It seemed hardly prudent to argue, but Bertie couldn’t stop herself. “If not the mirrors, what about a wish-come-true? Would that send me there?”
“No doubt.”
When Her Gracious Majesty said nothing further, Bertie pressed her only advantage. “You did say I would be suitably rewarded for turning the Sea Goddess away from your very gates.”
“So I did.” The Queen reached out her hand, and pressed the largest and most impressive of her rings to the center of Bertie’s forehead. “I would have you consider a few things, though, before I bestow this upon you. Wishes are not mere trinkets and trifles, nor are they a way for us to wriggle free from our troubles. Reflect hard, Beatrice Shakespeare Smith. A wish-come-true must be worthy of the wisher, and the wisher must be worthy of the wish.”
“I understand,” Bertie said, nearly cross-eyed from trying to look up at the massive sapphire digging into her flesh.
“You don’t,” the Queen retorted, “but with luck you might someday.”
Then Bertie’s head filled with light, the sort of brilliant silver illumination that suggested sunshine reflected off all the Grand Hall’s mirrors at once. By the time she drew a breath, the radiance of the wish-come-true was reduced to a lingering smear of sparkling light that danced behind Bertie’s eyes when she blinked or turned her head too quickly.
It was, she realized, a thing too weighty, too precious to waste on something as simple as mere transportation. “If you fetch my friends and my carriage, I will find another way to get us back with due haste.”
Her Gracious Majesty hiked up her royal skirts and scampered down the corridor, revealing dainty ankle-strapped Mary Janes under the yards and yards of silk petticoat and embroidered black velvet. “Fenek!”
The servitor appeared around the very next door. “Yes, Your—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish the royal address, for the Queen bellowed as she passed, “Come! The Mistress of Revels demands her cart and her companions at once, do you hear!”
“Of course!” His own voice raised, amplified by unseen means as he kept pace with them. “Calling the many-liveried butlers! Calling the ostlers! Calling the courtiers!”
They converged in groups of three or four, pouring in from the various corridors until the massive tidal wave of personages convened in the Grand Hall. Bertie was most relieved to see the members of her own company standing Center Stage.
Nate leapt at her, his face a study in panic and relief at once. “Bertie! Sedna’s here, in th’ river surroundin’ th’ castle—”
“Not anymore!” the Queen crowed, victorious. “The Teller of Tales banished her!”
“Ding-dong, the Sea Witch is dead!” Moth crowed, waving his tiny hat overhead.
“Not dead, stupid!” Mustardseed jabbed him with an elbow. “Just banished!”
Ignoring the byplay, Her Gracious Majesty issued orders like rifle fire. “Open the gates! Prepare and pack the Mistress of Revels’s caravan! And SOMEONE bring me an omelet!”
Nate drew Bertie off to one side as the Queen shouted and jabbed her finger at various members of her court. “Is it true? Sedna’s gone?”
Bertie wanted to rest her head upon his shoulder, but she didn’t have that luxury right now. “Yes, but I drove her away from the castle only for her to turn toward the theater.” Four horrified gasps from the fairies, and Bertie could only nod in acknowledgment. “She’s rushing there now, determined to clamber up the plumbing and no doubt flood the building to the rafters again. We have to get back. Immediately. So I can protect it.”
“You think we can protect the theater from an angry Sea Goddess?” Ariel’s soft question attacked from behind.
Both Bertie and Nate turned as one, though she spoke first. “I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try. I have to.”
“And I stand wi’ her.” Nate almost didn’t need to say the words, so aligned with her body was he.
“You’re both fools,” Ariel said with the sort of sigh he might direct at a pair of children playing in the mud. “And in great want of a babysitter. I suppose I have no choice but to accompany you on this mad journey.”
Not about to let him get away with using such a tone with her, Bertie shook her head. “Don’t be bound by a false sense of obligation, Ariel. We’ve no more need of your company than you have of ours, it seems. Stay here with the Queen, or visit the other Twelve Outposts of Beyond if you prefer.”
“I could never desert you, as well you know.” The air elemental’s hair coiled about his shoulders, drifting around him like wisps of smoke. Varvara, as yet silent, hovered just behind him, her own hair moving in superheated currents. “And Mrs. Edith would never forgive me if I left the two of you … to your own devices.”
Wishing she could understand just what he was playing at now, Bertie shook her head. “A pretty argument, except you’ve already deserted me thrice in anger, once upon the Innamorati’s train, just days ago at the Caravanserai, and again on the road. And so I tell you this: Leave again, and you needn’t ever come back.”
Fenek squeaked an interruption before Ariel could respond. “It is as you wished, Your Gracious Majesty! Their caravan is ready!”
“There now!” The Queen beamed, and as an unseen clock struck ten, time advanced upon her face; her pimple disappeared, and the roundness of her cheeks melted away until a beneficent woman of perhaps one-and-twenty stood before them. “To your carriage, good Mistress of Revels, and safe travels to you!”
Bertie paused long enough to curtsy—may it be the last time!—before she ran for it with her friends at her heels. Pirate, air elemental, fire-dancer, and fairies negotiated the hallways, clattered into the courtyard, and clambered upon the caravan. Ariel looked ten sorts of sour to see Nate in the driver’s seat, a position he had once occupied with grace and skill, though he made no comment.
“Ye might want t’ hold on to somethin’,” Nate warned Bertie before he signaled the mechanical horses.
The clockwork steeds launched themselves forward with matching pewter whickers, hurtling toward the bottom of the hill and the newly cleared opening just beyond the gates. Bertie squeezed the armrest hard enough to coax sap from the wood as the road leveled out. Passing under the glass archway, the caravan nearly overturned as Nate tried to avoid the felled trees and boulders that littered the road.
“Bertie—” he cried, guiding the horses around the worst of it. “Do yer best t’ clear th’ way!”
Concentrating until she was nearly cross-eyed, Bertie struggled to move the wayward branches and massive stones from their path. A particularly large specimen wiggled mica ears at them as they passed. It had, she realized, the sort of face worn by Pan and Puck. The sort of face that would be carved in the bark of a tree. The sort that had been carved into one of the trees in her dreamland forest. Leaves of ivy formed his features then; granite trapped him now. He taunted her from the heart of the stone, beckoning with loam-encrusted hands and moss-tipped fingers.
There are faster ways to travel, Daughter of the Earth.
There were indeed … like a wish-come-true. But Bertie resisted the lure of the glowing, magical thing lingering just behind her eyes; she couldn’t bring herself to use it just yet.
“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 ou
t 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.