Perchance to Dream (14 page)

Bertie tried to get her bearings as bells jangled and voices called and livestock protested over breezes that carried suggestions of yeast, simmering meat, dried spices, and hay. The fairies flew about her, practically sparkling with excitement, and Waschbär moved alongside her, his bulk an effective shield against the jostling crowd.

Looking up at him, Bertie spared a moment to smile before setting off down the nearest aisle. “Why do you feel the need to act the guardian?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion. It’s most perturbing.” Disconcerted or not, Waschbär kept pace with her.

“Someday, I’ll be able to take three steps without having a shadow. Or four tiny ones.” Bertie cut through a corner stall, only to have a horse—real, not clockwork—snap at her with clacking teeth. Hurriedly, she backed into a different horse, this one thankfully happier to make her acquaintance. It nudged her pockets with a velvet nose and whickered at the fairies, who scattered with tiny screams and the sudden brandishing of swords.

“Get back here,” Bertie hissed at them. “And put those things away. Do you want to start a riot?”

The fairies sheathed their weapons, toothpicks purloined from the pie car, just as they passed a mountain of a man swallowing two feet of tempered steel.

“Golly,” said Mustardseed.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Bertie said. “You’d split yourself open from the inside out, and I’m not giving you mouth-to-mouth.”

“What about snakes?” Of course Moth was staring at a snake charmer, coaxing a length of gleaming-scaled serpent from a woven basket.

“No snakes!” Bertie said. “Remember the asp problem?”

“Asps?” Waschbär asked.

“Malfunction during a
Hamlet
rehearsal. Suffice it to say I’m not a huge fan of snakes.” Bertie tried to duck through the crowd, but everyone around her seemed determined to thwart her progress, especially the jester capering in front of them, holding a tambourine in one hand and a dripping dill pickle in the other.

“Hail and well met!” He bowed to Bertie with much jingling of his bells. “Would the lady care for a taste of my gherkin?”

“She would
not,
” Mustardseed said, no doubt thoroughly offended by the stranger beating him to a vulgar suggestion. “Apologize at once, or feel the wrath of my toothpick.”

“Ooh, he is a rude one, isn’t he?” Delighted, the jester stuffed his pickle into the depths of an unseen pocket. “You are searching for a new gown, perhaps?” He reached out to hook a finger under a wooden hanger over which flowed a garment of scarlet loveliness.

Bertie scowled at her assailant. “Kindly get out of my way.”

Instead, he turned the hanger around, and the red dress faded to a creamy confection of ribbons-through-lace. Spiders dangled from the delicate cobwebbing, still knitting the sleeves and collar. “Something more appropriate for a summer wedding?”

Recoiling, Bertie shook her head. “Absolutely not!”

“What sort of lady cannot be tempted with finery?” The jester capered in place.

“The sort that is going to have your arms removed if you don’t get out of her way.” Bertie signaled to the sneak-thief, and Waschbär snarled, displaying all his teeth.

Under his gaudy makeup, the street performer paled. “My humblest of apologies!” He tripped over his own feet as well as a nearby tent pole, trying to back away and bow and beg her pardon until he disappeared from view with a last muttered, “I hope I didn’t offend thee!”

“An offense to mine eyes as well as mine ears,” Bertie said, leaning against the nearest stall to gather her strength. Silk streamers decorated a hundred wooden dowels, and the occasional breeze tugged at the miniature maypoles. She stared at the ribbons until they bled into a watercolor river that cascaded to the ground in paint spatters, speckling her shoes. The stall owner cried out her dismay, trying to catch her wares in copper pots.

The sneak-thief skirted the puddle of color to put a hand on her arm. “Bertie?”

“Hmm?” She blinked, which did nothing to dispel either the ribbon-river or the nimbuses of light surrounding the fairies hovering nearby.

Peaseblossom waved a hand before Bertie’s face. “You look awful.”

Waschbär, too, looked concerned. “We need someone to look at your wound. Your fever is escalating, and you’re changing things without meaning to.”

“It’s not just the cut on my palm.” Bertie rubbed a hand across her eyes, trying to get them to focus on the here and now. “The scrimshaw used to show me what was real, even if what was real wasn’t the part that was real.” Though the sneak-thief steered her true, she stumbled, banging her knee against the corner of the stall. A miniature burst of fireworks accompanied the pain with a sudden flare of light and color. “Did you see that?”

“I did.” Waschbär slid an arm around her waist as the fairies danced among the falling sparks. “That medallion of yours was acting as a stopper between your imagination and reality, I think. You used it to focus, yes?”

“I used it to see to the heart of things.”

“Now that it is gone, you are seeing multiple truths. Possibilities are manifesting as realities.” Waschbär glanced sidelong at the milling crowd, who couldn’t help but notice the changes taking place around them.

“Good lady!”

“Perhaps you’d care for these—”

A dozen hands plucked at Bertie’s sleeves, tempting her with wares ranging from twisted gold earrings to honeyed desserts. The first offering transformed into tiny gilded eggs, the latter into a miniature dragon whose copper talons scrabbled at the striped awnings before he disappeared into the sky with a roar.

“Bertie, you must stop.” Waschbär indicated the nearest stall. Its sun-bleached curtains shifted to reveal rows of green bottles and crystal flasks. “We’ll find what we need in here.” He added a potent glare at the fairies. “Don’t touch anything.”

Coiled up on an enormous floor cushion, legs impossibly tucked underneath her, a woman looked up as they entered. Her skin was covered in mother-of-pearl scales, luminous with rainbows held captive. “Greetings to you, sneak-thief. Fair warning: There are no unwanted things here.”

“I would never dare pilfer from your stall, Serefina.” Waschbär unfurled his fingers to reveal they were empty. “I might wake up a toad on the morrow.”

“What is needed today? Unguents for rashes, or liniments for aches? Powders, pills, the old herbal cures?”

“This young lady has a wound—” Waschbär started to say.

“Ah, yes, the walls have already whispered of this one to me.” When the woman licked her sun-parched lips, she did so with a forked tongue. “Show me, child.”

Without entertaining the notion that she could disobey, Bertie held out her injured hand. She tried to not look at the ugly, ragged edges of her skin, the streaks of red radiating from the cut, the ooze of thick white fluid, for the sight of it made her stomach lurch.

“Ooh, Bertie,” Peaseblossom breathed, “that looks terrible.”

“You don’t have to tell me, I know—” Pain strangled Bertie’s words, choking them off when the herb woman pressed her thumbs hard on either side of the ragged furrow. Spots of mirrored light swirled in lovely patterns over every surface as
click, click, click
went Serefina’s tongue against the roof of her mouth

“A ceremonial knife made this cut, oh, yes.” The herb woman reached for a silver-lidded pot of liniment. “You didn’t know what your lad was doing, did you? That’s why the cut’s gone bad.”

“I knew. Sort of.” Bertie tried to pull her hand away, but Serefina didn’t relax her grip.

“Blood-magic is powerful magic.”

“Tosh,” Bertie found the spirit to say. “If that were true …”

I should have been able to rescue Nate.

“Don’t argue with me, child.” The woman reached out, and though Bertie flinched back, she still managed to tap the empty spot between Bertie’s collarbones. “That sort of magic is almost as powerful as bone-magic, and I think you know something about that.”

Color flared on Bertie’s cheeks. “What do you mean?” A low chuckle was the herb woman’s only response, but a gentle draft stirred the stall’s curtains, and then Bertie knew. “You’ve seen Ariel.”

Serefina tied a bit of clean linen around Bertie’s hand. “The rest of you, stay here. The girl will come with me.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Memory Be Green

W
ithout another word
to anyone, Serefina ducked through the back curtains of the stall, disappearing into the gloom of its innermost recesses.

Four sets of little hands grabbed hold of Bertie’s hair and clothes. “You’re not going with her!”

“No, I’m not.” Except the spot where the herb woman had touched her skin ached. Bertie looked to Waschbär for reassurance, but the sneak-thief had his nose lifted to the air. “Was Ariel here?” After a moment, he nodded. “Did he have my medallion with him?”

With furtive steps, Waschbär moved nearer the back curtains. “Yes.”

“I have to get it back.” Bertie wobbled a bit, though the throbbing in her hand was greatly reduced; indeed, a blissful numbness had encapsulated her arm and prevented her from pointing at the fairies. “You four stay here with Waschbär.”

A chorus of wails, but Bertie was already shuffling down a long corridor. Following the herb woman, she climbed a narrow set of twisting stairs, moving deeper into the mammoth, mica-flecked stone structure of the Caravanserai itself.

“Come along this way, girl.” Just ahead of her, Serefina turned right into a small alcove.

Doors of various shapes and sizes lined the walls, each fitted with a padlock and each padlock depicting a different brass-wrought animal. The larger doors were locked with lions, wolves, or bears, while lizards and rabbits safeguarded the smaller portals. Bertie blamed her fever when the animals peered back at her, blinking their metal-shuttered eyes, twitching their lustrous ears and noses. A panther hissed a warning when she strayed too near, a cache obviously in use, as the key had been removed from that lock.

“What fits in something so tiny?” She touched a finger to a door no larger than a paper clip, admiring the miniscule hammered-metal butterfly that fluttered its wings upon it. The number 169 was inscribed on its ivory plate in a series of ornate flourishes.

Serefina spared it a glance. “Secrets. Hearts’ desires. Perhaps something else, but it’s none of my never-mind.”

An enormous elephant’s head protected the largest of the doors, ears extended and trunk encircling the central mouth-lock. Bertie didn’t think she could pull the mammoth key out, much less carry it without help. “Convenient, if Bluebeard strolls through and wants to tuck away a troublesome wife or three.”

“Bluebeard knows better than to return to my establishment after the commotion he caused last time!” From somewhere on her person, Serefina produced a brass key, looped through with a heavy chain and an ivory plate marked with the number 572. “The air creature traded something with me.”

The cubbyhole that matched the number on the key was, unsurprisingly, fitted with a lock in the shape of a bird. Bertie wanted more than anything to leap at it, but she resisted the urge in order to meet the herb woman’s gaze. “It was not his to give.”

“So I surmised,” Serefina said. “The question is now: What will you trade to get it back?”

“There are the coins on my belt, but I doubt very much that’s what you mean.” Bertie knew this game well by now. “What is it you want?”

From her pocket, Serefina drew a crystal flask and held it up to the light so that Bertie could see it was empty. “Fill this.”

“With what?”

“With words.”

Bertie would have scoffed, except she remembered the changes she’d wrought in the marketplace: rivulets of ribbon-color, golden earrings transformed into eggs. “Just words?”

“It’s never just words,” the herb woman said with a knowing smile. “Is it?”

“No, it’s not.” For a moment, Bertie contemplated refusing.

The words are all I have right now.

When the lock-mouths began to whisper to her in dozens of different animal languages, Bertie knew she would never make it through the Caravanserai and to the Scrimshander without the scrimshaw. She began to pull words out of the furthest recesses of her still-cloudy brain, with
rareripe
streaming out of her mouth alongside
horbgorble,
moonglade
followed by
curliewurlie
.

Though Serefina sought to catch only the most meaningful, inevitably some nonsense also slid inside the crystal flask, which she capped off with a cork stopper. “This will want sealing wax, I think.”

Unwilling to wait a moment longer, Bertie interrupted. “The key, please?”

The herb woman paused long enough in her appreciative petting of the flask, its contents rainbow-sparking with power, to complete their trade. The key’s weight settled into the center of Bertie’s palm as she fit it into the lock and twisted. Inside the tiny niche lay a black velvet bag. Everything seemed to slow as Bertie pulled it out, untied the drawstring, and tipped the contents into her hand, but the moment the scrimshaw touched her skin, the world came into sharp focus and the animals ceased their whispering.

“He replaced the chain.” The first one she’d broken before their fateful tango; the new one was a singularly fine series of interlocking gold rings, and Bertie traced it with her fingers before clasping it around her neck. The medallion settled between her collarbones. “What did he trade it for?”

“A flask from my stall, one that would banish memories.” Serefina took Bertie by the hand, leading her away from the alcove and down yet another set of stairs. “He wanted something to dull the pain of a broken heart.”

The numbness from the salve seemed to have spread to Bertie’s own chest.

He’s going to kill the parts of him that knew me. Loved me.

Serefina opened a door and gestured to a narrow alleyway. “This is where you leave me,” the herb woman said. “May you find what you seek beyond these walls.”

Bertie stumbled out into the tiny street, intending to make her way back to the marketplace, to Waschbär and the fairies. Thankfully, with the medallion in its rightful place, she had no more waking dreams. Instead, just before her, a small archway revealed a glimpse of another world. Beyond the shifting curtain of moss, Bertie could see trees: not the palm trees of the desert, but her trees.

She shook her head and wrapped her hand around the scrimshaw. “I don’t have time for that place. Not now.”

The curtain dissolved with the hiss of falling sand, joining the shimmering metallic dunes outside the Caravanserai. The shore that would lead to the White Cliffs. To the Scrimshander.

To Sedna’s kingdom.

No time to double back to Serefina’s stall, no time to fetch the sneak-thief and her miscreant companions, not with her father so close. Bertie jerked the nearest torch off the wall and struck out across the beach, only to realize within seconds that it was tricky slogging along. The scrimshaw hummed against her skin as she walked.

Peaseblossom would tell me this was a very bad idea.

Such an odd feeling, being without her tiny conscience. Even the boys would say it was unwise for Bertie to head off on her own, with no one to know where she’d gone. Her fears chased her, misshapen imps that tugged at her clothes and pulled her hair:

Nate, sucked under by Sedna’s waters.

Ariel, drinking the contents of a flask just to be free of her.

Her father, flying far and fast away from her and Ophelia both.

When Bertie swung the torch at them, they danced into the shadows but were not dissolved.

“I cannot think of such things,” she muttered, cresting the next dune. “I can only move forward.”

Before her, the sand curved around the dinner-plate shoreline and the ocean filled the earth’s cup until it brimmed over the horizon. Light from the moon washed the towering cliffs of Fowlsheugh silver before clouds entered the scene. Everything began fading to black, just as it did back at the Théâtre, with a slow hand on the dimmer.

Hardly able to see where the sand left off and the sea began, Bertie crossed her fingers and made a wish that went down to her toes: that a portal would yawn open like a feeding whale’s mouth, that stepping stones would surface to lead her down into Sedna’s world. Everything wavered; she felt the moist air shift, waited for salt-laden scrim curtains to slide past her …

Instead, high up in the side of the cliff, a faint pinprick of light hinted where the Scrimshander’s hearth fire now burned.

Bertie uncrossed her fingers. Only now, staring up at his home, did she understand her real wish had been for something, anything, that would save her the necessity of confronting her father again, of trying to pry or cajole the way to Sedna’s kingdom from his stubborn bird-brain.

Then her mind opened to the idea that this was where he’d brought Ophelia—

This was where my story began.

—and suddenly, a thousand other tales wanted to be told. The sand sucked at her feet, every grain a separate story. The cliffs rose before her, a tale too old, too large to fit inside her skull. A vein in Bertie’s forehead throbbed.

It’s too much.

But if she wanted to rescue Nate, she had to hold it inside her, had to carry it with her as she climbed the shallow steps carved into the cliff side. The footing was precarious, and there was no railing. The crashing waves below called to her to jump in Nate’s lilt.

“Lass.”

Spurred by the sound of his voice, she ran, with the winds pulling at the lavender gown, tugging her close to the edge and speaking with Ariel’s inflections.

“Jump. I’ll catch you.”

A gust of wind extinguished her torch. Bertie clutched the useless stick of wood, forcing herself to climb the last ten steps to the low entrance. Ducking her head with a sob of gratitude, she entered the Scrimshander’s Aerie.

Her first reaction was sympathy for Jonah. Whalebones soared overhead, curving alongside the inner walls and meeting tip to tip at the ceiling’s highest point. Light from a tiny hearth illuminated the countless carvings decorating every exposed inch of the ivory beams: ships tossed at sea or armed for battle; sirens luring sailors to their rocky doom; every seafaring mammal and salt-blooming plant imaginable.

“You shouldn’t have followed me here.”

Startled, Bertie dropped the now-useless torch as she turned toward the voice. The bird-creature, no more than a dark shadow, huddled under the vast expanse of carvings. Trembling with exhaustion and the effort required to speak in a human tongue, he might have commanded sympathy.

But only from someone, Bertie thought, who had not chased him over half the countryside and through a snowstorm. “And you shouldn’t have dropped me.”

In the puppet theater, she’d seen his transformation from bird-creature to man and back again. Still, it didn’t prepare her for the violent shedding of feathers as he unfolded from the floor, for the swirling tattoos that decorated the patches of visible flesh. No longer confined by the caravan’s low ceiling, the Scrimshander towered over her, spindly through the legs but thickly muscled in the chest and arms. His face was, once again, the one he’d shown Ophelia in their short time together. “You need to leave.”

Bertie searched his features—elongated nose, strong chin, high cheekbones—trying to catch a glimmer of herself there. It was hard to tell for certain, in the uneven light from the hearth. “I will, just as soon as you tell me how to reach Sedna’s kingdom.”

“Little One, I don’t—”

“I
know
there’s a portal. Sedna promised to open it for you.” Bertie paused to catch hold of her temper and tears, both threatening to escape, before she added, “It’s no use lying to me. I’ve seen your story.”

The Scrimshander turned on his heel, as though he found it easier to address the hearth than her. “Then you know it was not my choice to leave.” Golden radiance filled one lamp, then a second before he moved farther into the cavern, carrying a burning rushlight.

“Yes.” She chased him with her argument. “But it’s your decision whether you help me now or you force me to pull the knowledge from you like a fat worm from the grass—”

Her voice faltered when he lit the final lamp at the far back of the Aerie. Illumination poured over a massive bone slab that rested against the wall. Upon it, the Scrimshander’s carvings were a hundred variations on one study: Bertie’s own face, as she might have looked at age three or four. Against her will, she reached out a hand, fingertips tracing the tiny, stippled holes.

His voice was feather soft. “You came here, once. Do you not remember?”

The silence that followed was underscored by the distant call of the sea, and she recalled the scene in Mrs. Edith’s part of
How Bertie Came to the Theater
when Young Bertie put her toes over the edge of a towering cliff, held her arms out wide …

I wonder if I can fly.

It was like falling again, to listen to him speak.

“I saw you jump.” With every word, the Scrimshander’s voice evened. Feathers drifted loose, swirling like inky leaves on the floor of the cave, leaving more of his skin visible. “Such a strange little bird, in your silken skirts and kerchief. I caught sight of your face as you plummeted: eyes wide-open, expression joyful. You reveled in the wind that tore at your clothes and hair.” His own eyes were closed, perhaps to picture the breathtaking plunge. “You hit the water and sank like a stone. It’s a mercy you survived the fall, a greater mercy still that I found you. The water was dark, and you were tangled in the kelp. Your eyes were closed then, but you had starfish perched in your hair and the crabs hastened to cut you free. I dragged you to shore, where you spat water from your lungs and complained that I’d spoiled your swim. By the time the Mistress of Revels reached us, I was glad to hand you back into her keeping.”

This bit of the story was another piece in the puzzle, albeit an unexpected one, all ragged edges and hard corners. Had it been real, Bertie would have pressed it to the flesh of her inner arm, just to see if something could hurt more than the ache in her heart. “Did she tell you who I was?”

He nodded, a stiff jerk of his head that belied the grace of his talented hands. “She gave me your name, yes.”