The Whatnot (21 page)

Hettie stared up at him. She didn't want to replace Florence. She didn't want to be a doorway and she didn't want to let this mad king and his faeries into England. But she already knew what she had to do. She could cry and scream all she liked. It wouldn't help her escape the tower. It wouldn't save her brother.

She wiped her face and stood. “All right,” she said. “I'll walk when the door's open. I'll do it, but you can't let anyone hurt him. You can't let them kill my brother.”

The Sly King held the bottle out to her.

She took it.

“Drink,” he said.

Hettie drank. The Sly King's eyes became slits again. He smiled. Far, far away, soft, but getting louder, Hettie heard the sound of wings.

“There,” the Sly King laughed. “Good-bye.” And then he was gone, and the tower shuddered, as if being slammed with some great force.

“Bartholomew!”
Hettie screamed.

There was another shudder.

Kill them.
Kill them. Kill them. Perhaps it will teach you some obedience.

Black wings whirled through the window, slashing around her. The tower shattered like a glass spindle.

And then Hettie was falling, down, down into the City of Black Laughter.

 

“No . . .” Bartholomew's hand went to his side, but his own knife was long gone. “No, stop, we're not your enemies! We're here to find my sister! Please!”

The blades kept coming. The tips glinted in the starlight, closer, closer.

“Hsthil?”
Bartholomew tried in the faery language. “
Makevinia pak. Mak tur hendru!”

No use. The three ladies wore long, beaked masks and the eyes behind them glinted, fixed on Pikey and Bartholomew.

Oh, crikey, they'll run us right through,
Pikey thought desperately.
They'll run us through and they won't even blink.
A blade slipped into his cloak. He felt the cold metal on his skin, biting.

And then someone laughed. “Now, now,” a voice said, as if it were scolding a naughty child.

The ladies whirled toward the speaker, but their swords remained, just pricking Pikey's and Bartholomew's skin.

A tall, thin figure was coming toward them along the cliffs. He wore a fine coat and waistcoat, and many necklaces that jangled against it. “Do not kill, my dears. Not yet. I need these two a little longer.”

He stepped nearer, his coat swishing softly in the wind. Pikey's heart lurched.
A slender figure. A hand unfurling out of the shadows. “Don't do anything stupid,” he had said.

“Hello, Pikey Thomas,” the faery said, stopping directly in front of him and smiling a wide, white smile. “What a good and useful boy you've been.”

Pikey gaped at him.

“Who could have known? The boy from the cracker box. Such a valuable specimen. Such a help.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” Pikey tried to growl, but his voice was shaking, and his hands were, too, and his legs. “I don't know you.”

“Don't lie, Pikey Thomas.”

“I'm not lying.” Pikey dropped his eyes. “I don't know you.”

The Sly King's smile never wavered. “Let me prod your memory. A boy in a brass-button coat, punching the air from your lungs. A lady with a fly hat, walking into a bright, bright house. A metal beetle, belly-up in the grass.”

Pikey's skin went icy. “You didn't see those things.
I
saw them, you couldn't have—”

The Sly King said nothing.

“You couldn't have
seen them
!”

“Oh, but I see everything,” the Sly King said. One long white finger reached down and tapped Pikey's clouded eye. “I see everything you see. My little spy.”

CHAPTER XXI

Truths

L
ITTLE pale faces flickered between the wings. Their mouths were moving, their whispers filling Hettie's ears. She saw the door growing around her as she fell, not the flimsy little thing it had been in London, but a great storm cloud of wings, vast as the sky.

A piece of roof tumbled past, almost smashing into her. The tower was going to bury her. It was going to fall on top of her and make a hill. She flipped in the air, saw the ground rushing up. And suddenly small, bony hands grasped her. She was dragged to a halt, her nose inches above the gravel. Then she was swept onto her feet, and there was a deafening shriek. She staggered, clamping her hands to her ears. And when she had regained enough sense to look around her, the tower was gone. Everything was gone. The City of Black Laughter, with all its streets and buildings, had been blown to bits, and all that was left were stones and jagged archways and feathers falling like snow.

Hettie dropped her hands from her ears. She turned a full circle. She stood at the center of the door. It was a gigantic ring, hundreds of feet high, hundreds of feet across. And it had flattened everything. She could see from the sea all the way to the fields beyond the edge of the destruction, to the low hills and the deserted farms.

Her heart thudded.

Something was in the fields. Many things, moving swiftly through the dead grass. Banners and flags sliced toward her, snapping in the wind.

Faeries. Thousands of faeries, emerging onto the rubble of the city. Goblins and satyrs and piskies and sprytes, advancing row upon row, like an army.

My people are ready,
she heard the Sly King's voice.
Ready for their new home.

 

“You were not my best spy,” said the Sly King. His eyes were very bright, as if he were telling the funniest joke. The beaked ladies made a velvet wall around Pikey and Bartholomew, blades only a hairsbreadth from skewering them.

“In fact, I never thought you would amount to anything. You are not the sharpest needle in the haystack, and the chances that you would see anything useful were very low. I mean, really, that sentimental sylph brings you a gem and you strut straight off to a Mayfair jeweler. Of course everyone would think you stole it. You ought to look in a mirror sometime and see just what a pitiful little creature you are. I saved you because you happened to witness a fetching angle of the fall of Wyndhammer House, but then you went and got yourself caught
again
, and went to
prison
, and stared at people's boots for days on end. I simply couldn't be bothered to save you a second time.”

The Sly King winked at Pikey. “I'm so glad I didn't. You, meeting the infamous Bartholomew Kettle. You, and the three naughty, naughty faeries in prison, and my poor, dear Edith, and all of them trying to warn you of your purpose. You, a little shadow at the general's tent in Siltpool, gathering information, a little boy at the foot of Tar Hill, watching the soldiers hurrying up the slopes. It all worked together so perfectly.”

Pikey wasn't looking at him. He was staring at the stones between his boots. He could feel Bartholomew's eyes on him. He could feel the Sly King's eyes on him.

All those troops. All dead because of me.
“
Don't let him see,”
Edith Hutcherson had said.
“
Not the Sly King.”
But Pikey had seen. He had seen everything, and so the Sly King had, too.

He looked up. “You stole it,” he said. “My eye. You made me hurt folk and—and I never wanted to hurt them.”

“Yes, but it makes no difference what
you
want.
I
wanted it. I sent my Belusites into your streets and alleys, into English drawing rooms and houses to steal eyes, and then I watched!” He lifted a small glass object, like a telescope lens or an oblong marble. For a second Pikey glimpsed tiny, tiny scenes flickering inside it, one after another, landscapes and rooms and faces. Then the Sly King put the glass to his eye.

“Right now, in Buntingford, a little girl is looking out a window, watching a great big prison roll past,” he announced. “Yandere stole her eye in 1854. Everyone said it was polio. But it wasn't, and now I know that the prisons are thirty minutes from London.” He returned the lens to his pocket and sighed. “Isn't that practical? The plan is not flawless, of course. The English eyes must be kept sound in the Old Country. They continue to function and to be the window to your soul, and sometimes my spies can see backward, into this world.” He brushed his hand over the chains around his neck and the many eyes that dangled there stared, deep and watchful.

English eyes,
Pikey thought. Edith Hutcherson's, and the soldier in Siltpool who had pulled his out with his own hand, and so many others.
And all of them spies.

“But it is a small price to pay,” the Sly King finished. “Very small indeed. Florence?”

A tall woman, her doll's face black as a chess piece, emerged out of the dark and moved to stand beside the faery king. Her skirts were a rich, deep red like cherry skins. She slipped her arm through his and stared at the two boys inside the circle of blades.

“My dear?” the Sly King said. “Are you watching?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I am watching.”

They began to whisper to each other, heads bowed, in a language Pikey could not understand.

Suddenly Bartholomew spoke. “My sister,” he said.

The Sly King and Florence looked up.

“My sister was lost here years ago.” The faeries' eyes were full of disdain, but Bartholomew's voice was steady. “Her name is Henrietta Kettle, and I need to find her. I don't care about your wars and your schemes, and Pikey didn't know about them, so no one can blame him for anything. Please, have you seen her here? Has anyone seen her?”

The Sly King stared at Bartholomew an instant longer. Then he began to turn toward Pikey, slowly, so slowly, and Pikey saw that his face was pulled into a savage, hungry grin.

“Your sister is dead,” he said to Bartholomew, though his gaze was fixed firmly on Pikey. “What, did my little spy forget to tell you? She drowned in a river.”

 

Hettie could see London. It lay only a half mile distant, a hedgehog of snowy roofs and chimneys against the ink-blue sky. The fields were pure and white. Black smoke rose in chains toward the clouds, as if to fasten them to the ground.

Above her, the wings boiled and shrieked. Feathers flew in gales around her. She stood on an invisible line, and behind her was the Old Country and ahead was England. Home. Where the houses didn't move, and trees didn't swallow people, and dolls never spoke unless you wanted them to. Where Bath was, and where Old Crow Alley was, and where Mother was.

But Hettie didn't feel happy. She felt like a rabbit in a thorn bush, caught and tangled. She wanted to scream at the door, at the sky, at nothing in particular, that she was too small to do this.

She looked back over her shoulder. The ruin of the City of Black Laughter stretched toward the Old Country's star-spattered horizon. The faeries marched across it, their feet kicking stone dust into the air. Somewhere in that place was Bartholomew. Hettie imagined going back for him, running straight into the faeries, crashing past shields and spears, the door closing behind her, running and running until she found her brother.

But then a sliver of red caught her eye. On the English side of the door, only a few steps away, stood a huddle of barren apple trees. A face was in the branches, a pale doll's face. It was Florence La Bellina. She was watching Hettie, her skirts swishing silently in the wind. Their eyes met. Slowly the Belusite lifted a dagger, the tip pinched between her fingers. She began to wave it, back and forth, back and forth.

Hettie faced London, all pretty and new under its blanket of snow. She began to walk.

 

“What?” Bartholomew's voice was barely audible. He looked suddenly insubstantial, as if he were made of paper and ash and the slightest wind would send him spinning away. “She what?”

Pikey wanted to disappear. He wanted the waves to come over the cliffs and pull him into the sea.

“She drowned,” the Sly King said again, enunciating each word so that it drove like a spike. “In a river.”

Bartholomew looked at Pikey. His eyes were watery, red. “Pikey?” he said. “You lied to me?” His voice was so full of hurt.

“I had to, Barth, I—”

“Did you ever see her?” Bartholomew was crying now. “Did you see her even
once
?”

“Yes!” Pikey shouted. “I saw her loads of times, right up until we left London! I swear I did, and she
is
alive. She—she just
is.
”

“Don't lie to the poor boy, Pikey,” said the Sly King. “Don't lie anymore. She is dead and there is nothing for you here. Nothing for any of us.”

 

Hettie hurried out across the snowy field, a tiny, twig-headed figure in a great white sea. The wings followed her, spreading like a great storm. The Old Country followed her, too. In the distance she heard clanks, grating, and rumbling.

“You're going to kill everyone,”
said a voice in her mind. It sounded like coal and chocolate, like a great lady with copper curls. “
You're doing exactly what the Sly King wants, following his orders like another one of his Belusites. Like a
Whatnot
.”
The voice spat the word.

“Be quiet,” Hettie whispered, but her words were swallowed at once by the wind and the flapping wings. “I can't let him die. He's all I have, him and Mummy, and I
can't
.”

She knew the voice was right. All those faeries would be here, and this wasn't their home. This was where the Sly King wanted them to be, but no one asked them what
they
wanted. She remembered the rebels in the Old Country, struggling weakly against the Sly King. She remembered Old Crow Alley and how the faeries there had seemed so dark and horrible to her. But she hadn't known a thing about faeries then. They were all trapped, in the smoke and the iron, and in someone else's plans. And so was Hettie.

She wished she had the mask again. All she would need to do was tie its ribbons behind her head and suddenly she would be strong. She would be wise, and she would know how to stop the Sly King
and
save her brother, both at once.

But she didn't have the mask. She didn't have anything.

Whatnot,
she heard Piscaltine saying, and she heard the Sly King saying it, too, and the reflection of the old Peculiar in the water.
Whatnot, Whatnot. You're nothing but a useless little Whatnot. Better do as you're told.

London loomed. The black wings swelled, a great wave about to descend.

Hettie broke into a desperate, stumbling run.

 

“Mi Sathir?”
Florence whispered. “The Peculiar is in London.”

The Sly King flinched. It was very small, just a tiny click of his fingers. But Pikey saw.

“Who?” he croaked. “Who reached London?”

Bartholomew wasn't listening.
“You lied to me!”
he shouted. “You never knew! You never did!” He tried to duck under the blades. One of the beaked ladies swatted him back, and another swatted Pikey, though he hadn't moved.

Pikey tried not to cry out, tried to ignore Bartholomew. “Who reached London?”

The Sly King glanced at him. “Nobody,” he said. And then, addressing the beaked ladies, “Kill them.”

Pikey shouted, struggling. “Is it Hettie? Is it Hettie in London?”

The beaked ladies drew back their swords.

“You lied!” Bartholomew yelled, and then Pikey kicked him, hard, and they both fell rolling and wrestling to the ground. The blades sang together over their heads.

Bartholomew tried to scream again. Pikey kicked him again. “Shut up,” he snapped. “I'm sorry I lied. I wish I hadn't, but it's your own fault. You can't just give up. You can't just stop, just because things are bad. You don't know what's going to happen, but I do, and I'll
tell
you. We're going to get Hettie and—”

A blade buried itself in the stones between Pikey's fingers. Another pegged his hood. He tore away, just in time to kick at a blade about to take off Bartholomew's ear.

“And everything's going to be grand!” Something sharp grazed his thigh. He barely felt it. “Anyway, what if the faery's the one lying? Why d'you only believe the bad things? I don't care if you hate me and if you leave me behind, but you can't
give up
!”

“Oh, kill them and stop that infernal noise,” the Sly King groaned.

Florence La Bellina shoved past the ladies. A knife glinted in her hand.

Pikey's eyes widened. “Barth?” he said shakily.

Bartholomew didn't even glance at the doll-woman. Her blade flew. And Bartholomew caught it, right out of the air, spinning with the force of the throw. He leaped to his feet. The knife flashed again. Florence let out a screech. He had the knife in his hand, and its tip was against her heart.

“Get back,” he said. His voice was ragged and low. Savage. “Get back, all of you, or I'll kill her.” When he said it, Pikey knew he would.

The beaked ladies retreated a step. The Sly King stayed perfectly still.

“You, too,” Bartholomew said, gesturing to the King.

The Sly King smiled. “No,” he said. “Go on. Kill her. I have a better servant now.”

In one smooth motion Bartholomew kicked the legs out from under her. She crashed to the ground. Bartholomew pressed the knife to her back and the red velvet parted such a little bit.

“Back,” he said.

“No!” the Sly King said gleefully. “I
do
have your sister, you see. The London Door. Henrietta Kettle. She is the trick and the whip hand. She will be the turning point of this endless war. But she doesn't know. She doesn't know what she's worth. Servants never do.”