The storehouse had a large front entrance with big barn doors. Lovisa crept through the trees to the back and entered through the small back door, which gave straight into one of the storage stalls. She knew it would be dark back there, hidden from the open front of the building.
As she’d expected, she stepped into an unlit stall. It smelled faintly of firewood. She closed the door quickly, grateful for the distant roar of the ocean that muffled the sound.
Light shone from the front of the storehouse and she could see a moving shadow there. Slowly, crouching low, Lovisa worked her way forward from stall to stall.
When she got close enough to see the front of the storehouse, she folded herself against a wall and peeked out. In the slender open area before the big doors, Linta Massera sat at a table, facing Lovisa, making notes in a small notebook. The table was crowded with objects and implements, some, like a stove, oddly shaped glassware, a microscope, reminding Lovisa of the laboratories at the academy. Others seemed more like the detritus of life. A cup of tea; a tray with empty dishes and cutlery; papers and pens; a short stack of notebooks like the one Linta wrote in. Ropes hung on the wall behind her. A small, square trapdoor was set into the floor near the table. Lovisa had noticed it before but never tried it, for it had always been locked. It intrigued her now, because she could see the key in the lock, sticking out of the floor like a tiny spike.
A pot on the stove at Linta’s left elbow bubbled gently. Linta turned toward it to check on it, and when she did, something moved against the wall to her right. When she turned back to her notebook, the movement stopped. A moment later, she reached for the pot again and the same thing happened. Lovisa watched, fascinated, as a sack of some foodstuff, positioned among other sacks of foodstuff, shifted closer to the table. A wave of nausea swept through Lovisa, heightening when she forced herself to stare at the sack and was able to discern in its rumples and folds, ever so slightly, the shape of a crouching girl. The sack was Hava. And Hava was trying to get closer to Linta’s table.
What should she do? How could she help? Lovisa began hunting around her stall, looking for an answer. She found it: a sack of some dried thing—beans—with a tiny hole in its side. A bean lay on the floor beneath the hole. Lovisa stuck her finger into the hole, widening it. She caught the stream of beans that emerged. Then, the next time Linta seemed intent on her notebook, she hurled the beans to the side of the room opposite from where Hava was lurking.
They made more noise than she’d intended, crashing against the wall, pounding down onto barrels, bouncing across the floor. Linta jumped up, stared around, then left the table and walked to that corner, muttering to herself. Instantly, Hava mobilized, stretching into a clearly girl-shaped sack that crept to the table, snatched up Linta’s notebooks, then shot down the narrow alleyway between the stalls. She dove into Lovisa’s stall. Turning back into a girl, she grabbed Lovisa.
“Get down. I can hide you,” she whispered.
Lovisa really thought she might vomit. The rapid transformations were so overwhelming. “How did you know I was here?”
“I saw the flight of whatever you threw. Sh!”
Together, they peeked out. Linta had found a few beans on the floor. She stood holding them in her hand, staring up at the wall and the ceiling, then, still muttering to herself, walking back to her table.
Instantly, she saw that her notebooks were missing. She froze, grabbing a knife that lay on the table, glaring out across the stalls. As Hava pressed Lovisa down, Linta’s footsteps neared. Hava crouched over her, covering her with her own body.
Lovisa closed her eyes, needing not to see Hava’s transformation, not to move, not to breathe. Linta’s footsteps grew closer, padding toward their stall. Continued past it and receded; turned back and approached again. The footsteps returned to the table, where Linta could be heard swearing under her breath. Then the big front doors slammed and Linta’s voice rose, shouting in the yard about stolen notebooks.
Hava moved, grabbed Lovisa’s arm. “We need to find a better hiding place, quick,” she whispered.
“There’s no place to hide in here. They’ll tear it apart,” said Lovisa.
“What about that trapdoor?”
“I don’t know what it leads to.”
“Let’s try it,” Hava said, pulling Lovisa out of their stall—then, when the big doors burst open again, pushing her into a different stall. It was mostly empty, not packed tight with supplies as the others were. Terrible for hiding, containing only three wooden chests, stacked one behind the other. The chests were locked with padlocks.
At the front of the room, Linta was loudly explaining to someone what had happened.
“We have to get out of here!” Lovisa whispered.
“We’re stuck in this stall for now,” Hava muttered, reaching into her pockets and extracting some long metal sticks that attached to a ring. Lovisa watched in amazement as she began to insert various sticks into one of the padlocks and fiddle around. Lock picks? Now?
A click sounded. The padlock slid open. Linta’s voice grew louder, heavy footsteps pacing, a man’s voice asking a question, another man responding. Two guards? Carefully, grimacing with anticipation of creaks and squeaks, Hava opened the chest. It made no sound. With a grin at Lovisa—this girl was a maniac; what was she so happy about?—Hava reached inside and pulled out something Lovisa had never seen before: a metal, egg-shaped thing, about the size of a large potato, with a ring and pin at one end. Hava inspected it closely, holding it to the dim light, then bringing it to her own pale face. She turned it around, then turned it back again. All the while, Lovisa was staring at the thing with a growing sense of distress that she couldn’t articulate. She wanted Hava to put the thing down, close it back inside the chest. She thought to herself, Whatever Linta Massera is making here, it can’t be good. She thought to herself, That would fit in a banker’s box. She thought to herself, When the house was on fire, something exploded in my mother’s study.
“Put it back,” Lovisa said sharply, not even caring if Linta heard her. “Put it back.”
Hava, her eyebrows furrowed in curiosity, took hold of the ring at the end of the egg. And Lovisa knew; all at once, she understood what was going to happen. As Hava pulled the pin from the egg, Lovisa screamed. She snatched the egg from Hava and threw it as hard as she could, then grabbed Hava and knocked her down. She covered Hava’s ears with her hands.
The world turned to sound and light.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The roar of the explosion shot Giddon to his feet. He felt the room shaking and thought, momentarily, that he must be losing his mind.
“What was that?” Bitterblue said thickly, the nausea plain in her face. He helped her up and they ran toward the sitting room door. In the corridor, when they encountered a guard who was also rushing to get outside, Giddon made a split decision.
“Sorry,” he said, driving his fist into the astonished man’s face. As the man struggled for balance, Giddon grabbed the sword at his belt, then cracked him across the temple with the hilt. The man crumpled to the ground, breathing shallowly.
Giddon spun to Bitterblue, expecting an appalled expression. She was already to the door, knives of her own in each hand. “Here comes another one,” she said, pushing outside and marching unsteadily toward a guard who was running from the front gate.
What was she going to do, stab him? It was the nice guard, the one who’d been kind to Bitterblue about her magic. Gritting his teeth, Giddon burst after Bitterblue and ran at him. Instantly, the startled guard unsheathed his own sword, but Giddon was upon him, knocking him down, punching him, clipping his temple.
“I never knew you were so efficient,” said Bitterblue.
“You take this,” said Giddon, handing her the guard’s sword.
“Should we be leaving these men alive?”
“It’s a risk I’d prefer to take.”
“All right. I’m in no state to make important decisions. Let’s go,” she said, setting off through the trees toward the noise of distant voices.
Their route led them away from the cliff, toward a barn. Rounding it, they came upon what must until recently have been the storehouse. At its back end, broken walls rose from rubble and dust billowed like fog. Its front end was gone, transformed into hills of detritus that circled a massive hole in the earth. The air smelled strange, metallic.
Giddon spotted a guard near the hole, overturning pieces of wall and roof. Noticing Nev near the building’s broken walls, Giddon called, “Nev! How many guards are there?”
“At least six,” Nev called back.
“Two are dead,” came a voice, small and frightened, from somewhere inside.
“Lovisa?” said Nev, turning sharply at the sound. “Lovisa? Where are you?”
“I’m going to fall,” said the voice, “so listen to me. If anyone sees a metal thing shaped like an egg, do not touch it.”
“Lovisa!” cried Nev, trying to find a way over the broken walls.
“Nev, don’t!” said Lovisa. “You stay there! The floor is caving in!”
“Nev, see if there’s a back entrance!” shouted Bitterblue, and in that moment, the guard who was digging through the detritus cried out. His digging had unearthed the body of one of the dead guards. Looking around wildly, he spotted Giddon heading toward him with a sword. Unsheathing his own sword, the guard ran and attacked. Giddon had been carrying his sword in his right hand, a habit he’d picked up to hide his secret advantage of left-handedness. He waited until the guard was near. Then, switching sides, he surprised the man with a left-handed parry that gave him an opening for a punch.
Then Davvi was beside Giddon, helping him grapple the guard to the ground.
“We need something to bind them,” said Giddon, who was getting tired of handing out concussions. “And there’s at least one more guard.”
Davvi grunted, distracted. He was staring across the hole in the ground, trying to make out what was happening at the other edge of the hole, where the broken walls of the storehouse began.
“Nev!” he shouted, then jumped up and ran around the hole, then around the storehouse, disappearing behind it. Giddon squinted, trying to see what Davvi had seen. Nev was on her knees on the storehouse’s broken floor, crawling toward the edges of the hole. That’s when Giddon saw Lovisa, clinging to the crater’s edge.
“Bitterblue!” shouted Giddon, because the queen was there too, leaning over Nev, using her sword as a cane, trying to look into the hole. “Get back from that edge!” He thumped the poor guard on the head. Then he ran after Davvi, as fast as he could.
Inside the storehouse’s back entrance, piles of rubble blocked his way. Giddon pushed through it, stepping into broken barrels, scratching himself on nails. By the time he reached the operation at the edge of the hole, Davvi was on his knees, anchoring Nev’s legs.
“Bitterblue!” Giddon grabbed her, dragged her back from the crater. “You are not well enough for a rescue operation!”
“You’re right,” she said, tears running down her face. “But what about—”
“You stay there,” he said, dropping beside Davvi onto a painful hill of splintered wood and taking one of Nev’s legs. Nev had hold of Lovisa’s arm, but Lovisa was gripping some sort of broken post, some pillar that had used to be part of the storehouse floor, with both hands. She wouldn’t let go.
“You have to,” said Nev. “Lovisa. You have to let go, or we can’t pull you up.”
“I’ll fall in!”
“I will not let that happen,” said Nev fiercely.
All at once, the lip of the crater began to break. Lovisa screamed, released her hold on the post. For one horrible moment, Lovisa dangled over empty space by one arm and Nev plunged in after her. Giddon and Davvi dragged on Nev’s legs as hard as they could, harder, back, away from the edge, across a floor that snagged and cut them. Giddon got hold of Nev’s shoulder, yanked. His hand closed around Lovisa’s arm. He pulled. They all fell together, scrambling back as the crater continued to widen. Someone else had Lovisa. Giddon grabbed Bitterblue, who still hovered too close, trying to see into the hole. He spun her up and pushed himself over the rubble to the back door, burst out into the air with Bitterblue in his arms, running, putting distance between them and the storehouse.
In the yard, Lovisa dropped onto the ground, gasping, crying. Nev dropped beside her and wrapped the smaller girl in her arms.
“But what about Hava?” said Bitterblue. “Does anyone know where she is?”
“She fell in,” said Lovisa. “She fell in.”
* * *
—
Their shouts yielded no response.
“Hava!” they repeated. “Hava!” Bitterblue’s cries were the most piteous of all. She kept drifting toward the hole, crying “Hava” with tears running down her face, to the point that monitoring her safety became an exigency of the group. Someone was assigned to the intoxicated queen at all times.
It was impossible to approach the crater, impossible to get a good view inside or even contemplate trying to climb down. The ground was still crumbling at its edges. Even Giddon, who should have been able to muscle himself down into that hole and find her, find her!, was reduced to shouting.
He searched for rope in the barn, instead finding the sixth guard, trying to sneak out on a horse. Giddon, exhausted, worried, and hacking up dust, dragged the man down from his saddle, then did his best to knock him out without killing him. These things weren’t exactly a science, after all, and it was getting harder to care, what with Hava inside the earth somewhere, not responding to their cries.
Finding no rope, he returned to the others. Bitterblue lay flat on the ground, too close to the rubble, ear to the dirt. At first the sight frightened him—she looked like she’d collapsed there—but then she turned her head, pressing her other ear flat to the ground.
She raised a hand. “Everyone,” she said. “Silence.”
Everyone went quiet, standing still, staring at the prostrate queen.
“I hear her,” Bitterblue said. “She’s calling my name.”
* * *
—
Hava’s ankle was trapped under a ladder. It was, by her estimation, sprained or worse, and her head hurt, but she insisted she was otherwise fine. She’d been knocked unconscious. As she came awake, her voice grew stronger. The group, gathering as near the crater as seemed safe, could hear her, and shout down questions.
“It’s a cave,” she told them. “With high, curving walls. There are even stalactites and stalagmites”—she spoke those words in Lingian—“though I can never remember which is which. I can’t move this ladder. Both of its ends are trapped.”
“Can you see any path down that looks steady?” called Giddon.
“No. And stuff keeps falling in and there are explosive eggs near me. Kindly don’t drop more rubble down here and set them off.”
“My mother told me of a cave,” Lovisa said numbly, sitting farther away than the others, her back to a tree, shivering.
Giddon spun to her. “What did she say about it?”
“Her father sent her there for punishments,” said Lovisa.
“Hava’s cave doesn’t sound like an accessible sort of cave,” said Giddon.
“I saw a trapdoor in the floor of the storehouse,” Lovisa said. “With a key sticking out of the lock.”
“Well then,” said Giddon, with rising impatience, “if that was the access point, it’s gone now.”
“She used to talk of being able to watch the sun set from the cave. She talked of being visited by birds,” said Lovisa, speaking with the numbness of an automaton, as if she had a rote announcement about the cave and had to make it all the way through from start to finish before stopping. Meanwhile, Hava was
trapped. Giddon wanted to shake anyone who wasn’t helping.
“That means there’s another access point,” said Bitterblue, who was still lying with her ear to the ground.
“What?”
Bitterblue sat up. She turned big, black, unhappy eyes to Giddon. Then she pointed out across the yard, to the place where the trees gave way to nothing but sky.
“This property is on a cliff, Giddon,” she said. “If Ferla could see the setting sun from her cave, it means there’s an opening to the cave in the cliff wall.”
* * *
—
The dim voice of Hava confirmed this theory.
“Yes,” she called. “I see daylight, now that I’m looking for it, straight ahead. It seems small, and far away.”
“The storehouse is built back from the cliff,” said Giddon grimly.
“We need rope,” said Bitterblue.
“I found no rope in the barn.”
“The rope was kept in the storehouse,” said Lovisa, in that same expressionless voice. “We exploded it.”
And so, they collected every sheet in the house. The house staff—a cook, a maid, and a housekeeper who all seemed so thunderstruck by the situation that Giddon was inclined to believe in their innocence—helped them, leading them to a spare pantry that even Lovisa didn’t know about. The staff’s eyes went huge whenever they glanced at Lovisa, who stayed against her tree, filthy, scratched, tattered, and crying. One of them brought her a cup of tea. Lovisa held it in her hands, unseeing.
While the others tied sheets together, Giddon rubbed grime out of his eyes, then experimentally stretched his arms. Like everyone else in the group, he was still coughing from dust, which filmed his eyes, nose, tongue, the back of his throat. His hands were stiff and bruised from punching guards. But he understood that the person who went over the edge to look for a route to Hava needed to climb down the cliff wall, then free her from that ladder, then probably carry her. That meant him.
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