Not again. Bertie had heard much the same from the Queen before she’d been shoved through a mirror and into the past. This time she wouldn’t go without protest. “You think part of my story is yet untold?”
“We do not think—we know.” They shifted again with the sound of jade mah-jongg tiles against an ancient table, then each member of the Greek Chorus lifted a tiled version of Melpomene’s tragedy mask to their faces. Jagged-edged or missing stones resulted in vacant eyes or noses, while others were completely without mouths and therefore unable to do more than moan. “We can see your story laid out before us. Only when you discover this lost scene from your script, the lacking piece from your puzzle, will you be able to connect what happened beyond these walls with what transpired within.”
Bertie suppressed the overwhelming urge to sigh and glare at the ceiling. What atrocious acts had she committed in a previous incarnation to doom her to battling cryptic riddle askers and gatekeepers?
“I am most peeved, forced as I was to call you back before you learned the whole truth of it,” the Queen had also said. The story revealed by Her Gracious Majesty’s looking glass, it seemed, wasn’t yet complete.
“Do you know what’s missing?” Bertie asked the Greek Chorus.
“We do.”
The bits of stone and glass rearranged themselves with the hiss of a Caravanserai sandstorm to form the picture of a familiar yet foreign hallway. It was, Bertie realized, the backstage corridor, its mahogany paneling and the floral pattern on the wallpaper rendered with colored glass, travertine, and river rock. Glittering mica and mirror composed the Ophelia leaning against the Stage Door.
“The performance is done. I didn’t miss my call. I did what was expected of me.”
The stones shifted so that the Theater Manager’s door now stood before them, thick with bubbled glass and black lettering. Tiny rubies marked the water-maiden’s trail—blood droplets, Bertie realized—but Ophelia paid them no attention at all.
“My child. I held her but a moment—” Though it was unlocked, the water-maiden barely managed to turn the knob before her strength gave out and she fell to her knees on the carpet.
Glowing amber light poured out of the mosaic’s version of The Complete Works of the Stage. It sat upon the desk, open to a blank page. Next to it lay the opal ring, already sparking with trapped fire.
“Ophelia!” A flint-chiseled Theater Manager jumped up in reluctant greeting.
“Where is my child?!” Grasping a chair, the water-maiden levered herself up from the floor.
“You’re speaking nonsense.…” But he was no actor, and he couldn’t deliver the line with any sort of conviction.
Ophelia lunged over the desk to clutch at him with fingers like talons. “Do not lie to me. I will have her back, or I will scream this building to the very ground.”
“Speak reason, I beseech you,” he pleaded. “You are a Player. Daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, betrothed to Hamlet. You cannot fulfill these roles with a child clinging to your knees! A child who never should have existed! It was all some dreadful mistake—”
“You will not call her a mistake again if you hope to keep your tongue.” Grasping an obsidian-sharp letter opener, Ophelia pointed at the microphone that controlled the backstage loudspeakers. “Instead, you will call the Wardrobe Mistress. You will instruct her to return my child to me.” She brought the weapon around to aim it at his chest. “Or I will cut the beating heart from you.”
“What will you do with the baby?” The Theater Manager gaped at her, wild-eyed. “Things cannot remain as they are!”
“I will quit this place with her, and you will not stop us.”
He hesitated a moment, then nodded. “If that is your wish, of course, I will have the child brought to you. At once. I will write the order this second.…”
“Nothing written is needed here. Call her to me.” But Ophelia’s legs, though stone, were unable to support her a second longer. She fell back into the chair, and Bertie saw her strength had waned, that she could do little more than pant her river-tainted breath in a mist before her.
The Theater Manager saw it as well. Reaching past the microphone, he picked up his pen and slowly, deliberately placed it upon the blank page of The Book.
“Let all that happened outside these walls be cast aside,” he whispered as he wrote.
A terrifying flash of light filled the room to the rafters as The Book rendered his words as truth. It snatched Ophelia’s memories with golden, greedy fingers: a chance meeting in her Dressing Room, a handsome stranger, a daring escape, a cliff-side sanctuary, a flood, a flight, a child born. The images waltzed away like so many ghosts, shrinking down to nothing, tiptoeing into another, smaller leather-bound tome upon his desk, wrapped about with a scrap of silk that could have been torn from Ophelia’s gown.
The journal … it holds all that happened outside the theater’s walls. It somehow contains the lion’s share of Ophelia’s memories.
But how could that be when it was blank when I got it?
Now in possession of yet more questions without answers, Bertie stared at the mosaic’s version of the Theater Manager. If nothing else, she knew now who had hired the brigands to steal the journal back.
Sitting empty and spent in her chair, Ophelia smiled blankly at the Theater Manager. “Did you want me for something, sir?”
“No, my dear.” He shook his head gently. With trembling fingers, he moved the journal next to the opal ring.
As Ophelia drifted to the door, Bertie caught muttered sentences, snatches of a conversation he held with himself: “Not what I’d intended,” followed by “There’s no changing it now,” “That’s two mistakes I’ve had to correct today,” and “Truly, these are both unwanted things,” but the water-maiden paid him no mind, and Bertie knew why. Ophelia’s Dressing Room called to her mother with a siren song, and she wanted nothing more at this moment than to put her face in the washbasin and drown.
Secrets told, the mosaic seemed to sag under its own weight. The droplets falling from the clepsydra suddenly gushed forth as though from a killing wound.
“Our allotted time is done, the ages call us back to dust,” the Greek Chorus said with crumbling lips. “Up the Charonian stairs you must go, from the depths of this underworld.”
With a final exhalation of ash, the mosaic crumbled in upon itself and snuffed out the torches. Bertie coughed and covered her streaming eyes. When the dust settled, another tunnel yawned before them, another demon’s mouth that would spit them out into a new, fresh hell at the top of the stairs.
“Can someone manage a little illumination?” she asked.
In response, thin golden light seeped outward from the bodies of the fairies, all four of them concentrating with their faces screwed up. Varvara added her rosy glow, revealing the remains of the mosaic, lying scattered on the floor about them.
Bertie looked to the others. “What came to pass … did you see it all as I did?”
“Everythin’, includin’ th’ Theater Manager’s betrayal, th’ bastard.” Nate looked very much like he wanted to punch something or someone. “Don’t ye think he tried t’ make ye disappear int’ th’ journal along wi’ Ophelia’s memories?”
Bertie didn’t want to defend the Theater Manager, but she knew how tricky it could be to find the right words, especially where the journal was concerned. Despite herself, she was unable to believe he’d known all that would happen as a result of his actions. “I think he was probably trying to fix matters as best he could, though I marvel that Waschbär didn’t take me from this place, since I was the truly unwanted thing.”
The sneak-thief shook his head. “Not possible. You were wanted—and loved—by plenty of people here. Besides which, I wouldn’t have known what to do with a small, willful girl, would I? I’m not in the habit of carrying jam-faced urchins away from their homes.”
Bertie didn’t answer him, didn’t return his coaxing smile, instead focusing her thoughts on the journal. Hard to bel
ieve the story of its creation and harder still to believe that they might never recover it. But recover it they must.… It was the center strand of her story, stretching between her and Ophelia, between the theater and the outside world, between the past and the present. “We’ll have to track down the brigands and steal the journal back somehow.”
“We ought to find a place to rest and plan beyond ‘somehow.’” Ariel turned to consider the way they’d come in, then the path that lay before them. “If I’m correct, these stairs should lead straight up to the stage.”
“An’ just how do ye figure that?” Nate stared into the tunnel, his distaste all too evident.
“I know every false wall and trapdoor in this building. I think this may lead to the solitary one I was unable to broach in my time here.”
“So the only way onward is up.” With a shuddering breath, Bertie put a hand against the wall and started to climb. She forced herself to hold her panic at bay.
We’ll find the brigands, and they will rue the day they twice over stole what was mine: the journal and Ophelia’s memories of everything that happened outside these damned walls.
Much as Bertie would have liked to curse the Theater Manager to the skies, she had to focus her determination and rage upon the brigands. With every step, she painted a mental picture of them: the woman who’d murdered Peaseblossom, the snatch-purses and cutthroats, the glint of gold-capped teeth by firelight. Then she focused on their Leader, on the sour stench of his clothes, the reek of his breath next to her face, and the secret pocket in which he’d hidden the journal. The image of him swam before her in the darkness, so real that she might have reached out and grasped him by the throat. Feeling the wish-come-true pressing behind her eyes, Bertie waged a fierce internal argument with herself: She might not be able to reunite her family by using it, but surely she could wish the journal back into her possession.
That wish-come-true isn’t doing any of us any good lingering just behind my eyeballs, and Ophelia can’t last much longer, trapped between worlds.
Thus preoccupied, she nearly stepped upon the four glowing lights that were the fairies when her little friends collided with something blocking their upward path and, sparking and sputtering, bounced back down the stairs.
Trying not to curse, Bertie scooped them up. “Are you all right?”
Cobweb rubbed the top of his head. “I think we found the trapdoor.”
Nate shoved past them. “Let me take a look.”
Bertie held up her fairy-filled hands so he could see the irregular, puzzle-piece shape of the door and the massive bolts locking it in place.
“Ye try t’ unlock it wi’ yer thoughts,” Nate said, bracing himself, “and I’ll push.”
Obeying, Bertie shoved at the thing made of earth and metal, commanding it to yield. With the screech of rusted iron, the first bolt slowly slid back.
The fairies clapped their hands over their ears. “It’s like nails on a chalkboard!”
“The wail of undead spirits—”
“Bertie singing in the shower!”
Three more bolts, each more stubborn than the last. The moment the final lock gave way, Ariel hit the wooden panel with a massive blast of wind, throwing it wide-open.
“Stay here a moment,” Nate managed to say through a wheeze. Taking the last of the stairs, his head and shoulders immediately disappeared.
“Like hell I will.” With a withering glance, the air elemental ducked in behind him.
Swallowing, Bertie transferred all four of the fairies to her shoulder and followed.
“I’m right behind you,” Waschbär said cheerfully. “I can pull you back if need be.”
“Thanks,” Bertie muttered. “I think.” The last few stairs were the steepest, and she had to look down to keep from barking her shins against the stone. It was only when her right foot hit familiar wooden floorboards that she realized she stood onstage. Letting her gaze flick over the cavernous darkness of the auditorium, she caught broken-glass glimpses of empty seats and the glittering chandelier. The room was as hushed as a Player behind the scenes waiting for a cue, the empty eyes of the footlights staring at them in the darkness. Bertie’s pulse was like the slamming of doors in her ears as she looked to the proscenium arch, Downstage Left, where The Complete Works of the Stage should have been sitting. Its pedestal stood empty, the chill of its absence silvering her breath to match her hair.
“So we meet again, and under such unusual circumstances,” said a disembodied voice. “I must admit, I was perturbed to have been locked out. I’d never before encountered a building we could not breach.”
Bertie whirled around, eyes adjusting enough to realize the brigands ranged before them, standing so still as to nearly be lost in the darkness. In the tunnel, Waschbär froze; when Bertie gave him a nearly indiscernible nod, he retreated with the fire-dancer in tow.
“How did you get in, then?” Bertie demanded, hoping her voice covered whatever telltale rustle might give them away.
“Transported as though by sorcerer’s wand,” their Leader said. “One second we were on the roof, the next on the stage as you entered like little mice.”
“Not a sorcerer’s wand,” Bertie said. “I summoned you here with my thoughts.”
He raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Is that so? Then you have our thanks and my utmost attention to assure neither you nor your friends do anything stupidly heroic.”
Nate and Ariel raised reluctant hands to prove they were no threat, reinforced by a brigand’s swift removal of the pirate’s cutlass from his belt. With matching squeaks, the fairies disappeared into the curtain of Bertie’s hair and clung to her like tiny, teeth-chattering barrettes. Contrariwise, Bertie hadn’t the presence of mind to be scared, not with the new bit of her story swirling about her head, not with the knowledge that she had to get the journal back if there was to be any hope of reuniting the theaters and saving her mother.
“You have something that belongs to me,” she said.
The brigands’ Leader ignored her, turning instead to the three largest of his band. “Fetch the Theater Manager.” Without a word, they disappeared in the direction of the Stage Door.
“Best of luck with that,” Bertie said. “I’m curious myself to know if he’s here.”
“He was most anxious to recover this tome,” the Leader said with a snarl. “Something about settling a small matter of a wayward child who should have never existed … I assume that wayward child is you.”
Chilled through by the words, Bertie did her best not to quail before him. “I am not easily erased, as well he knows.”
“Nevertheless, your Theater Manager will answer my summons, if he wants to remain in good health.”
“Your threats aren’t going to mean much if he’s unavoidably detained in a parallel dimension. Would you care to leave a message for him, should that be the case?”
“Stop speaking rubbish, or I’ll cut the tongue from your mouth.” The room seemed to darken a bit with the threat.
“And how are all your small, squishable friends this fine day?” the lady brigand asked, peering pointedly at Bertie’s neck.
Peaseblossom cowered back and buried her face in Bertie’s collar before bursting into tears. The blood raged in Bertie’s veins, sending angry heat rushing through every limb.
“If you touch any of them, I’ll personally break every one of your fingers.”
With a bark of laughter, the lady brigand feinted toward her, cackling again when Bertie recoiled.
“Enough!” her Leader snarled, stepping forward with his wicked knife already unsheathed. “You can have your fun once we’ve been paid for our troubles.”
“I assure you that I’m the only one interested in acquiring your wares at the moment.” In a show of bravado, Bertie forced her stance wider, her voice louder.
“In exchange for what, I’d like to know?” The Leader raised his nose to the air and circled the troupe, sniffing at them. “We left you with nothing of value.?
??
Bertie hoped that he wouldn’t be able to detect the wish-come-true lingering just behind her eyes, not just yet, not so early in the game. Her fingers clamped down upon her other gift from the Queen. “I’ve this broach. It’s a token from Her Gracious Majesty and worth quite a lot.”
“A paltry bit of jewelry isn’t worth anything close to what we were promised.”
Suddenly suspicious, Bertie narrowed her gaze at him. “What did the Theater Manager offer in exchange for the journal?”
His answering smile was a fearsome thing indeed. “A fortune in gold and jewels. A prince’s ransom, he said.”
“And just where do you suppose he was going to get such a sum?” Bertie tried to sound reasonable and soothing, to convey as much goodwill and don’t stab us as she could manage rather than the dripping condescension boiling up the back of her throat. “There’s never much money in a theater’s cash box.”
“He paid us each a coin on tick,” the lady brigand purred. A metal disc flipped through the air and landed at Bertie’s feet with a ping! “He said there would be more when the job was done.”
“And when did he enter into such a contract with you?”
Under no obligation, the Leader nevertheless answered, “A week or so ago.”
“About the same time we departed the good theater,” Ariel noted. “That’s quite the coincidence. But the Theater Manager couldn’t have known that Waschbär had stolen the journal, nor that he would give it to us. How did you track it down, without any idea who had it or where it might have been taken?”
The Leader flipped his knife about one hand with silver slices of reflected light. “Magic that strong leaves a trail, and we followed it as surely as a hound scents a stag.”
“A rheumatic bloodhound with a bum nose,” Bertie said with a sniff. “We wended our way over half the countryside, and it took you that long to catch up with us?”
The Leader scowled his displeasure, but before he could punish Bertie for the insult, the brigands returned without their quarry.
“His office was empty,” the tallest said. “There’s no one at all in the building, save this motley group.”