The Whatnot (20 page)

“Bartholomew?” he called.
Perhaps it's just a hole,
he thought.
Perhaps it doesn't go anywhere, and only that tall faery can open it.
Bartholomew might still be under the roots, still in England.

“Bartholomew?” he called again. No answer. Above him the branches creaked.

Panic seized Pikey. He dropped to the ground and wriggled in. It was pitch-dark. Roots pressed around him—
too narrow, too narrow
—no air. Nothing but blackness and moldy wood, and the whole great tree above him, swallowing him up. Roots were in front of him, roots were behind him. He struggled on, but it only seemed to make the passage smaller, tightening around him. And then he felt something. Wind. A fresh, swift wind, full of salt and the sharpness of the sea. He stretched out his hands, clawing. The wind brushed his fingertips. And then his hands came down on rocks. The wind was full in his face. He heard the crash of waves. Sky was above him, endless black sky.

Pikey pushed back dirt and pebbles and stepped out into the Old Country.

CHAPTER XX

Lies

H
ETTIE'S eyes split open. She was alone. The Sly King's footsteps were echoing on the stairs, down into the dark.

She looked about, spinning, trying to see where she was. She was in a small, shadowy room, smooth as an egg. The room at the top of a tower.

It was very cold. There was no furniture, though the marks on the floors said there had been once. The beams overhead went up in a point under the roof, and there were things hanging from them, what looked like huge dripping bundles of grapes. Dark liquid flowed down the walls. Wind gusted through a narrow, unglazed window. The window looked out into the night and a sky full of towers.

The next sight you'll see is London, and her river will run
through your toes, and her houses will lie at your feet in shatters and
shards. . . .
But this wasn't London. And she could see well enough, stupid faery. She hurried to the head of stairs and peered down.

The Sly King's footsteps still pattered in the depths of the tower. He would hear her if she began to descend. She went to the window and pulled herself onto the sill.

Her stomach fell. She was so high up. Perhaps a thousand feet. Wisps of cloud floated below her. The tower was a dull, rusty red. Across from her was another tower, ash-gray, the window almost level with hers.

Can I jump?
It was only a few feet. Fifteen, maybe twenty. Her fingers gripped the sill. She imagined herself leaping, arms spread. Even in her imagination she only got a little ways and then dropped like a stone. She went back to the stairs and peered into the dark.

All was silent now. The stairs wound away into shadow. She began to descend, quickly, hopping down the steep steps two at a time.

Her hand slid along the wall to keep herself from falling. The stones were wet. Everything was wet. She tried to wipe it off. It clung to her skin in ropes. Then, far below, she heard footsteps, coming up.

Hettie spun. She began racing up again, but whoever it was was coming quickly, impossibly fast. She heard a laugh, as if this were some horrible game. Her feet slapped the stone, splashing wet all up her nightgown. She didn't care.
Back. Back to the top.

And then she was in the little room again. She took three gasping breaths so that it wouldn't look like she had been running and dropped into a heap on the floor.

“Not trying to escape, are we?” the Sly King's voice floated up the stairs.

Hettie let out a little cough.

“
Are
we, my dear?” He had reached the top. He was in the room.

She sat up a bit, trying to keep her lungs from heaving. “No,” she said. Her head pounding from lack of air.

The Sly King took something out of his pocket and stepped toward her. “Of course we aren't . . .” he said, a little light igniting next to his ear and floating there like a star. And then Hettie's breath burst out of her and she was gasping again, swallowing the air in great gulps. Because in the Sly King's hands was a round glass bottle filled with a liquid dark as violets and midnight, and all over Hettie's feet and her hands, and smeared and tracked across the floor, was blood.

A tower of blood and a tower of bone,
the wind seemed to sing.
Who's at the top, who's in the dark, who climbs the stair without leaving a mark. . . .

The Sly King wasn't smiling anymore.

 

Bartholomew practically flew along the cliffs. In the distance, a pale castle stood, leaning over a shadowy sea.

“We did it, Pikey! We did it!” he shouted over his shoulder, and ran on, his hood billowing from his shoulders.

Pikey skidded to a halt. His voice was so light, not old and solemn anymore, but a boy's voice. Pikey had never heard him sound like that, not once in all their adventures.

“What're we going to do?” Pikey yelled after him. He began to run again, his feet jarring against the rocks. “We can't just— Barth, I don't know where she is!”

“You said you saw her in a Sidhe house!” Bartholomew shouted back.

She might be dead. She might be dead, dead, dead. . . .

“You said there were carpets and windows!” Bartholomew leaped a little brook that gurgled between the boulders. “So then that's where we'll look! She'll be somewhere in a great house, and there's one so close. What luck, don't you think?” He laughed, tripped on a spar of rock and kept going, still laughing.

Pikey caught up. He hurtled along at Bartholomew's side, blinking away the ocean spray and something else. Above, the night sky was speckled with stars.
Luck? It's not luck, it's nonsense. It won't be this house. It won't be this house or any house.

Bartholomew slowed a little. “Have you seen her lately?” he asked, breathless. “Hettie. Have you seen her since the prison?”

No,
Pikey thought. “Yes,” he said. “She's still just sitting.”
No!
he wanted to scream.
All I see is blackness and black water over my eye.

Bartholomew stopped, looking at the castle in the distance and smiling. “Well, that's good, then. Can you see any details? Anything would help. Can you see out the window? Can you see what sort of land is outside?”

Pikey pretended to concentrate, but it was a halfhearted show, and he felt so foolish and horrible. “Trees,” he mumbled. “It's not here. No rocks. Trees.”

But Bartholomew was already running again, and Pikey followed, on toward the castle by the sea.
Oh, Pikey,
he thought.
What are you doing, you dunderhead?

 

“This is what you will do,” said the Sly King.

He stood in the center of the tower room, like a pillar, like an iron thorn, polishing the bottle in the palm of his hand. “When you are in London, you will walk. Walk as fast as you can, and make for the river. The globes will be coming at the city like bowling balls, and—” He started laughing, stopped himself. “And I would not want my Whatnot harmed. Cross the river. Do not stop. Do not stop until you are at the very farthest edge of the city. There wait until your door has grown as large as the sky.”

Hettie sat on the floor, barely listening, trying frantically to wipe the blood from her hands, her feet, her nightgown.

“Pay attention, Hettie,” he said. His voice was soft, lilting.

Hettie started. She looked up at him.

“My subjects are ready.” He slipped something from his pocket, a piece of glass, like a lens. “The City of Black Laughter is empty, the great houses that have been obedient to me have been evacuated. They will all pass through you, into their new home.”

Their home?
Hettie stood, taking a step toward the King. “It's—it's not their home. It's
my
home. Oh, they won't like it.” Her heart was squeezing itself into her throat, choking her. “The faeries that are already there are so miserable and unhappy, and there's smoke in the air, and the bells ring every five minutes, and there's iron and gin, and—”

“They are miserable and unhappy because the English are despots,” the Sly King interrupted, smiling. “And yet your world is so new, so fast and fleeting and always different. I come to rule. I come to build a new world for the faeries, with the English under
us.
Anyway, what do we care of bells and foreign things? Have you not noticed how we all speak English? And wear waistcoats and frocks and ride with bells on our harnesses? I have made everyone immune. I want your world, you see. I have wanted it for so long.” He began to circle her slowly, like a great, sinuous cat. “The door that opened in Bath was not an accident. It was an
experiment.
An outpost. A foothold. But we slipped. We failed that time. No one was aware of his role, neither the high faeries nor the low, and they were unprepared for your wretched factories and your clockwork and coal. Things are different now. I am wiser. And I am hungrier. I will win this time.”

So that was it,
Hettie thought. Piscaltine had been jealous and petty, but she had been more than that, too. She had been hiding Hettie, keeping her locked away in Yearn-by-the-Woods to keep her from the enemy. To keep her from being a pawn for the Sly King. If only Piscaltine hadn't been such a fool. . . .

“I won't do it,” Hettie spat. “I'm the Door, and I
won't.
I know the trick. I've done it before. Stay on the line and the door stays, go into the Old Country and it closes, go into England and it grows. Well, I'll close it. I'll close the door and there won't be anything you can do about it.”

The Sly King stared at her, his eyes very round and very dark. Hettie stared back, shaking a little.

Then a hiss sounded from the stairs, like a spray of sparks.
“Mi Sathir.”

A Belusite stood in the archway. Hettie had not heard her come up. Hundreds and hundreds of steps, and she hadn't heard a sound. The Belusite wore black silk, the skirts ballooning below the wasp-thin waist. She had a battered pewter teakettle where her head should have been, and her hands were pewter cups.

“Mi Sathir
, Englishers. At the House of Sorrows. They came through the hole in Spitalfields, through the secret way. We are watching them. Shall we add them to your collection?”

The Sly King turned, staring at the Belusite intently. His fingers went to the necklaces under his jacket. “What sort of Englishers?”

“A boy. A boy and a Milkblood.”

“Bartholomew.” It was out before Hettie could stop herself.

The Sly King spun on her. “You don't know that,” he snapped. There was not even a ghost of laughter in his voice anymore. He turned back to the waiting Belusite. “Kill them.”

“No!”
Hettie shrieked. She leaped at the Sly King, beating his waistcoat. “No, you
can't
!”

“Oh, I can and I will.” His voice was low and savage, and he grabbed her by the wrist, pinching. “Kill them, Yandere, and bring their bodies here.”

Hettie stopped struggling. “It might not be him,” she sobbed. “It probably isn't. Barthy's cleverer than you are, and it's not him, and I don't really care.”

But it was too late for lying. The Sly King laughed again, a sharp laugh like splintering glass. “If it's not him, what of it, and if it is, perhaps his death will teach you some obedience.”

Again he looked to the Belusite, standing silent at the stairs.

“What are you waiting for, Yandere? Go do something ghastly.”

 

They came to the castle and hurried around it, searching for a door in its sheer chalky sides. They didn't see one. The stones were smooth, without gaps or footholds. Higher up Pikey saw leaded windows and arrow slits and curving towers like the necks of swans, but not on the ground. Nothing until far above his head.

“She's not here,” he said. “There are trees outside. Trees outside the window, I told you.”

“There might be trees inside. There might be a courtyard. We won't know for sure until we've—”

Bartholomew froze. He had just gone around the corner of the castle, the side hidden from the sea and the cliffs. He stared a second at something high up on the wall. Then he turned, hands raised to keep Pikey back. Too late. Pikey rounded the corner. He saw it, too.

The goblins dangled against the wall of the castle, trussed up with ropes. One was pointy, one short. One wore a patchwork hat, one a red leather jerkin with copper bottles along the belt. Their heads were inside wire cages, and each cage had a sharp-toothed piskie inside it, scurrying over their faces, gnawing. Pikey stood staring up at them, solemn.

“Don't,” Bartholomew said gently, taking him by the arm. “Don't look. Let's go to the other side.” He began hurrying Pikey around the next corner.

Pikey kept staring at the goblins over his shoulder. “Barth, let's go,” he said. “Let's go, she's not here, I know she's not.”

Bartholomew didn't stop. “We have to try, Pikey. We'll be all right. We'll search this place and then we'll be on our way.”

But just as they were rounding the final corner of the castle, there was a hissing and a snapping, and suddenly a lady with a teakettle for a head appeared. She stood several paces away, very still, and stared at them. Or she would have been staring, but Pikey could not tell where her eyes were, and where her mouth was, so she appeared strangely blank and sinister. Slowly she raised one hand. It was shaped like a pewter teacup.

“Barth?” Pikey edged a little closer to him. “Is it a faery? What is it?”

Another hiss, hollow and metallic.

Bartholomew pushed Pikey behind him. “I don't know,” he said. “Stay back.”

There was something dripping out of the spout of her teakettle,
drip-drip-drip.
Pikey squinted. He couldn't see what it was, and by the time he saw the three ladies slip from behind boulders it was too late, too late to run. Long knives whispered from their gowns. They flicked their points toward Pikey and Bartholomew and began to converge.

 

“Please,” Hettie whispered. “Please don't let her kill my brother.”

The Sly King looked down his long, sharp nose at her and said nothing.

Hettie wanted to hit him again. She wanted to push him out the window. “Barthy can't die now. He's been looking all this time, and—and he
can't
!” She broke off into a series of hiccuping sobs.

The Sly King sighed. “You know, it is so simple. If you don't want your brother to die, you only have to do as you are told. You have to be a proper, obedient servant, and when your King tells you to open a doorway for his people, you will do so! Then all will be well. You will be such a wonderful Belusite. One of my greatest. Perhaps you will even replace Florence one day.”