The Plentiful Darkness

by Heather Kassner

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  For Cameron, who I found when I needed him most

  THE MAGICIAN—QUIETER BY ONE

  Gloom cluttered the whole of the tower, and within its dark folds stood a magician. She wore a grim smile and an ink-black suit. Both cut severe lines, softened only by the tendril of fog that plumed from her mouth.

  The magician swirled her hand through the air. The fog tightened and heavied, it twisted and reshaped, and at last, it settled around her shoulders, the smokiest of magical cloaks. One that held close the quiet.

  But it was not enough.

  Beyond the tower, the village of Warybone and all the people within it breathed. In and in, and out. So loudly.

  How dare they, she thought.

  Her pulse thundered against the black ribbon she wore cinched at her throat. She stalked to the window and threw back the shutters. Glaring out at the town and the black sea beyond it, she cursed each chimney spiraling smoke, each moonlit lamp shining in a cottage window, each couple strolling down the lane.

  “Hush,” she hissed to the night, wishing to smother it in a cloud of silence, to dim the candle glow until everything below the tower glimmered black.

  With a whoosh of her cape, she turned from the window. Moonlight flooded the circular room, betraying every quiet space and exposing the beamed walls, which rose like a rib cage of brittle bones.

  Across from her, a stairway descended into the belly of the tower. She alighted down the twisted steps. Around and around, lower and lower, she went, skipping fastest past the locked door on the third story. Cobwebs clung to the corners of the frame, evidence of how long she’d left it closed.

  As she stepped into the street, the magician pulled up her hood, concealing her raven-wing hair and her narrow face, which was best kept out of sight so as not to scare the children. It wouldn’t do much good if they ran from her before she could catch them.

  A chill filled the magician’s bones. It felt like winter instead of autumn, though all the pumpkins displayed on the porches and stoops told her otherwise. Lights flickering, their jack-o’-lantern faces leered at the magician, but at least they were silent.

  Striding by, she murmured under her breath, and the pale moon-blue flames winked out one by one. The townsfolk would think it was the wind and nothing more.

  Or the rain.

  The tiniest drops had begun to fall. They struck the street, the rooftops, the bramble. But they did not touch the magician, not even when the rain poured heavier from the sky. She commanded it away from her the way she might sweep back a curtain.

  As she glided farther down the hill, she touched the silken scarf in the pocket of her suit coat, rubbing her thumb over its seamless fabric. The scarf was darker than night, softer than air. It brought her equal amounts of comfort and pain.

  Gently, she pushed it deeper into her pocket.

  At the same moment, a shrill, grating noise ripped through the night. The magician stumbled, pressing her hands to the sides of her head. She cowered in her cloak of quiet, but it could not ward off this awful sound.

  With widened gray eyes, she looked all around, seeking its source.

  She had to silence it.

  Ahead of her, on a rather flat stretch of the hill, a row of quaint houses sat beneath the clouds and rain. They looked much too tidy to hold such a sound, but there was no question it originated here.

  And here it would end.

  A flicker of movement caught the magician’s eye. She slowed.

  Someone stood there in the rain, tight to the little white cottage at the very end of the row. The figure dared to breathe. Of course it breathed. In and in, and out.

  But it was not the source of that wretched commotion.

  One thing at a time, she thought. Her focus turned from the small snooping body beneath the window to the shrieking disharmony churning from within the walls of the cottage. Whoever conjured the noise, that’s the one she wanted firstly.

  The magician waited, dry beneath the stormy sky. At last, the sound cut off. At last, the rain stopped. At last, the snooping figure peeled away from the house, running, running right past where the magician stood. She could have reached out one white hand and snatched the child’s skinny wrist.

  But not now. Not yet.

  “You’ll have your turn.” The cloak of fog masked her words as the dark-haired child fled, unaware of how close it had come to the magician—and the ever-dark night that awaited anyone she touched.

  The magician took a step toward the house, bracing herself should the pitiful sound crash down again. An ache beat at her temple. She’d spent too long in the streets of Warybone. Too long away from the tower. It hurt, it hurt awfully, these sounds pounding in her head. (And in her heart.)

  But the streets would soon be quieter by one.

  1

  THE LUNAR MIRROR

  A Few Hours Earlier

  Stardust was trickier to catch than moonlight. In fact, Rooney de Barra had never caught a speck of it. It danced far out of reach, little gems in the evening sky that taunted her with their bright sparkling.

  Even on overcast nights like this one, they glittered through the gray.

  Standing in the darkened alleyway, Rooney ran a thumb over the round metal case in her hand—the exact size of her small palm. A thorny stem was etched on the lid, and she cracked it open. It might have looked like a chainless pocket watch, but nestled within lay a very special mirror.

  A lunar mirror.

  Some said these rare mirrors were made from the moon itself, tiny slivers of the dead rock fallen to Earth. Rooney thought that notion silly, because she knew the truth.

  Magic touched the glass.

  Oh, it was a most extraordinary mirror. The silvery surface rippled like the sea, then settled smooth and shiny once again. She tucked her dark hair behind her ears and tipped her face over the glass. Her freckled white cheeks, her arrowed eyebrows, and her bark-brown eyes left no reflection.

  The only face the mirror would reveal was that of the moon.

  Rooney polished the glass with the frayed sleeve of her coat, checking for nicks or scratches, removing fingerprints and thumb smudges. When she was through, the mirror shone.

  Its reflected light exposed the blackened bricks of the buildings to each side of her, the grime-coated windows, and the mold stuck in the cracks. Rooney wrinkled her nose and inched away from the walls so she stood in the very center of the alleyway.

  A thread of silver fell between the old buildings and glanced upon her cheek. She took one step back, and another half step, lifting her right arm and holding it steady with the left. Quite precisely, she angled the mirror toward the sky. It reflected the dark clouds above and sieved a smidgen of moonlight, which spiraled down through the air, wispy and blue.

  Rooney held very still so the mirror would not tilt. One little twitch might spill the light instead of capture it, and she needed every last drop
.

  A breeze swept by, scampering through the alley and swooping up, up, up into the sky. Rooney kept her feet firmly planted. Her raised arm never wavered. But the clouds shifted when pushed, and the moon disappeared behind them.

  She frowned, turning the mirror this way and that, but it did no good. The moonbeams could no longer reach her.

  And of course, the stardust only teased her, a glimmer beyond the fog.

  Rooney closed the mirror and tucked it into the pocket of her long coat. With a huff, she stalked down the alleyway. It was undoubtedly the worst place to catch moonlight, but it was the one place in Warybone she felt safest.

  Yes, it was dark. (Very.) Yes, it was crooked and foul and dank. (Very, very, very.) But it was quiet too. A hushed space that Rooney had all to herself.

  Or mostly.

  The rats gathered here too. Thick furred and long tailed, they skittered through the shadows, unbothered and right at home. No one troubled them in the alley. No one shrieked or kicked them out of the way like the gents and ladies and roughhouse boys did in the cobbled streets. All those hard-knuckled boys scared of getting bitten, while Rooney slept beside the little beasts without suffering a single scratch or nibble.

  In unspoken agreement, the Montys—which was what she called the rats, a collective name for all of them, as she could hardly tell one hairy creature from another—behaved quite politely, and she offered them the same courtesy.

  She could not say the same for the roughhouse boys. She’d rumbled with them a time or two. They were all bruises and teeth.

  Rooney watched for them now (the boys, not the rats) as she emerged from the alleyway and hesitated on the darkened street. At each corner, lamps glowed blue in the misty air, moonlit sparks wavering behind the glass, and within each house, moonlit flames leaped in the hearths, for when moonlight touched wood or wick, it warmed, and when it touched metal or glass, it cooled.

  It was much safer than the outdated use of fire or gas, which could as easily warm a house as burn it to the ground. Spilled moonlight would only glimmer harmlessly before it eventually faded away.

  She cast a look over her shoulder. Usually the boys made enough noise in their coming that she heard them before she saw them, but it was still wise to be cautious.

  Her boots fell softly on the street as she crept forward. One of the Montys followed her the length of a block and then another, keeping close to her ankles. It was a skinny thing (like Rooney herself) with a scruffy black coat and a splotch of white on its nose.

  Rooney glanced up at the sky. She licked her finger and held it out in front of her, trying to gauge which way the wind would carry the clouds. That-a-way (she did not know north from south), she guessed, and turned left down Cider Street.

  Best to stay on the busier avenues as long as she could, where the laughter and music from the taverns spilled out into the night. (At this hour, there were still more smiles than fists.)

  The Monty continued to follow her. It must have felt safe in her shadow, hoping she’d spare a crumb. One it wouldn’t have to fight over with its sharp-toothed brothers and sisters.

  “I’ve got nothing for you, I’m afraid.” Her stomach grumbled. “And nothing for me, unless I gather a mirror-full of moonlight to trade for my supper.”

  It was probably only a shadow falling across its snout, but the rat seemed to frown.

  “As though you could do any better in weather like this,” she scoffed, then sighed. “If only I could figure out how to capture stardust, I’d never go hungry again.”

  If moonlight gleamed like glass, starlight would glitter like diamonds.

  And like diamonds, it would be worth so much more.

  Both forms of light could be cut and shaped into sparkling necklaces and delicate rings; into golden or silver-blue thread, ribbon, and rope; into glinting ever-lit chandeliers. But whereas moonlight was fleeting, starlight was forever.

  At least, that’s what all the stories whispered in the streets of Warybone told.

  Rooney wasn’t sure about all that, but gathering a twinkling from the stars above would prove a thing or two to those roughhouse boys. That she was as good as them.

  That she was better than them. For they’d never caught a bit of starlight either. They would beg her to show them how she’d done it.

  “One day,” she muttered.

  Rooney kicked a stone in her path and stuffed her hands into her pockets. Thistle Hill stood in the distance. The highest point in all of Warybone, it was the perfect place for catching moonlight, but it was also the spot the roughhouse boys had claimed as their own.

  She would just have to avoid them as best she could.

  The Monty followed her up the narrowed street, its little claws scratching over the stones. Rooney’s eyes flicked to the Tower of Thistle, rising dark and straight into the night. The roof shimmered.

  “Do you think the stories are true? That starlight sturdies the tower?” The rat made no reply and only slipped closer to her heels. “Well, I think it’s true. Come on.”

  The hill inclined slowly, with cottages sitting crooked on its slope. Where the land was too rocky or the hill too steep, blackberry bushes grew untamed, and in these open spaces Rooney felt most wary.

  Maybe the Monty did too. It skittered away, as if something had scared it off. Rooney froze. A tap-tap-tapping pelted the cobblestones. She looked all around, ready to dart off after the rat.

  Then a scraping sound split the night. Rooney trembled.

  After all, these days there were even worse things on the streets than the roughhouse boys.

  2

  KINDLING

  Worse things.

  Rooney did not want to think about that now. It was only a story anyway—the thing that was disappearing children from the streets of Warybone come dark fall.

  A breeze struck her all at once. Cold, wet pinpricks speckled her cheeks.

  With a startled gasp, she fled. Just ahead sat a row of cottages. She darted toward the nearest one, crowding close to its wall, but she had not been as fast as the whip-tailed rat in her escape.

  The sky grumped gray, dumping rain. Rooney was already soaked through and through. She swiped a hand across her face, pushing back wet strands of hair.

  Slouched under the dripping eaves, Rooney glared into the ever-darkening night.

  She pressed herself more firmly against the rough wall of the house, folded her arms across her chest, and waited impatiently for the rain to stop. But it continued to fall.

  Rooney sidled closer to the front window. Her tall boots squelched in the mud as she rose to her tiptoes and leaned forward. Through a crack in the shutter, Rooney peered into a formal sitting room.

  Against the far wall, a moonlit fire blazed blue in the hearth, two straight-back chairs flanking it. A trim, broad-shouldered woman with dark brown skin perched on one. Her foot tapped the floorboards. A bearded, bespectacled man sat cross-legged in the other. His tapered brown finger drummed the brim of his pipe. Grinning, they looked, not at each other, but toward the corner of the room.

  Rooney smooshed her face against the shutter. Even so, she could not see what they gazed at so fondly, and she could not understand what made them smile in such a manner.

  Not with that horrible whining sound piercing the night.

  It came from this room. It cut right through the rain. All the town must have heard the shrill, scraping sound, worse than graveyard cats yowling and hissing and spitting.

  Rooney frowned. She covered her ears. But she kept stubbornly in place, not wanting to get any wetter than she already was.

  With one final shriek, the sound quieted. The man and the woman clapped their hands softly. From the corner of the room came the shuffle of footsteps, and then a girl, who couldn’t have been any older than Rooney’s twelve years, strode forward.

  She held a violin and bow.

  Rooney blinked. Never had she known an instrument could make such a dreadful sound. The girl hadn’t been playing
the violin, she’d been torturing it.

  The girl bowed at the waist, first to her mother and then to her father. The tail of her black braid swung over her shoulder, and her brown cheeks rounded in a smile when their clapping continued.

  Rooney would have clapped along with them (not in appreciation, only thankful for the quiet), but of course, she did not want to give herself away—a girl clinging to the wall of a house the way a river leech suctioned itself to skin.

  So she turned back around and resumed glaring into the night. Her boots sank deeper into the mud, as heavy as her mood.

  She was not thinking about how she missed having a mother and father of her own (though she did miss them very much). She was not thinking about how wonderful it might be to play an instrument (horribly or otherwise). All she was thinking about was how toasty this family must have been before the hearth, while she stood shivering in the rain. If she’d been bolder, she would have snatched the violin from the girl’s unskilled hands, as she could have put it to better use than the girl had.

  It would have made excellent kindling for a fire.

  But though the disused heat source might warm her, it would not fill her stomach, and she’d yet to catch enough moonlight for supper. She pulled her mirror from the pocket of her coat, eyeing the clouds and wishing them away.

  Around her, the rain fell softly, and then softer still. Before she could break away from the house and be on her way, the shutters beside her flew open. She ducked, but too late. The shutter on the right smacked against the house, and the one on the left knocked against her head. She yelped, rubbing the tender spot on her temple (but she supposed she deserved it for poking her nose where it didn’t belong).

  The woman she’d spied through the window turned wide eyes on Rooney. Her hands flew to her face, covering cheeks, nose, and mouth. She screamed, stumbling away from the window and into her husband’s arms.

  “Someone’s outside!”