Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘It is pitiable,’ murmured Mr Grace sadly, as if answering an unspoken thought. ‘Its instinct is to tug at the heart, even after the mask has slipped. Like a cuckoo trying to sing.’

  Violet stared at Not-Triss, apparently hypnotized. The wet weather behind her eyes was on the move, clouds shifting formation. Then her scowl deepened again and she turned back to Mr Grace.

  ‘All right,’ she growled. ‘I’m convinced. She’s not Theresa.’

  Mr Grace’s tension seemed to subside slightly into relief. ‘Thank you, Miss Parish—’

  ‘Which means,’ continued Violet with the steely relentlessness of a torpedo, ‘that she isn’t Mr Crescent’s daughter, and he has no rights over her. Which means you don’t either. So she’ll be coming with me.’

  Suddenly Not-Triss’s lungs were full of too much air, and she did not know what to do with it all.

  ‘Please do not do this!’ exclaimed Mr Grace. ‘Think of Penny! At least let me take Penny back to her parents! Remember, that letter gives me authority—’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’ Violet crumpled the letter and thrust it into her pocket. ‘Not any more.’ She leaned forward and jutted her long jaw. ‘So I don’t think you’ll be taking Pen either. Now get out of our way, or I will start screaming the place down. They know me in this tea shop . . . and they won’t know you from Jack Frost. Who do you think they’ll believe?’

  Watching Violet and Mr Grace stare at each other across the table, Not-Triss realized that they were about the same height. It baffled her, for Mr Grace had quietly become a towering figure of fire in her imagination. Only now, when he no longer seemed unstoppable, could she see that he was not that tall for a man. Violet was tall for a woman, stubbornly lanky like a thistle.

  ‘Violet,’ piped up Pen, ‘he keeps looking at the clock.’

  Belatedly, Not-Triss realized that Pen was right. Mr Grace had been glancing repeatedly at something on the wall behind them.

  He was clock-watching. He was waiting for something to happen. Perhaps when he had seen the three of them walk into the tea shop he had not followed them in immediately. Perhaps he had sent off a hansom cab or message to somebody . . . maybe even Piers Crescent.

  There was a frozen moment during which the truth sank in, and everyone realized that everyone else was about to do something. The next moment, of course, everything happened at once.

  Mr Grace leaped sideways, arm outstretched to block any attempt at escape, just as Pen threw her cup of cold tea into his face. Violet brought her knee up hard against the underside of the tabletop, tipping it on to its side and sending crockery, scissors and everything else tumbling to the floor. The tailor leaped backwards reflexively, and Violet gave the table another kick, knocking it on to its back like a turtle.

  ‘Run!’ she shouted.

  There was now a path across the overturned table. Pen and Not-Triss leaped for it without more prompting. Out of the corner of her eye Not-Triss thought she saw Mr Grace make a lunge for her, but suddenly Violet was there as well and crockery was breaking and his fingers did not reach her after all.

  At the street door fear jerked her to a halt, and she stared paralysed at the hanging scissors. The next moment, however, Pen had flung open the door, and the scissors could only clatter at Not-Triss harmlessly from behind the glass. Both girls hurled themselves out on to the pavement and ran for Violet’s motorcycle.

  ‘Get into the sidecar!’ Violet burst from the tea shop and pelted after them, her face red and her hair awry. The girls obeyed, Pen scrambling in after Not-Triss with painful haste. Violet did not bother with her goggles or hat, but straddled the bike.

  She brought down her heel on the kick-starter and the world filled with the triumphant roar of the motorcycle engine. The forward surge was so sudden it yanked back Not-Triss’s head, jarring her neck.

  The roads were full of traffic and Violet did not seem to care about any of it. They weaved between two carts, dared a car head on, clipped over some tramlines and came perilously close to the broad, downy feet of a shire horse. At the end of the road Violet ignored the furious waves of a policeman and cut across the path of a large mint-green Sunbeam that Not-Triss recognized all too well. For a fleeting second Not-Triss thought she saw Piers Crescent in the driver’s seat, frozen behind glass like a photograph.

  Then they were past, and through the next gap, and nothing that ought to stop them did. The traffic just seemed to part for them again and again, like cows for a terrier. There was dust in Not-Triss’s mouth, and her mind was spinning and singing like a gramophone record. The wheels of disaster had fallen foul of a rut. The unavoidable had been avoided.

  At last Violet stopped the bike in a quiet dockland street. After the engine had faded away she did not dismount, but sat for a few minutes with her face in her hands, almost as if she was praying. If it was a prayer she was muttering, however, it was one full of all the swear words that Not-Triss had ever heard, and quite a few she had not.

  ‘What happened to Mr Grace?’ demanded Pen, breaking the silence.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ muttered Violet, without looking up.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ asked Pen in hushed tones.

  ‘You’ll work it out some day,’ Violet growled. ‘But I’m not going to be the one to tell you.’ She glanced across at the two girls, her face grimy with dust, and gave a small grimace. ‘Hop out then.’

  They ‘hopped out’, and Not-Triss’s legs promptly gave way. Her mind was still spinning and singing, not helped by the engine fumes, and her limbs were shaking uncontrollably. When she tried to speak, she found her mouth was still full of thorn-teeth. Without meaning to, she started to sob, her eyes filling with cobweb. The world misted from view.

  Suddenly there were two strong arms around her, holding her tightly, more tightly than Triss’s parents had ever dared to hug Triss. Violet smelt of oil, cigarettes and some kind of perfume. Her coat was rough against Not-Triss’s face. Not-Triss could feel Pen there too, scrambling to be part of it, resting her head against Not-Triss’s back.

  ‘You’re all thorny,’ whispered Pen, shifting position.

  ‘I’ll hurt you both,’ whispered Not-Triss. ‘My thorns – they’ll hurt you.’

  ‘What, me?’ answered Violet. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m tough as nails. I’ve got a hide like a dreadnought.’

  Violet did not feel cold or metallic like nails or a battleship. She felt warm. Her voice was a bit shaky, but her hug was as firm as the hills or the horizons.

  Chapter 28

  A WINTER’S TALE

  There was a deserted boathouse on the water’s edge, so Violet pushed the bike inside, the girls showing willing by putting their shoulders to the sidecar. The roof had not been mended for a long time, and was full of bright squints where the sky crept through. The concrete floor was slick with old puddles.

  Against one wall were stacked some crates that were almost dry, and serviceable enough as seats. Violet dropped herself down on one, wiping at her grimy face with her handkerchief and leaving red, rubbed swipes across her cheeks.

  ‘Don’t worry, nobody comes here,’ she said, evidently noting Not-Triss’s quivering tension. ‘Not during daylight anyway. It’s too damp to store anything, and no one will be coming back for these.’ She patted the crates with the flat of her hand. ‘It’s just a bundle of toys sent over from Germany a few years ago, handmade, part of their reparations for causing the War. The water got into the crates, so – oh, Pen! Stop that!’

  ‘I’m not doing anything wrong!’ Pen protested, elbow-deep in a newly opened crate. ‘You said nobody was coming back for any of them!’

  ‘That’s because they’re rusty and rotten,’ explained Violet. ‘Well . . . don’t come crying to me if you get gangrene and they have to saw your arm off.’

  Pen grinned at Not-Triss, holding up a tin clockwork airship which circled its mooring mast with a buzz. Not-Triss looked at it with a fascinated, hollow feeling. War reparations. We’re sorry
your sons are dead. Have some clockwork airships instead. Then she wondered what it was like for the German families who had lost sons but who still had to make toys for British children, to say sorry.

  Not-Triss settled herself on a crate-seat next to Violet. Her pulse was slowing to a normal rate now, and her teeth felt like teeth when she ran her tongue across them.

  Violet put an arm around the shoulders of each girl.

  ‘Now then,’ she said quietly, and waited.

  Pen and Not-Triss exchanged a glance, and in fits and starts began to explain.

  It was a bit of a scrambled mess, full of meaningful glances while they decided what to say, followed by pell-mell spurts of exclamations, contradictions and repetitions, most of it in the wrong order.

  Violet listened without interruption to their account of Pen’s pact with the Architect, the abduction of Triss, the arrival of Not-Triss, the strangeness of the dolls and scissors, the meeting with Mr Grace and Not-Triss’s unnatural hunger. It was only when Not-Triss described the encounter with the bird-thing, and the contents of the mysterious letter she seized from it, that Violet looked sharply across at her.

  ‘The letter was from Sebastian?’ Her tone was harsh.

  Not-Triss trailed off, afraid that her new ally did not believe her.

  After a couple of seconds Violet seemed to realize that she was glaring, and dropped her gaze. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked more quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Not-Triss timidly. ‘It was his handwriting. And . . . it had that day’s date.’

  Violet stared out towards the doorway, and the crooked square of bright water beyond. She spent a few seconds sucking in her cheeks, as if around a gobstopper.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What did it say?’

  Not-Triss recounted the words as accurately as she could.

  ‘In the snow,’ Violet said at last, almost inaudibly. ‘He’s in the snow.’ She hesitated, and then very slightly shook her head. ‘But he can’t be,’ she added, with soft finality. ‘He’s gone. There was a letter. He died.’

  ‘But we found out about that!’ exploded Pen. ‘He’s—’ She stopped abruptly, and gasped in a deep lungful of air. She stared at Not-Triss, all the colour draining from her face.

  ‘Pen!’ called out Not-Triss. ‘Remember, we’re not supposed to talk about what we were told at the—’

  A moment later Not-Triss knew precisely what Pen had just experienced. Just as she was about to pronounce the word ‘Underbelly’, she felt a sickening sense of vertigo and imminent peril. It was as if she had one foot on the very edge of a precipice, and the other stepping out over empty and lethal space. Like Pen, she broke off with a flinch and a deep gasp of shock.

  They had both promised not to reveal the existence of the Underbelly, or anything they had discovered while they were there. Now, for the first time, she understood the power of that promise. In that moment she had known that if she said another word something terrible would happen to her, something that would make all her trials so far seem trivial in comparison. The feeling of menace had been so intense that she knew she would never muster the willpower to break her word.

  ‘What is it?’ Violet stared at the two girls in bewilderment.

  ‘There are things we can’t tell you,’ Not-Triss explained. ‘Just now we tried . . . and we found we couldn’t.’

  ‘We made a magic promise, and now it’s stopping us talking!’ Pen joined in, red-faced with frustration.

  ‘Magic promises,’ muttered Violet. ‘Doppelgängers made of leaves. And letters from . . . people who couldn’t possibly have written them. If I ever have to explain all this to the police . . .’ She coughed up a small, dry husk of a laugh. But she was not laughing at them.

  ‘Violet,’ Not-Triss blurted out impulsively, ‘are you . . . magical at all?’

  ‘No.’ Violet gave a short snort and rubbed at her grit-reddened eyes. ‘A spiritualist once told me I had a “soul like clay” because I made fun of her. No, I’m not magical.’

  ‘Then . . . why do you make places cold if you stay in them too long?’ asked Not-Triss.

  For a long moment Violet looked startled and alarmed. Then she dropped her face into her hands and shook her head.

  ‘Oh, sweet Peter,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘I only wish I knew.’ She looked up, and in her dark grey eyes Not-Triss saw anguish, incomprehension and a sort of relief. When Violet started talking again, her words came out in a painful rush, almost stumbling past one another, like people escaping a burning building.

  ‘It never used to happen! Once I could stay in a place as long as I liked without the barometer tumbling. Then, one day, the news came – the news that Sebastian . . . was gone. There was a letter from his commanding officer, and another from one of the men in his regiment. They didn’t say much. All it told me . . . All it said about what happened to him was that . . . he died in the snow.

  ‘That’s when it started, I think. It was winter then, so I didn’t notice at first. I stayed in my house, and the snow came down a yard deep as if it wanted to bury everything, and I didn’t care. I barely noticed – my head was full of the snow, and when I opened my eyes and looked out through the window there was more snow . . . It seemed to make sense. It was the bitterest winter in Ellchester anybody could remember.

  ‘But then the spring came, and the winter didn’t leave. Or at least it didn’t leave me. I stayed in my parents’ house, but after a while I started noticing the way that there was always fresh snowfall outside our home but little or no snow on the rest of the street. Guests shivered when they came in, and put their coats back on. There was always ice on the inside of the windows. I thought there was something wrong with the house at first. But then I started visiting more, getting out . . . and I realized it was me. Winter was following me.

  ‘If I stay in one place too long, it starts to get cold. And if I still don’t move on, it starts to snow. Just a few flakes at first, then more, then a blizzard . . . I always give up and run for it by that point. I just . . . keep running and running. I don’t want people to notice what’s happening and realize I’m a freak, but that’s only the half of it. I’m afraid that it’s Sebastian’s winter chasing me. I’m afraid that if I let it catch up with me, and I get lost in that blizzard, then I’ll find myself there. In that place, with the wire and the booming of the guns and blood on the snow, with no way of ever getting back.’

  She took in a little gasp of air, and Not-Triss might have mistaken it for a sob if Violet was the sort who cried.

  ‘What are you doing, Pen?’ Violet asked, in a much more normal tone of voice. Pen had her arms as far round Violet’s middle as she could manage.

  ‘Making you warm,’ answered Pen, her voice muffled by coat.

  ‘Oh, good,’ murmured Violet wearily. ‘Problem solved.’ She gave Pen’s tangled hair a brusque but affectionate ruffle.

  ‘Is Sebastian haunting you then?’ Pen looked up at Violet. ‘

  Is that why you sold all the things he left you? Was it to make his ghost go away?’

  Not-Triss winced. She briefly wished that there was some way of shutting Pen up after she had said something and sweeping away her words before anybody could hear them.

  For a moment it seemed that Violet might become angry. Then she let out a long breath and looked tired instead. She gave Pen a little squeeze.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I sold them because I needed the money. They were just things, Pen. They weren’t him. And do you know something? He wouldn’t have minded. Not one little bit.’

  Chapter 29

  TRISTA

  After a long period of silence, there came a sense that hugging had solved all it could.

  ‘We need a plan,’ said Violet. She let out a long breath, and stared at the floor between her feet. For a moment she looked somewhat at a loss, then she sniffed hard and straightened again.

  ‘First of all . . . we need to decide whether we stay in Ellchester, or leave right now and hea
d to London. It’s a bigger city. People hunting us might not be able to find us there.’

  ‘London?’ Pen’s jaw dropped. ‘Do you mean . . . we’re really running away?’ Her face was aghast, and Not-Triss was not sure whether to laugh or cry. Clearly ‘running away’ in Pen’s mind had never previously involved ‘not coming back’.

  ‘I can’t leave.’ Not-Triss bit her lip hard. ‘I need to stay. I don’t know if there is any way to stop me falling apart, but I can only find that out here. All the secrets are in Ellchester. If I leave, then I know I’ll die. And . . . And either way, I want to do anything I can to help other me. And . . . Sebastian.’

  Violet sighed again, and rubbed at her temples.

  ‘Yes,’ she muttered, ‘I was thinking much the same. We stay then. It won’t be easy – we’ll have your parents, Mr Grace and maybe the police looking out for us. And time is against us.’ She gave Not-Triss a brief cloudy frown of concern. ‘Whatever we do, we have to act fast.

  ‘This mysterious Architect – he seems to be the key to everything. The other Triss’s kidnap, Sebastian’s letters and whatever is happening to you, Triss. We need to discover as much as we can about him – who he knows, where he’s based. Perhaps we can even get some advantage over him.’

  Not-Triss glanced at Pen, whose mouth had drooped into a little pout of fear. When she thought of hunting down the Architect, Not-Triss remembered the towering blurry silhouette that had loomed over her strange birth, and her insides felt watery with unease. But what other choice was there?

  ‘Triss – you understand birds when they talk, don’t you?’ exclaimed Pen. ‘You should ask them where the Architect is. They fly everywhere.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand real birds,’ admitted Not-Triss. ‘Just the scary ones with people-faces . . . and they’re working for the Architect.’

  ‘Let’s try another approach then,’ suggested Violet. ‘What do we know about him?’

  ‘He’s evil,’ Pen declared helpfully. ‘He tricks and lies and—’