Cinders and Sparrows

by Stefan Bachmann

  Minnifer nodded. “I still remember the day she arrived. She came in a great black coach, splendid and tall in her black cloak and shiny shoes, and it was all the orphan mistress could do to keep her from taking every one of the children back to the castle. Georgina couldn’t bear to leave the others, you see, in that gray old house, with all of them pressed up against the windows, watching us rumble away to good food and warm fires. For every month after that, the orphanage got a chest of delicacies, and thick blankets, and dozens and dozens of new coats every winter. That was Georgina Brydgeborn for you, always trying to help everyone at once. . . . But I suppose being good is no guarantee that life will be good back. She worked all those years banishing troublesome spirits and making sure the lands of the living were safe. And it went to pieces before her eyes.”

  “Because of me?” I asked. “Because I was kidnapped?”

  “Not just because of you,” said Minnifer kindly. “Things have been going downhill for witches for ages. Maybe the other families wouldn’t say so, but it’s true. They’ve become like violins in museums, or toys on high shelves. Quite useless. They don’t remember how to fight the dead. And yet the dead are still out there, perhaps closer than ever.”

  I remembered Mr. Grenouille’s words in the morning room as the light spilled in between the drapes: “Whatever came for you all those years ago, whatever killed your family, may well still be lurking nearby.”

  “Have either of you ever heard of someone called the Butcher of Beydun?” I asked, picking at the crust of my apricot tart.

  “Heard of him?” said Minnifer. “Everyone’s heard of him, though we all hope we’ll never meet him. He’s the king of a city deep in the fogs of the underworld, a city of ash and cinders, all black and burning and full of lost souls. He’s the one Magdeboor brought back with her from her travels. But he’s long gone. He was banished when she was burned up in the north wing.”

  Long gone? I wondered. Only he’s not. He was here ten years ago to take me away. And if he’s found his way back, how far behind him is Magdeboor?

  Later, after I had said good night to Bram and Minnifer and was crossing the great hall toward the stairs, I heard a sound from the front doors. They were standing open, framing the woods and the wild dusk and two figures on the steps, silhouetted against the pale branches in the garden.

  One was most certainly Mrs. Cantanker. The other was small and hunched. I pressed myself into the shadows of the dragon staircase, straining to hear what they were saying. All I caught was Mrs. Cantanker’s low purr and the occasional coo from the stranger. And then Mrs. Cantanker turned, and I saw she was holding a candle over a little wheelbarrow, or perhaps a wagon. It was heaped with treasures: pictures in gilt frames, silver saucers, and a long fur-lined dressing gown stitched with hibiscus flowers.

  Mrs. Cantanker handed the wagon over, and I saw the second figure clearly for a moment—a pale, sharp-faced little man in riding boots and black coattails cloven like the hoof of a goat. He bowed to Mrs. Cantanker and doffed his hat. Then he bumped the wheelbarrow down the steps and creaked away toward the woods, whistling a jaunty, slightly grating little tune.

  Mrs. Cantanker returned inside and closed the doors, looking back over her shoulder as she slid home the bolt. She passed within three feet of my hiding place, her expression stony. The light of her candle danced across the elegant bones of her face and winked in the jewels at her throat and on her fingers, particularly on a blue ring with a tiny spider etched into its depths. She did not see me, watching from the shadows.

  Chapter Nine

  BY my third week in Blackbird Castle, I was beginning to wonder whether Vikers’s arrival, and the fact that I could see spirits from beyond the veil, had simply been bouts of extraordinary good luck.

  “You’re the worst witch I’ve ever met,” Mrs. Cantanker told me one afternoon, as I tried desperately to reverse a spell I’d cast. It had come out wrong, and instead of all the toads in the pond becoming my friends and doing my bidding, they had gone to war with one another, charging in glistening green battalions across the lawn, their croaks echoing up to the tower tops. “How will you get ghosts to follow you into the underworld if you can’t even get toads to follow you around a muddy puddle?”

  She waited, as if expecting a reply, but there was none, and she knew it, and so I stood there forlornly, avoiding her gaze. At last I mumbled something about how I’d get it right next time.

  “Next time . . . ,” Mrs. Cantanker sniffed. “There is no next time for a witch. What do you suppose an attacking moorwhistler will do if you tell it you’ll get it right next time? It will eat you, that’s what! No, Zita, you are either capable, or you are not, and I’m beginning to think you’re incapable of anything except stumbling about looking belligerent.”

  I stared at her, a bit stunned. Then the little flame kindled in my belly, and I was angry.

  I am capable, I thought. I was sure I could do every task she gave me if only she would stop calling me quite so many names. She could go from whispers to rage within seconds, and when she raged I became flustered, and when I became flustered, I made mistakes, which made her rage more, which in the end left us both quite exhausted. But I was determined to improve. If I became a great Blackbird, I could break the ephinadym mulsion curse. I could try to bring my mother and adopted siblings back from the dead. And then I could throw Mrs. Cantanker out on her ear.

  She was hatching something, I was sure of it. The League of the Blue Spider . . . that was what the marble prince had told me to investigate, and it could not be a coincidence that Mrs. Cantanker had a ring with a blue spider in it on her littlest finger. But what was the league? I wished I could be finding out instead of herding toads and being screamed at.

  I’d been kept perpetually busy the last few days. Herbology in the morning, zoology in the afternoon, and sometimes, if Mrs. Cantanker was feeling particularly energetic, crypt visits after sunset. She would rap on my door and drag me out to the graveyard, where we would open a stone sarcophagus and descend the stairs to speak to the skeletons and ghosts who lived below. She would have me listen to their stories and write them down in my notebook, and though these tales were doubtless interesting to the wakeful, they were awfully tedious to someone longing to be tucked into a warm bed.

  I often felt I wasn’t learning any of the things I was supposed to. And I was given no opportunity to learn them on my own. Whenever I was in the High Blackbird’s study, Mrs. Cantanker made sure I did not touch any of the books but the ones she gave me, and as for the Library of Souls and any other rooms where books of a magical nature could be found, she kept them firmly under lock and key. “What are you hiding from me?” I wanted to ask her. “What sort of teacher does not want her student to know things?”

  It was several days after the incident with the toads when something happened whose importance I would not understand until many months later. I was balanced on a marble bench in the frosty gardens, a book on my head, waving my arms foolishly. My back was to the woods, my face to the castle. Mrs. Cantanker paced about, shouting orders at me, her skirts rustling through the flaming leaves. She called this exercise “the language of clouds,” and the idea was that if you listened very closely and said the proper words you could divert the weather, speed its arrival if you required thunder, rain, and lightning, or send it in another direction entirely if you wanted sun. Personally, I thought it best to leave the clouds to do as they pleased, but when I told Mrs. Cantanker this she said, “Personally, I think it best if you keep your thoughts inside your head where they will not bother me. Now do as you’re told.”

  I made a face at her when her back was turned and resumed my flailings. I hadn’t yet confronted Mrs. Cantanker about her thievery. I felt like I ought to, that it would be a small sort of revenge for all her meanness. But what would I say? And what would she do if she knew I had spied on her? The thought of her selling away my family’s things made me furious, and yet the real question was why. Why stea
l our treasures when she was already so rich? And who was the little man in the coat like a cloven hoof? There had been something not right about him, something strange, and there was something not right about Mrs. Cantanker too. I wasn’t quite at the point where I believed she might have had a hand in the murdering of my family, but it had crossed my mind.

  My arms began to ache. The book on my head—“It will aid your poise and posture,” Mrs. Cantanker had informed me—wobbled dangerously. From the wizened branch of a nearby elm, Vikers watched me, a glint of amusement in his eye. I scowled at him, but he only ruffled his feathers and settled onto the branch so comfortably I wanted to scream.

  As for the clouds, they ignored me. There were quite a lot of them, puffy and billowy and very far away, but they didn’t seem at all interested in my efforts to commune with them. The sun was shining brightly, melting the frost. . . . My eyes traveled along the toothy contours of the castle, up its spires, to the forest of chimneys sprouting from its many-angled scalp. Rows upon rows of windows stared blankly back, milky eyes reflecting the trees and the sky—

  “Concentrate!” Mrs. Cantanker barked. “The clouds are practically standing still. Have you decided to slow them down?”

  I haven’t decided anything, I thought, but I said, “Yes,” just so she’d leave me alone.

  High up near the roof, I spotted a window quite unlike the others. It was shaped like a diamond resting on its tip. And all at once, I realized there was a face looking out of it—a pretty heart-shaped face, golden curls flashing. Then the clouds were rolling and breaking overhead and the window was a mirror, showing only the busy sky and the sunlight.

  I fell from my bench with a gasp. The book went bouncing into a thicket. And it began to rain.

  “Well, well,” said Mrs. Cantanker, opening a pointed black umbrella. “A success at last!”

  She did not offer any shelter to me. Instead she led me into the woods, which were quickly becoming just as wet and miserable as the gardens, and insisted on taking me to the grave of an ancient Blackbird named Pater Ribbons and introducing me to his almost catatonic ghost. I stood in my soggy stockings, scribbling away in my notebook and hoping to die, or at least to faint.

  Whoever came for my family won’t even need to curse me if things continue like this, I thought. I shall freeze into a statue naturally.

  I returned to my room, bedraggled and dripping, and fell face-first onto my bed. Vikers stood guard atop the headboard, watching the door with sharp little eyes.

  “Vikers?” I mumbled into my pillow. “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a witch.”

  Vikers let out a disinterested caw, as if to say, “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a crow. I’ve always felt I should be a well-pruned topiary. Yet here we are.”

  I felt my clothes beginning to soak the sheets and forced myself to get up, peeling myself out of my witch’s uniform and slipping into one of Greta’s fine nightgowns. Then I stuffed my feet into fluffy slippers and scurried to the fireplace.

  I ought to be out investigating the castle, but I was damp and miserable, and all I wanted was a fire and a mug of tea. Why was it always so cold in this house? I spotted a stack of wood by the hearth and a full coal scuttle, and set to work laying out the coal and lighting the kindling with the flint box. It began to burn fitfully, and I had just settled myself in front of it when I noticed that none of the smoke was going up the chimney. Instead it churned out of the fireplace, filling the room. I coughed and ran to the windows, throwing the casements wide.

  “Well done, Zita,” I muttered, as freezing air poured in.

  I went back to the hearth and brushed up the little fire, throwing it into the ash bin. Then I got on hands and knees and peered up the chimney, feeling for the blockage. I braced myself for the worst, remembering the poor sparrows in Mrs. Boliver’s chimney. But this time there was no nest or charred little bodies. There was a book, perched on a ledge and almost completely blocking the shaft.

  I pulled it down and wriggled out of the fireplace, brushing the soot from my knees. The book was small and plain and had certainly seen better days. Its cover was scarred leather, and when I opened it, most of the pages fell out in a cascade of ash. It must have been in the chimney for some time, the thick cover never catching, only mottling, while the pages inside were eaten away. And then, somehow, it had fallen across the opening, alerting me to its presence.

  “Vikers?” I said, and he flew over and landed on my shoulder. “What d’you suppose a book is doing in the chimney?”

  I ran my fingers over the inside of the cover, admiring the once-lovely endpapers. They were the color of willowware, white and blue. Someone had written in a childish, unsteady hand:

  Greta Brydgeborn, May 27, Year of the Twist-Horned Ram

  Some of the pages were still intact, badly burned around the edges but holding together. For a moment I was sure there were lines of writing on them—two eyes made of letters, periods, and question marks, which blinked at me. But when I looked closely, it was only specks of ash. It seemed as if the words had fled from my candlelight, pressing themselves to the edges of the paper.

  I squinted, bringing the candelabra closer. Then I pulled the light away and the words crept out again, shyly, dancing like little figures across the page.

  Greta . . .

  Greta . . .

  Greta, darling . . .

  “I’m not Greta,” I whispered.

  But the book did not hear me.

  Greta, where are you? Why have you left me in the dark? The other Blackbird is here. I feel her power, but it is still weak and unsteady. She needs her Anchor.

  “The other Blackbird? Do you mean me?”

  The words became sharp and angular.

  Greta!

  Are you listening?

  Greta, you fool, do something!

  Murder!

  Murder!

  MURDER! The Dark Queen moves in the shadows—

  My heart wriggled into my throat. I slammed the book closed, but still it seemed to scream at me, the ink oozing in slimy tendrils across its charred cover.

  She will kill the Blackbird hatchling. The three tasks will be completed, and then will come that pale friend, and all his beasts with him—

  Greta . . .

  Don’t

  let them

  in—

  I stuffed the book onto its ledge inside the chimney and scrambled back on all fours. The Dark Queen had to be Magdeboor. The pale friend was most likely the Butcher of Beydun. As for the Blackbird hatchling they were going to kill, well . . . that was most definitely me.

  That night I lay in my sea of feather beds, the lace like the froth of waves on the shore, the pillows like clouds scudding across the sky, and me floating in the center of it all, my arms outstretched, my eyes closed.

  And then I heard a sound. It was coming from the door. I rolled onto my side, opening my eyes. No light shone across the threshold, and nor was there the smell of candle wax or kerosene that usually accompanied a nighttime wanderer. But something was out there, scratching gently at the wood.

  I shivered. The room was icy cold. The drapes were open and the moon peered in like an enormous eye, its silvery tears drenching the floor and the bed things.

  The scratching continued. Stealthily, I slipped from under the sheets and crept to the fireplace, lifting the poker. Then I padded to the door, pressing my ear to the wood. The scratching stopped.

  “Who is it?” I whispered. “Who’s there?”

  Whoever it was did not see fit to answer me, so I gathered my courage and wrenched open the door, brandishing the poker ferociously. The corridor was empty. I glanced down it, then up at the ceiling, remembering what I had learned of ghosts and wishing I’d brought my sachet of herbs or my silver scissors with me. But the ceiling was empty too. . . . And then I felt a soft brush against my ankle, like a breath of cold air. On the ground was a dog—a small black pup, like a puff of coal smoke. It stood gazing up at me with solemn, mir
ror-bright eyes.

  “Hello, little thing,” I said. And then I swayed, the memory flashing once more through my mind.

  A little girl in white, walking toward the woods. At her heel, a black pup, barking and whining. Something is waiting up ahead, just inside the shadows of the trees. The dog yaps desperately, but the girl keeps going. She is curious. She has always been curious and brave, and her hand is outstretched, for she does not yet know what fear is. She reaches the edge of the wood and looks up—

  It was Teenzy! My dog! I was about to crouch down to comfort her—why was she peering at me so sadly?—when she turned, gazing into the dark. She let out a sharp warning bark, just as she had all those years ago. One bark, two, echoing down the corridor. I worried she might wake someone. I tried to scoop her up. But suddenly she was gone, my arms closing on empty air. I turned back to my room, Teenzy’s bark still ringing in my ears. . . .

  My blood ran cold. Standing face-to-face with me, her nose an inch from my own, was Greta. She was still encased in her dripping cocoon. Her eyes were open, unmoving. Then she blinked. I opened my mouth to scream.

  Greta shuddered. Her stony mantle melted away, and she looked as I imagined she must have looked in life, all golden curls and sparkling eyes. She peered straight through me, as if I were the ghost and she were alive. And then she turned, and I saw the flash of a silver chain just below the hollow of her throat. Hanging from it was a long key with an ivory handle, its tines in the shape of a leaf.

  “Greta?” I whispered. “Greta, what happened to you?”

  She continued to stare straight ahead, swirling her dress to and fro in the moonlight. Then Teenzy scurried over the floorboards and Greta chased her, and they both vanished into the wall behind an old threadbare tapestry. I heard a musical little laugh. Then I was falling, down, down, through rings of blackness. . . .