The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  “And Gerda agreed not to mention it in the meantime?”

  “Gerda was pretty dubious, actually. But she hates talking so much at the moment that she nodded.”

  “And will you tell Christine?”

  “Oh, yeah. I have to, I know that. Gerda will check up on me.” He lit a cigarette and blew out a long stream of smoke. “I’ll tell Christine before we get married, give her a chance to back out.”

  “She won’t back out.”

  “I hope not.”

  They walked in silence a few moments, then Mayfridh had to ask, “So, you’ve decided not to take up my offer?”

  “Mayfridh, I—”

  “Did you give it ten seconds’ thought? Like you promised?”

  “I did. I gave it more than ten seconds. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.”

  “And still you decided not to come with me?”

  He swept his arm around him. “I belong here.”

  “I know.” Mayfridh refused to give up hope; she might convince him yet. At least he’d admitted to thinking about it.

  “I have to take care of Christine.” He shook his head. “I’m not looking forward to seeing her face when I tell her about you and me. Guilt is a terrible feeling, Mayfridh. It’s like a kind of nausea that never goes away.”

  “If you come with me, you’ll forget all your guilt. You’ll forget Christine, the accident, the betrayal . . .”

  “Don’t, Mayfridh,” he said. “I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of everything.”

  “Ewigkreis is very beautiful,” she said. “It’s—”

  “No. No. Here, I’m alive. There, I’d be a shadow.”

  As will I.

  He led her down the street behind Vogelwald-Allee, into the park near Hotel Mandy-Z. Jude had seen Hexebart run in there to hide, and Mayfridh hoped she might be there again, waiting for Mandy to return.

  “That’s where I last saw her,” Jude said, indicating a tall elm. “She just seemed to disappear.”

  “She can climb trees very quickly and hide in them, although not so easily now that all the leaves are falling.” Mayfridh thought about the birch outside the great hall. When would the last leaf drop? Would she be pulled back, empty-handed, to Ewigkreis? The thought sickened her with dread. “She also likes to hide in bushes and hedges, so we’ll have to check them all.”

  “What do I do if I find her? I mean, what if she turns me into a frog or something?”

  “She can’t turn you into a frog. If you find her, grab her as hard as you can.”

  “But—”

  “Whatever she does to you, I can undo. Once she’s in my presence, I command her magic again. She has to do as I say.”

  They began the search. The grass was overgrown and Mayfridh’s feet sank into the bed of sodden leaves.

  “And what happens if we don’t find her?”

  Mayfridh shook her head. “We have to find her.”

  “Would it be very bad?”

  “She has the royal magic that our world runs on. Without it, we’ll be caught in winter forever. Endless night, frozen ground, nothing will grow. Our race will die out.”

  Jude stared at her, astonished. “I had no idea it was so serious.”

  “We still have time.”

  “She could be anywhere in the world. She could have jumped a train to Frankfurt by now.”

  “No, she can’t go too far. We’re bound by the passage until it closes.”

  For an hour they searched the park with no success. Mayfridh taught Jude to look for the little signs that Hexebart had been present—bent twigs, dropped threads or spells—but there was no sign of her. A headache had started throbbing over her right eye. Perhaps it was worth going back to Ewigkreis briefly to take the remaining spells from Christine. Hexebart could hide from a searching spell, but magic might pick up the signs of her movement in the Real World where their eyes couldn’t.

  Jude touched her elbow gently. “She’s not here. I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go out to Zehlendorf. She might have returned to my mother’s house. We can search the streets out there.”

  “Sure, if you like.”

  “And then we’ll scour the newspapers for reports of strange events—anything that might be related to Hexebart. We’ll get Fabiyan and Gerda to help. Christine might even be back soon.” Mayfridh felt a sudden jolt of guilt as she realized she still hadn’t told Jude about Christine’s injury. Not because she was deliberately withholding it; she had simply forgotten.

  Christine let herself into Hotel Mandy-Z and hung her coat on the hook. Her back was throbbing and she needed painkillers and a soft place to lie, but she couldn’t walk past Gerda’s door without stopping to undo Hexebart’s enchantment. Poor Gerda had suffered for days, and must have been frantic when Mayfridh arrived without spells to help her. Christine had the last four spells in the pocket of her jeans and she patted them lightly with her silver hand. She knew she had to give them back, and wondered at her extreme reluctance to do so. Surely she should be happy to put all this faery magic behind her and try to lead a normal life. But then, what was normal about her life? The chronic pain, the missing hand, the fiancé who loved somebody else, the still-unaccessed multimillion-dollar trust fund?

  She knocked lightly at Gerda’s door, then pushed it open. Gerda sat on the sofa, her knees drawn up, a bucket positioned between them.

  “Hi,” Christine said. “Don’t say a word. I have spells to fix you.”

  Gerda’s eyes rounded in surprise and excitement. Christine closed the door behind her and approached, sitting on the coffee table in front of Gerda. She fished in her pocket for a spell. Gerda reached out to touch the silver hand, her eyebrows shooting up in shock.

  “It’s a long story. Let’s fix you first,” Christine said, balancing a spell on her palm. She wasn’t exactly sure what to say, and bit her lip as she thought about it. Moments passed and Gerda began to look worried. Christine took a deep breath, and said, “Speak normally.” She couldn’t be more specific than that. She blew on the spell; it dissolved.

  Gerda tentatively opened her mouth and said, “Did it work?”

  Christine laughed. “I guess it did. No bugs and lizards.”

  Gerda threw the bucket aside and clasped Christine against her in a hug. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.” She sat back again and indicated the silver hand. “What happened to your hand?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Immanuel Zweigler took it.” Christine told Gerda the whole story, while Gerda shook her head in anger and disbelief.

  “I’m so sorry, Christine.” Gerda took the silver hand in her own and traced her fingertips over the carved vines and birds. “This is beautiful.”

  “It’ll probably tarnish.”

  Gerda smiled. “I’m glad you can joke about it.”

  “What’s the option?”

  “Revenge.”

  “Revenge?”

  “On Mandy. He can’t get away with this. He deserves to be punished.”

  Christine leaned forward, puzzled. “What can we do to him in this world? Here, there are police and courts to worry about.”

  “We’ve got magic.”

  “Do we even know where he is? I presume he’d be in hiding now that we all know what a monster he is.”

  “All the others think he’s disappeared, but I don’t.” Gerda lifted a finger to the ceiling. “I think he’s up there.”

  Christine shuddered. “Here in the hotel?”

  “I think he’s hiding up there. I read his diary. He needs that boning vat, he needs to be near his sculpture. While they’re all frantically searching for the witch, I think she’s up there too. She’s magic. She can probably cast a silent spell.”

  “And what did Mayfridh say when you suggested this?”

  “I haven’t spoken to anyone about it. I hated speaking, and . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know if I like Mayfridh anymore.”

  Christine was unne
rved. “Why? What did she do?”

  Gerda tapped Christine’s silver hand. “For one thing, she’s told nobody that this happened to you.”

  “What? Not even Jude?”

  “Do you think she forgot? That’s bad enough. Or maybe she didn’t want Jude to know for other reasons.”

  Christine narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “What reasons?”

  “Oh, who knows?” Gerda waved a dismissive hand, clearly fearful that she’d said too much.

  Christine sat back on the coffee table, heavyhearted. She understood what Gerda meant: Mayfridh knew that Jude’s love for Christine relied on a healthy dose of pity. If Jude’s deepest compassion were aroused for Christine, it would dull his feelings for Mayfridh. “I feel like such an idiot sometimes, Gerda.”

  “She’ll be gone soon.” Gerda tapped her knee. “But don’t trust her.”

  Christine raised her shoulders helplessly. “I . . . What difference does it make?”

  “Forget about her. Let’s concentrate on Mandy. We’ll have a meeting, all of us, tonight. We’ll decide what to do about him. We’ll stop him from hurting anyone ever again.” Gerda stood up and helped Christine to her feet. “I’ll organize it. Meet here at seven o’clock. Tell Jude. We’ll go somewhere nearby, somewhere Hexebart and Mandy won’t hear us. In the meantime, go upstairs and rest. Your back must be hurting.”

  “It is.”

  “Do you need a hand?”

  “No, I can manage. Thanks, Gerda.”

  She left Gerda with her plans to lead a mutiny, and took herself upstairs to her own apartment.

  “Jude?” she called as she let herself in. No answer. He was probably out with Mayfridh, looking for Hexebart. She dropped her keys on the kitchen table and went to the sofa. The curtains were drawn against the gray daylight. Christine slumped down among the soft cushions and closed her eyes. Relax. Outside, traffic noise and distant trains, two men with loud voices unloading a van, and a nail gun on a nearby building site. No real quiet. She opened her eyes and gazed at the carved silver hand, choking on a sob.

  Unexpectedly, a noise deep inside the apartment.

  Christine sat up, ears straining. A floorboard creaked. Footsteps?

  “Jude?” Her heart hammered. What if it were Mandy, waiting for her, waiting to take the other hand? She leapt from the couch, unplugged a heavy lamp, hefted it in her good hand, and tiptoed toward the bedroom. The door was ajar a few inches. “Who’s there?” she called, forcing a note of bravery into her voice.

  “It’s me.” A little voice, old and husky.

  Christine recoiled. “Who is it? Get out of my apartment.”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  Hexebart. It was Hexebart. Christine looked at the lamp in her hand. It wasn’t proof against magic. “Come out of there. Let me see you.”

  Four crooked fingers curled around the door and slowly pulled it open. Hexebart peeked out, a wicked glint in her eye. “Hello, Christine.”

  “What are you doing here?” Christine knew she should detain Hexebart, but was frightened to move any closer.

  “I came to say something to you.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “I know something about Jude.”

  “Jude?” How did she even know who Jude was?

  Hexebart clicked her tongue and pointed at Christine. “I think you know. I think you know—deep under deep—what’s wrong, why it’s wrong.”

  Christine was bewildered and frightened. Where was Mayfridh? Should she call out for Gerda to come and help? “You have to go back to Ewigkreis,” she said. “Mayfridh needs the royal magic.”

  Hexebart’s face crinkled up in anger. “Why should I care what the preening pig needs? I didn’t come here to talk about her, I came here to talk about Jude.”

  “What about Jude?” Was this to do with Jude and Mayfridh?

  “He’s a liar.”

  Christine shook her head, baffled. But before she could say a word—

  “And a killer.”

  “A killer?”

  The witch revealed her stained and crooked teeth in a smile. “Oh, yes. Yes. You know who he killed, you know.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Hexebart cackled and her long bony finger pointed to Christine’s chest. “Your mother and father are dead.”

  An awful tide of dread began to rise up inside her. “Yes,” she managed to gasp.

  “Jude killed them.”

  Christine felt her lips moving, heard the word “No!” shouted in the dark hallway, but a searing shock of reality—an overwhelming moment when the knowledge of her own existence grasped her and shook her—blunted her senses and sent her pitching to her knees. The lamp crashed from her hand, cracking in two on the floor. When she looked up, Hexebart was gone. And she knew. Hexebart was right: Christine had already known.

  Deep under deep.

  Mayfridh saw Christine and the artists already assembled around a table under the bright lights of a fast-food restaurant. They had arrived together, and Mayfridh had walked alone from her hotel. Gerda’s phone call had been brief and terse: “Meet us there at seven-thirty. Don’t even think of coming by Mandy-Z first.”

  Mayfridh’s first surprise was that Christine was back. Her second—and it should have been no surprise—was that Jude wouldn’t meet her eye. No doubt he wondered why Mayfridh hadn’t told him about Christine’s injury.

  “Hello, everybody,” she said, taking the seat next to Pete. Empty food wrappers were piled in front of him on a plastic tray. “Christine, when did you get back?”

  “A few hours ago,” she mumbled.

  Christine seemed more hunched and skinny than ever before, almost as if she had folded in on herself. Was it the pain? The loss of her hand? Or had Jude already told her their guilty secret? The first glimmer of gladness that she would forget all this stole over her. “And how are things in Ewigkreis?”

  “Eisengrimm is recovering well, but winter’s very close. Eisengrimm said a week.”

  Steel fingers constricted around her heart. “How is your hand?”

  Christine held up her left wrist. Attached to it was a beautifully carved silver hand. “I have no idea as I don’t know where it is.”

  A tense silence followed as all eyes at the table watched to see what Mayfridh would do. “Of course. I’m very sorry.”

  Pete slurped on his shake and dropped the empty container on the table with a satisfied sigh. It broke the tension. “Come on, Gerda,” he said, “what’s your devious plan and why are you revealing it here?”

  “We’re meeting here because I don’t think it’s safe to talk back at the hotel,” Gerda said.

  “What do you mean?” Fabiyan asked.

  “Because I think Mandy and Hexebart are there.”

  “We haven’t heard them or seen them,” Jude said.

  “I’ve seen Hexebart,” Christine said, and every pair of eyes turned on her, shocked.

  “What?” Mayfridh gasped. “You’ve seen her? Since you’ve been back? Why didn’t you tell me? Did you try to catch her?”

  “She was in my apartment but she ran when I came in. I didn’t try to catch her because I figured I’d lost enough body parts already.”

  “Did she say anything?” Jude asked.

  “Like I said, she ran when I arrived.”

  “It doesn’t matter that we haven’t heard them,” Gerda added.

  “Yes, yes,” Mayfridh agreed. “She could have enchanted the apartment. It’s easy to do. I should have thought of that.”

  “We don’t know for sure they’re up there,” Pete said.

  “No, not for sure,” Gerda conceded, “but if they are, we can’t risk them hearing our plans.”

  “What plans?” Jude shook the ice at the bottom of his drink in a nervous gesture.

  “The plans we’re going to make tonight,” Gerda said, “to stop Mandy from hurting anyone ever again.”

  “Revenge on Ma
ndy isn’t as important as capturing Hexebart,” Mayfridh said. “My world is at stake, the survival of my people.”

  Gerda shrugged. “My guess is that Hexebart is hiding with Mandy, right? She thinks you won’t come near her as long as he’s there to protect her. But, if he’s out of the picture, she has nowhere else to hide. You can do what you want with her.”

  “What you mean ‘out of the picture,’ Gerda?” Fabiyan said, a ner-vous laugh on his lips. “It sounds like you intend to murder him.”

  “Murder him? No. I’m not suggesting anything illegal. I’m suggesting something . . . unnatural.”

  “Like?”

  “Mayfridh here can put a spell on him. Think about it. We can turn him into a frog. He can’t kill any more faeries, then. He can’t cut Christine’s other hand off, then.”

  Mayfridh spread her hands in protest. “I can’t turn him into a frog.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I don’t have that kind of magic. Even Hexebart couldn’t do it. Only a dedicated sorceress, someone who’d spent her whole life on . . . It’s preposterous to suggest it.”

  “Don’t you have a sorceress back home who can come and do it for us?”

  “No. Nobody like that lives in Ewigkreis. We’re peaceful people. We use magic for little things to bring harmony and balance the seasons, to alter moods and make small enchantments. Hexebart did about the worst she could do to you, Gerda. Besides, I don’t have any magic.” She turned to Christine. “Unless you brought spells from Ewigkreis?”

  Christine reached into her purse and pulled out three spells, which she lined up on the table between the empty wrappers and cups.

  “Three?” Mayfridh said. “You only have three?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “I used them.”

  “You used them? For what?”

  Three spells weren’t enough to do anything. She wanted at least two to help her find Hexebart—in case Gerda was wrong and the witch was hiding elsewhere. The other she would prefer to keep spare. What if she met with Mandy and needed a protection spell?

  “I used them. I had to fix Gerda—you couldn’t help her. I had to anchor myself in Ewigkreis while I recovered.”