The Crooked Castle

by Sarah Jean Horwitz

  He held out a shaking hand palm up, and fought every instinct to snatch his hand away when the leader of the dogs took a few cautious steps forward, sniffed at it with an impossibly large muzzle, and gave his fingers a lick with a pink, sandy tongue.

  “I hate to rush a delicate process,” said Grit testily, but Carmer could hear the relief in her voice. “But if we don’t get you out of here soon, you won’t have any hands to lick!”

  The husky nudged its head under Carmer’s palm. He patted its neck until he found its collar, and grabbed on.

  12.

  ONE BOY, DEFROSTED

  Carmer and Grit’s arrival at the imposing brick mansion at the edge of the graveyard would be forever hazy in Carmer’s memory. The fact that there was an imposing brick mansion at the edge of the graveyard was the least of his concerns. It was all a confusing, frost-encrusted jumble of sturdy hands ushering him inside; supportive nudges from the dogs; someone expertly stripping him out of his frozen clothes and into a nightshirt big enough to fit five Carmers; scratchy homespun blankets and panels of dark wood; a roaring hearth—where was Grit?—and swallowing some liquid that was cool in the mug they pushed into his hands but burned like fire going down.

  He didn’t know how long it was before he finally came to his senses, half dozing in an armchair by the fire. The chair was so big he could nearly lie down in it, and he was wrapped in so many blankets he felt like a swaddled infant. An occasional shiver still rocked through him, though he was already sweating through the nightshirt. His feet were bare and beet red, submerged in a pan of lukewarm water. They hadn’t given him any pants.

  “Still in the land of the living, eh, boy?” said a booming voice, sounding even louder without the roaring wind to muffle it.

  Carmer looked up into the face of the large, bearded man who’d stood behind him at the Wonder Show: Robert Blythe.

  Carmer couldn’t decide, in that moment, whether he was very, very lucky or very, very cursed. “I think so, sir.”

  “I don’t think Isla and I have seen this much excitement since Jules here had her last litter of pups,” the man said, affectionately rubbing the head of the husky standing at his side.

  “Thank you for your help, sir,” said Carmer. He fidgeted under his cocoon of blankets, feeling around for any sign of Grit. “But I really need to be going—”

  “No one’s going anywhere.” Isla Blythe’s voice was surprisingly smooth for such a severe-looking woman. “Not tonight, anyway. Unless you’d like to finish the job that frostbite started.”

  Isla circled around Carmer’s chair to stand next to her brother, and Carmer was even more struck by their size in person than in the picture in the newspaper. They weren’t what anyone would call fat, exactly; they were just big. Both of them stood well over six feet tall—Isla looked even taller, thanks to the height of her waved caramel-colored hair—and they each looked broad enough to balance a park bench on their shoulders with ease. Probably with Carmer on top of it.

  This, at least, explained the size of the chair—and the nightshirt Carmer felt like he was swimming in. (No faeries in there, either.) Everything was bigger in the Blythes’ house: the shelves and the pictures were mounted higher on the walls, the table legs were longer—even the glasses on the drink tray looked more like soup bowls than anything else. Carmer felt like he’d shrunk.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Isla, staring down her large, sculpted nose, a twinkle in her eye.

  Was she the same woman who’d terrorized Bell?

  Bell.

  “You don’t understand,” Carmer said, “I—I’m ever so grateful for your help, but . . .”

  He hesitated. It was entirely possible the Blythes had already captured (Carmer didn’t let himself think and killed) Bell, especially if Isla had recognized the sole witness to her crime. If Bell had managed to elude the dogs and seek shelter from the storm, it was better that the Blythes never know of his involvement. Carmer could have led all of them into a trap.

  But if the Blythes were innocent, and Bell was still out there, freezing . . .

  Carmer shivered again and made up his mind. Better to be in trouble in a warm bed than outside in a blizzard.

  “Yes, my dear?” asked Isla kindly.

  “I didn’t come here alone. My friend is still out there.”

  The Blythes exchanged concerned looks.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, son, but my sister’s got the right of it,” said Robert. “It’s not safe for any of us to be going out there again.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll send the dogs out again as soon as there’s a break in the weather,” allowed Robert. “But if your friend’s been out there all this time . . .”

  Carmer swallowed the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat.

  “What the devil were you doing out in our yard on a day like this, anyway?” asked Robert gruffly, sitting back in the chair across from Carmer and stroking his massive beard. “I don’t recognize you as one of the manager’s boys.”

  “Your yard?” Carmer asked, then wished he hadn’t. He probably sounded more like a clueless outsider than ever—though not even Bell had known the Blythes ran Driftside Metals.

  Robert smiled, standing up a little straighter. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said. “I’m Robert Blythe, of Blythe Flights, Inc., and this is my sister, Isla.”

  Carmer extricated his hand from the blankets with some difficulty and limply shook both of theirs. Their grips were unsurprisingly crushing.

  “And that,” said Isla, gesturing outside, “is our scrap yard.” She looked as if she were rather daring Carmer to laugh.

  “We started it in the early days,” explained Robert, “when Blythe Flights was just a pipe dream, and new parts were beyond the financial reach of green, aspiring aviators like us.” He chuckled.

  “Now, it’s just home,” said Isla with a fond, concerned look at the snow piling high outside. “But enough about us. You haven’t told us what you were doing out there in the blizzard, young man.”

  Carmer gulped. He had another decision to make, and no Grit to consult before he made it. What were the chances he could get away with lying to the Blythes, famous experts in aviation, about his business on their own property?

  He looked into Isla’s flinty eyes and thought, Not very likely.

  “My name is Felix Cassius Tiberius Carmer III,” he said.

  To their credit, they did not laugh.

  Carmer told them everything.

  Well, not everything, of course. But he spoke as plainly as he could about being hired by a competitor of theirs to investigate the Jasconius crash, and how this had led him to their offices, and then the graveyard, where he and his friend (he didn’t mention Bell’s name) heard the wreck had been delivered, and it seemed unlikely anyone would be around to catch them snooping. He kept the state of the ship’s engine car to himself, too.

  The Blythes took it all in without saying a word, only the occasional flash of their dark eyes betraying any hint of interest. Neither did they seem inclined to bash Carmer over the head and bury him in the snow as the only witness to their crimes, but he supposed the night was young.

  Robert Blythe surveyed Carmer over steepled fingers the width of sausages.

  “And Tinka suspects us, does he?”

  Carmer worked very hard to keep his jaw from dropping to the floor. “Sorry, I—”

  Robert let out a hearty chuckle. “No need to look like such a gasping fish, my boy. Anyone who looked twice at you coming in, even after we’d scraped all the ice off you, could see you’d walked straight out of the circus.”

  Carmer thought of his silk top hat and patchwork coat. He supposed the man had a point.

  “Well, you needn’t worry about us,” continued Robert. “We’ve known about Tinka for years.”

  Isla explained how they’d replied to the author of an article in an aeronautical journal years ago; the initial letter led to a flurry of regular correspondence
between the three inventors, and it wasn’t long before the Blythes figured out the identity of their pen pal.

  “I always knew he was a private fellow,” said Robert, “but I thought something must’ve been wrong when he wouldn’t even see me the other night. It was his first stay in Driftside City in ages, and I thought, since we’d been writing each other for years, exchanging ideas and such . . .” The big man shrugged. “But they turned me away, soon as the show was over, and told me I wasn’t even to come to the camp.”

  Robert huffed, and Isla patted him on the arm.

  A private fellow? Carmer thought. Tinka had hardly seemed that way to him. He was secretive about his business, that was certain, but in person, Carmer would even go so far as to call him a bit of a show-off. Those pinstripe pants of his didn’t belong to someone who wanted to avoid attention.

  “Mr. Tinka has contributed more to the field than most could even imagine,” Isla said. “We’ve no wish to do him harm.”

  Maybe it was the exhaustion of the day catching up with him, or the effects of whatever engine fuel they’d poured down his throat, but Carmer was quite ready to believe her. The Blythes had taken him in when he was facing certain death, and had fed him and clothed him and offered more information than he’d ever expected to a perfect stranger. He was finding it harder and harder to believe that they would bring down an entire airship of passengers just to ruin someone they’d clearly worked with for years.

  Then he saw the plants near the window.

  They were displayed in glass boxes on a long table that ran the length of the room, electrical heat lamps filling in the gaps where the sun would be in short supply. Exotic greenery of every kind was on display, from cacti and succulents to a hideous flower that looked suspiciously like an open mouth—complete with teeth.

  The Blythes saw him looking. Isla laughed lightly.

  “Oh! I see you’ve spotted my plants,” she said. “Aren’t they lovely? I was originally a botanist, you know.”

  Carmer smiled tightly, thinking of mushrooms, and was suddenly a lot less convinced.

  THERE WAS NO choice but to spend an uneasy night at the Blythes’. Carmer spared himself further interaction with Isla and Robert by claiming fatigue—which was true enough—and was promptly spirited away to an upstairs bedroom by a portly, red-faced maid. She tucked him into a feather bed so large and lush he wouldn’t have felt out of place in The Princess and the Pea.

  The wind howled as mercilessly as ever, snow still pounding against the windows. Carmer was glad of the warm bed and the bowl of hot soup he received for supper, even if it meant poisonous fungi were going to start blooming in his intestines while he slept. Anything was better than being out there.

  Like Bell.

  The maid must have seen Carmer’s face, because she patted him on the cheek and assured him the dogs would be out to search the graveyard and fetch news first thing in the morning. As if anyone could survive an entire night out in a blizzard like that.

  He didn’t finish the soup.

  The split second after the door closed behind the maid, a handful of papers flew out from behind the inkwell on the desk, flitted around the bed, and dropped on Carmer’s head. He jumped so high he nearly fell out of the bed.

  “Look what I found!” said Grit, bobbing around excitedly as Carmer extricated the sheets of paper from his already messy hair. “I thought those giant humans would never leave you alone!”

  “Nice to see you, too,” he said.

  Grit touched down on the blanket over his knees and lay back, letting the cushiony quilt swallow her up before popping up to a sitting position.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said. “If we’re going to have heartfelt reunions after every near-death experience, we’ll soon run out of time for much else.”

  “So you propose abolishing the policy entirely?”

  Grit flitted to his shoulder and gave one of his unruly locks a friendly tug. “Well, not entirely,” she said, voice creaking a little.

  Carmer blushed and busied himself with the paper in his hands. “What’s this you’re so excited about?”

  “That,” said Grit, swiftly drawing her hatpin sword and spearing the first sheet, “is a letter. And not just any letter. I was eavesdropping in the fireplace while you were talking to the Blythes, and when they mentioned writing to Tinkerton, I took the liberty of doing a little exploring.”

  The paper floated in front of his face, still suspended from her sword. “See anything interesting?”

  Carmer grabbed the letter, leafing through the pages. Aside from a fascinating discussion on propulsion, the most notable feature was obvious.

  “This isn’t Tinkerton’s handwriting,” said Carmer. “It’s the same as the note that came with the golden glider ticket.” The Blythes’ pen pal and the real Julius Tinkerton were clearly not one and the same.

  Grit crossed her arms with a triumphant gesture. “I knew it!” she crowed. “I knew I was right about him not being the brains behind that operation.”

  “Even if that’s the case, do you still think this ‘silent partner’ is the one behind the attacks?”

  “Who else could it be?” Grit asked. “If Tinkerton is claiming their ideas as his own, who else would have as much of a reason to bring him down?” She grimaced. “No pun intended.”

  Carmer told her about Isla Blythe’s gift for plants.

  Grit frowned. “I’ve been around this whole house and haven’t seen hide nor hair of anything fae,” she said, pacing along Carmer’s knees. “So it’s unlikely she’s working with one. And . . . Carmer, even you must have sensed it out there. This storm isn’t natural. Not totally.”

  Carmer thought of that rippling hair, the upturned lip, the hood of a shining cloak held up against the wind.

  “You think they’re here, but not for the Blythes,” he said. He couldn’t help lowering his voice to a whisper. “The Unseelie fae.”

  The wind suddenly rattled the windows, blowing so hard even the sturdy Blythe mansion seemed to shake around them. Carmer looked out the window; for a moment, all he saw was his own pale, tired reflection, but in the next, mixed in with the swirling clouds of white, he saw . . . turning wheels?

  They weren’t the monstrous train wheels that had so often haunted his nightmares, or even the tires of a car. Flitting in and out of the shadows, they reminded him of velocycle wheels. He could have sworn he even heard the sputtering and roaring of their engines, and recalled Bell’s offhand comments about the racing velocycle clubs. Surely, no sane person would be out riding in this weather, and so far from the public road?

  SNAP. Something hard flicked against the window, making Carmer jump. A branch being blown about in the storm, that was all, but it broke his focus. When he looked back at the window again, all he saw was snow.

  “Carmer?” asked Grit. “Are you all right?” She flew to the window, sparks skittering at the ready between her palms.

  Carmer realized he was breathing heavily, the back of his neck slick with sweat.

  “I’m fine,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “But what was that?”

  “Specifically?” Grit peered out into the snow. “I don’t know. But the Unseelie won’t attack us here, not tonight.” She landed on the windowsill with her hands on her hips.

  “What makes you so sure of that?” Carmer asked.

  “Because I’m a Seelie princess,” Grit said with a sigh, in the tone of one who was admitting to an embarrassing hobby or youthful history of petty crime. “Their creepy king must’ve found me out by now. And he knows the law. Any direct Unseelie attack against me would be grounds for war between the courts. No matter how miffed he is I haven’t handed myself over for inspection.”

  Carmer, for one, was not sorry about this royal perk. “You don’t think . . . did they start this storm because of that? Because we broke the rules?” If Bell was lost and hurt—or worse—because of them . . .

  “No,” Grit said firmly, flit
ting back to the bed. “There are easier ways to get our attention. I think they were after something else, this time—and I think they got what they came for.”

  If the faeries really were behind the attacks on Tinkerton’s ships, then they’d just had the chance to take care of the sole witness to their crimes; a young pilot lost in a blizzard was a much easier story to believe than one kidnapped by faeries.

  “We made it easy for them,” said Carmer bitterly. “We walked right into their trap at the graveyard. All they had to do was separate us—”

  “Carmer,” started Grit, “it’s not your fa—”

  She froze, plopping down onto the quilt with a small oof.

  “That’s it,” she said, her voice nearly swallowed by the covers.

  “What?” Carmer asked, pushing down the blankets to find her.

  “I think I know why the Unseelie are sabotaging Tinka’s ships,” she said. “It’s a trap. The accidents weren’t just to hurt humans—although that’s always an added plus for the Unseelie. They were luring Tinka. They wanted him to bring the Wonder Show to Driff City, closer to their castle.”

  “But what could the Unseelies want with the Wonder Show?” Carmer asked.

  Grit sat up and shook her head. “That’s just it. I don’t think they care much about the Wonder Show at all. It’s the faeries on it they’re interested in.”

  “But why?” Carmer leaned forward. “You said yourself, back in Skemantis—street fae and court faeries don’t mix. So what do the Unseelies want with a bunch of Free Folk?”

  “That’s exactly the point,” Grit said, bouncing up and down on the quilt. “A bunch of Free Folk. Street fae hardly ever band together like the faeries on the Wonder Show. The job we pulled off in Skemantis, getting them all to cooperate like that . . . it doesn’t happen often. If it did, the official courts might start to get a little . . . concerned.”

  “They’re worried about the Free Folk challenging their power?” Carmer guessed.