The Crooked Castle

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  It was the sound of something very large crashing into his roof.

  “Grit?!” Carmer called. She had a habit of watching the sunrise from the turret in the mornings, and at five inches tall, she wasn’t exactly squish-proof.

  “Urmngmf” was all he could make out of the reply.

  He jumped out of his bunk and scrambled down the stairs and out the door. The sight that greeted him outside the Moto-Manse was not one he expected.

  There was a balloon on his roof.

  Perhaps more alarmingly, there was a man on his roof. He was fairly certain it was a man, at least, from the look of the khaki-clad limbs sprawled every which way.

  “Um,” said Carmer.

  “I said I’m here!” said Grit, a little more clearly this time, though he could barely hear her. A glowing light switched on somewhere under the fabric of the balloon, which had caught itself quite dramatically on the topmost turret of the Moto-Manse.

  Carmer scrambled forward, unsure of what to do. The man groaned and pushed himself up onto his elbows, and then, probably realizing he wasn’t actually on the ground yet, plastered himself even more firmly to the roof. One of his boots found the peaked trim of one of the windows.

  “I wouldn’t put your weight on—”

  That, Carmer thought, just as the decorative molding gave way. The man’s legs swung wildly, and Carmer saw that he was attached to the balloon. The hole where the turret had pierced the fabric was getting bigger, tearing as the balloonist’s weight pulled it. A glowing light—Grit’s glowing light—tumbled a few feet down, still trapped underneath the balloon.

  “Grit!” called Carmer.

  “I’m fine!” came the breathless reply.

  He pictured her clinging to the shingles of the roof for dear life, even as the iron in them burned her hands. Iron repelled all things fae. He hoped she’d been wearing her gloves this morning when she decided to go chasing balloons.

  “Me too,” said the man hanging from Carmer’s house. “Thanks for asking!”

  “Wait a minute,” said Carmer, frowning. “I’ll climb up to the attic and pull you inside.”

  But Carmer’s plan never came to fruition. With a great ripping sound, the balloon tore almost all the way, dropping the balloonist down the side of the Moto-Manse until he was only a few feet off the ground. Somewhere underneath the canvas, Grit shrieked, and her light went out.

  The balloonist swung around to face Carmer. He was young—perhaps only a few years older than Carmer—with smooth ebony skin and closely cropped black hair. He smiled, a blinding smile that lit up his face all the way to his eyes, hidden as they were behind thick aviator goggles (now hanging crookedly, of course). He removed the goggles with a flourish and looked down at Carmer.

  “Bell Daisimer,” said the balloonist. “Professional aeronaut, at your service.”

  And then the balloon tore from the roof completely, dropping him into a tangled heap at Carmer’s front door.

  2.

  BELL THE BALLOONIST

  “I’m fine,” protested Grit, cringing away from Carmer’s touch. Her wings were folded protectively against her back, but Carmer could see that the mechanical one lay at an odd angle. Carmer, Grit, and their uninvited houseguest sat in the Moto-Manse’s kitchen, the latter two taking stock of their various bumps and bruises. Carmer had put on a pot of tea; that’s what Kitty Delphine, a girl he’d spent most of his childhood traveling with, seemed to do in the face of difficult or awkward situations. He assured himself it was just one of those things people did.

  “And I’m king of the—”

  Faeries, he was about to joke, when the full ramifications of the balloonist named Bell Daisimer sitting in his kitchen hit him like a brick wall. Carmer stared at Grit, then at Bell, who was twisting his ankle experimentally with a grimace, and back at Grit.

  “Spirits and zits,” Carmer exclaimed. The figure of speech was another one of Kitty Delphine’s influences he would probably never shake. “What do we do about him?” he whispered. As a Friend of the Fae, Carmer had sworn an oath to guard the secrets of faerie magic with his life. It hadn’t been six weeks since he’d sworn that oath, and now he was making tea for his very obviously faerie best friend and a clueless errant balloonist.

  “Why don’t you make sure the lunatic hasn’t broken his ankle, for a start?” suggested Grit.

  “I think we can confidently say this lunatic has not,” said Bell cheerfully. He placed his foot on the ground and prodded at a blossoming bruise over his temple. “And my lunacy is debatable.”

  You attached yourself to a balloon and lit a fire under it until it blasted you off into the air with no means of controlling it, thought Carmer. The teakettle whistled.

  Carmer’s skepticism must have shown on his face, because Bell said, “Aw, come on there, Mr. . . .”

  “Um, Carmer.”

  “Mr. Carmer. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a barnstorming act before?”

  Carmer could have pointed out that most barnstormers were called such because the balloons and airships they performed with actually took up enough space to fill entire barns. He shrugged and busied himself with the teacups.

  “Barn . . . storming?” piped up Grit, frowning. “I didn’t even see any barns around here . . .”

  Bell laughed. “It’s just a few aerial tricks for the local yokels,” he explained to her. “Nothing so fancy as the real flying circuses. But a man’s gotta eat, right?” At that, he looked around the kitchen rather hopefully.

  Carmer sighed and handed him the cookie tin with his tea.

  “Thanks!” said Bell. “But I gotta say, I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought on the way down, because was I or was I not just crash-landed by a faerie?” He took a sizable chomp out of his cookie and looked at Carmer and Grit expectantly.

  Carmer nearly dropped the rest of the cups.

  Grit, on the other hand, hopped to her feet. “Crash-landed?!” she demanded, wincing as pain lanced through her shoulder. “You’d have had a very pointy encounter with some evergreens if it weren’t for my help, mister.”

  “I had the situation perfectly under control,” protested Bell. “Just got a little off course, is all. It’s not every day an airman gets multiple foreign objects stuck under his canvas at the same time—”

  “I am not a foreign object,” Grit fumed.

  Carmer busied himself with the tea while they bickered; it was useless to try to get any information out of Grit when she was in a temper, and Bell didn’t seem particularly inclined to explain himself properly, either. He picked up his cup and ventured outside to look at the state of his house.

  The remnants of the balloon flapped in the breeze from the Moto-Manse’s turret like a sad banner on a miniature castle. Most of it wouldn’t be salvageable—Bell had been so tangled in his straps they’d had to cut him out—and the balloon was in pieces. Carmer examined it, but it didn’t take much deduction to see how Bell made his living. It was a cheap trick, the sole province of twopenny entertainers with a balloon and not much else. Most modern balloons were gas balloons; they were lifted by hydrogen and equipped with ballast for ascending and a vent in the envelope for descending. But in the absence of a proper lifting gas, anyone could light a coal fire under a balloon, wait until it got hot enough, and bam! Liftoff. The practice was foolhardy at best. The balloons often caught fire, endangering the unfortunate barnstormers attached to them, and they had no means of control up in the air.

  The other reason coal gas wasn’t often used was that it wasn’t nearly as powerful. The balloonists were usually aloft for only a short while before they came drifting back down, but the strong winds that morning must’ve had their own ideas for Bell.

  Carmer shook his head. Winds didn’t have ideas. Clearly, he’d been spending more time in the company of mythical beings than was strictly good for the scientific mind.

  That’s when he noticed the balloon was moving—and it was most definitely not because of the wind. S
omething was caught under the shredded mass of canvas, trapped between the wreck of the balloon and Carmer’s roof, and it was . . . buzzing? About the size of Carmer’s hand, it rattled with a soft metallic clang against the roof as it struggled to free itself from under the weight of the balloon.

  Multiple foreign objects, Bell had said. Grit hadn’t been the only thing to get caught in Bell the Balloonist’s operation this morning.

  “Um, hello?” Carmer called out, a little hesitantly. He knew he was supposed to be getting better at recognizing magic, but whatever this was didn’t sound much like a faerie. It sounded like . . . a machine.

  Carmer picked up a long piece of broken window frame, squared his shoulders, and gave the canvas a good shove.

  A small, white, and birdlike metallic object skittered out from under the balloon and across the roof tiles, bumping along like a poorly thrown skipping stone. It made a strained ticking noise as it fell off the roof and sailed straight over Carmer’s head—he ducked just in time—and shakily flew a dozen or so feet before plummeting to the ground.

  Carmer stayed in his crouch, his heart pounding as he watched the object twitch across the packed earth of the dirt road. The last time he had seen mechanical birds, they’d been the tools of Gideon Sharpe, apprentice to the evil, faerie-enslaving mastermind Titus Archer, also known as the Mechanist—and Carmer had barely escaped their pointy beaks with both eyes still inside his head. Was this Gideon, somehow out of fae captivity, coming for his retribution already?

  There was only one way to find out. Carmer forced himself to stand up and edged closer to the twitching device—and saw, with no small amount of relief, that this object had very little in common with Gideon’s ornate, realistic automata. “Birdlike” was a generous description; it was, in fact, a miniature glider. Once gleaming white, it was scuffed and dented from its rough journey. A bit of gold foil peeked out of a small chamber on its underside, winking in the morning sun as the glider bounced around.

  So this was what had gotten caught in Bell’s balloon while Grit had been trying to help him. Unfortunately, it had probably gotten caught because she’d been there. Mechanical devices had a tendency to go on the fritz around too much faerie magic, and if this glider had been flying in the area at just the right (or in this case, the wrong) time, well . . . their collision suddenly made a lot more sense. But whose was it, and how had it even flown high enough to get caught there in the first place?

  The glider wouldn’t be flying anywhere anytime soon—not with those bent wings and the noises coming from its insides. In a different life, Carmer would have scooped it up and run upstairs to his laboratory to gleefully take it apart piece by piece. He still planned on doing that, of course, but now, he also took the extra precaution of hefting his handy piece of window frame and whacking the glider as hard as he could.

  The grinding and ticking noises ceased, and Carmer shook off the sad, guilty feeling that came over him, as if he’d killed something small and defenseless. It was just a machine, after all. He picked it up and gently placed it in his coat pocket.

  “Carmer!” Bell Daisimer’s panicked voice came from inside the Moto-Manse. “Hey, that’s your name, right?” Bell ran out the door, still limping a bit on his right leg. “I think something’s wrong with Grit.”

  Carmer dashed past him and into the house, where Grit was lying on the kitchen table, pale and panting.

  “She, well, she got kind of mad at me,” admitted Bell, “but when she jumped up to fly, she just fell.”

  Carmer pulled out his portable magnifying glass from his pocket and sat at the table. “Let’s take a look.”

  “Something bent when I got caught under the balloon,” admitted Grit, breathing shallowly.

  “Can you sit up?” Carmer asked.

  Grit nodded and eased herself into a sitting position. “It only hurts when I try to extend it.”

  “What were you doing, Grit?” Carmer asked, examining her wing as gently as he could.

  Grit explained how she’d seen Bell bobbing around the skyline that morning. “I couldn’t just let him plow into the trees,” she said. “I’ve seen the fire in other kinds of balloons before. I thought I could give him a boost without him even seeing me. But then something else flew underneath us, too, and . . .” A red flush of embarrassment crept up her neck.

  “It wasn’t a bad idea, little miss,” said Bell fairly.

  He seemed to be taking the revelation that faeries were real in stride.

  Then again, Carmer thought, anyone who willingly launches themselves hundreds of feet in the air for spectator sport can’t be too easily rattled.

  Carmer sat back. “The frame is fractured,” he told Grit grimly. “On the apex of the forewing.”

  Grit stared at him.

  “It’s small,” he assured her. “I could probably weld it back together, but I worry about burning you.” Thanks to a dose of magic from Grit’s mother, Seelie Queen Ombrienne, Grit’s wing was part machine and part real faerie wing; the glass panes between the tiny gears and wires had been replaced with actual membranes, and the device was permanently fused to Grit’s back. But that same magic, while making the wing more functional, also made repairs tricky.

  “I’m a fire faerie,” Grit reminded him. “You could probably drop me headfirst in a volcano.”

  “Have you ever seen a volcano?” asked Bell.

  “Have you?” countered Grit.

  Carmer interrupted before they could get going again. “I’ll do my best.” He sighed. “I wish I could’ve made it more durable. I’m sorry, Grit.”

  Grit blushed again. “I probably should’ve made more of an effort not to get myself squished.”

  “And I sincerely apologize for any role I may have played in said squishing,” added Bell, placing a hand on his heart. “Now, I don’t mean to be indelicate, but as it seems we will all live to see another day . . . can I ask if the same is true for my balloon?”

  Carmer grimaced. At this rate, they were all going to need a lot more tea.

  “WHAT DO YOU think?” asked Grit, lying under one of the lamps in the Moto-Manse’s attic laboratory. She was trying to distract herself from the fact that her best friend was about to melt part of her body.

  “Think about what?” asked Carmer, intent on the diagram of Grit’s wing in front of him.

  “About Bell, silly. About what we’re going to . . . well, do with him,” said Grit. She almost shrugged, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to move. “You’ve been awfully quiet since the . . . um, accident.”

  Carmer looked down. “I don’t know,” he said, and sighed. Bell Daisimer had become an unexpected guest at the Moto-Manse for the past day and a half, as his primary form of transportation had been reduced to scrap fabric. “I’m just . . . I’m not like you, Grit. I don’t make friends with every person I meet. And it’s odd for me, having someone else in the Moto-Manse, after all those years with just Kitty and the Amazifier.” Until recently, Carmer had been apprenticed to traveling magician Antoine the Amazifier, but the old man had retired.

  “Bell and I are hardly friends,” said Grit. “Or at least, we won’t be until he admits I saved his backside.”

  Carmer smiled as he checked over his tools.

  “And I thought since his balloon was wrecked, and that was a little bit my fault . . .” She trailed off.

  “I’m nearly ready,” said Carmer, tugging on the ends of his safety gloves. “You may want to, er . . . do the magic thing.”

  “Do the magic thing?” Grit laughed nervously. “I’m so glad I’ve spent the last month teaching you about faerie lore.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, focusing on channeling her magic to make herself as hot as the metal poking at her wing. She was glad of the cement surface of the lab table.

  “Speaking of faerie lore, it’s just . . .” Carmer said. “Is it okay that Bell’s in the loop? Your mother was furious when you revealed yourself to me.”

  The muscles in Grit’s back t
ensed. “Well, my mother’s not here, is she?” she asked testily. Carmer paused in his work until she sighed. “I . . . I’m sorry. I know I messed up. But he seems to be taking it well, right?”

  “Remarkably so,” admitted Carmer. “But he could also be blabbing to every soul he meets about the faerie princess in the moto-mansion parked just outside town.” Bell had gone into the nearest town earlier that morning to see if they had any supplies that might fix his balloon.

  “I don’t think so,” said Grit. “And even I haven’t mentioned the princess part, thank you very much.” And she hadn’t done so on purpose—this far south, few fae would recognize her for what she was, and she wanted to make the most of it. No one had to know she was a sheltered Northern princess who’d barely left her own kingdom.

  “But if he does talk,” continued Grit, “I . . . I’ll take care of it.”

  Carmer paused, so briefly that Grit barely noticed, before he finished fusing the two broken pieces of her wing together. He didn’t ask how Grit planned to take care of it, but he had an idea, and he didn’t like it one bit.

  Carmer watched in fascination as Grit’s wing glowed a bright gold, the membrane stretching to accommodate the new repair. Just when he’d thought magic couldn’t amaze him any more.

  “That should do for now,” Carmer said. “But take it easy for a bit, all right? I promise, I really will do my best to see if I can improve the design.”

  Grit scurried up Carmer’s shoulder, as she used to do before her wing. But this time, she did something she’d never done before, and jumped up to peck him quickly on the cheek. He blushed.

  “I think it’ll be good to have Bell around,” Grit said as Carmer made his way back down to the cab of the Moto-Manse. He’d promised to pick up Bell at the town’s main square soon. “At least until we can drop him off somewhere that he can get a new balloon. He’s passionate about learning how things work, just like you.”

  Carmer thought Bell was more passionate about seeing how high he could get in the air before he came crashing down, regardless of the vehicle, but he kept his thoughts to himself.