The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I (21 page)

“Give me them tongs!”

“Why? So you can drop the pass
again?
Give me my penknife back!”

“The girl gave them tongs to
me,
didn’t she?”

“Right. And she’s such an expert judge of character. Let’s nominate her for the Lion’s Paw.”

In the end, one of them managed to unfold the note by placing an edge of it under his boot and slipping the tongs into the crease, flipping over the first fold. He gripped the pass and held it high, keeping it a good distance from his face. “Fourth Floor Clearance,” it read, followed by a postscript saying that the assistant could check out library books. It was signed by Irenka December, Sixth Countess of Krumlov, and it bore a seal showing a white ermine. The guard heaved a long-suffering sigh and the paper wafted in the air. “Go on, then.” He handed the tongs and the letter back to the girl, who solemnly accepted them. She walked down the hallway.

Petra was very pleased with herself. She had grown up in a village
with busy adults and a long-winded schoolmaster, so she had had many opportunities to practice faking other people’s handwriting. But working for Iris gave Petra a new edge in the art of forgery. Petra had learned that sorrel vinegar mixed with salt can make the strongest ink vanish. To produce the right kind of pass, all Petra had to do was apply the vinegary juice to the word “Third” and write the word “Fourth” in its place. The only problem was that sorrel vinegar lightens the color of paper as well as making the ink on it disappear, so a close look can easily reveal that a letter has been tampered with. Remembering Sir Humfrey Vitek’s reluctance to touch paper handled by Iris, Petra cooked up a plan that would get her past the fourth-floor guards and provide enough distraction so that Neel could slip past them as well.

Petra walked down the corridor that would take her north. Her feet echoed on the gray, veined marble floor. She tried to stay focused, even though the splendor around her—ancient suits of armor, and round-bellied Chinese vases balanced on pretty tables—begged for her attention. It was also hard to ignore Neel as he followed her up the hallway, dashing from one set of window curtains to the next. They had decided to break into the captain’s bedchamber during dinnertime, when he was likely to be away and there would be few people in the halls.

“What about your job?” Petra had asked Neel.

“Pfft,”
had been Neel’s dismissive response. “I give em the slip all the time. Easy as breathing.”

A valet passed Petra in the hallway, giving her a doubtful look. Neel stayed behind his curtain. The valet shrugged and walked on. Otherwise, the halls stretched emptily before them as they then headed west.

When they reached the chambers at the northwest corner, they spotted a room whose doorknob was a snarling boar’s head. Neel put one eye to the keyhole, screwing the other one shut. Then he
took a small glass out of his pocket and pressed one end against the door, holding the other end to his ear. Nodding briskly, he moved his fingers over the door and they heard a click.

Checking the hallway to make sure no one was there, Petra slipped in after Neel. She held her breath, hoping that the captain of the guard was happily stuffing food in his mouth someplace far from here.

They shut the door softly. The captain’s bedchamber was a suite. They had entered into an empty drawing room. A door to the bedroom was at the opposite end.

“Did Sadie say where he keeps it?” Neel whispered.

“It’ll be right by his bed.”

“That ain’t a very safe spot to keep all your secrets.”

“Nobody knows that you can suck the secrets out of Worry Vials. Everyone thinks they’re reliable. And you’d better not tell anyone otherwise.”

Neel unlocked the bedroom door. “Think of all the krona you could get from blackmailing …” His eyes were wide.

“Not now!” She pushed open the door. And there, right on the nightstand, was a fat, black bottle. Petra reached in her pocket for a flask of water. She uncorked the Worry Vial and poured the water in.

“How long do we have to wait?” Neel scooped up a pile of coins on the dressing table.

“Neel,”
she hissed. “Put that back.”

“What for? I want to get something out of this, too.”

“But the captain will notice that the money’s missing.”

“So? He’ll think one of the servants took it.”

“Exactly. One of the servants. Don’t you care that one of the servants will get in trouble?”

“Nah. Not really.”

“Even if the servant is
your sister,
who cleans this room?”

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” He sighed and put the money back on the dresser. “Can’t figure why she didn’t take it herself.”

“Just steal something that the captain won’t notice is missing for a while, will you?”

Neel began inspecting the room, pulling open drawers and peeking inside of trunks. “Hate to repeat myself, but how long is this going to take?”

“I don’t know.” She placed her palm over the Worry Vial’s opening and shook the bottle, hoping that agitating the water would make the process go faster.

“It’s not like we got time for taking tea and biscuits.”

“Agreed,” Astrophil spoke up. “Petra, we should get out of here as soon as possible.”

“See? The spider thinks so, too.”

“All
right”
She poured the treated water back into the flask it came from. She was gratified to see that the water was very dark—not quite black, but it would have to do. The Worry Vial had a sort of grayish color to it now. From her pocket, Petra pulled the bottle of India ink, which she had mixed with the algae earlier that day to make the ink stick to glass. She tipped the black liquid into the vial. Not exactly wanting to walk around the castle with a black hand, she bent down and pulled up her petticoat. She held the beige cloth over the opening of the vial and shook it so that the ink coated the inside of the vial. Letting her stained petticoat fall, she poured the leftover ink back into its original container. She stoppered the Worry Vial. Now it looked almost exactly the way it had when they entered the room.

They hastily exited the captain’s chambers. Neel locked the doors as they left. It was not until they were safe in the basement of the castle that Petra handed him the flask of dark water and asked, “So what did you steal?”

“A silver codpiece. He’s got a zillion of them.” He caught Petra’s
look. “I’m not going to
keep
it! I’m going sell it. They fetch a fair price on the market. They make a fellow look all manlylike.”

Petra, however, had her doubts.

T
HEY DECIDED
they would listen to the captain’s worries on their next day off in the woods near the Lovari campsite. Petra had a hard time agreeing to this, eager as she was to hear the contents of the Worry Vial, which Neel had left out to dry in his family’s wagon. “The garden seems safe enough,” Petra argued. “Why don’t we do it there?”

But Neel looked uncomfortable. He said he had been to the menagerie since they had visited it together, and felt that something was wrong. “The elephant was trumpeting away like there was no tomorrow. She was looking right at me, flapping her ears. So I started to back up. And then I swear she nodded at me, like she’d been saying ‘Get out’ and I finally caught on.”

Petra teased him for taking the moods of an elephant so seriously, but Neel insisted that they should not return to the garden.

At the campsite, the small children ran up to Petra and tugged at her skirt for attention. Neel kissed his mother, slipping some money into her skirt pocket. Then he dashed into the family wagon to fetch the vial.

Ethelenda was there, and introduced Petra to an old woman named Drabardi, who looked surprisingly fit for her age. She said something to Petra, which Ethelenda translated. “She offers to tell you your fortune.”

Petra felt uncomfortable. Not for the first time, she was glad that she seemed to have inherited her father’s gift rather than her mother’s. Mind-magic was her least favorite kind. Despite —or maybe because of—the fact that her mother had been able to read the future, the very thought of magic like the Second Sight, scrying, or mind reading made her feel as if something were weighing
her down, like the time she got sick and Dita piled blankets on top of her until Petra couldn’t move. She could only lie there, breathing and sweating. She tried to think of a polite way to say no to Drabardi. The woman might be a fraud, but even if she wasn’t, Petra didn’t want to hear what she had to say. As far as Petra could tell, knowing the future had never done anyone a bit of good.

Drabardi laughed and said something. Ethelenda translated in a puzzled voice, “She says you’re probably right.”

Petra was relieved when Neel emerged from the wagon and gestured for her to follow him. They walked among the pines and slender birch trees, which were shrugging off their pale leaves.

When they were a good distance from the campsite, Neel pulled out the bottle Petra had given him. No liquid remained in it, just dust. Petra tipped the dust into her palm and stirred it with her finger.

Like a ghost, a disembodied voice began to speak. The captain of the guard’s voice was low and rasping. “And
we took them to dungeons and let them starve first… Then we …
“

The voice droned on, telling Petra and Neel of horrible things: torture, murder, large graves, and missing limbs. Petra wanted nothing more than to dash the black dust from her hand and scrub it clean. Nausea and a sense of despair welled up in the back of her throat. Her eyes stung with unshed tears and she wanted to make the voice stop. But she kept her hand still.

“…
until they stopped. Tomorrow night we will seize the clock-maker. Fiala Broshek will remove his eyes and put a spell on them. She says the prince wants them for his collection, to lock up in his Cabinet of Wonders …
“

Petra flung the dust to the ground. She began scraping earth over it. Neel watched her, his face inscrutable. Petra didn’t try to guess his thoughts. She didn’t want to. After she had made a small
mound over the dust she rubbed her hands with dirt. She sat there, shaken.

Neel stood up first. He turned around, walked a few paces, and stopped. He spat. Then he kept walking.

Petra followed him, but at a distance. She let him disappear into the trees ahead of her. Without having said anything, they understood that they both wanted to be alone.

Petra …

She said nothing to the spider. She did not want to listen to any more voices.

You cannot change what happened,
he said.
But now you know where Master Kronos’s eyes are. And you can do something about that.

Petra didn’t know what she would have said to this, if indeed she would have replied at all. A rustle of leaves interrupted their one-sided conversation. She spun around.

“Well, well,
gadje,
what brings you back to our neck of the woods?”

It was Emil. He looked at ease, one arm slinging a brace of rabbits over his shoulder, the other loosely hanging by his side.

“You speak Czech,” she said warily.

“I do. I understand it, too. And from what I understand, what you just planted there”—he nodded back into the trees, which hid the grave of the captain’s secrets—“is a sickness. Even now, the ants in that bit of earth are tunneling far away from it. Not a blade of grass will ever grow there. And what I wonder is, who is this girl who brings her poison among my people and buries it in our earth?”

“This land does not belong to you,” Petra said.

“I don’t care if it doesn’t.”

Petra started to turn away when Emil trapped her wrist with his
free hand. The rabbits still hung nonchalantly over his shoulder. If it weren’t for the fact that Petra’s hand was seized in a viselike grip, anyone watching this scene would have thought that Emil was completely relaxed. “What I
do
care about,” he said, “is Neel. And his mother. And his sister. Now, I may be just an ignorant Gypsy”—he smiled, his teeth shining like a blade against the blackness of his beard—“but I think that you have invited Neel to play with your poison. You are involving him with something. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.”

She twisted in his grip and felt her wrist burn. “Neel’s his own person.”

“Neel is a child!
You
are a child!” He shook her. “The funny thing is, even children can get people hurt.”

“I’m not going to hurt anybody!”

But her next action probably didn’t make Emil believe very strongly in what she had just said. She kicked him hard in the shins. Gasping in pain, he loosened his hold on her and she pulled herself away. He started to stumble toward her. She scooped up dirt and flung it in his eyes. Petra ran, leaving him limping, cursing, and rubbing at his face.

She left the Lovari almost immediately after she reached the campsite. She said nothing of her encounter with Emil to Neel, but she didn’t want to be around when the man returned. Since Neel would be spending the night with the Lovari and she would have to walk back to the castle alone, she said she wanted to leave before it got dark.

Neel nodded. “Turn up at the stables the morning of the party,” he said. “We have to plan.”

But as Petra walked up the hill, she decided she would not meet Neel on the day of the birthday celebration. She would search for the Cabinet of Wonders by herself. Not because Emil had frightened her, but because what he had said was right.