Happenstance Found (Books of Umber #1) (18 page)

CHAPTER
23

Hap crept upstairs with the silver tray,
praying that Lady Truden wouldn’t intercept him. He peered around the third-story landing at the closed door to her room, hoping she was inside, preoccupied with her miniature portrait of Umber. Holding his breath, he hurried up the last set of steps.

Umber was on the terrace in his favored spot under the tree of many fruits. Normally the man couldn’t keep himself still, even when sitting. His knees bounced, his head bobbed, his fingers drummed on any surface, and his eyebrows flitted up and down. But now he looked as grave and still as a statue, slumped on the bench with his elbows on his knees and his fingers pressed against the corners of his eyes. He didn’t seem to see Hap approach, or hear the rattle of the mug on the tray, or smell the delicious, earthy scent that steamed out of the pot.

Hap had to talk past the lump in his throat. “Lord Umber?”

Umber replied with a soft grunt.

“I thought you might like some coffee,” Hap said. “Balfour made it. He’s teaching me how. I can roast the beans and everything.”

Umber put his hands on his knees and straightened slowly, as if all of his joints had fused. He looked at the tray with its pot of coffee, tiny pitcher of cream, and the thick-rimmed mug that he favored. With a heavy hand, he gestured at the lip of the planter. “There,” he said.

Hap put the tray down. There was another tray there already with a barely touched meal, and a third tray with a cup of brewed herbs. “You should eat, Lord Umber.”

“Please,” Umber mumbled. “I hear enough of that from Tru.”

“I’m sorry.” A warm breeze washed over them, bearing the scents of a hundred blossoms from the tree of many fruits and the other flora on the terrace. It was hard to believe a person could be sad on such a perfect day in such an amazing garden. “Lord Umber, I hope it’s not my fault you’re feeling this way.”

Umber stared at nothing. “It’s not. This has always happened to me. Even before.”

“Before?”

“Before … all this,” Umber said, gesturing weakly at the city and the sea. “I’d feel this way now and again in my old world. But I could … take something to help me then. Medicine.”

Hap clasped his hands behind his back. “Is there anything I can do for you? There must be something. Is it better if I stay or go?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Umber said. His voice fell to a mumble. “Nothing matters. None of you, none of this. It’s not real anyway, is it? How could it be?”

Hap’s head angled to one side. “You don’t think this place is real?”

Umber shook his head.

“But … how could that be? I’m real,” Hap said. “It’s like that phrase you asked me to translate.
Cogito ergo sum
. I think, therefore I am. Thinking makes me real. All of us are real.”

Umber spoke with his hands over his eyes, rambling. “Too strange to be real. Magic abounds … laws of nature and physics ignored. No, it’s a fever dream, a delirium. I’m lying somewhere badly wounded, and all this is the hallucination of a dying brain … only logical explanation. This place, these people … you exist in my head, as long as you’re in sight. Walk down those stairs and you’ll cease to be, until I imagine you walking back up.”

Hap stared, wondering if one of them had lost his mind. “Lord Umber, I promise you, if I go downstairs, I’ll still exist. I’m not going to disappear.”

Umber sniffed. “That’s what I
think
you think.”

“It’s true,” Hap said. “Watch, I’ll do it.” He walked across the terrace, took a deep breath at the top step, and descended out of Umber’s sight.

CHAPTER
24

“I went down the stairs,” Hap said a
minute later, when he had returned to the terrace, “and I was there all the while. I didn’t cease to be.”

Umber shrugged. “Just the sort of thing I’d imagine you would say.”

Hap shook his head. It was pointless to argue, if that’s what Umber wanted to believe. “I wish you’d try the coffee.”

Umber looked with heavy-lidded eyes at the silver pot. He lifted it and poured steaming black liquid into the mug. Without bothering with cream, he raised the mug to his lips, took a joyless sip, and set it down again. “Tried it.” His gaze returned to a meaningless point in the afternoon sky.

Hap twisted his lips. “I’ve been thinking about what Smudge said, Lord Umber. About the Meddlers and steering fate. And then I remembered that strange thread of light I saw. Do you think those things are connected somehow?”

Umber only grunted again in reply.

Hap sighed, wondering if there was anything he could say to rekindle Umber’s enthusiasm. “I’ve been reading your books,” he finally said.

Umber didn’t respond, but Hap pushed on. “They’re amazing. I can see why you want to share them. That’s what your new printing press is for, isn’t it? So you can make copies of them, and everyone can know what you know.” As he waited to see if Umber would reply, a sound came from behind: a displeased huff of air.

“Did I not tell you to leave Lord Umber alone?” Lady Truden said. She was at the top of the stairs with her arms crossed and her fingers tapping her elbows. It was obvious to Hap that she’d prowled up quietly. He would have heard footsteps otherwise. Most likely she wanted to catch him here, just so she could scold him.

Hap glanced at Umber, hoping for words in his defense. But Umber’s thoughts were still adrift. He’d plucked a leaf off the tree and was tearing it into tiny pieces.

“I was just trying to help,” Hap said.

Lady Truden pointed toward the stairs.

Hap left the terrace with his hands crunched into fists. As he departed he heard her snap at Umber: “You haven’t touched the tea I made. How do you expect to get better? And the food, do you mean to starve yourself to death?”

After that, Lady Truden made it her mission to know where Hap was at every moment and to keep him from seeing Umber. Hap had to find other ways to spend his time in the days that followed.

At first most of his hours were devoted to absorbing Umber’s books. He read about giants, ogres, goblins, gnomes, faeries, elves, witches, warlocks, serpents, and other things too strange to believe. Not once, though, did he read about people with eyes or unusual abilities like his.

A boy who never slept had many hours to spare, and he soon sought other pastimes. He observed the habits of the nameless fisherman and his wife who dwelt in Petraportus, the crumbling castle: Every morning they tossed their nets into the harbor; every afternoon they rowed their tiny boat to the Spout for fresh water; and every night they lit their driftwood fires. He wished he knew their names and their stories. Balfour said they had simply sailed into the harbor on a rickety craft years before and taken residence in the old castle, refusing to speak to anyone.

Hap inserted himself where he could into the routines of the Aerie. He made himself Balfour’s apprentice in the kitchen, which suited him well, since he enjoyed learning to cook and could better satisfy his own remarkable appetite. Balfour was amazed by the quantities of food that Hap could ingest.

Hap spent time with Sophie as well. In another room of the Aerie devoted solely to her craft, he watched her produce the illustrations for Umber’s books. Before Umber, she explained, engravings were done by carving wood. Umber introduced a new process that delivered a far more detailed result. Hap watched her work on an exquisite print of the tyrant worm. With her sketches pinned to the wall to guide her, she painted her design onto a smooth slab of limestone, using a brush dipped in greasy ink. When that was done, she treated the stone with a solution of Umber’s invention. This, she explained, ate away the areas of the limestone that were not protected by the ink. Next she would put the etched stone into a press to create her prints.

While Sophie was busy, Hap wandered around the room, looking at her other sketches and color studies. They reminded Hap of what he saw the night he crept past Lady Truden’s room. He hesitated, wondering if his question was better left unspoken. “Sophie, did you ever paint a portrait of Lord Umber?”

The brush Sophie had been holding clattered on the floor. “What? No!” She reached for the brush and wiped it on her smock. “Well, why do you ask?”

“It’s just that I saw a painting … it was very good, and I wondered if it was you that—”

“She
showed
it to you?”

“Lady Truden, you mean? Um … not exactly. Her door was open, and I—”

“Hap! Don’t ever speak of this again!” Sophie dropped her voice to a whisper. “Yes, I painted it for her. I didn’t want to without asking Lord Umber, but she begged me, and she made me swear not to tell. She’d be furious if she knew you saw it. Especially
you
!”

“But why did she want it? Why would she be angry that I saw it?”

“Oh, Hap,” Sophie said. “You seem so smart in most ways. But so dim in this one way. Can’t you see how she feels about Lord Umber?”

Hap stood with his mouth hanging open.
That explains some things,
he thought. Her fierce loyalty to Umber, and her protectiveness. “But why does she hate
me
so much?”

Sophie glanced at the door before answering. “When you first came, I heard her arguing with Balfour. She said she had a bad feeling about you, and that Lord Umber was too quick to trust you. Then, when that …
Creep
attacked, and people got hurt, she was sure she was right. She thinks something might happen to Lord Umber because of you.”

Hap slumped into a chair. “And now that Lord Umber is … not well … she blames me.”

He looked at Sophie. She turned her head away and bit her lip.

Hap felt hot moisture in the corners of his eyes. “Is that what everyone thinks? That I did this to Lord Umber?”

Sophie sat beside him. “Oh no, Happenstance! It’s not like that at all! Don’t worry. He’ll get better soon, and Lady Truden will see that she was wrong about you. She’s really not so bad, you know. You just seem to bring out the worst in her.” She shrugged and smiled, and Hap smiled back, glad that she was getting comfortable around him. When she spoke now, it wasn’t the bashful whisper she’d used before. Once or twice, she even looked him in the eye before dropping her gaze. But she still kept her damaged hand out of sight whenever she could, under her smock or behind her back.

Days later, while Hap was walking with Oates, Smudge popped his head out of the archives and called to him. “You there! I need you!”

Hap froze in his tracks. “Me?”

“Who’d you think I meant, the ignorant hulk beside you?”

Oates shook his head and brushed past the sneering little man.

“What do you want me for?” Hap asked.

Smudge scowled. Whatever the favor was, he wasn’t happy that he had to ask. “I … er … have a scroll or two in a language I’ve never seen,” he muttered, scratching at the floor with toes that poked from torn stockings. “Thought you might be able to … you know. Tell me what they say.”

And so Hap took on another responsibility, as a translator for Umber’s library. Smudge guarded his archives jealously and only gave Hap a precious few documents to decipher. But Hap was thrilled—here was a chance to delve beyond
The
Books of Umber.
Each time he got hold of another ancient text, he hoped to discover some secret about himself or Occo. But it never happened. Most of the books and scrolls were dull histories of ancient lands.

The passing days might have been pleasant except for the pall that Umber’s mood cast over the Aerie. The despair did not lift. If anything, it grew worse. At night, when Lady Truden slept, Hap would climb to the terrace. Sometimes Umber was locked inside his rooftop tower. More often, even in the darkest hours, Hap found him slumped on his favorite bench with his face turned toward the starry sky and a barely gnawed piece of fruit at his side.

When Hap first met him, Umber floated through the world as if buoyed by his relentless good cheer. Now he moved like a man whose clothes were lined with lead. His slender body thinned until he looked frail. A sparse beard grew on his usually shaven face, and Hap was surprised to see gray hair amid the sandy brown.

Umber’s gloom began to infect the others. Lady Truden took it hardest of all. If a book or package arrived for Umber—and they did, on a regular basis, brought by ships from the far corners of the world—she’d rush up the stairs, hoping it might be delightful enough to propel Umber from his miserable state. But each time, she’d plod back down with her mouth clamped in a thin grim line. Grief pooled inside her, fermented, and bubbled up as fury. If she couldn’t catch Hap doing something she considered wrong, she’d find someone else upon whom she could unleash her temper.

Hap met Thimble a second time, late one night when the others slumbered. While Hap was looking through bureaus for artifacts to ponder, the tiny voice drifted up from ankle-high. “Is Umber better yet?”

Thimble stood near the crack in the wall that Hap supposed led to his home. Hap was several steps away, so he walked over to close the distance.

“Stop there!” Thimble commanded, thrusting a pen-size spear forward. “Or you’ll be in more pain than you can imagine.” He must have seen the smirk that flashed quickly on Hap’s face, because he lifted the spear over his shoulder and poised to fling it. “What, you don’t believe me? One nick from this and you’ll be thrashin’ on the floor, screamin’ for your mother!”

Hap winced at the reference to a mother he did not know. He narrowed his eyes at the little man. “Why? Does your little spear have that spider venom on it?”

“You’d better believe it,” Thimble said, shaking the spear.

“If you say so,” Hap said, pursing his lips.

“Don’t give me that look!” snapped Thimble. “I’m happy to stab you if you doubt me. But know this: There’s a spider you see every day, and you think it’s harmless. And it is, but only because its little fangs can’t pierce your skin. But that poison is deadly, and it’s all over the tip of this spear!”

Hap let his head tilt to one side. “And how do you get the poison from the spider? Does he lick the spear for you?”

Thimble’s pinhole nostrils flared. “Idiot. You catch ’em and lash ’em down. Then you have to know where to stick ’em.” He jabbed his spear at an imaginary spider.

“I hope you’re careful,” Hap said.

“Still alive, ain’t I?” Thimble said, puffing himself up to his full height of just a few inches.

Only because of me,
Hap thought. “Well, to answer your first question: No, Lord Umber isn’t better yet. But you obviously know that something is troubling him.”

Thimble rested the spear across his shoulders, behind his neck. “I’ve heard people talk. And I’ve seen him, mopin’ in his garden.”

Hap leaned back in surprise. “
Seen
him? How could you possibly get all the way up there?”

Thimble glared up. “I know my way round this place. There are ways I can take that others can’t.”

Hap was impressed. He couldn’t imagine being Thimble’s size and venturing all the way to the terrace. He wondered what path the little fellow took to get there. Did he mount the stairs? Did he climb the chains of the water-lift, or the tapestries on the walls? Or were there fissures in the stone behind the walls that he could squeeze through? Hap wondered, too, exactly how far Thimble had explored.

“So you’ve been all the way to the terrace,” Hap said.

“And what if I have?” replied Thimble, rocking the spear across his shoulders.

“I just wondered if you’ve been inside Lord Umber’s tower,” Hap said. He was thinking about the secret thing he accidentally saw when he leaped up to Umber’s window: the sleek silver box that glowed with unnatural light.

Thimble shook his head, disgusted. “You’re pokin’ your nose where it don’t belong.”

“I just—”

“
You just
mind your own matters, you nosy whelp. I know what you’re askin’ ’bout. It’s Umber’s secret, and I’ll keep what I know to myself. That’s how I repay him for what he done for me.”

And what about what I did for you?
Hap wanted to ask, but he held those petty words inside. “But you
have
seen it. And you know what it is.”

“I’ve seen it. And I got
no idea
what it is,” Thimble said. He turned and vanished in the crack in the wall.