from the silkiness of that one word that there was someone in the room with them.

  “Success? The boss has found the Winterfyrst?” The stranger had a brassy, blaring voice.

  “No. But I have caught the Twistrose instead, and I think she will do quite nicely. Cold child, warm child, the difference is not great. Did you perform your little task?”

  “Little task,” the blaring voice said. “Yes. It’s cracked now. Dead and destroyed.”

  “Excellent,” Figenskar said. “I shall finish the last one myself later tonight. Teriko, my good lieutenant. You may ready the casks and burn the evidence. Operation Corvelie is back on track.”

  “Back on track!” said the one named Teriko. “You’re a genius, boss!”

  “The Sylverings will never know what hit them,” Figenskar said smugly. “And as for this little bareskin . . .” He nudged Lin with the toe of his boot. “. . . she can ripen while we finish our preparations. Put her in the cage.”

  “The cage? Right you are, boss. She’ll sit pretty there,” the stranger cackled.

  “Remember, little Rosenquist,” the cat purred in Lin’s ear, “you’re caught, like a worm on a fishhook, and you can spare yourself any wiggling, hmmm? This is the Observatory. You’re in my house now.”

  • • •

  Lin was hauled off again, this time in violent jerks, down a long flight of stairs, and along a pebbly tunnel. By the time they stopped again, she hurt all over. She heard a jangle of keys, followed by a rasping click that echoed off the walls.

  The sack opened, and as Lin struggled free of the burlap, metal banged against metal. She sat up, blinking.

  She was trapped inside a cage inside a cave. Smoking torches lit the bottom, which was soiled like a neglected barn floor and reeked even worse. Tree-trunk perches covered in dirt and old feathers crisscrossed the cage, and in the middle hung a fat, rusty chain that ended about twenty feet above the ground. Fastened to the chain with a thick rope was the only clean object in the entire cave: a large, gleaming mirror.

  Right in front of Lin there was a door of metal bars, and from outside it, a perfectly round eye stared at her. It sat next to a flat, strong beak that curved viciously at the end, surrounded by shiny feathers in deep blue, green, and yellow. Figenskar’s lieutenant was a parrot.

  “What a lucky little girl!” the parrot cawed. “Not everyone gets to borrow Teriko’s home sweet home.” He poked a claw through the bars. Lin scrambled away.

  “Now, now, bareskin. Teriko will unstuff her mouth. Or does she like the taste of rag?”

  Scalp prickling, Lin allowed the bird to pick the rag out of her mouth. She lifted her bound hands to her jaw, coughing and spitting. The parrot turned his back and hopped toward the craggy archway that led out of the cave.

  “Wait!” Lin said hoarsely. “Don’t leave me here! I have to finish my task!”

  Teriko turned one unblinking eye toward her and gaped wide and high. “Task! Stupid little task!”

  “But it’s important! I’m a Twistrose! Rufus knows, ask him! Or ask Teodor!”

  “Teodor,” the bird spat. And with that he left, hop, scrape, hop, scrape, sweeping gravel with his tail feathers.

  Lin kicked on the cage bars and yelled after him, “Sylver is in danger. You have to let me out!” But the only answer she got was the slamming of a heavy door in the distance.

  Her legs buckled. She couldn’t bear lying down on the muck-encrusted floor. Instead she sank down on her haunches and hid her face in her throbbing hands.

  Rufus would never find her, not in this wretched dungeon. Nobody knew where she was, except for a malicious Feline and a gloating parrot. Nobody knew where Isvan was, either. There would be no statue in her name. She would never see Summerhill or her parents again. Instead she would see the Margrave, who had taken his name from a star, and who scared even Figenskar.

  “I’m sorry,” Lin whispered, and she was. She was sorry she had left without telling Rufus. She was sorry she had been so cross about moving to Oldtown. But most of all, she was so very sorry that she hadn’t stayed to taste her mother’s rice pudding.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Two troubled voices found their way down the slanting corridor toward the parrot cave, accompanied by rapid footsteps.

  “Really, Mirja, I hope you realize how improbable this sounds!”

  “But it’s true! I was waiting in line on the Memory balcony, and Memory is next to Comfort, right?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “That’s where I saw her, the Comfort mirror. A human girl with messy hair and a shabby cardigan.”

  “Messy hair and cardigans are not uncommon on human children.”

  “But, Marvin, she was sitting at the bottom of a giant, filthy cage exactly like Teriko’s, right here beneath the Observatory.”

  “The Observatory cage doesn’t belong to Teriko,” Marvin huffed. “A true Starfalcon was found trapped inside it once. He was long dead, nothing but feathers and bones, but his cage is still a site of magic. Only the chief observer is allowed down here.”

  “That may be,” Mirja said. “But it’s Teriko’s now, full of Teriko’s muck and Teriko’s trinkets. I delivered the glass for his mirror, so I’ve seen it.”

  “Oh,” Marvin said, sounding uncertain.

  “Naturally, the sight of a girl in that cage appalled me. I got up to get a better view. And when I leaned out over the balcony railing, I saw her in not one, not two, but four of the magical mirrors! She was crouched on the ground, the wretched thing. Suddenly her eyes bulged in surprise, or in pain. And that’s when the mirrors all went blank.”

  Marvin cleared his throat. “That was unusual, I agree, but the mirrors rekindled instantly. It was probably a natural fluctuation of magic. We were told to expect them on Wanderer’s Eve.”

  “Rubbish. Even I know what it means when a human child appears in several mirrors at once.”

  “It means she is in dire need,” Marvin said breathlessly.

  “Exactly.”

  They walked in silence for a moment before Marvin said, “Even so, it must have been a different cage. There are no human girls in Sylver.”

  “There is one tonight! I saw a hooded stranger at the Waffleheart a little while ago, wearing a cardigan. She didn’t smell like a Petling. She smelled like a child. I’m telling you, a Twistrose has come.”

  “But what would she be doing down here?”

  “I know what I saw.”

  Someone stumbled on a loose rock, and Marvin complained, “I do wish you had made a note of the girl’s name.”

  “I think it began with an L. Laura? Liesl? But I didn’t catch her last name.”

  “Oh dear. I just hope Mr. Figenskar doesn’t find out we took his keys to get down here. He gets so frightfully angry. . . .”

  Two persons appeared in the cave opening. One was a guinea pig with horn-rimmed spectacles, a red woolen vest, and generous bangs slicked down with pomade. The other was the pretty Feline from the Waffleheart. Both stopped in their tracks when they spied the cage.

  “She is gone!” Mirja said. “She was sitting right there. . . .”

  “This is not good,” Marvin squeaked, searching through a crowded key ring. “Not good at all.”

  The rasping click sounded, and Marvin took a few steps into the cage. With trembling hands he picked something up from the ground, lifted it up against the torch light, and straightened his glasses. “But this is . . . Oh, dear me!”

  He dropped the object and rushed out of the cave. His littl
e feet pounded up the long corridor like drumsticks. Mirja whirled about and ran after him.

  Broken glass littered the cage floor. The largest shard, the one Marvin had picked up, dripped with fresh, red blood.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The door at the top of the stairs slammed. Lin let out a long, shivering breath. She had intended to reveal herself to the two Petlings and beg them to save her from Figenskar. But when they walked into the cave, she just couldn’t. In her head she kept hearing Figenskar’s gloating hiss: “You’re in my house now.” Marvin worked for him. What if he delivered her straight back into his claws?

  So she had kept her silence as she dangled high above them, clinging to the chain that carried Teriko’s mirror. Or what was left of Teriko’s mirror, a clunky metal frame and a few bits of glass around the edges.

  While she was crouched on the floor, Lin had heard a clear ringing noise, like a gong struck in the distance. She had raised her head and noticed something in the slime on the cage bottom: a rock covered in parrot turd. Almost without considering, she had picked it up, weighed it for measure, and hurled it at the mirror.

  On her first attempt, the mirror cracked. On her third attempt, the glass had shattered into hundreds of pieces that rained down on the floor. She had cut the rope on her hands with the biggest shard. But when Mirja’s and Marvin’s voices sounded in the tunnel, she had started so badly she cut her wrist, too. She still had no idea how she had managed to climb from perch to perch and onto the mirror with hands that were slippery with blood.

  Lin eyed the nearest tree-trunk perch, which was slick with excrement. She wasn’t at all convinced she could jump that far again, and it was a twenty-foot drop to the floor. But if she wanted to get out of the cage, she had no choice but to risk it.

  The very instant she made her decision, there was another boom from the door.

  “But Mr. Figenskar! I assure you, she was gone when we got there!”

  There was no way she could get down in time to get out through the cage door. There was no way she could escape at all. Unless . . . Lin looked above her. The red glow from the torches didn’t reach the top of the cage. The dark might be deep enough to hide her up there.

  Using her legs to push and her one good arm to hold on, she began to climb. The voices approached quickly, Marvin’s simpering and worried, Figenskar’s deep and furious, and just when she thought she had better stop climbing, Lin bumped her head into something hard. She had reached the end of the chain.

  Far below, Figenskar stepped into the circle of light with a flashlight in his paw, and Marvin trailing behind. Shoulders hunched, the chief observer walked around the mirror shards, setting them alight with the white beam. His boots made sucking noises in the muck.

  “Who broke the mirror?” he said, so softly that Lin almost didn’t catch his words. “Was it you, Rodent?”

  “What? No! It was already smashed when we arrived!”

  Figenskar whirled about and sent the flashlight beam straight into Marvin’s face.

  “You expect me to believe that? After you left your post, after you came down here even when I expressly forbade you to?”

  “It’s true!” Marvin squeaked, cowering against the bars. “I swear it!”

  Figenskar glared at him for a long, cruel moment before he turned his attention back to the glass. He picked up the bloody shard and ran a claw along the edge. “She can’t be far away. How fortunate that you encountered Teriko in the corridor, hmmm? She won’t have gotten past him.”

  Figenskar sniffed the cave floor outside the open door. “I don’t see her marks anywhere. Rodent! Search the tunnel for footprints!”

  “It’s too dark, Mr. Figenskar. My night vision isn’t what it used to be.”

  “Then take one of the torches, for winter’s sake!”

  Lin dropped her jaw. The torches! There were at least twenty of them along the wall, and they all gave off black smoke. The air in the cave ought to be thick with it, but it wasn’t. That could only mean that the smoke was escaping somewhere. Maybe there was another way out after all.

  She squinted at the craggy rocks in the ceiling. The end of the chain was fastened to a hook. To its left, there was a ridge, big enough to hide a crack. She leaned out.

  One point to Miss Rosenquist!

  It wasn’t a crack; it was a tunnel opening. Even better: Inside the tunnel, she could just make out what appeared to be the bottom rung of a ladder.

  Lin reached out as far as she possibly could. Her fingers locked around the metal bar. She could do it. She had climbed the highest branches of the morello tree outside her window on Summerhill a hundred times, she could do this. Before she had time to reconsider, she let go of the chain and flung herself at the ladder.

  It was a terrible mistake.

  Her injured hand couldn’t carry her weight. It slipped, and just like that, she was dangling lopsided from the ceiling, ten yards above the ground. Her sudden jump set the chain to quivering, and the mirror frame danced back and forth above Figenskar’s head with tiny movements.

  The chief observer was bent over picking shards up from the floor. His ears turned backward as if to pin down some irksome noise. His tail flicked. Lin winced and waited for the “hmmm.”

  But it didn’t come. Instead he called Marvin back into the cave. “Alert the clerks! Tell them her name is Rosenquist. Lin Rosenquist. You know what to do.”

  “Yes, Mr. Figenskar.” Marvin pushed his glasses back, looking very relieved to be dismissed.

  “Wait! First hand me my keys. I don’t want any more meddling.”

  “Yes, Mr. Figenskar.”

  Marvin approached his boss warily, holding out the keys. But before Figenskar could seize them, the guinea pig pulled back his hand and touched his neck, as if something itched there. Slowly, he turned his broad face upward, staring straight toward Lin. She expected him to cry out in alarm, but instead he jumped as something dark spattered onto his glasses.

  Blood from the cut on her wrist.

  Figenskar hissed, veering about with his flashlight. The beam rose along the cave wall like a hungry spotlight.

  Suddenly Lin found the strength she needed after all. Ignoring the pain, she hoisted her weight up so she could reach the next rung on the ladder. And the next, and the next.

  Just as the flashlight beam swept by, she pulled her legs up into the tunnel. Clinging to the ladder, she hugged her injured arm to her chest.

  She had no way of knowing if Figenskar had seen her or not. But deep below there was a terrible snarl.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At first it hadn’t occurred to Lin to count the rungs. But the tunnel was so dark it felt like climbing into nothing. Counting made it seem like she was going somewhere. She reached for the next metal bar and pushed with her legs.

  Thirty.

  The injured arm blazed with pain. Cold, smoky air blew up the narrow shaft, chilling Lin’s stiff and trembling legs. She rested her head against the rock. Beneath, a red circle marked the opening to the parrot cave. It had grown quiet down there. Maybe Figenskar hadn’t figured out where she had gone. Or maybe he knew where the tunnel ended and sat there waiting, like the Summerhill cat by his favorite mouse hole. Well, if he did, he did. There was nothing Lin could do but keep climbing.

  At forty-three, the ladder ended and the tunnel split in two. One fork continued upward with the draft. The other slanted to the side, ending in a pink glow. Lin crept into the side tunnel and lay down for a moment, to stretch her sore limbs and examine the cut on her wrist.

  There was a piece of glass wedged in the wound. No wonder it was painful! Lin picked the shard out and tossed it on the tunnel floor. The cut began to bleed again, but it hurt less. Encouraged, she crawled toward the end of the tunnel.

  The opening was covered by a heavy fabric. It yielded slightly to Lin’s touch, letting in a
glimpse of light and the crackle of a lit fireplace. She waited, listened. Nothing but the sputter and hiss of the fire.

  Lin pulled her hood back up, lowered herself to the floor, and inched along the wall to peer around the edge of the curtain.

  No pouncing Feline in sight. Just a large office of whitewashed plaster with a fireplace, a small chest, a desk with an ancient gramophone, and two doors. Golden lamplight fell on a sign next to the gramophone: CHIEF OBSERVER FIGENSKAR. The curtain turned out to be a tapestry of a white bird soaring in a sky of faded ruby, rose, and scarlet. If she didn’t know, Lin would never have guessed it concealed a tunnel opening.

  She crossed the room and put her ear to the first door. Muffled, urgent voices in the distance. Behind the second door, there was only silence, and the wood felt cold against her skin. In a puddle of water by the threshold lay a frayed burlap thread. This must be where she had been brought in, which meant it was the way out.

  With her hand on the doorknob, Lin paused. Figenskar had been searching for Isvan. He needed him for some sort of secret operation, something to do with the Margrave, something he said would hit the Sylverings. And here she was, alone in Figenskar’s office. What kind of Twistrose would waste an opportunity like this? Legs jittering, she turned around, away from the exit.

  She found the drawers of the desk empty. Not so much as a scrap of paper in them. But the pile of ashes in the fireplace seemed conspicuously big. Burn the evidence, Figenskar had told Teriko. Whatever they were planning, it would happen soon.

  Lin found a poker and raked through the embers.

  Teriko may have been obedient, but he had also been sloppy. At the bottom of the ashes an object had survived the flames: a small, slim leather cylinder engraved with a bird of prey. The metal top was too hot to touch, so Lin set the cylinder on the edge of the hearth to cool off.