“No. That.” She gestured at the hook. He stared down at where it dangled from his tongs. Surely she didn’t mean that she wanted to learn how to make hooks. Hooks were boring. “I want to smith something.” Her voice was smaller and less imperious as she added, “I want to mend something.”
“Oh,” he said, words failing him. He’d never been allowed to call himself even an apprentice blacksmith, but he was well aware of the importance of keeping his grandfather’s craft secrets. But Perrotte didn’t have to learn anything particularly secret just to mend something.
He remembered then the story of when his father became his grandfather’s apprentice. After his father left Castle Boisblanc and shoemaking behind, he had shown up at Grandpère’s house. His father had begged to be taken on as Grandpère’s apprentice. Grandpère had asked his father the one question, the most important question.
No one needed to ask Sand the question, of course; raised by a smith and with Grandpère’s blood in his veins, everyone had known Sand’s answer since he was a toddler. And in the end, they hadn’t asked him the question because his father had no intention of letting him become a smith. It still rankled him that he’d never been asked. That he never would be asked.
Even so, Sand asked Perrotte the one important question of blacksmithing: “Do you have an imagination?”
10
Bed
PERROTTE BLINKED LIKE A SLEEPY CAT.
“Of course I have an imagination,” she said, sounding prickly again.
“Well, great,” Sand said. “I’ve never heard of a good smith who had no imagination.”
Perrotte glanced around the dim smithy and ran her finger through the fine layer of dust and soot on the nearest hammer. “It would take some imagination to think of this place as beautiful. Is that why smiths don’t clean better? They can imagine away the dirt?”
He shook his head. Dust and soot were part of the job. “I meant—can you imagine how things are going to shift in the fire and under the hammer? Can you look at four pieces of broken metal and think of a way to put them together into something useful? Turning swords into plowshares? That sort of thing.”
Perrotte frowned. “I’d like to turn a plowshare into a sword,” she said. “I’d cut our way out of those thorns, and then use it to run my enemies through—” She bit off her next words and swallowed them.
Sand stared at her, aghast. She met his eyes, defiant.
“What? You don’t like bloodthirstiness?” she asked.
“Pardon? No. I’m horrified that you would dull a sword on that thorn brake. I could make you some pretty good hedge shears.”
He laughed inwardly as the defiance on her face changed to surprise. But he did wonder who her enemies were—and how he would make sure never to give her a sword and then get on her bad side.
SAND FINISHED BRAIDING HIS rope. It went fast, because when his hands tired, Perrotte took a turn. Then he spent the better part of an hour leaned over the edge of the well, casting his hook into the water again and again, dredging for the bucket. Perrotte leaned over the edge with him, and gave him completely useless advice. Sometimes he caught the bucket and managed to haul it up a couple of feet before it plummeted into the water again.
“Let me have a turn,” Perrotte said, and on her second try, she hooked the handle and triumphantly hauled the brimming bucket upward.
“Beginner’s luck,” he muttered, then helped her bring the bucket over the well’s lip. That she had completed the rescue in no way diminished his enthusiasm for having a real bucket to haul water in. He grinned, carrying his watertight bucket, full, all the way to the kitchen.
It occurred to him: The bucket was far better at holding water than it had any right to be. He’d had tremendous luck in mending so many things over the last week, working far beyond his skills.
And then there was the matter of the hawk.
And the matter of Perrotte.
When it came down to it, Sand had to admit that some sort of magic was at work in the castle.
“This is what we have to eat, then,” Perrotte said, interrupting his thoughts. She eyed the kitchen table’s collection of broken and dirty foods.
“There’s lots of turnips in the root cellar,” Sand said, pouring some of the water from his hard-earned bucket into a copper pot. This was so much easier than wringing water out of bedsheets over several trips!
“You should plant a garden,” Perrotte said.
“Thank you for the suggestion,” he said formally, putting fragments of venison, turnip, and onion into the pot. “I already have. It isn’t working out.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, nothing grows here. Nothing lives. Nothing rots, either. Everything just . . . dries out.”
Perrotte shook her head. A yawn overtook her, and she looked taken aback by it. She lifted her hand to her mouth belatedly. “I’m sorry. I’m so tired.”
Sand glanced at the unplumped chunks of turnip, onion, and venison sitting in the cold water. “Food won’t be ready for a while yet.”
“I’m more tired than hungry. I can eat in the morning. Good night.”
“But—”
She stopped in the doorway. “But what?”
“I don’t know—that is—” Sand had mended only one bed. “You can sleep in my bed,” he blurted.
Perrotte drew herself up taller, an affronted expression on her face. “Your bed? Your bed, in my father’s room?”
“My bed,” Sand said again, feeling his eyebrows knit together. “The one I mended.”
“Why haven’t you been sleeping in the servant’s quarters?” she asked. “Or above the smithy? That would be the place for you.”
He gaped at her. “This is my castle!”
“No, it’s not. I’m the heiress of this castle! May I remind you!”
Sand blinked. Very well, technically it wasn’t his castle. But she was no more the heir of it than he. “No,” Sand said. “This castle belongs to your sister.”
“She’s not my real sister!” Perrotte screamed, face turning bright red, and a vein popping on her throat. Then she clutched her head. “Oh. Ow.”
Sand was frozen. He didn’t know how to react to this Perrotte, to screaming Perrotte.
He was reminded again of what it was like taking care of his little sisters. This would be a temper tantrum, then? And he should just ignore it?
“I’m sorry,” Perrotte whispered, shamefaced.
Sand shrugged, which wasn’t an acceptance of her apology.
Perrotte took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t quite have the control on my behavior that I should. And considering I have more than eight-and-thirty years now . . .”
This startled Sand out of his frozen state. “What?”
“Well, if it’s been twenty-five years since . . . and I was thirteen at the time . . . So I’m quite, quite old now. I really should know better.”
Sand sighed, and stirred the stew again. He really should know better too. Perrotte had awakened from the dead—today. To find everyone she knew and loved gone, and twenty-five years in the past. More than that. She was probably closer to forty than eight-and-thirty.
Even the people who still lived, like his own father, had changed, perhaps unrecognizably to Perrotte. And she had also discovered that she was trapped in this castle, this broken castle where nothing lived, nothing thrived, with a boy who apparently thought it was his own castle. . . .
“Of course it’s your bed for the taking,” he said, feeling weary. He bit his lips, thinking about the smith’s quarters. He hadn’t even gone to look at them, but she was right, that’s where he belonged.
“No. No, no. I’m horrible. Your bed is the one you mended. You shall have it. I’ll go sleep in my old bed.”
“It’s not mended,” he pointed out.
“How bad can it be?”
“Bad enough. Take the bed. I’ll make do in the smith’s quarters, as you suggested.”
“No!” She stepped toward him. “I’m sorry, Sand. I don’t know what I was thinking. I think . . . I think sometimes, even though I hated everything my father’s wife did, and regarded her every word as poison she dripped from her tongue, sometimes I think I’m as heartless as she is. And I don’t wish to be. Please, Sand. Forgive me.” She reached for him.
Awkward, uncertain, he gave her his hand. She squeezed his fingers.
“There, then,” she said, and let his fingers go. “Do you forgive me?”
“I—” He wanted to shrug, to hold back his forgiveness like a punishment. But this time, he did forgive her. So he nodded. “I do.”
“Come with me, to look at my old room.”
He banked the fire and lowered the stew pot toward the coals, then went with her to the keep.
“Let’s just look,” she urged, entering a room he’d taken no particular notice of before.
Sand had never tried to mend any of the things in these chambers. It looked like a whirlwind armed with sledgehammers had taken the room apart, and then picked up some daggers to finish the job. Sand regarded Perrotte’s face.
“None of these things are mine,” she said, poking into a broken clothes chest. “Someone else was sleeping here—they must have moved all my things out. How long—how long between when I died and the castle was sundered?”
“I’ve never been sure about that, myself. More than days, less than years?”
“And they gave my room over to . . . ?” Perrotte looked around, picking up bits of torn fabric and investigating them. “I don’t know who. Some cousin, maybe. Some relative of my father’s wife. Blech.”
Sand shook his head.
“Well, I won’t have this room! It’s not mine anymore.”
“Do you want the Countess’s room?” Sand suggested, then almost bit his tongue. Of course Perrotte wouldn’t want to sleep there.
But she just shook her head.
“Look, you take your father’s room,” Sand said. “I really will find somewhere else. Maybe this room. It’s quite nice.” The castle’s silver swans and golden phoenixes were painted on the walls here too, though most were scratched through.
“Thank you, Sand,” Perrotte said quietly.
PERROTTE HAD WALKED INTO her father’s room and lain down in Sand’s former bed with the weariness of someone who had been awake for days.
Sand left her, returning to her old bedroom and putting it in some sort of order for his night’s sleep. He pulled the mattress off the broken bedframe and stuffed the feathers back inside. He sewed the mattress, using a nail from his purse as an awl and strips of old sheets for thread, tying each of his stitches like Agnote would knot a quilt.
He wandered back to the kitchen to check on the stew. The turnips were beginning to mush up, but the venison was still tough and dry. He ate dried apples and crumbles of cheese instead, then raised the stew off the fire so it wouldn’t burn in the night.
Back in Perrotte’s old room, he bedded down. The lonely ache in his chest—it hurt worse with Perrotte here. While he felt relieved to have company, she was strange to him. He didn’t understand her, nor she him, and he missed his family intensely.
He curled on his side, trying to force himself to sleep. He must have dozed—but then he heard a scrape and a shuffle, smelled the scent of burning beeswax, and sat bolt upright.
Perrotte stood in his doorway—the door needed to be repaired along with everything else in the room—holding a candle. “Sand.”
“What?” He clutched at his chest, trying to still his racing heart.
“Will you—will you stand up?”
Confused, he stood.
She walked over and picked up a corner of his mattress with a grunt, then started to drag it awkwardly toward the door.
“What are you doing?”
She didn’t say anything, just continued to drag the mattress along. It was a smaller mattress, which was the only reason she could shift it at all, and while his mending job might have been good enough to sleep on, it hadn’t been meant to hold together through this treatment. The mattress leaked a trail of feathers behind.
“Perrotte? Just tell me what you’re doing and maybe I can help!”
She continued to pull the mattress along, bent nearly in half and breathing heavily. For the sake of not losing all the feathers, Sand picked up two of the other corners and lifted, helping her to maneuver through the door. He carried the mattress along behind her, feeling like an attendant carrying the end of a robe in a coronation ceremony.
She led him into the Count’s room, then placed the mattress at a right angle to her own—head to head, but perpendicular, so that just a corner of each mattress touched.
Immediately, she crawled under her blankets and snuggled in.
“Get your covers,” she said, yawning. “I’m tired.”
“What are you—”
“Please, Sand.”
He jogged off to the other room, returning with half-blankets piled high in his arms.
“Lie down, Sand.”
Hesitant, he lay on his mattress. Perrotte leaned over, and he thought she was going to blow out the candle. But first she seized his hand and held it tightly.
Then she blew out the candle.
Though it was strange, holding her hand across the corners of their mattresses in the dark, Sand had no trouble falling asleep.
11
Stars
SAND’S BREATHING EVENED OUT ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, though his fingers twitched and squeezed Perrotte’s in his sleep. Eventually, Perrotte pulled her hand from his, and lay with one palm under her cheek.
She had been so tired before. She had slept only briefly before going to fetch Sand from her old room. Now she was wide awake.
Perrotte had never been a good sleeper, and maybe that was why she lived again. Death was the ultimate night, and she couldn’t keep her eyes closed even through that.
Bad sleep was why she had come to be an observer of stars. Before her father remarried, there had been no questioning of her late nights and lazy mornings, or the reason that she needed doors in a tower ceiling and a servant to come prop them open for her, or star charts, or an astrolabe, or a tutor in the natural sciences.
But then her father never recovered from a wound that baffled physicians. The Count felt he needed a son, so he married Jannet, the pious younger daughter of a family from Lower Bertaèyn, who spent more time praying than doing most anything else.
For a while after her father remarried, Perrotte’s life had remained much as it had been. But slowly over the months, Perrotte realized that secret ice lurked in her new stepmother’s otherwise pleasant manner—narrow ice, tiny ice, that seeped slowly into every crack and crevice between people and widened them.
The plan for sending Perrotte away to some convent had been sprung without warning; suddenly, her tutor, dear old Efflam, was being sent into retirement, while her father’s new wife paced around, ordering servants this way and that to prepare Perrotte for a journey. “You need proper religious instruction before you move out into the world of temptations and trials,” Jannet had said. “You need time for spiritual contemplation before you go to the Duchess’s court.”
There had been no time to appeal to her father; the Count had gone to dance attendance on the King in Paris, and wouldn’t be back for a month. Perrotte had played chess with Efflam for years; she knew when checkmate was inevitable. All she could do now was guard the supply lines of her retreat, as it were; she had to make sure her special possessions came with her: her books, her maps, and her astronomic instruments. She had packed everything from her tower room, and her chests were prepared when Jannet came in for inspection.
“Sir Bleyz is ready for you, Perrotte. Now, what’s all this nonsense?” Jannet asked.
“My things,” Perrotte said.
Jannet threw open one chest, then another, glancing with unconcealed disdain for what she found inside. “Unpack them,” she ordered Perrotte’s maid, Loyse.
Perrotte stepped forward. “No. They are coming with me.”
And just like that, Jannet had yanked the first thing out of the closest chest: Perrotte’s prized astrolabe, swaddled in silk. Jannet held it against her breast, above her swelling belly.
“I’ll be taking this until you learn how to honor your new mother properly. Raoul! Yannig! Come in here. Take these chests away to my rooms. Perrotte will be traveling only with this.” Jannet had nudged a single clothes chest with her foot.
The servants had all obeyed Jannet. How could they not have? She was their Countess; Perrotte would be the heir only until Jannet produced a son, which she might do in the next few months.
Years later, in a room not far from the site of her dispossession, Perrotte pushed the memory away and sat up, groping for her candle. Sand’s breathing didn’t shift. She went to the hearth and crouched to light the taper from the embers.
Shielding her eyes from the light, she left the room. She wanted to see the stars.
She wondered if her old astrolabe and any of her other possessions were still in the castle. She was afraid to find them, though; they must be broken like everything else.
Perrotte reached the castle’s courtyard, and stumbled out into the mud, bare feet squelching coldly. She looked up, finding “the shining Bears at the height of the sky,” as one long-dead Latin philosopher put it, the stars that never rose and never set. The constellation of the larger bear, or as everyone who was not a dead Latin philosopher called it, the Plough, contained seven stars, by most counts. But Perrotte always looked for, and always found, the two-part star in the Plough’s handle, a double star that most people never noticed: a star and her sister.
She thought of her own sister then, who had been newborn when Perrotte returned from the convent. She felt warmth toward this unknown sister, and guilt. Perrotte had seen Rivanon exactly once, and what she felt now made no sense to her, and not because Perrotte lacked imagination, but because it did not seem that anything that could have grown inside of Jannet could cause such feeling in Perrotte’s heart. She was a rotten older sibling, a poor protector. Perrotte had been trapped, first by death, now by thorns, and she had left Rivanon alone to be raised by Jannet.
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