All around it, the interior of the box was lined with scarlet satin. It seemed empty, but there was one tiny loop of ribbon that showed where a secret compartment lay.
Sarah took a breath. Then she reached in and her fingers lifted the ribbon loop, careful with the delicate sliver.
She stared into the black hole. It was space, eternal and endless. It was dusted with tiny stars and distant galaxies. Or were they strands of gold and diamonds and rubies?
The bird said, “Nice, isn’t it? It goes on forever and ever.”
She stared.
“I can’t tell you how good it is to be back, though.” It spread its tiny wooden wings and waggled them. “I am so bored! Centuries of silence.” It whistled again, joyful, flew around the room and came back to perch on the box rim.
Sarah took a breath. “This belongs to Summer?”
“Her treasure box.”
Hope was dawning in her like pain. She said, “I’m looking for something that belongs to me. A coin—well, half a coin. It’s been cut in two. It hangs on a gold chain and . . .”
“Know the very thing.” The bird nodded, self-important. “Just you wait there.” It spread its wings, then looked at her again, oddly anxious. “You won’t go away, will you?”
“NO! . . . No.”
It flew into the box. And as she watched, it was lost among the distant stars.
Night thickens
and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.
21
He could not lie, he could not sleep.
She stole his dreams away.
She locked them in her darkest hall
with fiend and ghost and fey.
He said, “I will not mercy beg,
I will not bow the knee.”
But she smiled and thawed the snow
And set the flowers free.
Ballad of Lady Summer and Lord Winter
PIERS SWUNG THE casement wide and hung out. Rain spattered his face.
“There! See it!”
Over his shoulder, Maskelyne stared. From every window, a cat gazed.
This corridor was at the back of the Abbey, where the building crouched under the great crag called Winter Tor, a range of slate that jutted through the Wood. Far below, in its hidden ravine, the Wintercombe roared in flooded spate. Above, on that steep wooded slope, Piers could see movement.
It was slow. A trickle here, a slither there. A bush would snap, a scatter of earth fall into the river below. But he could feel its threat in the very stillness of the air, the persistent drizzle of the rain. The whole hillside was slipping, inch by inch, shallow roots straining and tugging up in the saturated soil, until the weight tore them away. Already, a tree opposite the window was leaning against its neighbor, the trunk creaking as if in pain.
“The whole lot could come down on us any minute,” Piers breathed.
He jerked back inside. “What do we do?”
Maskelyne did not seem too concerned. “If it falls, it damages the house. But the mirror is safe in the Monk’s Walk. That part is more ancient and built of stone. It would survive.”
Piers gaped. “It might, but I won’t! Have you any idea what Venn will do when he comes back and finds his house flattened! Have you any notion of the utter misery . . .”
Maskelyne shrugged gracefully and walked away down the uncarpeted corridor. A trail of cats followed at his feet. “What can I do?”
“Plenty.” Piers pattered along behind him. “You have . . . means.”
Maskelyne stopped.
“Means?”
“Abilities. Oh, I don’t know for sure who you are, Mr. Scarface, but I know what you are. Nobody bottles me up in a jar unless they have magic stored up right to their fingertips. I never felt a spell as strong as that, and I’ve been around some sorcerers, let me tell you. So maybe a moving forest would be easy-peasy.”
Maskelyne smiled, shaking his head. “Piers! I think you must have me mixed up with someone else. I can’t stop the rain.”
Piers folded his arms, stubborn. “Maybe, maybe not. But if the house is flattened, what’s to stop the Shee picking the place clean, mirror and all. Think on that, Mr. Ghost.”
Maskelyne slid him a dark glance and then resumed his stride toward the stairs.
Piers watched him go, smug. That was telling him. No pulling the wool over Piers’s eyes.
He puffed his chest out and grinned, and then saw the cats watching him and the grin went.
“Well? If I don’t guard the place, who will? You lot?”
They slunk away, except for Primo, who rubbed against Piers’s ankles. The little man scratched him fondly; the cat arched, then sauntered to a bedroom door and sat outside it, giving one piercing mew.
This wasn’t a corridor Piers got to often in the rambling house—he could tell that from the dust. Now he opened the door and saw the attic room he had given Sarah.
“What?” he whispered.
The black cat advanced graciously in and padded across the worn rug. Just under the window it stopped. Its paw creaked a loose plank.
Then it leaped up onto the windowsill and began to wash.
Piers came and crouched. The plank was completely loose; he pried it out and found a dark space beneath the boards.
He looked up at Primo. “She hides her treasures here then, does she? Should we be looking?”
The cat licked on. Piers leaned in, groping.
He pulled out a small notebook and a black pen held tight to it by an elastic band.
The pen was from the future. He could tell that by its smell, and the big Z, as if for Zeus, on its clip. The notebook was gray. When he opened it he saw it was full of messages, written by Sarah and someone else, someone who wrote in capitals, a jerky, amused, bitter handwriting.
Who signed himself JANUS.
He read the last one.
I HAVE SENT YOU MY CHILDREN.
Piers put his lips into a whistle shape but no sound came.
“Oh that’s bad,” he whispered instead.
David sat on the narrow bed, the baby in his arms. He said, “There was a woman. She was pretty and young and . . . we started as friends. She was . . . the only one I felt safe with. Then . . .”
“I don’t want to hear the whole sordid story,” Jake growled.
He had gone back to the window and was standing in the shade. Gazing out.
Rebecca said, “Jake.”
“Stay out of this. This is not your business.”
His arrogance infuriated her, but she could hear the raw pain too, so she just reached out to David. After a moment he handed her the baby; she was surprised at his warm weight. Then he went over to Jake and stood behind him.
“Don’t hate me, son.”
“I don’t hate you. But . . .”
“It just happened. She told me she was pregnant. We got married.”
“You’re already married! You’re married to my mother!”
“She’s a thousand years in the future in a country not even discovered yet.” He tried to smile. “She never need know.”
Jake spun. “This is not some joke!”
“No.” His father’s tired eyes held him. “No. It’s not. Not when Gabriella was carried home from the market and I saw the first black lesion on her neck. Twenty-four hours, Jake, that’s all it took. Twenty-four hours of agony from a healthy woman to a corpse suppurating with dark sores.”
He gripped Jake’s arms. “I couldn’t save her.”