“You don’t have to tell me, I know—” Pain strangled Bertie’s words, choking them off when the herb woman pressed her thumbs hard on either side of the ragged furrow. Spots of mirrored light swirled in lovely patterns over every surface as click, click, click went Serefina’s tongue against the roof of her mouth
“A ceremonial knife made this cut, oh, yes.” The herb woman reached for a silver-lidded pot of liniment. “You didn’t know what your lad was doing, did you? That’s why the cut’s gone bad.”
“I knew. Sort of.” Bertie tried to pull her hand away, but Serefina didn’t relax her grip.
“Blood-magic is powerful magic.”
“Tosh,” Bertie found the spirit to say. “If that were true …”
I should have been able to rescue Nate.
“Don’t argue with me, child.” The woman reached out, and though Bertie flinched back, she still managed to tap the empty spot between Bertie’s collarbones. “That sort of magic is almost as powerful as bone-magic, and I think you know something about that.”
Color flared on Bertie’s cheeks. “What do you mean?” A low chuckle was the herb woman’s only response, but a gentle draft stirred the stall’s curtains, and then Bertie knew. “You’ve seen Ariel.”
Serefina tied a bit of clean linen around Bertie’s hand. “The rest of you, stay here. The girl will come with me.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Memory Be Green
Without another word to anyone, Serefina ducked through the back curtains of the stall, disappearing into the gloom of its innermost recesses.
Four sets of little hands grabbed hold of Bertie’s hair and clothes. “You’re not going with her!”
“No, I’m not.” Except the spot where the herb woman had touched her skin ached. Bertie looked to Waschbär for reassurance, but the sneak-thief had his nose lifted to the air. “Was Ariel here?” After a moment, he nodded. “Did he have my medallion with him?”
With furtive steps, Waschbär moved nearer the back curtains. “Yes.”
“I have to get it back.” Bertie wobbled a bit, though the throbbing in her hand was greatly reduced; indeed, a blissful numbness had encapsulated her arm and prevented her from pointing at the fairies. “You four stay here with Waschbär.”
A chorus of wails, but Bertie was already shuffling down a long corridor. Following the herb woman, she climbed a narrow set of twisting stairs, moving deeper into the mammoth, mica-flecked stone structure of the Caravanserai itself.
“Come along this way, girl.” Just ahead of her, Serefina turned right into a small alcove.
Doors of various shapes and sizes lined the walls, each fitted with a padlock and each padlock depicting a different brass-wrought animal. The larger doors were locked with lions, wolves, or bears, while lizards and rabbits safeguarded the smaller portals. Bertie blamed her fever when the animals peered back at her, blinking their metal-shuttered eyes, twitching their lustrous ears and noses. A panther hissed a warning when she strayed too near, a cache obviously in use, as the key had been removed from that lock.
“What fits in something so tiny?” She touched a finger to a door no larger than a paper clip, admiring the miniscule hammered-metal butterfly that fluttered its wings upon it. The number 169 was inscribed on its ivory plate in a series of ornate flourishes.
Serefina spared it a glance. “Secrets. Hearts’ desires. Perhaps something else, but it’s none of my never-mind.”
An enormous elephant’s head protected the largest of the doors, ears extended and trunk encircling the central mouth-lock. Bertie didn’t think she could pull the mammoth key out, much less carry it without help. “Convenient, if Bluebeard strolls through and wants to tuck away a troublesome wife or three.”
“Bluebeard knows better than to return to my establishment after the commotion he caused last time!” From somewhere on her person, Serefina produced a brass key, looped through with a heavy chain and an ivory plate marked with the number 572. “The air creature traded something with me.”
The cubbyhole that matched the number on the key was, unsurprisingly, fitted with a lock in the shape of a bird. Bertie wanted more than anything to leap at it, but she resisted the urge in order to meet the herb woman’s gaze. “It was not his to give.”
“So I surmised,” Serefina said. “The question is now: What will you trade to get it back?”
“There are the coins on my belt, but I doubt very much that’s what you mean.” Bertie knew this game well by now. “What is it you want?”
From her pocket, Serefina drew a crystal flask and held it up to the light so that Bertie could see it was empty. “Fill this.”
“With what?”
“With words.”
Bertie would have scoffed, except she remembered the changes she’d wrought in the marketplace: rivulets of ribbon-color, golden earrings transformed into eggs. “Just words?”
“It’s never just words,” the herb woman said with a knowing smile. “Is it?”
“No, it’s not.” For a moment, Bertie contemplated refusing.
The words are all I have right now.
When the lock-mouths began to whisper to her in dozens of different animal languages, Bertie knew she would never make it through the Caravanserai and to the Scrimshander without the scrimshaw. She began to pull words out of the furthest recesses of her still-cloudy brain, with rareripe streaming out of her mouth alongside horbgorble, moonglade followed by curliewurlie.
Though Serefina sought to catch only the most meaningful, inevitably some nonsense also slid inside the crystal flask, which she capped off with a cork stopper. “This will want sealing wax, I think.”
Unwilling to wait a moment longer, Bertie interrupted. “The key, please?”
The herb woman paused long enough in her appreciative petting of the flask, its contents rainbow-sparking with power, to complete their trade. The key’s weight settled into the center of Bertie’s palm as she fit it into the lock and twisted. Inside the tiny niche lay a black velvet bag. Everything seemed to slow as Bertie pulled it out, untied the drawstring, and tipped the contents into her hand, but the moment the scrimshaw touched her skin, the world came into sharp focus and the animals ceased their whispering.
“He replaced the chain.” The first one she’d broken before their fateful tango; the new one was a singularly fine series of interlocking gold rings, and Bertie traced it with her fingers before clasping it around her neck. The medallion settled between her collarbones. “What did he trade it for?”
“A flask from my stall, one that would banish memories.” Serefina took Bertie by the hand, leading her away from the alcove and down yet another set of stairs. “He wanted something to dull the pain of a broken heart.”
The numbness from the salve seemed to have spread to Bertie’s own chest.
He’s going to kill the parts of him that knew me. Loved me.
Serefina opened a door and gestured to a narrow alleyway. “This is where you leave me,” the herb woman said. “May you find what you seek beyond these walls.”
Bertie stumbled out into the tiny street, intending to make her way back to the marketplace, to Waschbär and the fairies. Thankfully, with the medallion in its rightful place, she had no more waking dreams. Instead, just before her, a small archway revealed a glimpse of another world. Beyond the shifting curtain of moss, Bertie could see trees: not the palm trees of the desert, but her trees.
She shook her head and wrapped her hand around the scrimshaw. “I don’t have time for that place. Not now.”
The curtain dissolved with the hiss of falling sand, joining the shimmering metallic dunes outside the Caravanserai. The shore that would lead to the White Cliffs. To the Scrimshander.
To Sedna’s kingdom.
No time to double back to Serefina’s stall, no time to fetch the sneak-thief and her miscreant companions, not with her father so close. Bertie jerked the nearest torch off the wall and struck out across the beach, only to realize within
seconds that it was tricky slogging along. The scrimshaw hummed against her skin as she walked.
Peaseblossom would tell me this was a very bad idea.
Such an odd feeling, being without her tiny conscience. Even the boys would say it was unwise for Bertie to head off on her own, with no one to know where she’d gone. Her fears chased her, misshapen imps that tugged at her clothes and pulled her hair:
Nate, sucked under by Sedna’s waters.
Ariel, drinking the contents of a flask just to be free of her.
Her father, flying far and fast away from her and Ophelia both.
When Bertie swung the torch at them, they danced into the shadows but were not dissolved.
“I cannot think of such things,” she muttered, cresting the next dune. “I can only move forward.”
Before her, the sand curved around the dinner-plate shoreline and the ocean filled the earth’s cup until it brimmed over the horizon. Light from the moon washed the towering cliffs of Fowlsheugh silver before clouds entered the scene. Everything began fading to black, just as it did back at the Théâtre, with a slow hand on the dimmer.
Hardly able to see where the sand left off and the sea began, Bertie crossed her fingers and made a wish that went down to her toes: that a portal would yawn open like a feeding whale’s mouth, that stepping stones would surface to lead her down into Sedna’s world. Everything wavered; she felt the moist air shift, waited for salt-laden scrim curtains to slide past her …
Instead, high up in the side of the cliff, a faint pinprick of light hinted where the Scrimshander’s hearth fire now burned.
Bertie uncrossed her fingers. Only now, staring up at his home, did she understand her real wish had been for something, anything, that would save her the necessity of confronting her father again, of trying to pry or cajole the way to Sedna’s kingdom from his stubborn bird-brain.
Then her mind opened to the idea that this was where he’d brought Ophelia—
This was where my story began.
—and suddenly, a thousand other tales wanted to be told. The sand sucked at her feet, every grain a separate story. The cliffs rose before her, a tale too old, too large to fit inside her skull. A vein in Bertie’s forehead throbbed.
It’s too much.
But if she wanted to rescue Nate, she had to hold it inside her, had to carry it with her as she climbed the shallow steps carved into the cliff side. The footing was precarious, and there was no railing. The crashing waves below called to her to jump in Nate’s lilt.
“Lass.”
Spurred by the sound of his voice, she ran, with the winds pulling at the lavender gown, tugging her close to the edge and speaking with Ariel’s inflections.
“Jump. I’ll catch you.”
A gust of wind extinguished her torch. Bertie clutched the useless stick of wood, forcing herself to climb the last ten steps to the low entrance. Ducking her head with a sob of gratitude, she entered the Scrimshander’s Aerie.
Her first reaction was sympathy for Jonah. Whalebones soared overhead, curving alongside the inner walls and meeting tip to tip at the ceiling’s highest point. Light from a tiny hearth illuminated the countless carvings decorating every exposed inch of the ivory beams: ships tossed at sea or armed for battle; sirens luring sailors to their rocky doom; every seafaring mammal and salt-blooming plant imaginable.
“You shouldn’t have followed me here.”
Startled, Bertie dropped the now-useless torch as she turned toward the voice. The bird-creature, no more than a dark shadow, huddled under the vast expanse of carvings. Trembling with exhaustion and the effort required to speak in a human tongue, he might have commanded sympathy.
But only from someone, Bertie thought, who had not chased him over half the countryside and through a snowstorm. “And you shouldn’t have dropped me.”
In the puppet theater, she’d seen his transformation from bird-creature to man and back again. Still, it didn’t prepare her for the violent shedding of feathers as he unfolded from the floor, for the swirling tattoos that decorated the patches of visible flesh. No longer confined by the caravan’s low ceiling, the Scrimshander towered over her, spindly through the legs but thickly muscled in the chest and arms. His face was, once again, the one he’d shown Ophelia in their short time together. “You need to leave.”
Bertie searched his features—elongated nose, strong chin, high cheekbones—trying to catch a glimmer of herself there. It was hard to tell for certain, in the uneven light from the hearth. “I will, just as soon as you tell me how to reach Sedna’s kingdom.”
“Little One, I don’t—”
“I know there’s a portal. Sedna promised to open it for you.” Bertie paused to catch hold of her temper and tears, both threatening to escape, before she added, “It’s no use lying to me. I’ve seen your story.”
The Scrimshander turned on his heel, as though he found it easier to address the hearth than her. “Then you know it was not my choice to leave.” Golden radiance filled one lamp, then a second before he moved farther into the cavern, carrying a burning rushlight.
“Yes.” She chased him with her argument. “But it’s your decision whether you help me now or you force me to pull the knowledge from you like a fat worm from the grass—”
Her voice faltered when he lit the final lamp at the far back of the Aerie. Illumination poured over a massive bone slab that rested against the wall. Upon it, the Scrimshander’s carvings were a hundred variations on one study: Bertie’s own face, as she might have looked at age three or four. Against her will, she reached out a hand, fingertips tracing the tiny, stippled holes.
His voice was feather soft. “You came here, once. Do you not remember?”
The silence that followed was underscored by the distant call of the sea, and she recalled the scene in Mrs. Edith’s part of How Bertie Came to the Theater when Young Bertie put her toes over the edge of a towering cliff, held her arms out wide …
I wonder if I can fly.
It was like falling again, to listen to him speak.
“I saw you jump.” With every word, the Scrimshander’s voice evened. Feathers drifted loose, swirling like inky leaves on the floor of the cave, leaving more of his skin visible. “Such a strange little bird, in your silken skirts and kerchief. I caught sight of your face as you plummeted: eyes wide-open, expression joyful. You reveled in the wind that tore at your clothes and hair.” His own eyes were closed, perhaps to picture the breathtaking plunge. “You hit the water and sank like a stone. It’s a mercy you survived the fall, a greater mercy still that I found you. The water was dark, and you were tangled in the kelp. Your eyes were closed then, but you had starfish perched in your hair and the crabs hastened to cut you free. I dragged you to shore, where you spat water from your lungs and complained that I’d spoiled your swim. By the time the Mistress of Revels reached us, I was glad to hand you back into her keeping.”
This bit of the story was another piece in the puzzle, albeit an unexpected one, all ragged edges and hard corners. Had it been real, Bertie would have pressed it to the flesh of her inner arm, just to see if something could hurt more than the ache in her heart. “Did she tell you who I was?”
He nodded, a stiff jerk of his head that belied the grace of his talented hands. “She gave me your name, yes.”
“But did you know who I was?”
The Scrimshander faltered then, as though some wave broke upon his shore and knocked down all the careful walls he’d constructed over the years. “She didn’t have to. I would have recognized those eyes anywhere.” He paused before adding the inevitable, “You have your mother’s eyes.”
“You knew who I was, but you let her take me back to the theater?” This fresh betrayal cut as deep as the wound on Bertie’s palm. “Why didn’t you tell her you were my father? Why—” she choked on the accusation, barely able to finish asking, “why didn’t you keep me with you?”
“The flood destroyed the nest.” As he looked about him, the r
oom seemed to fill once again with water. “In my absence, sea creatures had crawled in here to die.”
The memory of unseen things wrapped themselves about Bertie’s bare ankles, oil-slick with a razor’s edge that cut. Ribbon-tendrils of her blood snaked through the water, luring other creatures, blind and hungry creatures, out of their hiding places. Then, with hisses and thrashing, the water evaporated, and flesh melted from bone until only their bones remained. “The mess would have made no difference to me.”
“This was no place to bring a child, to raise a family. I was only half alive anyway, and entirely wild—”
“And you’d conveniently forgotten me.” Bertie balled her hands up into fists, wishing she could hit someone, something.
The Scrimshander didn’t deny the accusation. “It was only when I looked into your eyes that I remembered there was a mother, or a child.” His gaze shifted toward the desk, where knives and needles lay in neat, glinting rows between bits of bone. “Only when you turned up here did I realize that something had happened to Ophelia, that things hadn’t gone the way I’d intended.”
“Really?” Bertie managed to shove a lifetime of thwarted sarcasm into a single word.
“The Mistress of Revels promised you’d both go straight back to the theater, and I thought it would give me time to remember what it was like … to be human.” He reached out, fingers closing around one of the tiny tools. “I took to gouging bits of bone with my fingernails, thumbnails. Rough markings only—”
She made a rude noise through her nose, one worthy of the fairies. “And how did that work out for you?”
“It was harder than I could have ever imagined. I know I lost days, weeks. Maybe years. Trying to recall your face.” His fingertips grazed the hundreds of portraits, skimmed in search of the right place to begin. Finding a tiny space free of other marks, the blade of his knife met the slab in a running series of scratches and scrapings. “Trying to remember your name. Then I found a special piece of bone in the deepest cavern of the Aerie: a bit of Sedna’s finger, lost to her for so many years.”