The Crooked Castle

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  “You need someone you’ve got something in common with to talk to,” Grit chattered while Carmer finished starting the engine. “And what are the odds you’ll run into another Friend of the Fae who’s like that? I mean, someone besides—”

  She broke off, but Carmer knew what she’d been about to say.

  Someone besides Gideon Sharpe.

  Gideon Sharpe was—had been?—around Carmer’s age. Maybe a year or two older. He’d been a magician’s apprentice, like Carmer. He’d been a Friend of the Fae, like Carmer. But he’d also been a kidnapper, a faerie murderer, and a magic stealer—a past that caught up with him right around the time Carmer met him. And when he was finally free from the man he claimed made him do those things—the Mechanist—Gideon had come to Carmer and Grit asking for forgiveness. Asking for help. Gideon Sharpe had been a thorn in Carmer’s side, but he was also just a boy—a fascinating one at that. Grit’s mother had said he was an Unseelie changeling—a healthy human baby swapped with a sickly faerie child and raised by the fae instead.

  Gideon Sharpe was what happened when one caught the interest of a very different kind of faerie than Grit, and Carmer couldn’t help feeling a strange kinship with him.

  Carmer and Grit had tried to help him, but it wasn’t enough. Gideon was taken prisoner by the Wild Hunt, a horde of trapped human and faerie souls led by the Unseelie fae creature known as Mister Moon, as punishment for his crimes against the fae. Carmer didn’t know if he would ever be freed.

  “It’s all right,” Carmer said to Grit. “You’re right.” But he couldn’t stop his memories of the Wild Hunt from roaring back. The ghostly train screeching down the abandoned underground tracks, the howls of the warrior-prisoners trapped inside, the clash of their weapons against the glass windows. And then, unbidden, the sound of faerie music, eerie and enchanting all at once . . . Carmer gripped the Moto-Manse’s steering wheel so hard his knuckles went white.

  “Carmer,” Grit said. “Do you hear that?”

  The music wasn’t in his memories. It was all around him.

  3.

  DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW?

  Without a second thought, Carmer nearly put his foot through the accelerator. The Moto-Manse bucked under his rough treatment, her engine not yet warm enough, and Grit was forced to jump off Carmer’s shoulder and onto the dashboard.

  “Carmer, wait!” she said, but even the hint of faerie music had brought a manic gleam to her friend’s eyes. It was coming from the town to the east, the town Bell was visiting for supplies—the town whose skyline was now littered with half a dozen balloons. The lilting song floated toward them. Carmer and Grit heard every word as if there were faeries inside the Moto-Manse at that very moment.

  Come fly so high

  You’ll touch the sky,

  However the wind may blow.

  Browning fields and ramshackle cottages whizzed by as Carmer drove faster, giving way to clusters of statelier brick buildings that made up the small town’s main street. People stopped and gaped, first up at the sky, and then at the three-story house on wheels tearing past them.

  “Carmer, stop!” said Grit. “Look!”

  Small white balloons covered in delicate gold and silver filigree were winding their way between the buildings. The balloons were shaped like airships, and a beautiful girl in a fancy, glittering costume was suspended from almost every one. They held megaphones to their mouths as they sang.

  We see that you’re curious,

  So won’t you come join us

  At the Roving Wonder Show?

  Carmer was finally forced to slow as more and more locals crowded the streets, pointing with delight up at the pretty girls. The women were obviously human—at least, they looked that way to Carmer—and now that he’d had a moment to calm down, he realized the music wasn’t really faerie music at all. At least, not entirely. It had a tinny quality from being distorted by the megaphones that was decidedly unfaerie-like. Some of the balloons had no girls attached at all, but bunches of colorfully painted gramophones that looked like flowers in a bouquet. They all broadcast the same song. Carmer couldn’t see anyone steering them, but he had a sneaking suspicion that tiny winged creatures were involved somewhere in the equation.

  They were criers, Carmer realized—the circus members responsible for getting into town a few days ahead of the show to spread the word and sell tickets. But the criers Carmer had grown up watching were usually men in dusty top hats nailing a single flyer to a town notice board while they shouted from a stool in the main square. Flying criers were something he’d never seen in his life.

  We don’t have beasts

  And we don’t have freaks,

  So boy don’t you want to know

  What makes us so special,

  What’s teeming with magic

  At the Roving Wonder Show?

  The girls reached into the sandbag pouches at their waists—Carmer doubted they had any true function as ballast—and withdrew handfuls of white, black, and gold objects that he couldn’t quite make out from this distance. They stopped singing, but echoes of the melody still hung in the air, as if someone were humming it faintly in Carmer’s ear.

  “Atteeeeeention!” said the girls in unison, their balloons stopped in midair. “Put your hands together and glue your eyes to the skies for the amazing, the death-defying, the aeronautic feast for the eyes that is RINKA TINKA’S ROVING WONDER SHOW!”

  The girls tossed the objects from their hands, and Carmer saw that they were miniature paper gliders—simple toy versions of the downed glider currently stashed in his desk. People leapt off their bicycles and leaned out of the windows of buildings to try to catch them.

  “What is this?” Grit asked, and Carmer heard the undercurrent of unease in her voice. The last time Grit had sensed faerie magic combined with human technology, they’d discovered a plot to enslave all the faeries of her city—and eventually the world—to force them into generating power for humans.

  “It’s a flying circus,” said Carmer. “They’ve been around for a few years. I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never actually seen it.” The man known as Rinka Tinka, the owner of the Wonder Show, was supposedly a genius aeronautical engineer. He was notorious for being both selective about his crew and secretive about his technology.

  “Arriving in Driftside City for one week only TOMORROW NIGHT!” chorused the girls. “Come one, come all . . .”

  The gold and white balloons started drifting again, edging across the rest of town and beyond. The locals were already over their surprise at the criers’ dramatic appearance and were now chatting excitedly about how they would find the time to make the trek into the city, and which cousin they would stay with, and did they think Old Joe would let them borrow his steam carriage? Carmer watched as the last of the paper gliders flew this way and that on the wind. A group of schoolchildren rushed out of a white-painted church and tussled over one of the golden ones—a shade of gold that looked strikingly familiar.

  We don’t have beasts

  And we don’t have freaks,

  So boy don’t you want to know

  What makes us so special,

  What’s teeming with magic

  At the Roving Wonder Show?

  “Well, I certainly do,” said Grit flatly.

  Carmer loosened his grip on the steering wheel and cracked his knuckles. “There’s something I think you should see.”

  GRIT LOOKED AT the white metallic device on the lab table for approximately five seconds before striding up to the hatch in its center and blasting enough sparks from her fingertips to send the whole thing careening off the end of the lab table and crashing to the floor. The compartment fell open with a soft pop.

  “What?” Grit said at Carmer’s warning look. Bell, for his part, had skidded back into a shelf of the Amazifier’s old pickled specimens and nearly sent the whole thing toppling over. “You said you couldn’t get it open!”

  Carmer rolled his eyes and bent to pick up the (sl
ightly singed) glider and place it on the lab table. Bell righted the jars behind him with a casual salute to one of the floating salamanders and stepped forward to join them.

  “And you said this thing isn’t at all like Gideon’s evil mechanical birds,” Grit reminded Carmer. “. . . Right?”

  “I said it didn’t look like one of Gideon’s evil mechanical birds,” corrected Carmer with a sigh. At least, this one didn’t seem designed explicitly for inflicting terror. The metal plates he had been able to unscrew before revealed a complicated network of grooves inside the device—it was a map, he’d realized, designed to steer the glider toward its intended recipient. Only this glider had been intercepted by a certain balloonist—and now its message was in their hands.

  Or rather, in Bell Daisimer’s hands. Bell had already unfurled the tightly rolled golden paper that Carmer had seen peeking out of the glider’s center hatch. He stared at it with a worshipful expression. A second, plainer piece of paper fell to the tabletop.

  “What is it?” Grit asked. “Is that one of those papers the crowd was fighting over in town?”

  “A golden glider,” Bell breathed, carefully unfolding each corner of the paper to reveal the flowing calligraphy inside:

  The holder of this golden glider

  Is entitled to TWO first class boarding passes

  For

  RINKA TINKA’S ROVING WONDER SHOW

  On the mythical

  WHALE OF TALES

  Please present your ticket at the dock at the Topside Hotel.

  Boarding begins promptly at 2:00pm.

  “It’s a ticket, see? The criers always pass out a few of these to the crowd, to get people excited,” explained Bell. “But the golden ones aren’t just any ticket—they’re the VIP experience. You get to fly with the show itself! I never thought I’d even see a real golden glider, never mind get one!” He danced around the attic with the ticket in hand, too-long limbs nearly cracking Carmer over the head in the small space.

  “Watch the glassware, please,” Carmer said, cringing. “And it’s not exactly ours, is it?”

  “It did crash into my balloon,” Bell pointed out. “I’d say I’ve earned it.”

  “And I’d say it’s our best chance to get inside this ‘Wonder Show,’” said Grit, her mouth set in a firm line. “There’s faerie magic at work there, and I want to know why.” She bent down to unroll the plain note that had also accompanied the golden ticket. “Now, Bell, why don’t you tell me everything you know about this flying circus?”

  “It’s not just a flying circus,” said Bell, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “They’ve got balloon rides and ornithopters and aerial acrobatics, sure, but there’s stuff that’s just as amazing on the ground! And that’s saying a lot, coming from me . . .”

  He stopped, leaning over Carmer’s shoulder to read the note, which had probably come from within the Wonder Show itself. In small, shaky handwriting, it read simply:

  With my compliments. I hope you enjoy the show.

  Carmer gulped. It probably wasn’t a good time to mention that he was a little afraid of heights.

  “WELCOME,” BELL DAISIMER said, “to Driff City!”

  Bell hung out the door of the Moto-Manse, long arm swinging out to greet the approaching city skyline. He’d spent much of their approach to Driftside City nervously pacing around the few feet that constituted their living quarters and sneaking glances out the windows, but he couldn’t seem to help himself from bursting outside eventually. The young man was incapable of sitting still; he climbed all over the Moto-Manse like he’d take off into the sky at any moment if he had the chance. Carmer told him to get inside before oncoming traffic finished the job his balloon accident had started.

  Driftside City—or “Driff City,” as Bell said the locals called it—didn’t loom up overhead the way other cities did, so much as slowly surround you. It was more flat than anything else, built on swampy marshland surrounded by rivers and spitting distance from the coast. The milder Virginia climate meant the weather conditions that spelled disaster for most airships—snow and ice—weren’t as big a threat. All these factors combined made it a hub for transatlantic travel—first by boat, in the shelter of the Chesapeake Bay, and years later by airship. Now it was a manufacturing capital for everything that flew—a bonus for both Bell and his ballooning needs and Carmer’s hopes to improve Grit’s wing. If Carmer wanted to learn more about aerodynamics, there was no better place.

  There was also no bigger place, it seemed. The city was huge; the necessity for large, open spaces for airship takeoffs, landings, construction, and storage meant the city had expanded out, not up. There were no clusters of skyscrapers here. And from his view in the cab of the Moto-Manse, the first words that sprang to mind to describe Driff City, cliché as they might have been, were lighter than air. Airships of every shape and size imaginable, from transatlantic luxury liners to local taxis, and even a smattering of balloons, dotted the sky. Almost every building had a mooring mast attached to its top. The buildings themselves gave off the impression that they, too, could be neatly folded into compact packages, ready to be loaded onto a ship at any moment.

  Though some sort of vehicle seemed necessary for traveling around Driff City, the Moto-Manse immediately stuck out like a sore thumb. Other than a few cargo trucks, the three-story house on wheels was the heaviest, slowest, bulkiest vehicle on the road. In a city where even the paper delivery boy knew something about the complex weight calculations that went into getting an airship off the ground, lightness was a prized quality. There were distinct lanes on the major roads—one for wide-load vehicles and airships being towed at ground level, and another for the much lighter (and much faster) bicycles and velocycles. Even most of the steam cars had been stripped of all but their essential components, leaving the drivers open to the elements except for small canvases stretched across thin frames over their heads.

  Carmer glanced overhead to see the sky choked with low-flying airships. Brave air-traffic directors perched in crow’s nests attached to buildings or were suspended all by themselves at various “intersections” that seemed invisible to Carmer but no doubt made perfect sense to the fliers above. Advertisements and notices were placed at every height interval imaginable, displaying everything from announcements (Monsieur Giland’s Flying Monkeys!—One Night Only!) to news headlines (Jasconius Crash Mystifies Authorities—$500 REWARD for Information!).

  Carmer frowned at the Jasconius sign. It didn’t help his slight case of nerves at the thought of flying on Rinka Tinka’s Roving Wonder Show that the biggest airship disaster of the decade had occurred just two weeks prior. The great transatlantic passenger ship had crash-landed into a Driftside airfield and literally gone up in flames, killing five crew, three passengers, and a firefighter trying to combat the blaze. It was a miracle that more people hadn’t been killed, and no one knew what had caused the disaster, though engine failure was suspected.

  Yet Driftside City appeared to be taking the disaster in stride. The skies were still full of ships and the streets still full of people, as if they had all collectively shrugged their shoulders and said, “Well, that’s what happens sometimes when you fill a flying passenger vehicle with tons of highly flammable gas, right?”

  Carmer, frankly, was interested in machines that had a bit less of a chance of erupting into giant fireballs.

  Something whizzed by the Moto-Manse, snapping Carmer’s attention back to the road; he had to swerve to make sure Bell retained all his limbs. Up in the attic window, Grit shouted down a few choice words about his driving.

  “Sorry!” Carmer called.

  The balloonist galloped into the cab and clapped Carmer on the shoulder. “Velocycles!” Bell said, pointing ahead. “They’re made extra light and fast here, for travel between the ships. Pretty fabulous, right?”

  The motorized bicycles dodged and weaved around the Moto-Manse, forcing Carmer to coax his mobile house into more subtle maneuvering tha
n it was accustomed to. There was a whole pack of them—all ridden by young men whose appearances ranged from handsomely rakish to outright disreputable—and they laughed and pointed at the bulky Moto-Manse as they darted around it.

  “Yeah,” Carmer said, finally relaxing when the last hollering hooligan had sped away. “Fabulous.” He pulled over into the “wide loads” lane.

  “The velocycle clubs don’t have the best reputations,” conceded Bell. “You’ll want to steer clear of gangs like that, traveling on your own.”

  Gangs?! Carmer thought, but he didn’t want to seem like a total country bumpkin, so he said, “You’re not staying in the city, then? After the show?”

  Bell seemed to deflate a little, as if he were the balloon that had just been popped.

  “Just until I can get a new balloon,” said Bell, “and point you and the little miss in the right direction for getting her wing spruced up. To tell you the truth . . . Driff City wasn’t exactly on my itinerary, either. I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”

  Carmer flushed. He hadn’t realized his discomfort with Bell as a traveling companion had been that obvious. And perhaps, as a balloonist with a rather small operation, Bell avoided Driftside City for the same reasons Carmer and the Amazifier did with their magic show: city crowds (and markets saturated with entertainers) were tough customers.

  “I’m sorry about your balloon. I have . . .” Carmer hesitated. Finances—both Carmer’s and Bell’s—were just another thing that Grit hadn’t been thinking about when she took on another houseguest by effectively destroying Bell’s livelihood. “I have a little bit of money saved up, from a magic competition Grit and I just won. We could, um, help you out a bit with the new one, if you like.”

  “You’re a stand-up fellow, Carmer,” Bell said. “I’m not gonna lie, I could use the help. I barely had enough cash to— Well. You know how it is. And don’t worry, I’ll be more careful with the next one. And if all goes well, I won’t be Bell the Balloonist forever.”