The Cabinet of Wonders

  TOMIK WAS WAITING for her by the road that led from Okno to Prague. “Where were you? It’s already dawn! Lucie and Pavel will be coming along any minute. Here.” He thrust a small cloth bag at her. “A little going-away present. Use them well. Actually, don’t use them unless you have to, since the effects will be … dramatic.”

  Petra opened the bag and looked inside. Three glass balls winked up at her. “You didn’t,” she said.

  “Oh, but I did. Sir Wasp is all yours.”

  “What’s the third one?” She reached inside, fished around, and brought out a ball that did not contain an angry insect or a sliver of lightning. She lifted the sphere, and a small jet of water splashed inside.

  “One Marvel, made to order. It was your idea to put water inside, remember?”

  “Actually, it was Astro’s.” She shook the ball and stared at the water’s lovely dance.

  “Indeed it was my idea.” Astrophil drew himself up to his full height.

  “But she made some key suggestions,” Tomik told the spider. “Now, Petra, seriously: try to avoid breaking one unless you need to for protection from something. You know I haven’t tested the Hive.” He tapped the sphere with the wasp. “And I haven’t tried out the Bubble either. So don’t break them unless you have to.”

  “What’s the one with lightning called?”

  “Not sure. Any thoughts?”

  Petra recalled what she had been thinking about before she fell asleep the night before: a lightning bug. “What about ‘Firefly’?”

  Before Tomik could respond, they heard the clopping of horse hooves and the rattle of a carriage. He gave Petra a fierce hug. “See you in a couple of weeks!”

  He broke away and began to walk swiftly into the trees. “Not sticking around for Lucie and Pavel?” she called.

  He turned around. “I see enough of them as it is. By the way, take care to keep Astro hidden when you’re in the city. He could get stolen. And take care of yourself, too.”

  SO FAR, SO GOOD. Lucie and Pavel didn’t look at the letter twice, and the young blond woman was thrilled to have Petra for company. Petra sat in the back of the cart, which chimed with glassware whenever the cart rattled against a bump in the road.

  Lucie talked nonstop. She pointed out where poppies had grown along the road earlier that summer. “But they’re all gone now.” She sighed. “They were so red and pretty.”

  Pavel looked lovingly at her. When a snake squiggled across the dirt road, the horse whickered and Lucie squealed. Pavel patted her arm. Petra rolled her eyes.

  For most of the trip, Lucie hung her arm on the bench and twisted around to chat with Petra. The younger girl nodded along to whatever Lucie had to say, but she was impatient to look at the book she had taken from the secret panel in her father’s library. As the day grew darker, she stole a few glances at the pages. It was enough to confirm that the sketches were indeed of a large clock.

  “May I read it?” Astrophil asked. Petra propped it open for the spider. His green eyes glowed in the twilight. He walked quickly across the page, scanning the scribbled notes. Soon he reached the bottom of the page, and then slipped beneath it. A bump appeared in the paper as Astrophil pushed it up from below. Then the page flipped over as if an unseen hand had turned it.

  “I don’t like the dark,” Lucie said.

  “Don’t worry,” Pavel replied. “We should reach Prague before true nightfall. And if we don’t, we’ll be able to see by my Little Lantern.”

  Petra snorted, then coughed to hide her noise of disgust. “Little Lantern” was Pavel’s nickname for Lucie, whose name meant “light.” Petra’s own name couldn’t have been more opposite.

  When each of Marjeta Kronos’s sons had been born, she had given him the same name, showing a stubborn streak that Petra might have appreciated. Born years apart, the boys were named Petrak, which means “rock.” The first two sons each lived as long as a cut lilac branch in water. For a week, they breathed shallowly, barely cried, and refused to nurse. Varenka massaged their limbs with oil and wine, and rubbed honey on their gums. She offered to concoct a drink of mummy. This is a syrup made from body parts dug up from graves and then boiled. Mummy is supposed to ward off death. But Marjeta refused each time Varenka offered, saying that nothing could save the babies and she would not make their brief lives painful in any way, including forcing them to drink a vile liquid that wouldn’t work. Varenka was offended, but didn’t argue. After all, Marjeta Kronos could tell the future.

  When she became pregnant for the third time, her spirits got heavier as her body grew. Her older sister—Dita’s mother—and all of her friends did their best to help her through this difficult pregnancy. But Marjeta Kronos was no longer the cheerful woman they knew. Her husband had been distressed by the deaths of his first two sons, but he refused to give up hope for his third child. He pressed his wife to tell him what the matter was. Marjeta always grew distant and tired when he asked, and shook her head with the decision of someone who knew that what she said would not be believed, or would do no good.

  When she gave birth, it was to twins. The first child was a son. He was stillborn, but Marjeta said he was to be named Petrak anyway. The second child was a pink, healthy, squalling girl. She was wrapped in clean cloth and given to her mother, but by then Marjeta was too weak to even hold her. Mikal cradled the girl in his arms instead. Marjeta opened her eyes and spoke to the infant, “I worry for you. The future is not clear, love.” And then she added, strangely, “The horseshoe makes its own luck.”

  When Marjeta died, Mikal wanted to name the baby after her. But his sister-in-law Judita suggested the name Petra, saying that she thought that this was what Marjeta would have wanted. And so Petra became who she was.

  “Petra.” Lucie leaned over the bench. “In Prague you can’t walk around looking the way you do, half boy and half girl. Maybe people in Okno don’t care how you dress, but in Prague people will look at you oddly. You should comb your hair and wear something more suitable, more ladylike.”

  Petra considered this. “May I borrow a comb, then?”

  Lucie handed one back to her. Then she turned around and faced the road, settling into her seat with the satisfaction of someone whose words, after many years, have finally been listened to.

  When Lucie’s back was turned, Petra dug the knife out of her pack. She opened it and proceeded to saw away at her tangled hair, cutting so it fell just to her shoulders, like Tomik’s. Petra worked the comb through her newly short hair, screwing up her eyes in pain. But when she had untangled most of the knots, she enjoyed the way her hair swung about her neck. She felt lighter, freer.

  “Thanks, Lucie,” she said to the young woman’s back, and passed the comb.

  Lucie turned around with a smile that got stuck somewhere along the way. She gasped. “Petra,” she whispered in horror. “You look like a boy.”

  Pavel, who had been keeping his eyes trained on the road, stole a glance over his shoulder. He let out a long whistle.

  “Dita is going to kill you,” said Lucie.

  “What else is new?” Petra shrugged, and tossed her cut hair out of the cart for the birds to make nests with.

  9

  The Golden Spiral

  THIS WAS PRAGUE?

  Her first vision of the city had filled her with wonder. When Lucie, Pavel, and Petra reached the outskirts of Prague, night had fully fallen, and the city glimmered with lights. The Vltava River flowed like quicksilver in the moonlight. Boats bobbed along in the water. The castle spires on top of a tall hill pierced the black clouds.

  Lucie had fallen asleep by then, her head resting on Pavel’s shoulder. When they reached the inn, Petra helped him try to wake her up. Lucie flickered open her long, fair eyelashes for one good look at Petra. “Who are you?” she murmured confusedly, and fell back asleep, her cupid-bow mouth open. Pavel and Petra managed to get her upstairs to their room. The innkeeper brought an extra pallet for Petra. The girl plopped down onto it, and tried to
ignore the bedbugs. At first, she was too excited to sleep. The pattern of the city lights, not quite wild and not quite orderly, burned behind her closed eyes. She decided she had never seen anything so beautiful as this city.

  But morning light can be unforgiving. At dawn in the common room downstairs, several of the inn’s guests slurped down bowls of lumpy gruel. Petra decided to skip breakfast. She hurried away, telling Pavel and a still sleepy-eyed Lucie that she had been to Prague before and knew the way to Aunt Anezka’s from the inn. Pavel was thinking of all the things they had to do that day, so he simply told her to meet them at the inn before dark and let them know then if she planned to sleep at her aunt’s or with them. Lucie, half awake, nodded without really understanding and stirred her gruel with a spoon. Petra shouldered her pack, which contained the things she could not bear to have stolen: her father’s book and Tomik’s Marvels. She tied her purse around her waist, inside her shirt.

  The first thing that happened on her first day in Prague was that Petra stepped into a pile of something very unpleasant. She looked down and grimaced. “Ew.”

  Astrophil peeked over the edge of her ear. “It looks like someone just emptied a chamber pot in the street,” he said disbelievingly.

  Across the street, a pair of hands appeared in an upper-floor window to prove Astrophil’s theory. The spider and the girl shared a moment of shocked silence.

  “That is not what I would call the practice of good hygiene,” Astrophil declared.

  Petra walked, trying to ignore the squish of her right shoe. She stayed in the middle of the street, where it seemed less likely for her to be pelted by things people were tossing out of their windows. Soup bones and empty bottles rained down from above.

  There were no trees in the city, and no space between the buildings. The houses and shops were jammed together. Many of the buildings looked very ramshackle. They leaned, they sagged, they towered, they tilted.

  Petra spotted a trough of water and pushed past a few horses to reach it. Bits of green stuff and a number of bugs (dead and alive) floated on the water, but Petra didn’t care. She plunged her right foot into the trough.

  “Do you have to hang on to my ear, Astro? It tickles.”

  “Your hair is too slippery now for me to hang on to that. Perhaps it would help if you did not wash it for a while.”

  “Believe me, no one would notice if I didn’t.” Petra eyed a young boy who looked as if he had never had a bath in his life.

  And then the unexpected happened. Petra smelled something delicious. She followed the scent until she turned down a street crammed with shops. Dozens of wooden signs swung, showing oxen, candles, necklaces, dragons, flying horses, and countless other things. It was a challenge for Petra to figure out what exactly could be bought at some of the stores. Surely one could not buy a dragon?

  Petra could have discovered the answer to that question if she had peeked inside the shop at the Sign of the Fire-Tongued Dragon. But she had only one purchase in mind at that moment, and it had everything to do with the sugary scent that pulled her along the road. She turned a corner and faced a large square packed with rows of small stalls. To Astrophil’s delight, many of them were heaped high with books of all shapes, sizes, and colors. “Ooh,” he said. “Let’s go closer.” He gripped Petra’s earlobe excitedly.

  “Astrophil!” she hissed, trying not to attract attention, for now several people milled about them, mostly scholars in long black robes that identified them as students at Karlov University. “If I wanted to get my ears pierced I would have asked Dita to stick a needle in them a long time ago.”

  A bookseller with a long, scraggly beard gaped at her. For the millionth time she wished that she was able to speak to Astrophil with her mind. Carrying on a conversation with him meant that everyone around her would think she was talking to herself.

  “Sorry,” Astrophil said. “But can we get closer?”

  “After we buy breakfast.” She had identified the source of the sweet scent, and it was a stall selling pastries. Several people were in line. Petra stood behind a young man in a Karlov cloak. The line advanced slowly. Petra impatiently scratched some bug bites on her arm.

  When only the Karlov student stood between her and breakfast, a girl and a boy walked toward them. They wore Academy robes made of dark green velvet with a golden spiral stitched on the right shoulder. They paused right next to the man in the Karlov robe, and Petra was surprised to see that they expected him to let them step in front. She was even more surprised when the student stepped back and waved them ahead.

  “Oh, I cannot decide.” The girl stared at the row of cakes and cookies and honey breads. “Kolachki, perhaps? I do love their apricot jam centers. Or gingerbread?”

  “Just pick one, Annie. We have to get to class.” Then the boy said to the woman behind the stall, “Apple strudel. A big one.”

  “Anna.” The girl glared at him. “Remember to call me Anna. We are adults now. You should act like one.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Is it not splendid that we are in the same class?” she said. “Mother and Father are so pleased. To think that we can start fires with a snap of our fingers! I cannot wait to begin seriously practicing.”

  “I guess.”

  “You speak like a commoner, Gregor.”

  “Look, if you don’t pick your pastry now I’m going to go to class alone. If you’re so blazing pleased about being in the Academy, you can try not to get us kicked out after only a week.”

  She sighed. “I will have two kolachki.” She nudged her brother, and he pulled a large purse from his robe. “I wonder what the prince’s talent is. They say that he was in private lessons for all four years at the Academy. His talent is a state secret, of course, since our enemies would know his weakness if they knew his magic.”

  “You talk such nonsense.” He paid the woman. “Bohemia doesn’t have enemies. We’re part of the Empire.”

  “Why hide his talent, then?”

  Gregor shrugged and began to walk away. “Maybe he doesn’t have any and didn’t want anyone to find out. Maybe that’s why he didn’t take classes with a group of students.”

  Petra heard someone behind her gasp. The pastry seller looked scared.

  “Or maybe”—the girl grabbed her brother’s arm and glared at him—“he has more than one magical ability and therefore needed special attention.”

  He shook off her hand. “Don’t be stupid, Annie. Nobody has more than one magical ability.” He stalked away. His sister trailed after him, protesting.

  The student in front of Petra shook his head. “Reckless. What a reckless thing for him to say.”

  Petra bought a hoska, a braided bread made with almonds and raisins. She tucked her purse back inside her shirt, but she put the change from the bread in her pocket, so that she could reach the coins easily. Then she walked away slowly, mulling over what the brother and sister had said. The girl had been right about one thing, Petra thought: knowing what the prince’s talent was would help her get what she wanted. And she supposed that she was the prince’s enemy.

  Listening to their conversation had only confirmed her bad opinion about the sort of students enrolled at the Academy. The Academy was, above all other things, exclusive. Petra’s father had explained the meaning of the spiral stitched onto their robes. If you stand above or below a spiral, you can see how it spins out from its center. But if you stand inside the spiral and look straight around, you see a line, like the horizon. Using magic, her father explained, was like seeing a spiral from every point of view. Most people see only the results of magic, like seeing a spiral from above or below. But having the ability to use magic meant being able to not just see its effects, but to be inside of it, to see an infinite line of possibility.

  The coins jiggled inside Petra’s pocket as she walked, reminding her of more ordinary subjects. “Things are more expensive here,” Petra said.

  “Perhaps,” Astrophil replied. “But I think the pastry
seller simply cheated you.”

  Irritated, she stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Astro! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to see if you would realize it on your own.”

  Petra was groaning in exasperation when someone interrupted her.

  “The uncle stole your cloth, missus.” Petra heard a high voice. “I seen him. His hand is on the silks.”

  At first, Petra could not tell where the voice was coming from, but at the mention of a thief she instinctively touched the spot where she kept her purse. Then she remembered Tomik’s advice about pickpockets and cursed herself for being so thoughtless. But when she looked around, she saw that no one was paying attention to her. Everyone on the street corner was gazing at the girl with the high voice. “The uncle stole your cloth,” she repeated.

  “Poor thing,” someone next to Petra murmured, and tossed the girl a small coin.

  The girl was about Petra’s age. She was dressed in rags and had large, sunken eyes that stared straight ahead. “I seen him,” she said, showing a broken tooth. “His hand is on the silks.”

  It was clear to everyone in the small crowd that the girl’s mind was in ruins—broken, probably, by a scryer. People with the Second Sight, like Petra’s mother, can see into the future without any outside aid, but only into the future. Scryers, on the other hand, can look only into the past or present. They differ from someone with the Second Sight in another way: a scryer can never have a vision by him- or herself. The power always has to be channeled through another person, and a child is the best medium for a scryer. The scryer asks the child to look at a shiny surface like a mirror and say what he or she sees. The younger the medium, the better. The problem is that being a medium makes your mind very fragile while under the control of a scryer. And scrying is not an exact science, but one that offers conflicting images and false leads along with grains of truth. There were many stories of scryers who, impatient with results they couldn’t understand, forced children to stare into a mirror until their minds collapsed.