The Whatnot (10 page)

The faery lady stared at herself a moment, wire eyelids snapping up and down. Then her metal lips parted and she began to wail. The toad croaked again, louder. Piscaltine tore at the mask. It came away from her face, dropped from her fingers. And all at once the wires and the toad and the bellows vanished, and she was a faery lady again, in a fish-bone dress.

“Maud,” she said, her back to Hettie. She sounded as if she was smiling. “So special is my little Whatnot. So special to everyone.” And then she spun on Hettie and shrieked,
“I hate you!
I hate you. You are nothing, do you understand me? You are nothing at all.” She fled then, and the doors to the chair room crashed shut behind her.

Hettie stood frozen, rooted to the floor.
No. No, no, no.
This was not how things were supposed to go. Her tongue was still attached. Her head was still on her shoulders. But for how long?

You are nothing at all.

CHAPTER XI

The Scarborough Faery Prison

“S
HE looks worried,” Pikey said. He held one hand over his good eye and stared out with the other. He was in a chilly room, on a bed under low, sloping eaves. Bartholomew sat across from him. A small window looked out onto a narrow London street and the curling signboard of an inn. Laid out on the floor was an array of slim metal instruments, compasses, knives, glass tubes, and a lot of little bottles.

Pikey frowned, concentrating. “She's saying something. I don't know what, but she's frightened by something. Her eyes are real big, and she's just staring down at me . . . whispering.”

Bartholomew's skin was even paler than usual and there was a little spasm in the hollow of his cheek. “Is anyone near her?” His voice was so soft Pikey could barely hear it. “Can you see anyone?”

“I—I don't reckon so. She's alone, far as I can tell. But she's in a right swish spot. In this great, long hallway with carpets and curtains and a proper glass window behind her head. It's like a mansion! Like the sort lords live in, or the Queen!”

Bartholomew rose abruptly from his stool. He closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice shivered. “They've found her. Heaven help us, they've found her.”

Pikey switched hands, now covering his faery eye and looking at Bartholomew with his good one. “What? Who found her?”

“Oh no. No, they couldn't have, she was in the woods, in the snow, and they—”

“Who is ‘they'?” Pikey asked, swinging his legs off the bed.

“It was a cottage we saw in the distance, not a mansion. A
cottage
.”

Pikey stomped his foot on the floor. The glass bottles jumped and one began to roll.
“Who are you talking about?
”

Bartholomew started. He looked at Pikey as if seeing him for the first time. “What? The Sidhe
,
of course! Lords of the Old Country! Faery royalty! They've found her. We have to go.” He fell to one knee and began gathering up the instruments on the floor.

“Well, if
I
was stuck in the Old Country, I wouldn't much mind being with these Sidhe folk. With carpets and windows and such. It looks marvelous.”

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Bartholomew practically sobbed. “Their houses are deathtraps. Every word my sister says, everything she does, could get her killed. She would've been better off in the wilds. . . .” He stood. “We have to go. Now.”

“Yeh, you said that.”

“As in, this
instant.
” Bartholomew shouldered his pack and banged open the door. “She could die there. Any second, those horrid faeries could eat her alive, and I'm here and can't do anything to stop it, and wouldn't know until—until—”

“But she's
not
dead,” Pikey said, hopping off the bed and hurrying after him. “I just saw her. And anyway, if she survived such a long time, it goes to figurin' she'll survive a bit longer. Leastways by my figurin'.”

But Bartholomew had already pulled up his hood and was pounding down the stairs into the belly of the inn.

 

They went up York Road hurriedly, heads down against a brisk winter's wind. Bartholomew said they were disguised as vagabonds, but Pikey was reasonably sure he didn't look much different from usual. His sock patch was tied securely over his clouded eye. He wore his same old trousers and bean-sieve jacket, and while Bartholomew had rubbed dirt and grease into the silver feather buckles of
his
boots, Pikey's were cleaner than any he had ever worn. The day before, the curly-haired gentleman had come by and, after speaking to Bartholomew in hushed and urgent tones, had procured for Pikey a thick woolen cloak and a pair of boots so new you could smell the waterproofing oil. He had also said that he was not a pirate and thus could not be expected to know where one got eye patches. Pikey had no idea what that meant, but he had been pleased with the boots.

Bartholomew strode purposefully ahead, a wiry black shape against the ice and snowdrifts of London. His pack was on his back, bottles and metal devices clinking softly. His cloak flapped behind him. Pikey had glimpsed the inside of that cloak the other day. It was full of little pockets and pouches and mysterious bulges. Long black gloves hid Bartholomew's arms to the elbows. His hood was pulled low over his face.

No one even glanced their way. Luckily. They saw leadfaces and the black-goggled agents of the Faery Bureau swarming the streets, dragging gnomes out of cellars, pulling the wildly kicking and bucking
Virduger
out of drain holes. On Hatfield Street, a giant had disguised himself as an oak tree and had simply stayed very, very still. The leadfaces had discovered him when someone had tried to chop the tree down for musket stocks and now they were dragging him off, too. The last of the faeries were clinging to the city.

Bartholomew and Pikey came to the river. A crowd had gathered. They pushed into it. People began to squeeze and jostle, the smell of unwashed humans battering Pikey, and then everyone was shouting insults, and he saw they were yelling at a huddle of ragged piskies being herded from under the supports of Blackfriars Bridge. A turnip flew. Then a stone. Bartholomew pulled Pikey onto the bridge.

The shouting echoed away behind them. When they were in the silent alleys of Holborn, Pikey said, “So. Where're we going? I mean, today. We can't walk to Faeryland.” He could easily keep up with the other boy. He was taller, even though he was sure Bartholomew was older. The thought made him puff up a bit and put back his shoulders.

They were almost at Ludgate Hill again, almost to the—

Pikey slowed. “We're not going back to the prison, are we?” His heart squeezed. Hadn't he been enough help? Was Bartholomew bringing him back because he hadn't seen enough? Pikey wasn't going to be locked up there again. Not in the dark and the cold, with nowhere to go. He would punch Bartholomew and run fast as anything before that happened.

But Bartholomew shook his head. “No. We're not going back there. I thought about it. I thought about setting up nets and bells and all that and
making
the faeries talk, but I don't have time. I didn't even know whether Hettie was alive a few days ago, and now that I do it's as if she's in greater danger than ever. We need to get into the Old Country, and we need to get in soon.”

They turned a corner, onto a long, wide road. They were high up in the city now. The houses here were scrubbed and clean and stood in neat rows like the spines of books. The ash from the chimneys drifted down with the snow, gray and white and feather soft. The light through the draped windows glowed a gentle orange. Pikey spotted a large-wheeled bicycle propped against a fence and wondered what sort of people lived here. He wondered what they sounded like, and whether they ate plums and pies, and laughed a lot.

“All right,” he said, a little absently, still staring at the bicycle. “But where are we going
now
?” He shook himself, and said more loudly, “I mean, how'll we get into the Old Country, when you said you'd been searching for ages?”

Bartholomew sighed. “The faery world and England, they're not really that far apart. Sometimes people just slip in when they least want to. It's only when you're looking for it you can't find it. There are two scientific ways, as far as I know. There's the changeling door. It's complicated and destructive, and it has to be engineered with spells and blood and magic. You need a live changeling to open it, and a binding potion, and approximately seven hundred penumbral sylphs within a range of fifteen miles.”

“Well, makes it easy, don't it? You're a changeling. You could just be your own door.”

“Don't you think I've tried that?”

Pikey shrugged. Bartholomew had an odd way of snapping. His voice was never very loud, but you could always tell when he wanted to twist your neck twice around.

“I've done everything. I have the lines. . . .” He pulled down one glove, exposing a web of red threads almost exactly like the ones on the arms of the branch-haired girl. “I got the potion. I found a place in Wales where the sylphs roost.” Bartholomew stared dully into the distance. “It wouldn't work. Not for me. Someone told me once that I was too much a human and too little a fay, and I suppose he was right. You have to be equal parts to be a door. It wouldn't open for me.”

“Well, there are other Peculiars. I mean, it'll be hard now with 'em all being dragged to the lockups, but—”

“No,” Bartholomew said softly. “That's what John Lickerish did. Tried them one by one until one of them worked. Nine died before he got his door. Nine children like Hettie. I can't do that. I won't do that.”

“Oh.” Pikey didn't entirely understand. If
he
had a sister lost in the Old Country, he thought he might do a bad thing or nine to get her back. But he wasn't going to press the subject. “And the other sort of door? What's the second kind?”

“Natural doors,” said Bartholomew. They were almost out of the city now. Pikey saw fields ahead. No alleys or factories. Just fields.

Bartholomew continued. “I've been looking for them the longest, for years and years. I went to Dartmoor and Yorkshire and all the way to France and the forests of Germany. I found cairns and abandoned faery hills and saw lots of awful things. But none of them led me to the Old Country.”

How old was this boy? Fifteen? Sixteen?
Pikey wondered what it was like, searching for so long, doing and hoping and thinking about just one thing for such a long, long time. All Pikey ever thought about were hot stoves and caramel apples and how to not die. He felt a little bit pointless suddenly.

“I haven't found either sort of door, but I think I've found something else,” said Bartholomew. “I've got a chance now. A real one. The English armies are gathering in Yorkshire. The faeries are already there. Mr. Jelliby has connections with the Faery Bureau and rumors are spreading in the prisons that there is a leader in the North, a Sidhe
,
come specially from the Old Country to lead them into battle. That Sidhe had to get here somehow. I don't know how, but if there was a way for him, there's a way for me. We're going north.”

And with that Bartholomew swept under an archway, and suddenly Pikey was surrounded by white, pure white snow as far as he could see, as far as he had ever seen before. He was free.

 

That night they slept under the stars. They found a stretch of grass, sheltered over by trees and guarded from the wind by a low hill, and laid down their cloaks. Bartholomew had somehow managed to buy meat pies at an inn outside the city without attracting attention, and Pikey wasn't expecting another meal that day, but he became rather hopeful when Bartholomew set to gathering sticks. He lit the pile with a tinderbox and three drops of something black from a bottle in the depths of his cloak, and then the heap began to crackle, smoke curling from the frozen wood. It was not a cook fire, though. It wasn't even a fire for warmth.

Bartholomew kept poking at it, hurrying to the trees, tearing off branches, coming back, throwing on more and more wood until the fire had grown into a great, angry blaze. Then he came to Pikey, and said, “All right. Can you see Hettie? Is she safe?”

Pikey untied the sock and looked out through his clouded eye, but he already knew what he'd see. Nothing. Only blackness, with the occasional fleck of light, like a snowflake against his eye. “I— Well, I don't see things all the time. Sometimes it's like it's blocked, or—or under something.”

Bartholomew blinked at him. “You can't see anything.”

“No?” Pikey said cautiously. He looked over at Bartholomew.

“Give the sock to me,” said Bartholomew. Pikey held it out. Bartholomew grasped it, and before Pikey could say a word the sock had flown into the flames.

“You won't need that anymore,” said Bartholomew sharply. “You'll try, and try always, to see my sister, and when you do, you'll tell me. Everything. Every detail. I need to know she's safe.”

Pikey let out an angry cry, but the sock was already burning. “You could've just given me the sock to
wear
, you know!” he shouted, wheeling on Bartholomew. “D'you think I have lots of those? We don't all have fancy people buyin' us boots and cloaks whenever we want! We're not all rich stupid toffs!”

“I'm not a toff,” Bartholomew snapped. “I was just as poor as you once. But I—I—”

“You
what
?” Pikey demanded. “Who d'you think you are?”

They sat glaring at each other. The sock burned away to nothing. Then Bartholomew went to the other side of the fire. Pikey glared at him a while longer. He began to doze. The ground was hard, and the cold pricked at his cheeks, turning them red. Finally he huddled into his cloak and tried to sleep.

 

It must have been hours later when he opened his eyes. The fire had shrunk to a few red coals. Bartholomew still sat by it. His back was toward Pikey. His shoulders slouched. But he wasn't sleeping. He was saying something.

Pikey raised himself up on his elbows, silently. Bartholomew was whispering, repeating four words, over and over again. He was holding something. Then he bowed his head and began to cry. Pikey could hear the tears in his voice, the words coming ragged and weak.

“I'll bring you home,” Bartholomew said, and the sound of it drove into Pikey like a thorn. “I'll bring you home.”

Pikey lay down again, but he did not try to sleep. He watched Bartholomew until the other boy had dozed off. And when he had, Pikey saw the thing that was in his hands. It was a handkerchief, checkered green and black. It had parts knotted into it, arms and a head and something like a skirt. Almost like a little doll.