A Sliver of Stardust (14 page)

“Cleaning?” Simon groaned. “How will that help anything?”

“When the room you're cleaning is full of old Council notes, it can be a
very
helpful thing,” Mary said. “The repository is—”

“The repository!” Jack interrupted. “That's the place you visited when you came to the Crooked House last year.”

“Something you would do well to keep quiet.” Mary gave Jack a stern look. “But you have a good memory, Jack. I sneaked into the Crooked House last year, because the repository is full of valuable information
that is often overlooked. You'll be organizing records and scouring them for mentions of a gateway or a key. It's unlikely you'll find anything about Boggen there, but any scrap of information about gateways could prove useful. Any whisper of a Fiddler ever talking about a gateway. Any mention of a lock or a door. Anything that resembles a treasure map or chart with a portal. Anything that you even suspect might be relevant: you copy it down in these books.” She handed each of them little leather notebooks.

“Why us?” Simon asked. “If this is so important, why are you having apprentices do it?”

“Because whatever everyone else thinks about Wren,” Mary said, giving her a tight smile, “I know it's impossible.” She had a shrewd look in her eyes “The only people I know for sure aren't helping Boggen are the ones who have arrived at the Crooked House after he was already gone.”

“The apprentices,” Jack said with a slow nod.

“Exactly,” Mary said. “Any other Fiddler is suspect.”

“Even Cole?” Wren asked, wondering if she should tell Mary about his interrogation.

A flicker of something crossed Mary's face, and then she tightened her jaw. “Even Cole. And that's why I've
given you this task. As important as it would be to find any forgotten knowledge about gateways, it is even more important to know who else might have been interested in them. Perhaps tugging on that thread will lead us to Boggen's new friend.” She pointed to the notebooks in their hands. “You're also looking for a rhyme. Gateways can only be opened with a unique rhyme crafted by their creator. So search any rhymes you find for mention of gateways or maps or travel or golden keys.” She then produced a pail from a cupboard near the door, full of scrub brushes and old rags. “Do some cleaning while you're at it.” She held up a hand to forestall their groans. “Or not, if you choose, but you'll have Elsa to answer to. Don't think she won't check up on you three.”

Judging from the cobwebs that coated everything, the room Mary left them in hadn't been used much in the past fifty years. A few faint shoe-prints marked the dust on the floor, probably made by Mary herself the last time she was there. The space was like most of the nonmodernized ones in the Crooked House. A large wooden table with candelabras situated to provide light as needed. Bookshelves stacked high with sheaves of
paper, ledgers, and books. Glass cabinets with little drawers full of tiny notecards covered with a thin spidery script.

“It'll take us ten years to go through all of these!” Jack complained as he pulled out a drawer and set it down on the table with a thump, sending up clouds of dust.

“But think what we'll get to”—Simon covered his mouth with his elbow, coughing—“read about while we do it.” His eyes shone in the candlelight as he began skimming the cards.

“Simon is right,” Wren said. “We'll probably learn more than even Baxter or Liza could teach us.” She looked down at the nearly full page she'd already copied. She hadn't found anything about Boggen or gateways, but she found a few rhymes that mentioned sleeping. One about an old woman scraping the sky for dreams. Another about nightmares and the land of the fairies. And more detailed notes about whether experiences in dreams could be reality playing out in a different plane. She had put a star by that one, because it made her think of the times she had somehow moved within the dream and, despite the feeling of powerlessness, controlled her surroundings. If only
she could learn how to do that all the time. The three sleep rhymes were from Council meetings where Cole had shared his latest research. Wren wondered if she should have told him about the dreams back when he first asked her. If Cole was the dream expert, he at least would have answers. But now it was too late. Now anything she told him would only further link her with Boggen.

Wren copied down another rhyme about birds and their feathers. That seemed more like something the Fiddler that oversaw the falcons would want to see than Mary. One of her hands was cramped from writing with a pencil, and the other was smudged with flakes from the ancient book.

Jack stood and stretched, pushing one fist on the small of his back.

“Not exactly the most comfortable place to sit, is it?” He slipped a pencil behind his ear. He'd spent most of the last hour copying things down from a slim blue volume.

A flash of heat grazed Wren's ear, and she whirled around. “Simon! Will you cut that out?”

“Sorry, Wren.” Simon reached out a hand to catch the starlamp. He had spent the first hour copying things
down and then decided to try to use stardust to clean the repository. In the course of the morning, he had figured out not only how to create several starlamps at once but also how to send them flying like boomerangs around the room. The next one skimmed the tabletop, knocking Jack's notebook to the floor.

Wren scooped it up for him and couldn't help but see what he'd been working on. A diagram, with numbers and arrows and equations. Nothing at all like the list of rhymes she'd compiled.

“Did you find something?” she asked as Jack smoothly slipped his notebook out of her hands.

“I wish.” He laughed. “The book I've been reading is full of old Fiddler math. I'm hoping that if I stare at the equations long enough, I'll figure out what they mean.” He shrugged, looking sheepish. “But math isn't really my thing. Did you make any interesting discoveries?” He turned to flip through Wren's book that she'd left sitting on the table.

Wren snatched it out of his hands, causing him to pull back in surprise. “I found lots of interesting things.” She slipped her leather-bound book into her cloak pocket. “But nothing about gateways.”

Birds of a feather flock together,

And so will pigs and swine.

Rats and mice will have their choice,

And so will I have mine.

A
t first, Wren thought the group lessons that included all the apprentices would be nice, an opportunity to make new friends. But she soon saw what Mary meant about the Crooked House being political. Except for a few apprentices who, like she, Simon, and Jack, had arrived relatively recently, the others stood clustered according to their Fiddler mentor. Pockets of whispering kids eyed one another across the amphitheater. A lot of the time, the whispering was directed at her. Two girls giggled and pointed as Jill came in and sat alone against the wall.

Most full Fiddlers had two or three apprentices. The white-bearded Fiddler on the Council even had five. But Jill was the only apprentice who had to endure Elsa.

Wren moved over to the wall and sat down next to her. “Hey, Jill.”

Jill looked up at Wren with dull eyes.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” Jill's gaze darted over to the entranceway, as though she expected Elsa to show up any minute.

“Hope things go better than last time,” Wren said. During the previous group lesson they had spent about five minutes learning a new multiplication rhyme when the snooty girl next to Wren overdid it with the stardust and let loose an exponentially expanding waterfall of butterflies. Afterward, Wren still didn't know how to multiply objects, but she did learn that the easiest way to catch and trap a butterfly was by standing perfectly still until one landed close enough to pinch its wings. “Did you see the look on the butterfly girl's face?”

“I guess,” Jill said.

Wren sighed. That should have at least gotten a smile. The track record for the all-apprentice lessons wasn't that great so far. There had been another that
was supposed to teach them how to read the traces of stardust left behind after a rhyme. But two apprentices ended up having to take sick leave, because somehow instead of looking at the stardust they managed to magnify it and coat their eyes with it. Temporary blindness was not on the list of things Wren wanted to experience. Now she sat waiting for the next lesson with a sour taste in her mouth and a nervous feeling in her stomach. “I suppose butterflies are better than being stuck in the sickroom, though.”

“It's healing this time,” Jill said tonelessly. “The lesson is on healing.”

“Oh.” Wren proceeded cautiously. It was the first time Jill had volunteered information. “Who teaches healing?”

Jill shrugged.

Wren gave up and sat next to her in silence until a woman wearing jeans and a button-down shirt came through the doorway. The other apprentices didn't seem to notice her until she made her way to the center of the floor and cleared her throat.

“If you're here for a healing lesson, you'd better pay attention,” she said.

It took Wren a minute to register that this woman
was a full Fiddler. She looked like she might be a college student out in the real world. Her dark skin complemented her hair, which was cut close to her head. She wore glasses that glittered with rhinestones at their sharp points, and she adjusted them on her nose while she waited for the last apprentices to settle into their seats.

Then the instructor moved to a shelf on the wall and pulled out a small potted tree. “Watch.” She sprinkled stardust over the top of the sapling's thin branches. “A Fiddler cannot always predict how manipulating the stardust will change the world. Perhaps it will make something more of what is already there.” As she strummed the dust in the air, murmuring a rhyme under her breath, a dissonant note echoed through the room. Wren could see the tree stretching and changing. The branches pulsed and grew, reaching out like knobby claws. The trunk glowed bright red, and its wood split, curving out in sharp ribbons. The tip of one branch blossomed into a serpentine head that opened its jaws and unleashed a growl.

The instructor didn't even flinch. “Or perhaps it will become an altogether different—and potentially unmanageable—beast.” The tree bent toward the
apprentices, and Wren's skin crawled at the animal look of its branches.

“Even with centuries of practice,” the Fiddler continued, “stardust is unpredictable. Wielding magic recklessly will damage the harmony of all living things on Earth.” She frowned down at the mutant tree. “When you learn the healing arts, you learn something held in a sacred trust. Something to be used only with respect for the nature of all living things.” She murmured a rhyme and with a wave of her hand, the tree returned to its former appearance. “A wise Fiddler is careful to practice only known spells, calculating the cost as best she can, and restraining from magic outside the Fiddlers' ken: Kill no living thing. Create no unknown thing. Cause no undue harm.” She examined the sapling and pinched off a dead cluster of leaves with her fingers before turning to face the apprentices. “Find a spot for the lab, please.” She pointed to the long tables situated at the opposite end of the room, where trees were evenly spaced above each bench seat.

By the time Wren got to the table, Simon and Jack were already sitting next to each other, and the spaces around them were filled. She slid into the bench across from them, and Jill slipped in next to her.

The sapling at Wren's spot was wilted, one branch split. Looking around, Wren saw that the other trees were much the same. Each one had a torn leaf or a broken branch. Something for the apprentices to heal.

The instructor recited the first part of the rhyme they would use.

Intery, mintery, cutery-corn.

“You'll need to play the stardust like this.” The instructor held her long fingers up so that the thumb, middle, and pinky touched their counterparts on the opposite hand.

Apple seed and apple thorn.

“Then twist to the right on the word
limber-lock
.”

Across the way, Simon was practically crooning at his plant, even though nothing seemed to be happening. Jack, too, was midrhyme, but he must have done something wrong. His tree looked like a drooping weeping willow. The first time Wren tried the rhyme, her fingers got tangled up and the stardust fell flat on the table.

“That's all right,” the instructor's voice came from behind her shoulder. “Scoop it up and try again.” And then she left, circling the table to offer pointers to a student who had managed to twist his tree into a pretzel shape.

“She's got to be crazy,” Wren said to Jill. “To be the only full Fiddler monitoring all of this.”

When Jill didn't answer, Wren looked over to see that she was midrhyme, and whatever she was doing, it looked like she had doused her sapling in Miracle-Gro. The little tree was stretching up, broken branches knitting together and leaves growing an even brighter green.

“That's amazing!” Wren said.

Two spots of color appeared on Jill's white cheeks. “Thanks.” It was the most animated Wren had ever seen her.

“Wait! Stop!” the instructor said from the other side of the table, rushing to the end to counteract an apprentice who had accidentally lit a tree on fire.

The stardust fire was unnaturally bright, not like the kind lit by a match. Blue and green flames shot in little arcs over the tree, dancing around a blindingly white center.

In a flash, the walls of the Crooked House melted away, and Wren was back in the gray dream world. A familiar bay window with its cut-glass black-and-white squares filled her vision, but there was no figure standing in front of it this time. The window took up almost a whole side of what appeared to be some kind of important room. Maps lined the wall on either side of the window. The shelf below it was full of tools that Wren didn't recognize. A contraption that resembled a weighted scale. Sundials. Gyroscopes. Invention blueprints.

Wren moved over to look at a messy pile of papers. Graphs and angles and words and numbers covered the pages. She thumbed through some, pausing to note the few that reminded her of star maps, but with no constellations she recognized. A sheaf of rhymes that Wren hadn't read before. Poems full of odd jewels and gems. And ashes. All of them had something to do with ashes.

Wren heard footsteps, the sound of people talking, and then the two tall doors opposite swung open.

“Dreamer!” the foremost man said. It was the tall man she had seen once before, his dark hair slicked back into a knot on the top of his head and his lean form cloaked all in leather. He was flanked by others,
but their faces were blurred, and Wren couldn't make them out. “How dare you come here unsummoned?” the man said. His words sounded hard as ice.

Wren tightened her muscles, hunting for what she had done before, the way she had altered the dream, and then she felt it. Something shifted inside, the resistance that she'd tried before in the visions, and the scene changed. She wasn't sure what it was that she was doing, but it was the only way to move in the bizarre dream world. She opened her eyes again, and this time she was standing at the edge of a wide circular space, a shallow bowl carved into the earth like a crater. There was no sound. No wind stirring the dusty ground.

Wren stood very still, repeating the shifting trick, but with more focus this time. She let the land around her shiver, then waver, and then she was on the opposite side of the bowl, looking down over a vast wasteland where trees twisted in on themselves to cover a barren ground stripped of all other vegetation. Stumps and jagged tree trunks rested on one another between the remains of what must have once been houses.

The air was unnaturally close, like a heavy blanket on her skin. Something horrible had happened here, Wren was sure of it. Movement flickered against the horizon,
growing as it came closer until it was the shape of a bird, winging its way toward Wren. The animal landed on the closest branch, and although the shape was birdlike, something wasn't quite right. The lines were off, as though the creature was disjointed somehow. It cocked its head, locking its one-eyed gaze on Wren's face.

“Mer-ter,” it said. “Mer-ter.” It fluttered its wings out and then resettled them.

“Can you talk?” Wren said, surprised that her tongue was loose in the dream world. “What happened here?”

“Mer-ter,” it repeated, as though it was a parrot asking for a cracker.

Wren heard a large boom in the distance, strong enough that it startled the bird, which immediately took to the air. The rumbling sound came again. And then again, as if someone was shooting a cannon. Wren looked to the horizon, but everything seemed the same monotonous gray, broken only by the black silhouettes of trees. And then someone was shaking her, tugging on her shoulder and pulling her awake.

“Wren?” It was Jill's voice, and her face bent over Wren's. “Wren, are you okay?”

“I'm fine.” Wren shook her head. Jill must think she was a complete idiot. Staring off into space for who
knew how long. “Daydreaming, I guess.” Something had triggered the waking dream again—the bright light of the stardust, she supposed—but this was the first time she had intentionally tried to travel within the dream and succeeded, the first time she had actually gone somewhere in the dream world. What could it mean? And what had she seen?

“The lesson is over,” Jill said, and Wren could see the table was emptying around them. The Fiddler instructor was at the other end, cleaning up a glowing neon liquid that had come from somewhere. Simon and Jack were adding their newly mended trees to the long row positioned on the ledge above. And the rest of the apprentices were disappearing.

Jill's tree was perfectly restored, the very image of health. And Wren was shocked to see that hers was equally pristine.

“I didn't do that,” Wren said, shaking her head. The last she had looked, her tree was in bad shape, and Wren hadn't even been able to gather the stardust to work the rhyme.

“I didn't think you'd want any unnecessary attention,” Jill said matter-of-factly. “I hope you don't mind.” The two spots of color were back in her cheeks.

“Mind?” Wren was exceedingly thankful that Jill had kept the instructor from noticing. If word got back to Cole that she was having more problems with focusing during lessons, she didn't know what she would do. It didn't feel like the I-want-to-beat-Simon excuse would work a second time. “I don't mind. Thank you. How long was I spaced out for?” Wren asked Jill, who was watching her intently.

“A long time,” Jill said, without breaking her gaze. “You know, Wren, you are kind of an odd person.”

Wren slid off the bench and picked up her tree. “It takes one to know one, Jill.”