I’d broken it.
No one called me for dinner. The room grew dark. The starlings melted into the night.
I thought of how I’d turned round and round in the attic, making it fit my shape. I thought of the great craggy spaces of the hideout. I could turn around in it a million times, but it would never fit me. Soon I’d come to Grandmother’s house. I’d have to make it fit my shape. I’d have to start all over again.
I wore my britches now. They had good pockets. They held Grandmother’s photograph and the copy of the emblem. But my coat pockets were better. They were deeper. They wouldn’t crumple something like a photograph. My pockets were waiting for me by Rough Ricky’s willow, packed with Gentleman Jack’s wanted-poster face, the magnifying glass, and the rest of the butterscotch. I wore the opal pendants beneath my blue robber-girl shirt.
The Judge would check the butterscotch-thermometer. He’d see that the butterscotch-mercury was down to zero. Maybe he’d think that when your mercury is down to zero, that means you’re dead. Maybe he’d think that was about right, because to him and Mrs. del Salto I was as good as dead.
I couldn’t bring Paloma with me. Now I knew the Judge slept with one ear open. His open ear would hear me creeping downstairs, which also meant he’d hear Paloma.
“I wish you could climb down the tree, Paloma,” I said.
Paloma tilted her head into a question mark. I wouldn’t tell her I had to leave her. I knelt and rubbed her ears, and she licked me. She was getting friendly, just as I was leaving.
It was my fault. I hadn’t exercised judgment. If only I’d left her downstairs, she could have pressed the anti-Rough-Ricky lever and left through the dog door.
I felt my voice go liquid. I swallowed my next words, even though I didn’t know what they were going to be. Funny how sometimes you don’t know what you have to say until you say it. If I spoke, my voice would run out of my eyes.
I opened my cupboard-bed door. At the end was the wardrobe bit, where there was a space for hanging clothes. The wardrobe burst with scarlet frills and lavender velvet and garnet buttons; but despite the scarlet and lavender and garnet, the whole of the wardrobe shone like the inside of an almond.
Mrs. del Salto had filled up the wardrobe, which made it hard to think cold, hard thoughts. But I had to. Hard cold thoughts would keep my voice from running out my eyes.
I’d opened the window earlier so the Judge couldn’t hear me pull at the sash. I climbed into the indigo tree and dislodged a chorus of small birds. Surely the Judge couldn’t hear that! I’d betrayed the Judge by telling Rough Ricky about the plans to transfer Gentleman Jack. I’d betrayed Rough Ricky by buying the doll. And now I had to walk to Netherby Scar alone, which probably meant I’d betrayed myself.
The clay road was red because it was filled with iron. My blood was red because it was filled with iron. Iron is magnetic. But I was stronger than magnets.
Usually when you pull, you have something to pull on. But the road tugged me in the wrong direction, so I had to pull at myself. The red road tugged at me like a giant elastic—
“It’s not an elastic!” said the dagger.
It didn’t matter what it was. I was strong. I pulled until I gained the far side of the road.
The dolls had been wrong. I was stronger than the Indigo Heart. I’d snapped the elastic.
“Not an elastic!” said the dagger.
It took six days to walk to Netherby Scar. Or, really, six nights. It was safer to travel at night and hide myself in the bluestem grass by day. It wasn’t safe to be a girl alone in the Territories. Was this why Gentleman Jack wanted a boy, so his son wouldn’t have to dive into the grass whenever he heard voices or when a train barreled by? I wasn’t exactly sure why it was dangerous to be a girl. You could knock a boy on the head just as easily. You could bloody his nose; you could rip off his opal pendant.
“Can you tell you’re getting wilder?” said the dagger.
“I can tell I’m getting hungrier,” I said.
Sometimes I thought about my talismans and wondered if I’d chosen the right three. Maybe I should have brought Oakheart’s collar, just in case—
“In case of what?” said the dagger.
In case I was caught again and taken straight to Buffalo Bend to testify. I’d need the beads as proof I’d been to the Fair.
Maybe I should have brought my key to buttercream cottage, just in case—
“In case of what?” said the dagger.
I didn’t answer. I’d never go back.
Was this what it was like to go on a pilgrimage? Walking for days and days to get to a sacred place? Usually people went to Blue Roses, but I was going away. Maybe I was going on an anti-pilgrimage.
That would be wild.
I followed the railroad. I hid in the grass. I slept in my coat. I was glad Rough Ricky had suggested I bring it with me. I was warm enough during the days, but it was chilly at night. I’d decided to make fires only in the middle of the day, when it was too light for anyone to notice. But it turned out I couldn’t make any fires at all. It would be too easy to set the grass on fire. I didn’t have the tools to dig a clearing and I couldn’t pull up the grasses. Their roots went down longer than I was tall.
I caught grasshoppers. A person can eat grasshoppers when she’s really hungry. She has to skewer them, then rotate the legs and the wings until they come off. Legs and wings can choke a person.
The person slashes at the legs and wings with the dagger, but the dagger has grown dangerously dull. The person cannot sharpen it, even when she holds the whetstone at twenty-two degrees.
The grasshoppers make her chew hard. Raw grasshoppers are mostly crunch. She has to listen to the dagger saying, “There’s a lot of iron in grasshoppers.”
She is sick of iron.
My britches had been too small, now they were getting big again.
“It’s you, getting smaller,” said the dagger. “Just like you were with Gentleman Jack.”
Why was I smaller with Gentleman Jack? Was it because he didn’t fill me up with information, like about Grandmother being a Songbird?
“No one cares anymore,” said the dagger. “No one cares that Grandmother was a Songbird.”
But I cared. All the times I’d recited the task rhyme, wondering how to get a Songbird, and there she was—she had always been tucked away in the lid of the pocket watch.
It was strange to think that Grandmother had been a Songbird—no, she was still a Songbird, even if she no longer whistled praises to the Blue Rose.
She’d been hiding in plain sight.
You couldn’t see Netherby Scar right away. You couldn’t see it until you came to the edge of it, which was because Netherby Scar did not go up. It went down. It was built into a canyon.
It was the opposite of what the Judge had said about Blue Roses: that a city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Netherby Scar was very hidden.
I saw only one person. He was pacing the edge of the canyon, smoking a cigar. When it got dark you’d be able to see the glowing ash. The land that surrounded the canyon had no trees or mountains; you’d be able to see the cigar a long way.
The railroad didn’t go into the canyon, though. It turned into a bridge and flew over. That made sense. A train would have a hard time climbing into a canyon and out again. I drew near the railroad bridge. Great wooden trestles pierced the mouth of the canyon; the tracks sat on top of them.
The cigar man stopped me. “This is a path.” He had a black eye. You could tell he’d had it for a while. It had turned yellow and sulky.
He didn’t mean the path the railroad made over the canyon. He meant a path that led into the canyon. It was broad and smooth, flowing from the canyon’s edge, past the trestles. You could ride a horse down the path, or even drive a carriage if you were a very good driver and kept the wheels dead center. You could drive right into the town of Netherby Scar, which hulked on the canyon floor below.
“I built the path,” said the ci
gar man. “I get paid for the path.”
But I had no money. I didn’t even have the penny I’d put in the collection plate. I should never have given it away. I had my opal pendant, but I couldn’t trade away my good luck.
I had Gentleman Jack’s opal pendant, but I couldn’t trade away his good luck, either.
“Two cents,” said the cigar man.
I didn’t have two cents.
The man shrugged and went back to pacing.
I’d have to climb. I had gravity on my side. I walked along the edge of the canyon, peering over. Perhaps the town had once fit into the palm of the canyon, but now it had grown too big. The newer buildings heaved themselves up the canyon walls, where they lay sprawled and gasping.
The good thing was that the canyon walls weren’t straight up and down. They angled out as they went toward the bottom. I turned around and eased myself over the edge. I slid my feet onto little crumbles of stone. I held on to scrubby trees and roots that grew from the canyon walls.
When the walls became too steep, I had to move sideways, like a crab. But crabs scuttled and scuttling was fast. I was slow.
I felt the cigar man’s eyes on my back. They pressed at me, until a sound came hallooing and bouncing into the Scar, reverberating in fingernail crevices, off razor-blade shelves. The sound doubled and tripled and clapped at my ears.
It was the cigar man, laughing. He’d seen what I’d just seen, which was that I couldn’t climb out again even if I wanted to. I had gotten to where I was by hanging from a root-hand, dropping to a scribbly shelf, and pressing my fingers into a cleft. The root-hand had bent down with me, but once I let it go, it sprang up. I couldn’t reach it anymore.
I pressed my cheek into the rock face. It panted back, cold and greasy. I un-scuttled just a little farther. My feet were amazed to find a shelf generous enough to hold them both.
My heart pounded against the rock. But I felt no answering heartbeat, as I had in the Indigo Heart. Maybe this place wasn’t really alive. Maybe it was the place of the dead.
I lay against the wall of the Scar. The slant was now less steep. The wall lay at about a forty-five-degree angle; you could rest at forty-five degrees.
I was lucky to have gotten there, because that’s when the train arrived. It shrieked a warning and rattled the tracks and shook the flesh off the canyon walls. The train was a streak of darkness; it was sparks flashing from the rails; it was bursts of earth and rock. A couple of stones hit me, hard. I flung my arms over my head. You could do that at forty-five degrees.
The train screamed and shrieked itself away. I lay for a few more minutes against the rock. The rock was yellow rather than the beige and pink of the first and second floors of the world. It smelled like rotten eggs, which was also the smell of sulfur, which was the smell of the underworld, which was appropriate because Netherby Scar was built into the underworld.
I ducked beneath a ledge and came face-to-face with a cluster of nests. They were cliff swallows’ nests, hanging like grapes from the underside of the ledge. They were empty, even though it was May. The cliff swallows should have returned already. They were probably late because this place—the place of the dead—was very cold. It was the kind of cold that got into your bones. Rough Ricky had been right about bringing a coat.
By the time the cliff swallows returned, I would have met Grandmother. By then I’d be at home.
Now I was near. I was very thirsty. When I reached the bottom, I’d have a long, refreshing drink of sulfur. I climbed among the houses that bloomed from the canyon walls. They were fine brick houses, the color of sin.
“Sin doesn’t have a color!” said the dagger.
Past the yellow houses now and toward a tower, which I thought must mark the center of town. The tower turned out to be a shrine, which was not so surprising, although the rest of the town center did surprise me. It looked nothing like Blue Roses. But why should it be like Blue Roses? It wasn’t a city on a hill. Why should it be made of neat parallel streets fronted with pink stone buildings? Why shouldn’t it be made of tilty wooden structures crammed along alleyways? Why shouldn’t the alleyways wriggle every which way? Why shouldn’t they be a howling of mangy dogs and gangs of half-naked children?
In one way, though, it was like Blue Roses: it had a Main Street. There were no street signs, but I recognized it right away because it was wider and less wriggly, and because the buildings were bigger and most of them were shops, and because it was the only street lined with sandbags to keep people out of the muck.
But there were no street signs, not that it mattered. I didn’t know the name of Grandmother’s street, but the picture of her emblem was in my pocket. When I showed it to someone, they’d tell me where Grandmother lived. That’s because Grandmother was Royal, and everyone knew them. I’d ask at one of the saloons, even though they had no names, just the word Saloon painted onto the walls themselves. Everywhere I looked, the word stared out at me with its two owl eyes: SalOOn.
I chose a saloon at random, pushed through the door, and found myself wishing Paloma were with me. I wished for her hot, wet breath. I wished for her kisses, which she doled out as sparingly as silver dollars.
But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, which meant there was no point wishing for what I couldn’t have.
“Wishes can’t be horses!” said the dagger.
“They can if I want them to,” I said. “Anyway, stop sticking me with exclamation marks.”
“You stick someone with a blade,” said the dagger.
The saloon looked different from the Sapphire. It was made of splintery dark wood that had shriveled into itself, like a plum left sitting too long. There were plenty of women walking about. They were young enough, and pretty enough, but I felt as though someone had crumpled their faces like paper bags, then smoothed them out again. You couldn’t really see the creases but you could tell the women were old, beneath their skin.
I stopped the prettiest one. She’d be the most like Flora. I took out the picture of the emblem and waited.
“No begging!” she said.
I wasn’t begging! I was probably doing the exact opposite, since I was looking for the Royals, and the Royals lived like kings, not paupers. “The design is my Grandmother’s emblem.”
“I don’t know about no emblem,” said the woman. She stretched her lips into a smile. She had surprisingly nice teeth, but her smile was too rubbery.
“Can you tell me where she lives?” I said.
“Beats me,” said the woman.
“But everyone knows my Grandmother,” I said. “Her last name is Royal. Everyone knows her emblem.”
“You sit here a spell,” she said, “and wait for my boys to come visiting. There’s nothing they don’t know about emblems.”
I didn’t like the way she said this. I stepped back, but she grabbed my wrist, stretching her lips again into that rubbery smile. This was one of the things about being a girl I didn’t understand: girls had to be careful of boys who came visiting.
I couldn’t throw the dagger anymore, but I could reach for it. My right hand was still very quick. The dagger all but leapt from the sheath. I pressed it to the woman’s wrist. Now came the thin line of blood; now she didn’t smile.
“See!” said the dagger. “I’m still sharp!”
“You’re not,” I said. “It’s just that the skin on people’s wrists is thin.”
I chose one more person to help me find Grandmother. I chose an old man sitting on the street because he had only one leg. I could outrun him and out-kick him, and out-everything him. I showed the old man the emblem but held it out of reach.
“Can’t see it too good,” he said.
But I wasn’t going to lean in closer, not so he could grab me.
“Where can I find the Sheriff?” I should have thought of this before. The Sheriff here would know Grandmother and Gentleman Jack, just the way the Sheriff in the Indigo Heart knew the Judge.
“Sheriff?” said the old
man. “The last Sheriff got his badge at eleven o’clock in the forenoon and he was dead by lunch. T’ain’t too healthy to be sheriff around here.”
Quick as a lizard’s tongue, his hand snapped out and grabbed my ankle. I swallowed back my surprise. I turned my surprise into a boot to the face. I turned my surprise into a crunch. But he laughed—he laughed! His crab-apple fingers caught at the blood streaming from his nose. He lapped it from his fingers and laughed.
There I was, stuck in Netherby Scar. I was in the town center, and the town center was in the palm of the canyon. And the palm of the canyon was a scribble of lines, like the palm of a hand, but not nearly as organized. Think, Starling! Grandmother’s house was made of yellow bricks. I’d passed through a clump of yellow-brick houses on my way to Main Street. I could walk back to the clump, or I could—
It was easy to find the Shrine in this town of humpback houses. All I had to do was look up. It was easy to slip inside the Shrine, easy to talk to the priestess, because she spoke to me first. “No weapons shall be allowed in this place, dedicated to the Blue Rose,” she said, in a bored sort of way. “Surrender them here, or they shall fail to prosper.”
The opal blazed into warmth. That was how it spoke to me, wasn’t it? It had spoken to me three times before, twice on the Feast of the Blue Rose and once in the General Store. It spoke by growing cold and also by growing hot. Cold was for Stop. Warm was for Go.
It had grown cold when I’d been deciding to sneak the dagger into the Blue Rose’s Shrine. Cold was for Stop: don’t sneak in the dagger!
It had grown hot when I was deciding to drop the penny into the collection plate. Hot was for Go: give up the penny!
“You think the opal wanted you to put the penny into the collection plate?” said the dagger.
The Robber Girl Page 30