“Welcome back, my dear,” Mother said, smiling down at me, and all together we went up the dragon staircase, Bram, Minnifer, Teenzy, Vikers, Mother, and me. I took hold of the dragon’s horns. For a moment I thought I saw the faintest flicker of red from under the doors of the mausoleum, a finger of light reaching out and then extinguishing as the ghosts closed the sarcophagus and shut our enemies away.
Good riddance, I thought, turning the dragon toward Blackbird Castle. And good luck. They would need it on the journey ahead.
Epilogue
“DO you have a larger pair of shears?” I asked, emerging from under a banbristle shrub and squinting up at Mr. Paldome. He was the new gardener and he was standing against the sun, gaping down at me as if I were a poisonous snake that had just popped out of a bathroom drain.
“Well, miss . . . ,” he said. “I do somewhere, it’s just . . . well, I don’t know if—”
“You don’t know if you want to hand them over to a witch,” I said, and smiled at him. “Well, Mr. Paldome, I’ll tell you something . . . and you can tell Betsy Gilford this too, and anyone else who likes to spread tales.” I stood and leaned toward him, as if to whisper some great secret. “We don’t actually do anything very interesting up here. It’s mostly herbology, cutting lavender at a forty-five-degree angle, that sort of thing. And I’ve never eaten a heart in my life.”
He didn’t seem to believe me, but he got me the shears and I set back to work on the banbristle until I had an entire bag of bitter-smelling nubs, which I was going to use for my lessons the next day. Mother had told me banbristle nubs banished triggles much more effectively than lavender.
“Thank you,” I said when I’d finished, and handed Mr. Paldome back his shears. He tipped his hat, rather nervously, and I tipped mine, and then I headed quickly across the lawn toward the castle. Teenzy materialized next to me, a little burst of coal smoke trotting along by my ankles and looking up at me. I was glad she’d waited for me, and I hoped she’d never go away.
Vikers landed on my shoulder. He kept careful watch over the attention I showed Teenzy, and when he felt it was too much (and he always felt it was too much), he became grouchy and looked at me sideways. Sometimes Teenzy leaped about and barked at Vikers, trying to get him to play, at which point Vikers would hunch into his feathers in despair. Now he looked at me imploringly, as if to say, “Why don’t you just banish it? It’s obnoxious, and it snores, and ghosts don’t even have to snore if they don’t want to. It’s doing it on purpose.” But I suspected they’d get used to each other eventually. “I like you both the same,” I said, rubbing Vikers under his beak while Teenzy nuzzled my hand. One was warm, the other cold as winter.
It was a bright day, one month after the second fall of Magdeboor. The snow had all but melted. The air was soft and balmy, and the fog was burning away, turning to mist in the watery light. The woods loomed, not forbidding anymore, but rather old and sleepy, protective of the strange world they harbored. Vikers flew off to hunt mice, and Teenzy vanished in a puff of smoke, and I spotted Bram and Minnifer—or Greta and John, though I don’t think I would ever quite get used to calling them that—sitting on a bench, laughing at me.
“You could have helped instead of giggling,” I called to them, wiping my hands on my apron. “Or are you both too grand now?”
Minnifer was dressed in a blue coat and great fluffy hat, her face rosy. Bram had on a proper suit and shirt cuffs. He looked merry again, as if his little rain cloud had floated away.
“Never too grand to frighten the gardeners,” said Minnifer. “It’s just that Mr. Paldome is going to go home this evening, and everyone’s going to ask about his day at Blackbird Castle, and you know he’s going to make something up about being chased by a witch with a pair of shears.”
I laughed and shook my head, and together we headed up the slope toward the castle. Through the open windows I could hear workmen banging about, occasionally bellowing rudely when something not entirely alive accosted them. I heard the opening and closing of doors, Mother calling to one of the maids about where to set a pile of manuscripts, the dragon staircase shifting and creaking in its old place in the great hall.
“It’ll be odd having a house full of living things again,” said John. “We’ll have to get used to that.”
“I’m used to it already,” said Greta. “Though I bet we’ll forget sometimes we’re not Bram and Minnifer anymore, and accidentally wake up in the kitchens. Do you bet, John? A chocolate dollar?”
“No,” said John. “You’d win. I’ll be in the kitchens every day, I think, and I don’t intend to do anything heroic ever again.”
We stepped through the glass doors of the morning room. The house was being aired and scrubbed. An army of servants trooped through it, buckets steaming, the air sharp with the tang of vinegar and polish. Triggles still bobbed along the shelves, stealing the golden teaspoons and chittering to each other, but the last of the ghouls and moorwhistlers had been sent back to the underworld, and the shadows had dispersed. On the table, spread between the breakfast china and the silverware, were notes and documents organizing the year ahead, spring and summer and then another autumn and another winter. It all stretched ahead of me—a long road, but I was glad to be traveling it.
“One spares oneself all sorts of troubles by dying,” Mrs. Cantanker had said once, and Magdeboor had said it too, and they were each just as wrong as the other. One simply lost all the chances one might have had, and skipped all the paths one might have taken.
I’d take the troubles. I’d gather them in my arms and pile them onto my back until I was doubled over like a tinker, and in the meantime I’d see the sun in the puddles, and the flowers growing along the ditch. When I lifted my eyes, I’d see the kind faces among the pale, angry ones, and if I ever met a girl on a post coach I would share my plums with her. When it was all over, and I was an old lady, like Mrs. Boliver, that great big heap on my back would turn into a light as bright as a dozen lanterns, and I’d carry it across the marshes into whatever lay beyond. I was not afraid of life.
John and Greta busied themselves in the morning room, filling their plates with breakfast, but I walked on into the great hall just to stand for a moment by myself. The hall had seemed so grand all those months ago when I’d first arrived with my new hat and my carpetbag. It hadn’t changed. The lamps were lit and the floor had been swept and polished, but it was just as impressive as it always had been. Only I did not feel lost in it anymore. I felt it at my fingertips, under my shoes, as if roots were snaking out of me, stitching me up with it. I was a Brydgeborn of Blackbird Castle, and I had come home.
About the Author
STEFAN BACHMANN was born in Colorado and spent most of his childhood in Switzerland, where he graduated from Zurich University of the Arts with degrees in music composition and theory. He is the author of The Peculiar, his debut, which was published to international acclaim when he was nineteen years old. His other books include The Whatnot and A Drop of Night.
WWW.STEFANBACHMANN.COM
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
CINDERS & SPARROWS. Copyright © 2020 by Stefan Bachmann. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express
written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2020 by Anna and Elena Balbusso
Cover hand lettering © 2020 by Jim Tierney
Cover design by Paul Zakris
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943183
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-228997-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-228995-7 (hardback)
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
Greenwillow Books
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