The Kneebone Boy (21 page)

If I were The Kneebone Boy, Lucia thought, this is where I’d want to stay. Right here, deep in the woods where there are no eyes to gawk at me. I could slip along the ground like a shadow, hidden because the woods loves to hide things, not because it’s ashamed of them. I wouldn’t want to go to Little Tunks, either, even if people were kind to me and I had a nice, soft bed. I’d just want to live here
forever, with the foxes and hedgehogs and the wild mushrooms under my toes.

It was then that Lucia heard the voice from high in the treetop. It said, “Don’t look up.”

You can’t imagine how hard it is not to look up when a voice from the treetops tells you not to. Lucia lifted her head, just the smallest bit, and the voice said, “If you look up, I’ll go away.”

“I won’t, I promise,” Lucia said and she pointed her face directly at the ground. She was scared, but not as scared as you might expect her to be. It was all so unreal, you understand. It was almost like reading a story about yourself.

“Are you—” She almost said The Kneebone Boy, but stopped herself in time. That wasn’t his real name, after all. He did have a real name—Mr. Pickering had said it—but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was. Instead she said, “You live in the castle, don’t you?” she said.

“I don’t
live
there. I’m
kept
there,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Lucia replied and she started to look up without thinking. There was a great shuffling in the treetop and leaves fluttered down as The Kneebone Boy started to scramble away.

“No, no, please don’t go!” Lucia cried. The sounds settled and the woods grew quiet again.

Then The Kneebone Boy said, “The younger boy . . . he’s clever, isn’t he?”

“Max, you mean? Yes,” Lucia admitted. “Sometimes very.”

The Kneebone Boy’s voice was unexpected. Somehow, Lucia imagined it would be deep and garbled as though it were struggling out of a twisted body. Instead, his voice was soft and clear.

“I thought so,” The Kneebone Boy said. “And the tall, blond boy . . . something is wrong with him.”

Lucia bristled at this. “There’s nothing wrong with Otto,” she snapped.

“Good, good.” The Kneebone Boy’s voice soothed. “It’s good you stick up for him.”

Lucia remembered that The Kneebone Boy had nobody to stick up for
him
, and she immediately felt sorry that she had lost her temper.

There was a sudden scratching sound, like a squirrel scrambling down a tree and it took all of Lucia’s self-control to keep her eyes on the ground. In a moment, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a black shadow creeping toward her. Then she felt something rub against her ankles with a mewling sound.

“Chester!” she cried. She squatted down to pick him up and she buried her face in his fur. “Oh, sweet, sweet Chester,” Lucia said into his fur, smiling as she pictured Otto’s face when she returned with Chester in her arms.

“He was following me,” The Kneebone Boy said. “I didn’t take him.” Just as though he knew what she’d been thinking, which made her very ashamed.

“Listen,” Lucia said, “we’ve been talking, my brothers and I, and we decided that you should come home with
us. Our house isn’t anything special, but we do have a garden and our dad’s quite nice.”

She had not forgotten her thoughts about how The Kneebone Boy should stay in the woods; but she had thought them before she had met him, and now that he was here and real and speaking to her, she couldn’t bear to think of leaving him to roam the woods only to be caught and locked up again, or to be made into a spectacle by Saint George.

The Kneebone Boy didn’t say anything for so long that Lucia asked, “Are you still there?”

There was a hiss of shifting leaves. “Yes,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?” Lucia asked.

“The garden. Do you think it’s big enough for a peacock to live in?”

“I don’t know,” Lucia said, surprised by the question. “I suppose so. Peacocks aren’t very huge, are they? So will you? Will you come back with us?”

“I think . . . yes, I’d like to,” The Kneebone Boy said.

“Good. Excellent!” Lucia fisted up her hands and they gave a little bob of happiness. “Our father will be here tomorrow. Meet us in the morning by the two birch trees, where we left the food. All right?”

“All right,” The Kneebone Boy said.

“Until then, mind about the traps—”

What made Lucia look off to the right at that moment, she’ll never know. Certainly there was no sound. Creeping
stealthily through the woods, his rifle in hand, was Saint George.

“Go, go, go! He’s coming!” Lucia cried in a low voice, and in her alarm she forgot her promise and looked up at The Kneebone Boy.

He was lying across the upper branch of a tree like a leopard, dressed in a soiled white robe. When their eyes met he did not move a muscle but his eyes went wide. So did Lucia’s. His face was dirty, his hair wild-looking. Still, Lucia recognized him immediately.

From his high perch, the Sultan of Juwi brought a finger to his lips and in a moment he was gone.

In which we find out something about Otto’s scarf and take a peek inside the Hardscrabbles’ brains

“What are you doing here?” Saint George demanded, glancing all around him suspiciously.

Still stunned by what she had just seen, Lucia looked at him without answering.

“Who were you talking to?” Saint George asked.

“Nobody,” Lucia said, finding her voice.

“I heard you. You were talking to someone.”

“To the cat,” Lucia said feebly.

There was the sound of quick footsteps approaching and Otto and Max appeared, looking pink in the face. Upon seeing Chester, Otto smiled broadly and grabbed him out of Lucia’s arms, then tucked him beneath his scarf.

“We thought we heard voices,” Max said. “Oh, hello,” he said to Saint George.

“Now you lot had better listen to me,” Saint George
said, a thick finger pointing around at all of them. “You keep out of these woods. It’s property of the castle. If you need to get to the town, keep to the path, but quit stomping through here.”

“Oh, excuse me,
Lord Kneebone
,” Lucia said smartly. “I thought you were just a shopkeeper who, by the way, is
also
trespassing.”

He glowered at her in a way that made her want to take a step backward. She didn’t though. After making a low sound of disgust in his throat, he shoved past them and started off again, muttering, “If I were their aunt, I’d throw them all in the dungeon and toss the key into the abyss.”

When Saint George was safely out of earshot, Lucia turned to her brothers.

“He was here,” she said. “Up in that tree.” Her voice sounded odd even to herself. It was light and faraway, like she was recounting a dream.

“He?”
Max said. “Do you mean The Kneebone Boy?”

Lucia hesitated. It felt like a very, very long hesitation to her, but it was no more than a couple of seconds.

“Yes.”

“Did you talk to him? What happened? Did he have Chester?” Otto asked.

“Yes, Chester was with him,” Lucia said. “We talked a little. He’ll meet us by the birch trees tomorrow.”

“You sound funny,” Otto said.

“Did you actually see him then?” Max asked, wincing in expectation of a description.

“No,” Lucia said. “I never did.”

You are wondering why Lucia is not telling her brother that The Kneebone Boy is, in fact, the Sultan of Juwi. She has a good reason and it is this: They would not have believed her. Maybe you don’t believe her either. After all, she does have a tendency to see bits and pieces of the sultan in other people. There is no denying that Mr. Dupuis has the sultan’s chin and eyes. And her classmate Aidan McMartin has the Sultan’s lower lip, but exactly. Then there was the woman on the train. . . . They all have bits and pieces of the sultan but the boy in the tree
was
the sultan, every bit and piece of him, right down to the quick-primed eyes that looked as though they knew all Lucia’s worst qualities and liked her even more because of them.

If she had told her brothers about the sultan and they didn’t believe that she had seen him, she ran the risk of not believing that she had seen him either. And she
must
believe she has seen him. Too much depends upon it in order for this story to come out right.

“Here’s to our last night together!” Haddie tapped her Coke can against each of theirs. “You have been exemplary prisoners. You shall be sorely missed.”

“But won’t we see you again?” Max said, without drinking to the toast.

“That’s up to your father,”—Haddie threw back her head and swigged down some soda—“and if he finds you healthy and happy and all in one piece tomorrow.” She quickly scrutinized them all. “None of you have major abrasions or missing fingers, I assume?”

They shook their heads.

“Hmm.” Haddie seemed slightly disappointed. “Then maybe we should raise the stakes a little.”

After supper Haddie fetched a box of fireworks that she had found stuffed up one of the fireplaces, probably by one of the Dusty Old Children as a prank for some poor servant who went to light a fire. (“What stinkers!” Haddie said. “I like those Kneebone kids more and more, even if they were pigs.”)

They carried the box up the stairs and outside, to one of the walkways on top of the curtain wall. It was an excellent night for fireworks—clear and black and shot through with stars. From the walkway there was a fine view of Kneebone Castle, its lumpy, misshapen silhouette pitted with light from several windows.

Haddie lit the first firecracker. It was a dud. All it did was make a
thwipp
sound then fizzle out.

“Do you miss your mother very much?” Haddie asked them suddenly as she pulled out another firecracker from the box and handed it to Otto.

The question rankled Lucia. It felt sneaky. It made her want to say, “If you
are
her, why don’t you just say so already! Say so, and we can be furious at you and make you cry and then we can forgive you!”

Instead, she answered with perfect composure, “We manage.”

But Max could not contain himself, of course. “We miss her every day,” he said, looking at Haddie ardently.

“And you?” Haddie turned to Otto.

Otto would not meet her eyes. He just stared down at the firecracker as he toyed with it.

“All right,” said Haddie, “then tell me this.” She suddenly reached out and grabbing the end of his scarf, she gave it a sharp tug. “What’s the deal with the scarf?”

Otto raised his right hand. Max and Lucia flinched. But instead of attacking Haddie, Otto rubbed his right hand across his chest, held his left pinky up and bent it down twice, then touched it to his chin.

“What did he say?” Haddie looked to Lucia for a translation.

Lucia frowned, perplexed. “He says that Mum gave him her scarf before she left.”

Otto’s hands started moving again while Lucia and Max watched them carefully.

“He says, the night before she disappeared Mum came into his room. She knelt beside his bed and tied the scarf around his neck. It was her special scarf. Then she told him to wear it always, and no matter what happened to her, no matter where she had to go, she would one day see the scarf and they would know each other by it.”

Haddie smiled at Otto.

“Good boy,” she said. Her eyes looked suspiciously moist. So you see, they did make her cry after all, just a little bit.

They set off the rest of the firecrackers, and a couple of them went off beautifully, lighting up the black sky and even illuminating Kneebone Castle across the way. The drawbridge was down tonight and more lights flicked on
throughout the castle, perhaps because of the strange spectacle of fireworks, yet it looked as grim as always.

“Have you ever met the Kneebones?” Lucia asked Haddie, who was staring at the castle too.

“Of course not,” Haddie said. “The Kneebones don’t live there anymore. They haven’t in years.”

All the Hardscrabbles turned to her in surprise.

“But you said they were living there now,” Lucia objected.

“I never did,” Haddie replied.

“She’s right,” Max said after thinking for a bit. “She never did. We just assumed.”

“Local gossip is, the Kneebones lost all their money almost ten years ago. They sold everything, castle and folly included,” Haddie said.

“Then who owns the castle now?” Lucia asked,

“A doctor. What’s his name . . . what’s his name? . . . Oh! Azziz,” Haddie said. “Dr. Azziz.”

“Dr. Azziz!” Lucia and Max cried out at the same time. They looked at each other in confusion.

“Do you know him?” Haddie asked as she reached for the last firecracker in the box.

“No,” Lucia said quickly. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

The last firecracker was a disappointment. It made a loud crack but after a brief flash of light it sputtered right out. Kneebone Castle was absorbed back into the night. They stood there for a few minutes, staring out into blackness, thin wisps of smoke from the fireworks still lolling about the sky. In the distance they could hear the sound of
dogs barking—an ordinary nighttime sound, but in the gloom it seemed ominous. Even Haddie’s mood turned somber as she tipped her head up and listened. When she caught them watching her, she shooed them off the battlement.