The Jewel of the Kalderash

  “Perhaps you should not row so fast,” he said.

  “Why not?” Petra pulled at the oars that would bring her home.

  “We do not know where the Loophole will take us.”

  “Sure, we do,” said Tomik. “The Novohrad Mountains.”

  “Yes, but we do not know exactly where…” The words died in the spider’s throat as the boat passed between the spheres. The hull scraped against rocky ground. There was a gentle thud as the globes dropped into their velvet-lined box. Freezing air punched Petra’s face, and for a moment she was blinded by the sheer whiteness of snow.

  She leaned against the side of the boat, squinting her eyes against the bright light, trying to see where they had landed.

  “Stop!” cried the spider, who saw the icy valley yawning beneath them. The boat teetered on the edge of a cliff.

  Petra froze. Tomik dropped the oars in their locks and reached for Petra. The wooden rattle of the oars echoed across the valley, and the boat rocked as if still on waves. With one final wobble, the rowboat plunged off the cliff.

  14

  Snowdrifts

  THE ROWBOAT WHIPPED DOWN the mountain, hissing and slamming over stones and snow.

  Petra gripped the sides of the hull, aware of little else than Astrophil’s screams and Tomik’s arm around her waist. The boat thumped over a pile of rocks, and several boards broke beneath Petra’s feet. She saw a chunk of wood wing away into the crystal sky.

  “The boat’s coming apart!” Tomik shouted.

  “ACK!” Astrophil cried. “RORR! OCK! SSS!”

  What? Petra’s brain rattled in her head. She sucked in lungfuls of icy air and tried to focus on the panicked spider’s shouts. What was he trying to say?

  Then she saw it, looming ahead of them.

  Oh.

  They were heading right toward a giant pillar of stone.

  “ROCKS!” she yelled.

  Tomik’s arm tightened around her. He yanked her to one side of the boat. With a wooden creak, the rowboat veered left, shooting up a spray of powdery snow behind them. Tomik and Petra leaned as hard as they could against the boat’s side, but they were still careening toward the rocks.

  They bumped over a small hill of snow, and one of the five bags whirled out of the boat.

  “No!” cried Tomik.

  “Yes!” Petra kicked another bag out of the boat. The weight of the boat shifted. They leaned left again, and whizzed past the stone pillar.

  And straight over a ledge.

  The boat launched into the air, soaring over the snow. Then it hit the slope again and burst into pieces.

  Petra spun down the hill. A stray board smacked into her. She kept tumbling, headfirst. No magic she had could save her from this.

  Pressing her face against the snow, she jammed her fists deep into the freezing white powder and swung her legs so that her feet were pointing down the mountain’s slope. Her fists created friction, and her body slowed, but didn’t stop. Petra dug in her toes, and she sank into the snow, buried almost entirely. She dragged to a halt.

  For a moment, she simply lay there, panting into the snow, her face blazing with cold. Then she shoved herself up. “Astrophil?” Astrophil!

  “Here,” he said faintly. He was hanging onto her braid.

  Petra’s relief was short-lived. “Tomik!” She scanned the mountainside for him, but saw only the ruins of the boat.

  She was plunging through the snow, terrified, when one of the boards shifted. A dark shape lifted it aside, pushing through the snow’s surface.

  Petra waded toward Tomik and flung herself into his snowy arms. They huddled together, warm cheeks and freezing noses. They breathed, and breathed, and were grateful.

  “No bones broken?” Tomik murmured in her ear.

  “No. You?”

  He shook his head. “We were lucky. The snow softened our fall.”

  A gasp from Astrophil broke them apart. “The supplies!” wailed the spider, pointing at the ruins of the boat. “They are gone!”

  The blood drained from Tomik’s face. Petra stared at him, then at their surroundings: the mirror-bright snow, the frozen sun, the sharp peaks that caged them in at all sides except the only way down. A dark smudge marked a ridge of trees far below.

  Petra attacked the jumble of wooden boards at Tomik’s feet. He joined her, and they flung parts of the boat away, searching for the bags that contained everything they needed to survive in the mountains. They had vanished.

  Tomik suddenly sank to his knees. His silence changed. It hardened, and struck Petra with its force. Tomik had seen something. She followed his gaze.

  Peeking out from under the paddle of a broken oar was a brown box. It was flung open, and the blue velvet interior held nothing but glass shards.

  “The globes,” Petra whispered.

  Tomik stared at the broken glass. “We’d never find the Loophole again on our own,” he said. “There’s no going back.”

  Petra glanced up the slope. “We need to find the bags.”

  “That is suicide!” said Astrophil. He scrambled up Petra’s braid and tugged at her fallen hood, trying to drag it up over her head. He struggled under its weight. “We flew down hundreds of feet. The bags could be anywhere, and you will waste precious time searching for them, climbing up, when you should be moving as quickly as you can down, to the forest. There you will be sheltered from the cold. You will find food.”

  “Not for you, Astro.” Frowning, Petra plucked the hood from his legs and pulled it over her head. Astrophil climbed inside. “The brassica oil is gone.”

  “Oh, me. I am fine. I can go days without eating. I am a machine.”

  Petra said nothing to this. While it was true that Astrophil had once gone almost a week without his usual daily dose of brassica oil, no one had any idea of how long he could run without it, or what would happen if he stopped working. Would his gears start whirring again the instant they poured brassica down his mouth? Or, if he stopped, would he never start again?

  Petra did not want to find out. Yet she gazed at the sparkling slope and knew that it would be risky to flounder up the mountainside in search of the missing supplies. Perhaps Astrophil was right. He usually was. This kind of cold was dangerous, and the sooner they reached the forest, the sooner they’d reach Krumlov and the brassica oil Iris surely kept in her castle. The rich always had some oil on hand, for lighting lamps if for nothing else.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Do you have your sword?” Tomik asked Petra, his breath fogging the air.

  “Yes,” she said, and was grateful, at least, for that.

  “Maybe you can hunt in the forest.”

  “And what, fence a rabbit?” She shook her head. “Swords aren’t made for hunting. They’re made for killing people.” She had never spoken so bluntly about her father’s gift, and her own words shocked her.

  Petra had the power to kill someone.

  The thought was colder than the snow at her feet. A memory hissed in Petra’s mind. Assassin, an air spirit had called her with a sly smile. Assassin.

  Tomik must not have liked what he saw on Petra’s face. He turned away and began picking up pieces of wood and stuffing them into his coat. “We’re wasting time. Come on. Take some wood, too. We can use it for a fire.”

  “We’ve nothing to start a fire with,” Petra said grimly. “No matches.”

  “That is not what I would call a positive attitude,” Astrophil said directly in her ear.

  Petra sighed and packed the inside of her coat with fragments of the rowboat.

  They started down the slope.

  * * *

  THEY STUMBLED THROUGH THE DARK, their Glowstones lighting the way as they slogged down the mountain. They could no longer see the distant trees—only the snow surrounding their feet in a circle of blue light. They had no idea if they were still heading for the forest, or if the forest would really be any better than this.

  It has to be, Petr
a thought numbly. A cold wind scraped at her cheeks. She couldn’t feel her toes anymore, and the only thing that kept her moving was the thought of her father—and the certainty that if she stopped, the sweat slicking her skin would ice over.

  Astrophil jabbered in her ear, reciting reams of crazy poetry about a man who flew a winged horse to the moon to find his bottled-up soul. He’s trying to distract me. The thought was fuzzy. That’s nice.

  The spider poked her cheek. “Don’t ignore me!”

  Or not so nice.

  Tomik grabbed her hand and tugged her through a snowdrift. “We have to go faster!”

  Everyone was yelling at her. Even Neel, she thought, seemed to be trying to get her attention. She could feel a pressure on the mental link. An insistence. But she didn’t have the energy to listen.

  I could freeze to death, she realized. It was hard to care. Everything was so cold.

  Her foot hit a jumble of pebbles and skidded. She slipped, realizing that they weren’t walking on snow anymore, but on a scree. Tomik caught her, and they slipped together, tumbling down the slope in a shower of small rocks.

  When they stopped, Petra lay on the ground, faceup. Astrophil was standing on the tip of her nose. “Petra! Speak to me!”

  She focused and saw a fringe of pine branches above him, oddly blue in the light of the Glowstone that seemed to still be in her hand, even if she couldn’t feel it. She heard a muffled chopping sound and turned her head to see Tomik using a board to dig into a large, hardened snowdrift at the base of a tree. “The forest,” she said. “We made it.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Of course. I’m very warm.”

  Tomik stopped digging. “Astro.” His voice was tight. “Keep her awake.”

  Oh. The thought prickled at the back of her mind. That’s right. People feel warm, just before they sleep and freeze and die.

  She tried to worry about this, but the cozy warmth spread through her like liquid. Even with Astrophil jabbing her face and shouting in her ear and mind, Petra’s eyes slipped shut. The spider pried one lid open, and she could see Tomik hollowing out the snowdrift, working quickly with his broken board.

  He tossed it aside, yanked open his coat so that the wood inside fell to the ground, and crunched over the snow to Petra.

  She couldn’t really understand words anymore, just heard the anxious tones of Astrophil as Tomik fumbled with her coat and dragged out pieces of wood. She was vaguely aware that she should feel colder with her furs open to the air, but she didn’t.

  Tomik grabbed Petra under her arms, dragged her to the snowdrift, and pushed her into the hole he had made. Then he slipped inside, squeezing next to her in the coffin-shaped hollow in the snow.

  “Petra.” He was murmuring in her ear, reminding her of stupid pranks they’d pulled on the village schoolmaster back home, telling her that they were home, or almost, that they were so close to the Bohemian border, and didn’t she remember her plan? “This is our adventure. Ours. And I will help you, I’ll do anything. Just tell me you’re all right.”

  She blinked in the blue Glowstone light, and realized her head was pillowed against his chest, and that Tomik had pulled his open coat over her furs and the invisible rapier at her hip. She saw the green Vatran shirt he had worn at the beach, felt its soft cotton on her cheek as Tomik’s heat radiated from his body to hers. It was a healthy heat, so different from the otherworldly one that had almost sent her to sleep outside. This warmth smelled like him and her and spices from the delicious island food they’d eaten for weeks. She sighed. It was a gorgeous heat.

  No, she thought a moment later. A painful one.

  It started in her hands and toes: a cramping, searing ache as warmth ate into her cold skin. She cried out. Her body trembled, then shook violently. Tomik was trembling too, and she realized how cold he must have been, how hard it must have been for him not to give in to the same winter she had let creep inside her.

  Then the pain became too great for her to think such thoughts.

  When her shivering eased, and his, she whispered, “Thank you.”

  He said, “You’re safe. You can sleep now.”

  “Astrophil?”

  “He’s outside. He won’t get cold, and he said he wanted to keep watch.”

  “Yes. He should,” Petra said. “They might come here.”

  She wondered what she’d meant by that. They? They who?

  But if her mind-magic knew the answer to that question, it wouldn’t say.

  She fell asleep.

  * * *

  TOMIK FELT PETRA startle against him. He opened his eyes, and his first thought was not really a thought, but an unformed feeling of great happiness to be this close to someone he had loved since she was a skinny-limbed little girl who had given him a fistful of grass.

  Then he saw Petra’s face and his heart stopped.

  Her eyes were stretched wide. Her voice came in a halting, terrified whisper. “Turn off the light.”

  He fumbled for the two Glowstones that had fallen between their bodies. He squeezed them, and the blue light died.

  “Petra? What is it?”

  Her answer was a whimper. “I hear them. They … they can smell us. They’re coming.”

  “Who?”

  The darkness between them was alive with Petra’s silent fear.

  “Petra. Who?”

  “The Gray Men.”

  15

  Death in the Forest

  “GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!” Petra shoved at Tomik.

  He tried to stop her beating hands. “We can hide in here.”

  “We will die in here. They smell us already. We smell like sacks of skin filled with hot blood, and they are hungry. So get out.”

  Tomik pushed through the hole as a screech split the air. It was the sound teeth would make if dragged over stone.

  Petra joined Tomik and pulled the rapier from its scabbard. Astrophil jumped from a pine branch to her shoulder. “How many?” the spider asked.

  “Four.” Exactly like when she had been attacked by the Gristleki a year ago. She had panicked then. She had fainted.

  She could not do that now.

  Petra looked at Tomik, lit by the full moon, and wanted to tell him to run. But she’d seen the speed of a Gristleki loping on all fours. She knew it was hopeless to run.

  She tightened her hand around the sword’s invisible hilt. Four of them. What was she thinking? Fighting them was hopeless, too.

  A branch snapped in the distance. Petra’s heart jumped. Fear burned through her like acid.

  “Don’t let them touch you,” she told Tomik. “They’ll scrape you raw. Their skin is poisonous, and their tongues…”

  Tomik nodded. He looked so brave. If Petra had been capable of anything other than terror, she might have wept at the thought that he was here because of her.

  “I will help you, Petra,” Astrophil said in her ear.

  Another branch cracked the silence. Then another, closer.

  The monsters burst through the trees.

  A Gray Man leered at Petra, stretching its ashen human form. It leaped across the clearing and rammed into her.

  Petra’s blade fell from her hand as the creature straddled her, scrabbling at her coat, enraged at the fur that covered her skin. She flung her arms over her face. The Gray Man pried them back, gave her a great, toothless smile, and pushed its face toward hers.

  Astrophil jumped from Petra’s shoulder onto the Gray Man’s cheek. The spider stabbed his legs into one dark eye.

  With a howl, the beast reared its bald head and swatted the spider off its face. Petra swung onto her side, grabbed the hilt of her rapier, and stabbed at the Gray Man’s chest.

  The point of her sword glanced off its scaled skin.

  The Gristleki giggled. “Sssilly girl,” it hissed. Black blood trickled from its eye.

  She scrambled to her feet and stabbed again, straight at its heart.

  This time, when the blade ski
ttered harmlessly off its chest, three Gray Men laughed. Petra saw two of them sitting on their haunches below the trees, eyes eager, enjoying her pathetic attempts to retaliate.

  And the fourth? she thought with a fresh burst of panic. Where is the fourth?

  Where is Tomik?

  Astrophil jumped to Petra’s knee and raced up her body. He is in trouble, the spider said.

  Petra heard scuffling behind her, and a strange, whacking sound. She turned, and saw Tomik beating the monster away with the wooden board he had used to dig the snow cave.

  The sight filled her with desperation. She had been saved from the Gristleki once by John Dee, but there was no one to save them now.

  No one except her.

  A clawed hand reached for her. She ducked and executed a move Nicolas had taught her months ago at sea. She planted a boot in the Gray Man’s face, jerked away, and curled her sword arm back for a double-handed swipe at the beast’s neck.

  The rapier chopped off its head.

  Black blood spurted, and the headless trunk of the monster collapsed to the ground. It was only then that Petra remembered what John Dee had told her: that while she was unconscious, he had cut off the heads of the Gristleki that had attacked her.

  Petra whirled. She snatched Tomik’s shoulder, knocked him to the ground, and thrust her rapier into the second Gray Man’s throat. Blood bubbled down its neck as it clawed at the sword it couldn’t see. Petra dragged her blade, and the monster fell.

  The remaining two Gristleki sprang at her.

  They came too close, too fast for Petra to swing her long rapier, but she had seen what Astrophil had done to the first Gristleki, and knew their eyes were also vulnerable. She jerked up the hilt of her sword to smash it against a face. The creature stumbled back, hissing, but the second Gray Man tore off Petra’s hood, exposing the flesh of her neck. She jumped back.

  Forward! Astrophil silently shouted.