So Silver Bright (21 page)

“I can skip us ahead,” she shouted into the winds. “A stone across a pond, like I did aboard the circus train!”

Mustardseed squeaked with apprehension. “You melted the train’s engine!”

“I don’t want my guts turned into warm nougat!” Cobweb shouted.

Bertie reached out and jerked the reins from Nate’s grip. The caravan swayed wildly upon the road. Ariel was knocked back among the luggage with a curse. The fairies clutched her hair, screaming, “AAAAAAAAAH!” until they ran out of breath. Moth even went a bit blue, trying to keep it going. Then they all sucked in another breath and started again. “AAAAAAAAAH!”

“Careful, lass!” Nate admonished after one of the wheels hit a particularly large rut. “Ye’ll knock th’ pins right out o’ this thing!”

Bertie shook the hair from her eyes, scrutinizing the rocks that rose on either side of the road like needles poked through embroidery cloth. “Quiet. I need to focus, unless you want your innards to end up somewhere other than where they ought to be.”

The fairies immediately ceased their screaming as Bertie guided the caravan between another series of boulders that formed an ever-narrowing alleyway. Focusing upon the stones, she allowed the rest of the world to blur into an Impressionist canvas of blue and gray and green paint splotches. The tunnel that formed ahead was like the yawning mouth of a mountain mining shaft. The road under the caravan sloped down.

“Bertie—” Ariel started to warn her, but too late.

Daylight disappeared as the earth swallowed them, leaving only Varvara’s soft glow bathing Bertie’s shoulders. With grace almost impossible for their circumstances, the fire-dancer leaned forward and lit the caravan’s lanterns with a snap of her fingers. When that was done, she held out her hand until it skimmed the tunnel’s walls, causing heretofore unseen and ancient torches to spark to life.

“That’s a bit better, I think!” Her triumphant laughter caused a flare of heat and light around them.

The road ahead no longer a gaping void, Bertie could now see the tiny, uncut jewels studding the rocks, the gold-filled fissures in the walls, the brilliant and sparkling bits that suggested the Queen’s fantastically studded crown. The rock faces still appeared at intervals, beckoning them deeper into gloom, and Bertie had no choice but to obey; even if she stopped the caravan, there was no room in which to turn around, nowhere to go except forward, racing toward a theater that might be smashed to the ground before they arrived. Gauzy cobwebs drifted over them like tattered lace, and she had to swallow a scream when something with skittering legs crawled over her right shoulder.

“I got it!” Mustardseed grasped the uninvited passenger and flung it into the darkness.

“How long will this take?” Nate had both his booted feet braced against the floorboards. In the intermittent flashes of torchlight, he managed to look pale despite his tan.

“I don’t know. I should do something in the meantime. Something else to keep Sedna out.” If Bertie had had the journal, she could have written something and instantly made it so, but all she had now was her spoken words.…

And the wish-come-true. The Queen’s words echoed in her head:

“A wish-come-true must be worthy of the wisher and the wisher must be worthy of the wish.”

Surely it was worthy to protect the Théâtre Illuminata from the Sea Goddess! Except small cracks immediately appeared in the surface of such a notion. Could Sedna penetrate the theater’s defenses? Would the Sea Goddess even reach the grand building at all? A waste of the wish-come-true would be a terrible thing indeed.

I can think of another way to protect the building and all the Players, surely.

Bertie closed her eyes and cast her thoughts far ahead of them to the theater. Her connection to the grand building was thin but powerful, strengthened with memories and obligation and love, and so she summoned all that was earth to protect it. Cold iron answered her call in the form of bars upon the doors and locks upon the windows. Dirt clogged the pipes, and tendrils of every growing thing fortified the very timbers of the building. But those measures did not feel like enough.

“Faster,” Bertie said, though not to urge the horses, who were already running at a flat gallop. She reached out a hand, trailing her fingertips over the surface of the rock, gathering the heat of the earth: the tiny chemical reactions of mold lying against loam; the exertions of every root and branch simultaneously reaching down and pushing up. Catching them like green and brown ribbons, she wove them into something hot and bright. “Let all that is rough and rock be smoothed.”

“I can help with that,” Varvara murmured, placing her ruby-tipped fingers upon Bertie’s shoulders. “We are growing quite proficient at this party trick.”

In moments, the stones and dirt on which they traveled were transformed into glass. The walls flattened into dim mirrors, their silvered backing scratched and pockmarked with eons passed. It was as though they traveled the halls of the Distant Castle, but in a kingdom the sun had forsaken.

Except the princess isn’t asleep in a tower … she’s drowning herself over and over again, waiting for her prince to return.

When Bertie squinted, the torchlight blurred. Marked by wet, green trails, water trickled down walls reminiscent of a moldering dungeon. The damp pooled on the floors, and the caravan’s wheels splashed through puddles with increasing frequency.

“What’s happening?” Peaseblossom cried.

Bertie had no answer for her. Behind them, she could hear the building rush of a tidal wave. Over that, a voice called to them, growing more shrill with each passing second.

“I can hear her!” Nate leaned forward in the seat. “Move yer arses!” he shouted to the horses as water now poured down the tunnel walls.

“I don’t wanna diiiiiiie,” Moth wailed into Bertie’s ear like a tiny, demented ambulance siren.

“It’s not my destiny to go down with the ship!” That was Mustardseed, who had donned a tiny life preserver stamped RMS
TITANIC.
He clung to her bodice like a buoyant, beaded broach.

Another noise, somehow worse than the fairies’ screaming, started off low and built upon itself one decibel at a time. Varvara’s eyes had gone black, corner to corner, and her banshee shriek summoned another wave of heat to counter the water. Steam enveloped the caravan, thick with the scents of salt and seaweed.

Bertie would have jammed her fingers into her ears in an effort to banish the screaming, the rushing water, the stone walls that shuddered like an old man with rheumatic fever, but it was too much to manage while yet holding the reins. She gestured frantically to Ariel. “Help her dry some of it up.”

Winds answered his immediate summons. Kneeling behind Bertie, he held his arms out so they passed over her shoulders, crowding the fairies but shoving the worst of the water out of their path. It sloshed up the sides of the tunnel and poured in atop their heads, but still they raced forward. Light appeared in the distance; their luck being as it was, Bertie prayed it wasn’t the Innamorati’s train. The glittering star-promise expanded and then went supernova with golden brilliance as the caravan hurtled into its very heart and landed hard upon the cobblestones of a topside thoroughfare.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Come Not Home in Twice Six Moons

“Careful now!” shouted a
curiously familiar pedestrian as Bertie pulled upon the reins with all her might. The mechanical horses’ shoes sent up sparks when they dug in. The caravan rocked left, swerved right, and narrowly missed both the curb and the sneak-thief who bounded up to greet them.

“Such impeccable timing!” he crowed, clapping Bertie upon the arm and shaking Nate’s and Ariel’s hands in turn.

“Waschbär!” Bertie reached out to clutch at his sleeves. “Did you get the journal?”

“I tracked the brigands back to the theater,” he answered, expression suddenly pained, “but I’ve been as yet unable to reclaim the purloined tome.”

“The brigands are
here
?” Bertie gaped at him. “But why?”

“I know not yet, but when they left you upon the road, they headed straight for the Théâtre Illuminata, and I followed. Just as they would have entered, iron bars grew over the windows and massive bolts locked the doors in place. Such fortuitous magic warned me you might be nearby, and here you are!”

“Where did you last see them?”

“Circling around the back of the building, no doubt contemplating their lock-picking options.”

Peering down the alley in search of the brigands, Bertie couldn’t help but also gape at the city that surrounded them. The troupe had departed via an ill-lit boulevard, nearly deserted save for the rubbish collectors and a stray cat. The buildings had been like night-painted scenic flats, one-dimensional shapes propped against the backdrop of a star-splashed sky. Today the main avenue swarmed, overrun with people and conveyances of all sorts: Dickensian-era shoppers perusing wares from the open-air fishmongers alongside grinning short-skirted teenagers carrying slim cell phones in candy colors. Horse-drawn cabs maneuvered between motorbikes and automobiles of every make and model. Looking at the street was like peering through one of Mr. Hastings’s stereoscopic viewers at countless picture cards taken at different time periods and layered one atop the other.

Sitting at an apex of space and time, an intersection of all the years, the Théâtre Illuminata loomed over everything. The only steadfast point in a whirling world, the façade mirrored the ivory of the scrimshaw hanging, innocuous, about Bertie’s neck. In turn, the medallion echoed the theater’s domed roof, its gracious statuary, the wrought-iron flowers and vines, each detail rendered in miniature upon its surface.

Then everything shuddered, and chaos erupted. Gushing geysers of water exploded from the manholes. Seawater flung the circular metal disks skyward before they hit the street, an unoccupied automobile, and a cart filled with apples with a series of heavy thuds. Screams rang out as people scattered. Angry waves gave chase, shoving men and women into buildings, picking them up like rag dolls and tossing them aside.

“Run for the revolving door!” Bertie’s shout almost didn’t carry over the bedlam, but every member of the troupe heard and obeyed. A gust of wind indicated Ariel was right behind her. Varvara and Waschbär kept pace, marked by the thud of his feet and the tippity-tap of her toe shoes. Nate was next, moving uncommonly fast for a man of his stature. The fairies careened ahead, their wings a blur as they flew backward and upside down, facing Bertie so as to better coax her forward.

“You can run faster than that!”

“My grandmother can run faster than that!”

“You have a grandmother?!”

At the next gush of water, they adjusted formation with screams of “Help, she’s going to eat me!” that echoed off the flower-crowned statues, the portico, the dome. One enormous wave after another smashed into the steps behind Bertie. Currents swirled about Varvara’s toe shoes, staining the red satin tips two shades darker than blood and eliciting a whimper from the fire-dancer.

Taking pity upon her, Waschbär lifted her onto one shoulder before catapulting them forward. “See to your craft, wordsmith, before Sedna has her way with all of us.”

The wish-come-true glowed white-hot behind Bertie’s eyes as the Sea Goddess rose, huge and terrible, from the waves churning at the base of the stairs. Water sluiced off Sedna’s brackish-green skin and seaweed hair. She stretched out scaled arms, reaching for them with hands that were yet starfish.

I could wish her gone.

I could wish her
dead.

Sedna’s cruel mouth twisted into a smile of triumph, revealing jagged shark’s teeth. “Yes, wordsmith, do your worst.”

Bertie’s anger, her rage, her nearly futile hope that she could save them consumed her, and there was no room left in her head for wording the wish. Fueled by the memories of her mother and father, almost killed by the Sea Goddess’s water, of Nate kidnapped, of the brutal swordfight Sedna had orchestrated between Ariel and Nate on a distant beach, she pointed a single finger at the Sea Goddess and called upon all four of the elements: her own earth, her father’s air, her mother’s water, and a new understanding of fire.

“Get you gone!”

Her words caused an explosion of light and sound unlike anything Bertie had ever experienced before. Even when their page from The Book had fused into the journal, even when she’d been trapped, drowning, in Sedna’s cavern, she’d been able to think; now there was only pure energy using her body and mind as a conduit. Sedna’s screams filled the street, and still the fire and water and air poured through Bertie’s earth, consuming every shred of her consciousness and sanity and reason until there was only darkness.

From a distance, she could hear the others, could feel their hands upon her and a blood-flower of pain blooming on her skull. When the energy faded away, Bertie found she was flat on her back at the top of the stairs, head pounding harder than the time she’d gotten into Mr. Hastings’s rum, eyeballs one size too large for their sockets, and every inch of her body aching.

“Lass!” Nate looked as though he was shouting, but his voice was wrapped in wet muslin and his face had gone swimmy about the edges.

The distant suggestion of friction hinted Ariel might be chafing her hands. Bertie blinked, looking at both pirate and air elemental, wanting to reassure them but unable to summon the words.

“Ye know a part o’ me dies every time I see ye hurt like this?” Nate shoved his hands under her shoulders and knees, heaving her from the ground in one smooth motion. Someone or something had bloodied his lip, though the water had washed the worst of it away. “Ye keep this up, ye’ll be th’ death o’ me yet.”

All Bertie managed in reply was a soft wheeze. The entire street below was in chaos, but the Sea Goddess was gone. In her wake, rivulets of damp worked their way down nearby walls, and scum-bedecked puddles lingered between the lower-set cobblestones.