The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

  “I don’t think that term applies to dice.”

  Mirabel shrugs and heads into the Keeper’s office. Zachary can’t make out most of the conversation, only words and phrases that make it clear it is more argument than conversation, and then the door swings open and the Keeper marches in his direction.

  The Keeper doesn’t even glance at Zachary, focusing his attention on Dorian, pulling his head up and brushing the thick salt-and-pepper hair back from his temples and staring at him, a much more thorough visual exam than Zachary received himself.

  “You rolled his dice for him?” the Keeper asks Zachary.

  “Yes?”

  “You rolled for him, specifically, you did not simply let them fall?”

  “Well, yeah?” Zachary answers. “Was that okay?” he asks, half to the Keeper and half to Mirabel who has followed him out of the office with Zachary’s bags slung over her shoulder and a compass and a key dangling from chains in her hand.

  “It is…unusual,” the Keeper says but does not elaborate, and seemingly finished with his perusal of Dorian he releases him, Dorian’s head settling on Zachary’s shoulder. Without another word the Keeper turns and walks past Mirabel, and goes back into his office and closes the door. They exchange a pointed look as they pass each other but Zachary only sees Mirabel’s side and her expression doesn’t give away enough for him to interpret.

  “What was that about?” Zachary asks as Mirabel helps him with Dorian again, after adding his satchel to the bag collection.

  “I’m not sure,” Mirabel answers but doesn’t meet his eyes. “Rule-bending combined with a low-probability roll, maybe. Let’s get him to his room. Don’t trip over cats.”

  They make their way down halls that Zachary hasn’t seen before (one is painted copper, another has books hanging from loops of rope) and some too narrow to walk three abreast so they have to pass through sideways. Everything looks bigger and stranger than Zachary remembers, more looming shadows and more places and books to get lost in. Hallways appear to be moving, trailing off in different directions like snakes and Zachary keeps his eyes trained on the floor in front of them to steady himself.

  They come to a hall strewn with café tables and chairs, all black, piled with books with gilded edges. One table has a cat: a small silver tabby with folded ears and yellow eyes who regards them curiously. The floor is tiled in black and gold in a pattern like vines. Some of the tiled vines climb the walls, covering the stone up to the curving ceiling. Mirabel pulls out a key and opens a door between the vines. Beyond it there is a room quite like Zachary’s but in blues, the furniture mostly lacquered and black. Not quite art deco blended with the sort of room that looks like it would smell like cigars and kind of does come to think of it. The tiles on the floor are checkered where they’re not covered by navy rugs. The lit fireplace is small and arched. A number of filament bulbs hang unshaded from cords suspended from the ceiling, dimly glowing.

  Zachary and Mirabel put Dorian on the bed, a pillow-covered pile of navy with a fanned headboard, and Zachary’s dizziness returns, along with the realization of how much his arms hurt. From the look on Mirabel’s face as she massages her shoulder she likely feels the same.

  “We need to have a rule about unconsciousness around here,” she says. “Or maybe we need wheelbarrows.” She goes to a panel near the fireplace. Zachary can guess what it is though this one is a thinner, sleeker door than his own dumbwaiter. “Take off his shoes and coat, would you?” Mirabel asks as she writes on a piece of paper.

  Zachary removes Dorian’s scuffed wingtips revealing bright purple socks with individually knit toes and then carefully untangles him from his coat, noticing the paper flower, partially crushed, in the lapel. As Zachary puts the coat down on a chair he tries to uncrush the flower, realizing that he can read it though he remembers that the words had been in Italian.

  Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.

  He starts to ask Mirabel about translations without using the m-word but as the text swims from English to Italian and back again the dizziness intensifies. He looks up and the room is undulating, like he’s underwater and not just underground. He loses his balance, putting a hand out to the wall to steady himself and missing.

  Mirabel turns at the sound of the falling lamp.

  “You didn’t drink anything while you were tied up, did you?” she asks.

  Zachary tries to answer her but crashes to the floor instead.

  The girl in the bunny mask wanders the hallways of the Harbor. She opens doors and crawls under desks and stands stock-still in the middle of rooms, staring blankly ahead sometimes for long stretches of time.

  She startles those who stumble upon her, though such occasions are rare.

  The mask is a lovely thing, antique and likely Venetian though no one recalls its origin. A fading pink nose surrounded by realistic whiskers and gold filigree. The ears stretch above the girl’s head, making her appear taller than she is, a soft pink-gold blush inside giving the impression of listening, catching every sound that breaks the silence resting like a blanket over this place in this time.

  She is accustomed to it now, this place. She knows to walk softly and lightly so her footsteps do not echo, a skill she learned from the cats though she cannot make her steps cat-silent no matter how hard she tries.

  She wears trousers that are too short and a sweater that is too big. She carries a knapsack that once belonged to a long-dead soldier who never would have imagined his bag ending up on the narrow shoulders of a girl in the guise of a rabbit as she explores subterranean rooms that she has been expressly forbidden to enter.

  In the bag there is a canteen of water, a carefully wrapped parcel of biscuits, a telescope with a scratched lens, a mostly blank notebook, several pens, and a number of paper stars carefully folded from notebook pages filled with nightmares.

  She drops the stars in the far corners, leaving her fears behind bookshelves and tucked into vases. Scattering them in hidden constellations.

  (She does this with books as well, removing the pages she does not care for and sending them off into the shadows where they belong.)

  (The cats play with the stars, batting bad dreams or uncomfortable prose from one hiding place to another, changing the patterns of the stars.)

  The girl forgets the dreams once she lets them go, adding to the long list of things she does not remember: What time she is meant to go to bed. Where she puts books she starts but does not finish. The time before she came to this place. Mostly.

  Of the before time she remembers the woods with the trees and the birds. She recalls being submerged in bathtub water and staring up at a flat white ceiling, different from the ceilings here.

  It is like remembering a different girl. A girl in a book she read and not a girl she was herself.

  Now she is a different thing with a different name in a different place.

  Bunny Eleanor is different from regular Eleanor.

  Regular Eleanor wakes up late at night and forgets where she is. Forgets the difference between things that have happened and things that she read in books and things she thinks maybe happened but maybe did not. Regular Eleanor sometimes sleeps in her bathtub instead of her bed.

  The girl prefers being a bunny. She rarely removes her mask.

  She opens doors she has been told not to open and discovers rooms with walls that tell stories and rooms with pillows for naps embroidered with bedtime stories and rooms with cats and the room with the owls she found once and never again and one door she has not managed to open yet in the burned place.

  The burned place she found because someone put shelves in front of it tall enough to keep big people out but not small bunny girls and she crawled under and through.

  The room contained burned books and black dust and something that might once have been a cat but wa
s not anymore.

  And the door.

  A plain door with a shiny brass feather set into the center, above the girl’s head.

  The door was the only thing in the room not covered in black dust.

  The girl thought maybe the door was hidden behind a wall that burned away with the rest of the room. She wonders why anyone would hide a door behind a wall.

  The door refused to open.

  When Eleanor gave up due to frustration and hunger and walked back to her room the painter found her, covered in soot, and put her in a bath but did not know what she had been up to because the fire was before the painter’s time.

  Now Eleanor keeps going back to look at the door.

  She sits and stares at it.

  She tries whispering through the keyhole but never receives a response.

  She nibbles on biscuits in the darkness. She doesn’t have to remove her bunny mask because it doesn’t cover her mouth, one of many reasons why the bunny mask is the best mask.

  She rests her head on the floor, which makes her sneeze, but then she can see the tiniest sliver of light.

  A shadow passes by the door and disappears again. Like when the cats pass by her room at night.

  Eleanor presses her ear against the door but hears nothing. Not even a cat.

  Eleanor takes a notebook and a pen from her bag.

  She considers what to write and then inscribes a simple message. She decides to leave it unsigned but then changes her mind and draws a small bunny face in the corner. The ears are not as even as she would like but it is identifiable as a bunny which is the important part.

  She rips the page from the notebook and folds it, pressing along the creases so it stays flat.

  She slips the paper under the door. It stops halfway. She gives it an extra push and it passes into the room beyond.

  Eleanor waits, but nothing happens and the nothing happening becomes quickly boring so she leaves.

  Eleanor is in another room, giving a biscuit to a cat, the note half forgotten, when the door opens. A rectangle of light spills into the soot-covered space.

  The door remains open for a moment, and then it slowly closes.

  ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS half wakes underwater with the taste of honey in his mouth. It makes him cough.

  “What did you drink?” he hears Mirabel’s voice from far away but when he blinks she is inches from his face, staring at him, blurry, her hair a backlit halo of pink. His glasses are gone. “What did you drink?” blurry underwater Mirabel repeats. Zachary wonders if mermaids have pink hair.

  “She gave me tea,” he says, each word slow like the honey. “Intimidatey tea.”

  “And you drank it?” Mirabel asks incredulously as Zachary thinks maybe he nods. “You need more of this.”

  She puts something to his lips that might be a bowl and is definitely filled with honey. Honey and maybe cinnamon and clove. It’s just liquid enough to drink and tastes like cough-medicine Christmas. Always winter never nondenominational seasonal holidays, Zachary Narnia-thinks and coughs again but then Princess Bubblegum—no, Mirabel—forces him to drink more of it.

  “I can’t believe you were that stupid,” she says.

  “She drank it first,” Zachary protests, the words almost at a normal pace. “She poured both cups.”

  “And she chose which cup you got, right?” Mirabel says and Zachary nods. “The poison was in the cup, not the tea. Did you drink the whole cup?”

  “I don’t think so,” Zachary says. The room is getting clearer. His glasses weren’t missing after all, they’re on his face. The underwater feeling fades. He’s sitting in an armchair in Dorian’s art deco room. Dorian is asleep on the bed. “How long was I…” he starts to ask but can’t find the word to complete the question, even though he knows it is a little word. Oou. Tout.

  “A few minutes,” Mirabel answers. “You should have more of that.”

  Out. That’s the word. Sneaky little word. Zachary sips the liquid again. He can’t remember if he likes honey or not.

  Behind him the dumbwaiter chimes and Mirabel goes to check it. She removes a tray filled with vials and bowls and a towel and a box of matches.

  “Light this and put it on the nightstand, please,” Mirabel instructs him, handing him the matches and a cone of incense with a ceramic burner. Zachary realizes it’s a test as soon as he tries to light the match, his coordination failing him. It takes three attempts.

  Zachary holds the lit match to the incense, reminded of all the times he performed the same action for his mother. He concentrates on holding his hand steady, more difficult than it should be, and lets the incense catch before softly blowing the flame down to a smoking ember, the scent rich and immediate but unfamiliar. Sweet but minty.

  “What is it?” Zachary asks as he places it on the nightstand, curls of smoke wafting over the bed. His hands feel less shaky but he sits back down and takes another sip of the honey mixture. He thinks he does like honey.

  “No idea,” Mirabel says. She puts some liquid on the small towel and places it on Dorian’s forehead. “The Kitchen has its house remedies, they tend to be effective. You know about the Kitchen, right?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “They don’t usually include the incense unless it’s serious,” Mirabel says, frowning at the curling smoke and looking back at Dorian. “Maybe it’s for both of you.”

  “Why would Allegra poison me?” Zachary asks.

  “Two possibilities,” Mirabel says. “One, she was going to knock you out and send you back to Vermont so you’d wake up with mild amnesia and if you remembered anything you would think it was a dream.”

  “Two?”

  “She was trying to kill you.”

  “Great,” Zachary says. “And this is an antidote?”

  “I have never encountered a poison it couldn’t counteract. You’re feeling better already, aren’t you?”

  “Just a little blurry,” Zachary says. “You said he tried to kill you once.”

  “It didn’t work,” Mirabel says and before Zachary can ask her to elaborate there is a knock at the open door.

  Zachary expects it to be the Keeper but there’s a young woman at the threshold looking concerned. This girl is about his age, bright-eyed and short with dark hair tamed into braids that frame her face but left wild in the back. She wears an ivory-colored version of the Keeper’s robe but simpler, except for the intricate white-on-white embroidery around the cuffs and hem and collar. She looks questioningly at Zachary and then turns to Mirabel and raises her left hand, holding her palm sideways and then turning it flat, palm up. Zachary knows without asking for a translation that she’s inquiring as to what is going on.

  “We’ve been having adventures, Rhyme,” Mirabel says and the girl frowns. “There was a daring rescue and bondage and tea and a fire and two-thirds of us got poisoned. Also this is Zachary, Zachary this is Rhyme.”

  Zachary puts two fingers to his lips and inclines his head in greeting automatically, knowing this girl must be an acolyte and remembering the gesture from Sweet Sorrows. As soon as he does it he feels stupid for assuming but Rhyme’s eyes light up and the frown vanishes. She places a hand over her breastbone and inclines her head in return.

  “Well you two are going to get along just fine,” Mirabel observes, shooting a curious glance at Zachary before returning her attention to Dorian. She raises a hand to coerce the smoke from the incense closer, curls of it following the motions of her fingers and drifting along her arm. “You and Rhyme have something in common,” Mirabel says to Zachary. “Rhyme found a painted door when she was a youngster, only she opened hers. That was what, eight years ago?”

  Rhyme shakes her head and holds up all of her fingers.

  “You’re making me feel old,” Mirabel says.

  “You didn�
��t go home?” Zachary asks and immediately regrets the question as the light fades from Rhyme’s face. Mirabel interrupts before he can apologize.

  “Is everything all right, Rhyme?” she asks.

  Rhyme gestures again and this one Zachary can’t interpret. A fluttering of fingers that moves from one hand to the other. Whatever it means, Mirabel seems to understand.

  “Yes, I have it,” she says. She turns to Zachary. “Please excuse us for a moment, Ezra,” she says. “If he’s not awake by the time the incense goes out light another one, would you? I’ll be back.”

  “Sure,” he says. Mirabel follows Rhyme out of the room, retrieving her bag from a chair as she goes. Zachary tries to remember if the bag looked like it had something large and heavy in it earlier, because it certainly does now. Mirabel and the bag are gone before he can get a better look at it.

  Alone with Dorian, Zachary occupies himself with watching the curling smoke float around the room. It swirls over the pillows and drifts up to the ceiling. He tries to perform the same elegant conjuring gesture that Mirabel used to urge the smoke in the right direction but it curls up his arm instead, wrapping around his head and his shoulder. His shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore but he can’t remember when it stopped.

  He leans over Dorian to adjust the cloth on his forehead. The top two buttons on Dorian’s shirt are undone, Mirabel must have done that, maybe to make it easier for him to breathe. Zachary’s gaze moves back and forth from the curling smoke to Dorian’s open collar and then his curiosity gets the better of him.

  It feels like an intrusion, though it is a single button’s worth of trespassing. Still, Zachary hesitates as he undoes the button, wondering what Dorian might make of “I was looking for your sword” as an excuse.

  The lack of a sword emblazoned on Dorian’s chest comes as both a surprise and a disappointment. Zachary had been wondering what it looked like more than whether or not it was there at all. The extra button’s worth of revelation has exposed a few more inches of well-muscled chest covered in a fair amount of hair and several bruises but no ink, nothing marking him as a guardian. Maybe that tradition is no longer upheld, replaced by silver swords like the one beneath his sweater. How much of Sweet Sorrows is fact and how much is fiction and how much has simply changed with time?