His words cut through the haze of my anger. I thought of the blurry figure from my deepest dreams, a sweet voice, and the scent of violets and rosemary.
“When did she die?” I whispered.
“Just a few months ago! Not long. Not long at all.”
Just a few months . . . To think that all this time I’d had a mother and a family, that if only the scarecrow had walked faster and the letter had arrived sooner I might have been welcomed home as a daughter instead of a legal term in a sheaf of papers.
Or you’d be dead too, I thought. Frozen over your dinner and dripping stone from the end of your nose, and your ghost flitting about in the rafters.
“What happened to me?” I asked. We were back in the morning room, Mrs. Cantanker, Mr. Grenouille, and me, seated in front of the windows and watching the sun skim in a slow arc across the tops of the trees. “Why was I only found now, after they’d died?”
Mr. Grenouille’s face sagged. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I spent the last ten years searching for you, up mountains and down rivers, into woods and deep caves. I’ve been everywhere, followed every lead. But every road ended in failure, and with every passing year, my hope dwindled. Were you kidnapped? Lost? Dead? No one had the slightest idea. All we knew was that on the fourth of March, in the Year of the Wild Boar, you vanished.”
Vanished? But why? Who had left me, covered in soot and my hair full of twigs, on the orphanage doorstep? I wished I could remember. Something had happened, something in between my life as the beloved daughter and my life as an orphan. But what?
Mrs. Cantanker swirled her tea and made a small, bored tch with her tongue, as if settling herself in for a tale she had heard many times before. Mr. Grenouille’s gaze turned to the window. “You were still so small then, barely two winters old,” he said. “You’d gone out to play in the garden with your little dog. I was with your mother in the study, drawing up some papers. We heard you laughing, and the pup barking. And then all went quiet. A nanny saw you walking toward the woods a few minutes past three o’clock, your hand outstretched as if someone was just ahead. But she swore there was no one there.”
I shuddered. I couldn’t remember any of this. My memories began at the orphanage, where I woke up cold in the morning and went to bed filthy and tired from working the enormous, clanking, wool-spinning machines. It made me feel odd, hearing of nannies and castles and witches. It sounded like the story of a different girl, someone exceptionally interesting, not Mrs. Boliver’s maid.
“We turned this world inside out in search of you,” Mr. Grenouille continued. “And the next world too. We sent out affidavits into the spirit realm, swore terrible revenge on any dead thing that did not accommodate the search. We did not find so much as a shoe or button. Not a single sign pointed to where you might have gone. It was as if you had vanished into thin air.”
“It was very sad to see,” Mrs. Cantanker murmured. “Your poor father . . . driven to distraction with grief. He died in a shipwreck six years ago, on his way to fumigate a haunted wood. But I suppose one saves oneself all sorts of trouble by dying.”
I frowned at her, but the words caused a memory to bloom in my mind: firelight, the smell of oak and tobacco, me sitting on someone’s knee, someone very tall and wearing a scratchy coat. Papa?
“And your mother . . . ,” Mr. Grenouille said in a trembling little voice. “Georgina never stopped looking. She believed your disappearance to be an act of revenge, planned by some dead thing. I tend to agree. The Brydgeborn family has battled many horrible creatures over the centuries. They have disturbed things deep in the spirit realm, things that do not forget and do not forgive. One of them might have hidden you away with some spell, shielding you from all our powers of detection.”
“But you did find me,” I said. “Eventually.”
“And entirely by accident!” Mr. Grenouille exclaimed delightedly, though he took one look at my blank, sad face and deflated again. “A tip came in from beyond the veil, a letter written in some nasty, sticky ink, saying to look for you in Cricktown. Now, as you can imagine, I fed a scarecrow a drop of Brydgeborn blood, wound a lock of hair from your childhood through its rib cage, and sent it there at once. Three weeks later, it returned with news that it had delivered the letter to the owner of the lock of hair, Miss Zita Brydgeborn herself! I don’t know if I believed it. I don’t know if you believed it. Perhaps we’d all given up on each other by then. But as I waited for you to arrive, I became rather certain it was you. . . .”
Mr. Grenouille took my hand, his little eyes searching my face. “I’m sorry it took so long,” he said. “But you’re here now. You’re alive. You must be very careful, Zita. Whatever came for you all those years ago, whatever killed your family, may well still be lurking nearby. You must begin your training at once.”
I pulled my hand away. The room felt suddenly stuffy, as if it were full of people I could not see, all peering over my shoulder and breathing down my neck. I looked out the window, across the garden to where the woods rose sharp and dark against the flat white sky. They seemed familiar for a moment, as if I’d sat here before, looking upon this exact view.
My dog’s name was Teenzy, short for Tintinnabulum. . . . I was out in the garden when my old life ended.
An image flashed across my mind: something tall and thin standing just inside the shadow of the woods, and me in my white pinafore, dwarfed by those vaulting trees, a pale smudge against the dark. A little black dog was growling behind my ankles. We were watching the figure sway, one long arm outstretched toward us but never touching the light.
The figure in the woods sang to me in a voice like winter, like black water stirred suddenly by a ripple. I’d started toward it curiously. Teenzy had barked, shrill and desperate. And then all had fallen still.
The snapping of buckles from Mr. Grenouille’s briefcase brought me to my senses. He was moving briskly, spreading papers across a cluttered writing desk, procuring a bottle of fine blue ink and a poppy-colored quill.
“Come, Zita. Sign here. It’s almost midday, and I really don’t want to trouble you any longer than is absolutely necessary.”
It occurred to me that we must be quite an unpleasant family to deal with, and Mr. Grenouille no doubt wanted to see the end of the matter.
I sat down at the desk and picked up the quill. I scanned the lines of the document quickly, catching words such as “bequeathed,” “woods,” “castle and outbuildings,” “accounts.”
It may seem that I had no choice at all in that moment, that the decision was an obvious one, but I hesitated all the same. “A true Blackbird is graced with cunning, sly wits, a sharp tongue, and the power to repel the evils of night and fog. But! In return, they bear a great burden and are feared by both the living and the dead.”
So it was a crossroads for me, a gallows towering over it and a hawthorn tree hunched at its edge. I could go back to Cricktown, dust and polish for the rest of my life, listen to the radio box tell the weather while Mrs. Boliver exclaimed, “Rain! Rain on Wednesday! Oh, my joints.” And then I could fade away, peaceful as you like, an old woman who’d never caused any trouble, never witnessed anything too dreadful, and never done anything too terrible or too good.
Mr. Grenouille smiled at me encouragingly.
Mrs. Cantanker pinched her mouth into a thin, bloodless line.
I dipped the quill, and very carefully, making sure I did not wobble or place a single letter wrong, I wrote my name on the paper.
Chapter Five
JUST like that I went from being a penniless housemaid to the mistress of Blackbird Castle, Pragast Wood, and several desolate mountain peaks, as well as a bank vault in Manzemir in which resided hundreds of thousands of gold galleons and, according to Mr. Grenouille, a unicorn horn and several priceless medallions stolen from the seventh circle of hell. But to me, being a sentimental creature, the greatest gift was my name.
With a few splatters of ink, I had become part of something. I ha
d been given roots and history, a place in a family that did good and battled the darknesses of the world. I wasn’t sure yet whether I deserved that place. I wasn’t sure I belonged in this castle, with its grand spires and peaked roofs, and its hundreds of magic-drenched rooms. I felt I still had to prove myself, and that Blackbird Castle was waiting for me to do so. But I was a witch, and with the sudden flood of certainty that accompanied this knowledge, I felt capable of anything.
“Well,” said Mrs. Cantanker as we stood facing each other in the entrance hall. Mr. Grenouille had departed, whistling away through the gardens and down the wooded path into the valley. “I suppose you’re to be a Blackbird, then.”
“I suppose so,” I said, trying not to grin ear to ear.
Mrs. Cantanker frowned. And then her expression shifted, and suddenly it was no longer cruel or haughty. It was weary and resigned, a look that said, I am tired, and this is not what I want for my life, but I am determined to do my best. I had worn that expression myself on many a grim morning at Mrs. Boliver’s, when the floorboards froze my feet and I’d not gotten half the sleep I would have liked. It was a look I could respect.
“I will remain here as your guardian,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her. “I will supervise your education and prepare you as best I can for the life of a Blackbird. Your mother would have wanted that.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m awfully grateful—”
“I have no need for your gratitude,” she snapped, and whatever sympathy I’d kindled for her went out in a puff of smoke. “You’re the most unfit Blackbird ever to set foot in this house. Years behind in your training, gawky, ungainly, unrefined. But you’re all we have, and life does like to play its little jokes. . . . You’ll attend lessons every day. You’re to come down to breakfast at the bell and eat dinner with me in the Amber Room at seven. And keep away from the servants. They’re superstitious villagers and will have nothing good to tell you.” She eyed me up and down, her gaze seeming to pick me apart like a bit of roast beef. “Oh, and we’ll have to do something about that hair. You look like a paintbrush.”
Better than looking like a great big bully, I thought, fighting the urge to shrink into my collar. Plenty of people had made fun of me at the orphanage—for my hair, and my awkward height, and my penchant for keeping small animals under my bed. And not just the other children. The nuns had too, and Mrs. Boliver, and the insults always felt worse coming from grown-ups, because it made one realize that no one ever changed much or became much better.
But I was not going to give Mrs. Cantanker the satisfaction of seeing her words hit their mark. Instead I mustered all my courage and said, “I know I’m not what you were expecting. I’m not beautiful or clever, and I’m not a proper Blackbird. But I’ll work hard. I always have. And I . . .” I swallowed. “I will associate with the servants. They’ve been much kinder to me then you’ve been.”
We stood staring at each other across the checkerboard floor, and for a moment I was sure she was going to slap me. But in the end she simply nodded slowly and I nodded back, and we parted not as friends—not even remotely—but perhaps as a little closer to equals.
As soon as Mrs. Cantanker was out of sight, I burst into a run, galloping all the way back to my room. I closed the door and leaned against it, taking a deep breath. Then I screeched with delight and kicked off my shoes, lying flat on my back on the great fur in front of the fireplace. I stared up at the ceiling, my sumptuous dress spread around me, admiring the dark beams and paintings of sky and trees and winged creatures. The white fur against my neck was springy as a cloud, and I wondered what strange animal had lost its life to make the rug.
My mind began to wander, darting from thought to thought. I wondered if the Brydgeborns had hunted in other lands than these, if they had traveled to the spirit realm and traversed it in carriages and boats. . . .
After a while, I rose and lit a candle with the flint box on the mantel. Then I set to exploring every nook and cranny of my new domain.
I could tell all sorts of things about Greta simply by digging about in her closet. Everything was arranged just so at the front, but in the back was an enormous mess of piled-up dresses and empty candy tins, shoes with no partners, coats with no buttons, and an old stuffed rabbit in a faded dress that looked as if someone had spent years chewing on one arm in particular. I knew that meant it was very well loved indeed.
Everything else in the room had been scrupulously cleaned. The drawers in the nightstand had been emptied. Even the floor under the bed had been swept and polished, and all of the pictures seemed to have been exchanged for new ones. I could see where the old ones had hung, the faded squares on the wallpaper much larger than the nondescript landscapes hanging there now. I dug about under the mattress, hoping for some further hint as to who Greta had been. All I found were several novels and a list tucked between the headboard and the wall.
Read Cavendish’s Compendium of Spirits, chapter nine
Find pearl earring
Tell John about suspicions
“Well?” said a voice, and I almost leaped out of my skin. I whirled, expecting to see someone in the room. But there was no one.
“Hello?” I said, turning a full circle. The pictures, the closet standing open, a marble bust of a rather irritable-looking gentleman in a tricorn hat—
“I said, ‘Well?’ Not hello,” the voice snapped, and I whirled again, still utterly confused. The voice had a very clipped, no-nonsense tone to it, and it also sounded chilly and echo-y, as if the speaker were standing at the end of a long glass tube.
My eyes alighted once more on the marble bust. I crept toward it slowly. And then its stone eyebrows raised, and its mouth quirked, and it glared at me.
“As in, ‘Well, what are you going to do about your family, which is currently cursed to eternal petrification down in the dining room?’”
I flinched. Then I circled the bust, examining it for strings or wires. “Who are you?” I asked, eyeing its tricorn hat and mustache.
“I am a marble bust. But I used to be a Telurian prince. My spirit was bound to this effigy one hundred and fourteen years ago, when I angered one of the twelve kings of the underworld. I was forced to flee, and now I am doomed to cling to it for all eternity, or at least until I feel very confident the king is not going to find me and devour my soul, which I don’t think will be any time soon. Anyway, I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, coming back around to face the marble prince. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing: languishing about on a fur rug and staring at the ceiling is not the path to enlightenment.”
“I know that,” I said. “But I only just got here, and I know hardly anything about being a witch—”
“Excuses,” he said. “How d’you suppose you’ll learn? By pretending! By pretending so convincingly that you trick yourself and everyone else into believing it. Because in the end, we’re all only pretending to be the things people think we are, or pretending to be something else, or looking like a marble bust, when really we’re not a marble bust at all.”
I stared at the prince, waiting for him to get to the point.
“You must break the curse,” he said finally. “You must bring your family back to life and catch their murderer. I see no other solution.”
“Do you know who killed them?” I asked hopefully. “Mrs. Cantanker said it was a ghost—”
“I’m a marble head confined to my pedestal. I don’t know anything.”
“Then how do you know they’re dead in the first place?”
“Because sometimes people whisper things in my general vicinity. And just the other day, oh, did I hear some exciting whispers . . . I did indeed! About a spell called ephinadym mulsion. About how the last Blackbird was going to be put in this very room for safekeeping.”
“You mean for sleeping.”
“I mean for safekeeping. Tha
t’s you, I suppose. The last Blackbird . . . hmm. Not much like your mother, are you?”
I squinted at the prince. “Did you know her?”
“Alas, I did not. I did not even have the honor of seeing her. My eyes are marble. They gather no light. But I heard her from time to time. . . .” The prince’s tone became dreamy. “Her voice was always so beautiful, like the song of a nightingale, or the wind in a rosebush. Your voice is not beautiful at all.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes, it sounds like a dog chewing a stick. Now, as I was saying. Talk to the servants. They are an intriguing lot. Make friends with them. And ask them if they know anything about a certain something called the League of the Blue Spider, and a certain witch named Magdeboor. See what they say.”
I thought about that. “And what about the curse? Do you know how I can break it?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” said the marble prince. “Now go! Shoo! Be gone!”
“This is my room—” I started to say, but the marble prince dismissed me with a shake of his head. “I was here long before you, young lady,” he said, and began to reminisce about distant times as if I weren’t there at all, about how he had once played cards with the Tentacle King of Dreng and not exactly won, but at least lost very heroically. In the end I put one of Greta’s petticoats over his head and turned him to face the wall. Then I set off in search of answers.
I found Bram in a dusty corridor, balancing on a chair and attempting to stuff a crack in the cornice with straw.
“Mice?” I asked, stopping next to him.
Bram shook his head. “Triggles,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Little wretches. I patch up one of their passageways, and they dig a dozen more.”
I wanted to ask him what triggles were, but I also didn’t want to seem stupid, so I did the logical thing and assumed they were pests at least tangentially related to mice. “Have you tried tea leaves from the bottom of the pot?” I suggested. “At Mrs. Boliver’s, where I used to work, I’d scrape them up and plop them all over the shelves in the pantry to keep the crawlies out. Worked like a charm.”
Cinders and Sparrows Page 4