Magic Under Stone (6 page)

“They must have brought them over from the Old World,” Erris said. “These are no doubt heirlooms, but nevertheless I feel sorry for him if these are his ancestors. And I’m not looking for paintings.”

I would have been happy to stroll the moldy old portrait gallery with Erris, making jokes about the antique faces, laughing in the intimacy of shadows. “What are you looking for, then?”

“A piano, of course.”

“Did you ask Celestina if there is one?”

“No, I like the hunt. I wonder what’s up these stairs?”

I hoisted the lantern. “Let’s see.”

Erris followed, briefly grabbing my elbow with a steady hand when I stumbled on a crooked step. “I feel like a bandit, snooping around without anyone who lives here,” he said.

“I’m glad we can snoop. Clearly, there’s nothing to hide around here.” In Hollin’s house, I had found Annalie’s hidden quarters on the third floor.

But most of the doors on the third floor here were locked. I rattled them all stubbornly, trying to force them open, until Erris pulled me away. “These are probably Ordorio’s quarters. I’ll bet he locks them to keep Violet from poking around with magic. I wouldn’t worry about it. Although, if
his
wife is secretly alive up here ... well, I could only wish.” He motioned me back toward the staircase.

Not long after, we found the piano. It was not far from the dining room; we had just ventured in the wrong direction. Music has an uncanny ability to chase away misery, at least for a time.

“It’s in tune too,” Erris said. “Whoever Ordorio is, I could kiss him.”

“That wouldn’t be fair. You haven’t even kissed me yet.”

He smiled slightly, which wasn’t really the response I yearned for, and left me feeling silly for attempting flirtation.

He played a few notes. “How about it, Nim? ‘In Springtime Blooms the Rose’?”

I laughed. “Anything but that!” That had been one of the only songs he could play when he was stiff clockwork trapped at a piano, and it was hardly cheerful under any circumstance, about a man who goes to war, leaves his love behind, and never returns.

“I should learn to play the songs that you know from your home,” Erris said.

“It seems we have all winter. I can teach some of them to you.”

He played a soft little tune, his long fingers light across the keys. I sat on the edge of the piano bench, like I used to when he was trapped. I loved to watch his hands move freely.

We had fallen in love without being able to say much to each other. I think it was still hard for him to say the things in his heart. Jokes came easier. But he could speak through the piano, even now. His song remained slow, and it grew more melancholy. It could be that I ascribed things to the music that he didn’t mean, but I didn’t think so. I heard his regret that things had gone this way for him and for us. I heard him miss his family. I heard his desperation and his fear.

If he would share all of this with me, it couldn’t be hopeless for us. Not quite.

He began to sing quietly in another language, the foreign syllables rolling soft from his tongue. The notes sounded like winter, beautiful but cold. And then he sang,

When winter comes, birds fly home

When winter comes, birds fly home

The soil sleeps

The spirit rests

When winter comes,

The birds go to their nests

And we fly home

To those who we love best
.

He stopped. “I’m winding down,” he said. “Time for bed.”

We stood. “Good night.”

He left without waiting for me, without lantern light. I did not go to bed right away, but sat at the piano for long moments, my mind full of equal parts waking dreams and nightmares.

Chapter 6

I woke to a foggy morning, with the tops of evergreens just piercing the gray blanket out my window. It felt more cozy than gloomy. I exchanged my nightgown for a dress from my trunk and went to wake Erris, key in hand.

But when I walked into his room, Violet was there breathing raggedly over Erris’s body. She snatched her hands to herself like I had just caught her at something.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“I wanted to see you wind him.” Violet pulled her oversize robe closer around her neck. The collar touched her cheeks. “He
is
my uncle. You don’t have to snap.”

“What makes you think he would want you to see him wound?” I said sternly. “He wishes no one had to wind him at all. The least you could do is ask him first!” I was ashamed for Erris, and perhaps in some way, ashamed for myself. I never forgot that I was the
one who had done this to him. My anger overflowed, but a wave of sense rushed in behind and stayed my hand.

She seemed taken aback by my emotion. “I don’t see what the trouble is,” she said, sounding haughty but still hesitating.

“Because,” I said, “how would you like it if you couldn’t wake up in the morning until someone wound you? How would you like it if beneath your clothes, you weren’t flesh and blood? Would you want people to know, and look at you? Would you feel like yourself?”

She glanced quickly at the keyhole in Erris’s back, and her lips pinched in. She tossed her head and left the room at a hurried shuffle. She ought not to even be out of bed, I thought. But if she wanted to constantly endanger herself, well, I didn’t care.

I frowned. It was true—no one would care if she endangered herself except her absent father. She likely never left this house, and never had visitors. Violet was as much a secret as Annalie had been, except she had no spirits to keep her company.

Well ... that wasn’t my affair either.

I found Celestina in the kitchens, wearing a linen shirt, men’s trousers, and boots, which she nearly jumped out of when I said good morning.

“My goodness. You scared me. I’m not fit for company yet.”

I smiled. “I don’t care. Where I’m from, girls, even queens, wear trousers. Of course, they’re more likely to be made from colorful silk than brown wool, but either way, I don’t care if you dress like that all day.”

“Really?” Celestina flipped her frying bacon. “Because, when Mr. Valdana’s gone, this is exactly what I do wear all day. You know
how long it took me to come to the door when you first knocked? It’s because I was scrambling into a dress.” She laughed.

I laughed too. “I wonder if fairy women ever wear trousers.” I adored my fine clothes, the dresses made of silk and good wool Hollin had bought me, but sometimes I dearly missed having a good
lounge
. You couldn’t lounge with a corset around your ribs and a collar around your neck, and it seemed that the lower the neckline of a Lorinarian gown dipped, the smaller the waistline became, so any comfort you may have gained was lost.

Erris walked in a moment later, moaning at the aroma. “Must you make things that smell all the way from my bedroom?”

“What do you think of trousers?” I said, changing the subject before Erris’s teasing tone turned into melancholy.

“Trousers?”

“Did fairy women ever wear them?”

“Not often,” Erris said. “Fairies are vain and prefer looking fancy, but we don’t have such moral ideas about clothes as humans do, so I wouldn’t be offended.”

“In that case,” Celestina said, “I will continue to practice shocking behaviors.”

After breakfast, Erris went out for more foraging. Outside, the morning fog had vanished from the lawn, but it still swathed the bottom half of the trees, and I peered through the curtains as he vanished into it.

Celestina came back down from bringing Violet breakfast, scooping the cat up from the rag rug so his limbs dangled from her arm while she scratched his round cheeks. “Would you like me to measure you and make you some trousers?”

I laughed again. “Oh, I couldn’t
really
...” I hesitated. There was no logical reason I shouldn’t wear whatever I liked out here. The
rules of Lorinarian society had clearly seeped into me almost unnoticed, like a disease.

“You might as well,” Celestina said. “When winter comes, and there is work to do, it’s so much easier.”

I suppressed a bristle that she assumed I would do work during the winter. It stirred bad memories of the farm. But I was going to be more useful here. I wouldn’t be complaining about every little thing like Violet.

Celestina motioned me from the kitchen. “Come on.”

I followed her to a small room, feminine, but not overly so, with a sewing machine and a trunk spilling fabrics by the window. A bird perched on the branch of an apple tree outside the window but flew away when we drew near. Celestina whistled at it, almost absently, but it didn’t come back. In the corner was a heavy wooden chair with plush green padding, facing a card game that seemed long abandoned—in fact, a few cards lay scattered on the floor now, and Celestina stooped to pick them up. A guitar leaned against the wall by the chair.

“Who plays the guitar?” I asked.

“Oh, I do, a little bit.” She shuffled through a mess on the table by the sewing machine to find her measuring tape. “It belonged to my brother. And before that, my great-uncle. My brother left it behind when he went to the city, ‘seeking his fortune,’ which apparently meant a job at the slaughterhouse.” She made a face, then unfurled a measuring tape between her hands and measured my inseam in a casual way, through my skirt. Precise measurements of these trousers didn’t seem terribly important. “What’s your waist measurement without your corset, would you say?”

“Twenty-two inches?”

“You tiny thing!” She scribbled down her numbers. “We’ll make
it twenty-three. You’ll get fat with all the pie.” She pulled some coarse brown wool from the middle of the pile of cloth spilling from the trunk.

Determined to be helpful, I asked if there was anything I could do while she started to measure fabric. I couldn’t make clothes, but I could mend and sew buttons, and so she gave me one of Violet’s dresses with a hole under the arm, followed by a shirt with two buttons gone.

“We should probably go into town soon,” Celestina said, an unvoiced sigh hovering around her words. “I need some supplies anyway, but especially with two winter guests.”

“I don’t think the locals thought much of us,” I said. An understatement.

“No, well, they don’t think much of anyone who knows Mr. Valdana.” She was facing the window, but I saw her shoulders tense. “I used to belong there, and now I don’t like to go to market or anywhere. They really aren’t bad people at heart ... but they don’t think beyond this village. Or at least the district.”

“Are your parents still living?”

“Yes. My parents and two younger sisters and two younger brothers. And my older brother who works at the slaughterhouse. All still living. I don’t see them much. They wish I had stayed home. I could care for them in their old age, I suppose.” She snorted.

“Will you marry?” I was being more forward with her than I had been with another girl in a long time. But then, few girls were so immediately open with me. “Surely some young man would appreciate your pickles.”

She laughed. “No, no, no. He must like me for more than my pickles! Oh, come to town with me and just see if there’s a boy I would look twice at even if he would look twice at me. A lot of
young men have been leaving, anyway, ever since they extended the train line. It became rather a highway to temptation, I suppose. The old men are forever grousing about it.”

We both stopped at the sound of soft footsteps on the hall rug. Violet appeared, looking pale and peevish, swathed in a shawl atop her nightgown, skinny legs in whimsically striped socks.

“Get back in bed!” Celestina said. “You can’t always be getting out of bed and wandering the house.”

“Shouldn’t I be out of doors like Erris said?”

“We’ll wait until he gets back. It seems chilly to me, but we’ll see. I can’t go right now.” Celestina talked to Violet like she was still a child.

And Violet responded accordingly. “Well, I want something to eat. I’m hungry. That nasty salad stuff isn’t any good. I want blueberry bread.”

“Erris said you can’t have any.”

“What does he know?”

“You must think he knows something if you want to go outside,” Celestina said, with a tone of someone who has easily bested her opponent. “Anyway, he’s a fairy and your mother’s brother. Don’t you think we should trust him? So go back to bed and when he returns, we’ll see.”

Violet’s lips compressed and her pale face turned red rather abruptly. Her eyes cut to me, her rage plain, as if I had anything to do with it. I kept my face blank, and she turned with a toss of her hair. I felt I had been involved in some argument I did not clearly understand.

Neither of us spoke until the sound of Violet’s footsteps had shrunk into nothing.

“I’m sorry about her manners,” Celestina said.

Celestina didn’t like Violet either, I realized. She had been so solicitous to her, I had assumed her to be the sort of person who lives to care for others, but it was an incorrect assumption. I could see now that Celestina loved something here, the house and maybe even the romance of working for a man the villagers regarded as dangerous, but whatever the appeal was, it wasn’t Violet.

“Mr. Valdana is a wise sorcerer in many matters,” Celestina said, “but he’s blind to her. You should see the instructions he always leaves. ‘Buy her oranges. Read to her at night. Help her wash up.’ He seems to think her constant sicknesses have denied her so many things that he can’t possibly deny her anything.”

“But how can she grow up if he spoils her like a child?”

“I guess he thinks that will come when she is of age.
If
she comes of age.”

“What does Ordorio intend for her, eventually? She’s fifteen. I mean, most girls are beginning to be courted by then, aren’t they?”

“He’s mentioned that she might be able to return to the fairy kingdom and perhaps become queen, but not until she’s grown.”