The Whatnot (15 page)

CHAPTER XV

Tar Hill

P
IKEY and Bartholomew woke early on the day of battle and walked a short way out of town. It was hours before dawn and the fields were silent, sheathed in frost. Pikey looked around him, his boots crunching on the stony road. He saw the landscape he had glimpsed on the generals' map, but it looked very different now. On the map it was as if you were a bird, flying high overhead, but on the ground everything was huge and dark and faraway. Trees grew in black tufts here and there, until they formed a dark mass of woods in the distance. The twelve iron prisons encircled the town. About a half mile away, between the town and the forest, a high hill arched out of the sweeping fields, bare and round as a knucklebone.

“Tar Hill,” Bartholomew said softly, as if it was special somehow.

Pikey squinted at it. “Tar Hill's a silly name for a hill.”

Bartholomew laughed. “It is. It doesn't even look like tar. But it's famous. A battle was fought on it, ages ago. It was between the faeries and the English. Just like now.”

“Oh. We won then, I s'pose.”

“We?” Bartholomew frowned. “The English did, if that's what you mean. They slaughtered the fighting faeries and took the rest to the factories. People called it a great victory for the Empire. Better than defeating the Scots and the French and the Americans put together.”

Pikey shrugged. “I'd heard that.” He hadn't. No one had ever told him. He changed the subject. “The forest on the other side—that's where they are, yeh? But the English aren't marching yet, so we should have slept longer. The faeries'll eat us alive if we go in now.”

Bartholomew ignored this bit of reasoning. “We have an hour until the soldiers march for Tar Hill. We'll go to the other side of the hill, to the western flanks of the wood, away from the battle, but a safe distance from the trees, too, in case there are any stray faeries about. Then we wait. The English will gas the woods, the faeries'll leave, and in three hours no one will spot us going in.”

They came to the base of the hill and started walking around it. It went up in a smooth, steep line, so smooth Pikey thought it looked as if a giant had set his bowl upside down and then forgotten about it for a hundred years until it was covered with dirt and plants. The grass at the bottom was tall and wet, soaking his cloak. He wished it weren't so cold. It was not snowing, at least, and there were no drifts like there had been in London, but his teeth still chattered as the water seeped into his cloak. Worse yet, the hill was much larger than it looked. It took almost half an hour to get around it. Once they were, things became trickier.

The fields stretched away in front of them, empty but for the clumps of trees, all the way to the faery wood in the distance.

“They'll have posted lookouts,” Bartholomew said, stopping Pikey with a warning hand. “We'll move from tree to tree.
Don't
go until I tell you.” He took a small clockwork device from one of his many pockets and held it to his eye, scanning the dark woods.

“What d'you see?” Pikey asked. He wanted to look through the device as well, but he didn't know if Bartholomew would want him to, so he didn't say anything.

“Nothing yet. Nothing's moving, besides the— Wait.” Bartholomew went stock-still.

“Besides what?” Pikey's hands clutched at the sides of his cloak. “Faeries? Are faeries coming?”

“No. But something's wrong. Something's wrong with the trees. The branches, they're . . .”

Pikey shivered.

“I can't see,” Bartholomew said. “We need to move closer. Run.” And before Pikey could protest they were off, sprinting toward a trio of dead witch hazels that twisted out of the field a few dozen strides away. They flattened themselves to the trunks, gasping the icy air. Bartholomew pulled out the device again and peered through it.

“What is it?” Pikey asked. “Can you see now?” He strained to see the woods himself, but they were so far away. He squinted as hard as he could. There
was
something strange about the trees. The leaves were almost black and they stirred though there was no wind, sometimes swirling away in bursts of darkness, as if picked up on a gust.

“Closer,” Bartholomew hissed again, and again they ran. The next tree they took refuge behind was a birch, white and leafless, a skeletal hand clawing out of the earth. Bartholomew put the clockwork lens to his eye. Pikey waited, peeking around the trunk.

“Can you see it now?” he asked, gripping the bark with both hands. Above, the branches swayed, empty, silent. Pikey froze.
Leaves.
Leaves in the trees, even though it was winter.
There were only a few trees in London, but he knew how they looked in summer and he knew how they looked after the frosts. The branches should be bare now, the leaves all gone. He turned to Bartholomew.

Bartholomew had seen it, too. The device dropped from his hand. He looked at Pikey, his eyes wide.

“Oh no,” he breathed. “They're going to be slaughtered.”

 

The soldiers set off from Siltpool at precisely a quarter to seven, as was scheduled. They moved across the fields in straight lines, guns to their shoulders, heads held high. General Braillmouth rode at their front upon a proud steed as black as death. Above, the clouds hung low and ominous.

At the same time, four steam-powered beetles skittered out of town on pointy metal legs. Thick glass canisters full of carefully engineered gas were bolted to their backs. The beetles slipped into the grass, only a shiver of movement marking their paths as they streaked toward the faery wood.

It was seven o'clock sharp.

General Braillmouth reached the foot of the hill. He gave the signal to break rank. The soldiers' pace quickened. They started up the steep slopes, six hundred seventy-two men, swarming up the hill like so many ants.

No one heard the cries from the other side. No one saw the two small figures racing across the fields, away from the faery wood.
“Run!”
they screamed.
“Run, turn round, turn round!”
But no one heard, and no one saw.

Braillmouth's soldiers scrambled and crawled up the hill, their bayonets lowered. Rain began to fall suddenly, pouring down their faces and spouting off their hats, spattering their uniforms. Drums beat, but the rain was louder, and the noise of boots. And then the soldiers heard another sound. A hissing, shivering sound. It grew stronger, stronger, until it was not a hiss but a roar, like a waterfall.

Pikey and Bartholomew had reached the base of the hill. They waved their arms and shouted, but the soldiers did not see. They did not hear. The soldiers mounted the top of the hill and pooled for a moment, scurrying every which way, setting up aether cannons. The roaring became deafening. A shadow passed overhead, a cloud darker than the storm. As one, the soldiers looked to the sky. Their guns fell from their hands. They tried to turn back, but soldiers were behind them, soldiers were everywhere, and the officers were shouting, and the drums were beating, and the troops were trampling one another trying to get away.

The sky was filled with birds. A hundred thousand birds. Blackbirds of Dartmoor, jackdaws of London, ravens and crows from Cumberland, Dunne, and Yorkshire. They swirled above the army, a great black vortex of shrieks and flapping wings. And then they dove, straight down onto the troops, and for a short while the hill became as black as tar.

CHAPTER XVI

A Shade of Envy

T
HE Innard Stairs were blocked.

Hettie and the faery butler skidded to a halt and stared in horror at the pandemonium below.
Faeries.
Hundreds of faeries swarmed up the steps in a glistening swath of gowns and masks. They slipped, fell, wriggling over one another in their attempt to flee the lower stories. Jackets and skin hung in shreds. Some of the faeries bled, slow strings of black gore.

“There
is
no way out,” said the faery butler. The cord that bound Hettie's wrist dropped from his hand. He stood perfectly still, watching the guests boil up the steps. Below in the house, a jarring crash sounded.

The Glass Wing.

“There is now,” Hettie whispered, and this time she was the one pulling the faery butler, down, down into the writhing mass of Sidhe.

The faery butler let out a shout. Hettie thought she might have screeched a little bit, too. Then they smashed into the oncoming faeries, into a wall of silk and muscle. At first the panic was too great. Legs and arms and masked faces were everywhere, and the pushing threatened to wash Hettie and the faery butler back up the steps. But Hettie wasn't going up there again. She hooked her foot into the boot of a faery gentleman and clawed her way up his waistcoat and began leaping across the top of the throng, from shoulder to head, hurtling down the staircase. Faeries were tumbling everywhere, over the banister, flipping into the dark. They shrieked at Hettie, but she didn't stop. She had to get to the bottom. She could already see the lower hall. Then a hole opened up in front of her and she dropped. Shoes pounded down around her.

She began to crawl on hands and knees, step after step after step. A sharp red block heel came perilously close to mangling her hand. Then a lady in the mask of a wolf pulled her to her feet and shook her. “He will kill us,” she whimpered, not really at Hettie, though her fingers dug into her arms. “Kill us all for coming. Oh, Piscaltine, you fool, what have you done, what have you
done
?”

Hettie tried to pull away, but the faery wouldn't let go. Hettie was being pushed up the stairs again. The lady clung to her, screaming, her fingers bruising. Then the faery butler was at Hettie's side. He snatched her away from the lady. Hettie was swooped up into the air. And he practically hurled her down the remaining steps. She felt so high up, so high she would break every bone in her body when she landed. The last of the madness flew away beneath her. She fell with a thud in the lower hall and rolled over the floor.

A second later she was up on one knee, head pounding. The hall was almost empty now. Only a few stragglers were rushing down the trampled pathway of leaves and branches.
Wrong way,
Hettie thought as she passed them.
There's no way out up there. You'll all be trapped.
For a brief instant, Hettie thought now might be the time to slip away and lose the faery butler. But then he landed next to her and she was running with him, though she wasn't sure she wanted to be.

They came to the place where the guests had been received, where the path of ivy led away toward the Wings of Glass and Mildew.

Boom.
Another crash, some ways ahead. They turned a corner. Above, Piscaltine's flags and banners flickered in a gust of wind. They went down three steps.
Boom.
Around one more corner and into a hallway made of green and pale blue glass.

Boom.
The crashes were coming closer.

Boom, boom, boom,
louder and faster, and then the hallway shattered and three statues stood before them, taller than the faery butler, their heads bowed under stone hoods. One of them stepped forward, a long silver blade in its hand.

The faery butler flew at the statue, and even in his decrepit state he was faster than anything. Just as the statue swung its sword, the faery slid onto his knees, head back, eyes looking up at the ceiling. The blade hissed over him. In an instant the butler was back on his feet, whirling, smashing his own knife into the statue's head.

The knife snapped with sharp
ping.
The statue didn't even flinch. It turned, slowly, and brought up its sword again. The faery butler scrambled to his feet. Hettie didn't see the rest, because just then the other two statues stepped toward her. Their swords swung. She dropped to the floor and twisted onto her back. She saw the blades descending, descending. For an instant she glimpsed under their hoods, saw stone faces and stone lips. Then she slid to the side and the blades cracked down beside her. She was on her feet in a blink. The broken walls of the Glass Wing were so close. She leaped. Cold air slapped at her and grass crushed under her. She rolled out into the field beyond.

The faery butler followed a second later, already running.

“What are they?”
Hettie screamed, leaping to her feet and flying after him. She could barely keep him in sight. The fog was so thick and the faery butler went so fast, sometimes dropping onto all fours like a dog.
Like a pity-faery,
Hettie thought.

“I don't know!” he screeched back over his shoulder. “The Sly King's, most like. He is angry about something. You. You, and Piscaltine for keeping you. The Duchess of Yearn-by-the-Woods has fallen from favor, methinks. And her head from her shoulders.”

Behind her in the fog, Hettie heard shouts and the ring of metal coming after them. She strained to see something in the whiteness, but there was nothing. The fog swirled on all sides, endless and blinding. Only the patch of grass she moved over was visible, as if the fog were afraid of her and hung back.

“But I didn't steal his stupid necklace!” she shouted. “I—I left it, or dropped it somewhere—” She couldn't even remember anymore. The other one was still with her though, knocking inside her nightgown as she ran.

“It's not
about
the necklace.” The faery butler appeared, grabbing her hand. “I told you, you're the Door. Red lines. Branch hair. You're so obviously a Door. And the lady Piscaltine keeps you locked up and hidden, as if you were nothing at all, as if you were a nobody. The Sly King will be furious with her for not delivering you to him.”

Behind them, Hettie could hear footsteps now, beating the grass.
How close are they?
She couldn't tell. And then there was the rattle of a harness, and the footsteps became hooves, galloping.

“They're after us!” the faery butler shouted. They sped into the fog.

Hettie's side ached terribly. It was all she could do to keep her legs moving. Somewhere she heard a horn, low and groaning. And a river? Was that water rushing nearby?

“Where'll we go?” she gasped. “We might be going in circles and you wouldn't even be able to
tell
!”

The river sound was coming closer though, a gurgling, somewhere up ahead. So were the hooves. Then, without warning, the field dipped down a steep grassy bank and there was a waterway, black and deep.

The faery butler let go of her hand and hurried along its edge, sniffing, waving his long fingers over the water. He went a few paces, peered about, went a few more. The horn sounded again, and all at once the fog was filled with terrible cries. They were not even that far away from Piscaltine's house. In the fog, what seemed like miles might not have been more than a few hundred feet.

“Here we are,” the faery butler said, his voice low and urgent. Hettie followed his gaze. A boat was moored to the bank of the river. Or grown to it. Like a great white caterpillar, it clutched the grassy slope, pale tendrils hugging the dirt. The faery butler herded Hettie onto its deck.

“Hartik,”
he said.
“Mahevol Kir.”

The boat seemed to shrivel, the wooden tentacles drawing in around its belly. A second later the boat was picked up by the currents and pulled into the middle of the river.

Not a moment too soon. Florence La Bellina bloomed out of the fog like a bloody flower. Her horse looked like her, black coat, white mane, eyes like pits. It skidded to a halt on the bank, and Florence stared at Hettie, her shiny doll's face a mask of rage. Hettie stared back, breathless and aching, watching her until she was swallowed again by the fog.

 

The boat was very strange. It sliced through the water without a sound. Its sail was silver, glimmering in the mist, and it had two eyes in its prow, half-lidded and very haughty looking. A trapdoor was in its deck, though there were only shadows and squeezing, glistening tubes underneath. Sometimes the pale tendrils that twisted along the boat's sides would skim over the waves like the legs of a sea creature.

But when Hettie looked over the railing at the boat's reflection it was even stranger. It was as if a different boat were attached to the bottom of this boat, upside-down in the water. The mirror-boat was moss green. The mast was broken and the sides were full of gaping holes, the tendrils dragging, limp in the waves. Even Hettie's reflection looked worse. It was difficult to see because the ripples in the water kept cutting the image into ribbons, but it seemed to Hettie that her reflection was wrinkled and stooped, as if it were a hundred years old. Its hands clutched the railing like claws.

 

They had been on the boat for what felt like an age, Hettie and the faery butler, sailing on black water through white fog. The only sound was their breathing, close and muffled, and the hoofbeats. Florence's horse, following them along the river's edge. Hettie tried not to hear that part. She walked the boat prow to keel so many times she could picture every twist in the railing. She squinted at the eyes in the prow. Now she was occupying herself by staring at the figure in the water. The figure stared back.

It did everything she did. Hettie waved at it. It waved back. She smiled, wondering if it would smile, too. It did. It curled back its lips and opened its mouth, but there were bugs in its smile, black beetles and thousand-footed centipedes scuttling across its old, dead teeth.

Hettie gagged and snapped her mouth shut, half-expecting to feel the insects wriggling over her tongue.

“A Shade of Envy,”
the faery butler said. Hettie started. “That's what it's called. The boat. It was Lady Piscaltine's. Very fitting.”

Hettie turned away from his voice. She thought about ignoring him. “It's horrid,” she said finally. “Your whole Country is horrid. It doesn't have anything nice in it.”

The faery butler sat against the mast, very still. “It does. I'm sure it does. Perhaps we just haven't found it yet.”

Hettie made a face, but she went to the mast and sat down on the other side of it, so that her back was to the faery butler's back. “Well, I'm sick of looking,” she said, resting her chin in her hands.

She thought that would be the end of the matter, but the faery butler snorted. “You? You never looked. You wouldn't see anything pretty if it were sitting under your nose.”

“I would too!” Hettie turned a little, insulted. “And I looked all over the place. There's just nothing here. It's all dead.”

“
You
aren't dead.”

“That doesn't have anything to do with anything,” she said under her breath.

She heard the faery butler shift against the mast. “Yes, it does. You are a little fool.”

“No, you are. Everything keeps getting worse and worse, and I don't know where I'm going, and I don't know what's going to happen.”

She listened for a sound from the faery butler. For a long while there was nothing. Then, “Do you want to know how I survived the
Virduger
in Deepest Winter? You thought they had finished me, didn't you? But they hadn't. Piscaltine never had them kill me. She ordered them to wound me so that no one could tell the Belusites and the Sly King that I had gone unpunished, but if anything, she was pleased I had gotten rid of another of his servants. I did not know that then. I did not know that until many moons later when I stumbled half-dead up to her house. And now I'm here, on my way to someplace new, someplace better, I hope. Perhaps none of us know how important we are. Perhaps some of us never find out, because we simply lie down and die.”

Hettie peered around the mast at him. She saw that his green eye was glowing again, dully and very faintly.

“I didn't say I was going to die. I—I just said I didn't like it here.”

“What is this
liking
? If you
liked
everything that happened to you, you would be quite the most feeble person. A thousand things will happen to you, and some of it will be good and some of it will be bad and some of it will be utterly dreadful, but they all . . .” The faery butler paused. “They all lead somewhere.”

“Where?” Hettie inched a little closer. “Home?”

The faery butler's head was tilted up. He was looking into the distance, into the endless, still fog. “I don't know,” he said. “Perhaps if we make them to.”

Another pause. On the shore, the hooves pounded. Trees poked out of the whiteness, skeletons in a cotton sea. “When the Sly King has you, and I am gone, try to escape,” the faery butler said. “Try to get away.”

Hettie gaped at him. Slowly his eye went out again. He slumped against the mast as if he'd never spoken. And then, suddenly, the fog lifted. For the briefest instant Hettie saw the river, curling away in front of her, and the moon shone down, and the river became a silver ribbon, a silver road. Hettie gasped. Then the fog closed again, and they were plunged into murk.

 

She woke up at some point in the night and tried to think. She felt like she should be plotting, scheming a way to escape, but her mind was empty. So many strange and powerful creatures were snapping at her heels, and she didn't understand what any of them wanted. In London, Mr. Lickerish had tried to make a Door of her and so she had been special and dangerous, but she couldn't imagine Florence La Bellina would care about that, or the Sly King. It was such a hollow-headed thing the faery butler had suggested. Doors were for escaping, for the faeries to
leave
the smoke and factories of England and go home. But these faeries already were home. They were already in the Old Country. It had to be something else they wanted. It had to be— Her fingers tightened around the pendant under her nightgown. The warmth spread up her hand.
Like it's alive,
she thought, for the hundredth time.