Cuckoo Song

by Frances Hardinge

  The woman appeared to accept Trista’s answer, giving a slight nod, then put her head on one side.

  ‘Where is your coat?’ she asked, in her eerie, echoing voice. ‘I was told we were all to wear coats on arrival. So that we would not . . . cause remark.’ The last words were pronounced carefully, as if she was reciting them from memory.

  ‘I don’t need one.’ Trista watched the woman closely for any sign of reaction. ‘I didn’t arrive today – I was already here.’

  The woman’s yellow eyes became butter-bright with interest.

  ‘You have been living in this . . . town then? And is it true about the bells?’

  Trista nodded. ‘They cannot hurt us.’

  ‘I wanted to believe,’ breathed the woman. She shook her head. ‘I had no choice but to believe, to take a chance. Are you one of our guides then, for the ride tonight?’

  ‘No.’ Trista sipped slowly from her teacup to give herself time to think. ‘But I might join the ride . . . for fun. How much have you been told about it?’

  ‘Only that we should disembark here and wait, and go no further into this town, and draw no attention . . . and at midnight the Architect will arrive in his chariot and lead us to the haven.’

  ‘Is the haven the—’ Pen began, then cut off with a little gasp of fear and frustration. Trista guessed what the smaller girl had wanted to ask, for the same question had flitted through her mind. Is the haven the Underbelly? Due to the magic promise, however, she could no more ask the question than Pen could.

  ‘How much have you been told about the haven?’ Trista asked instead, desperate to know if her guess was correct.

  ‘Nothing – only that it is safe.’ The woman narrowed her eyes and gave Trista an inquisitive look, clearly inviting her to say more.

  ‘It is safe,’ Trista whispered, hoping that she sounded confident. ‘I shouldn’t say any more about it here though. You will see it soon enough.’

  The woman inclined her head, and drifted on through the tea shop. Trista was unnerved to notice the stranger talking to a number of the other seated Besiders, each of whom turned to gaze at Trista and give her a small, deferential nod.

  ‘I . . .’ Violet shook her head and rubbed at her eyes. ‘I . . . didn’t catch all of that. It was like listening through fog.’

  ‘These Besiders are all newly arrived from outside Ellchester,’ Trista whispered. ‘I don’t think they understand towns, and they can’t blend in well, so they’ve been told to stay here and wait to be picked up. That’s why the Architect is leading midnight rides – it’s so he can lead them to a new home – a haven.’

  ‘By leading them over the roofs?’ Violet raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s probably the only way to get them all there safely,’ Trista murmured back. ‘I certainly wouldn’t trust them to follow a map. Look at them – some of them are having trouble with spoons.

  ‘But the important part is, the Architect is starting the midnight ride here tonight. We already know that he takes Triss with him when he rides. It means that I might have a second chance – if I’m still alive at midnight, I can follow the ride across the roofs, and try to save her!’

  ‘Don’t let her, Violet!’ squealed Pen with deafening force. The waitresses glanced across at her with curiosity, and she dropped her voice again to match the whispers of the others. ‘She’ll get hurt!’

  ‘Pen’s right – it’s out of the question!’ Violet’s eyes were wide and serious. ‘Trista, last night the chase nearly tore you apart, and you still lost them! We . . . We’ll have to find a way to follow them on the motorbike.’

  ‘But . . . the fuel tank’s nearly empty . . .’

  ‘It will have to last!’ retorted Violet, and this time Trista caught the edge of panic intertwined with the determination.

  Of course. Violet without her motorcycle was Violet with her wings clipped. She needed her wings, so as to be ever on the move. Her nightmares were always a step behind her. The unending, all-swallowing blizzard, the iron skies and forests of thorned wire, the hungry tempest of ice and darkness and loss . . .

  . . . and snow. Soft, treacherous, all-covering, all-revealing snow.

  ‘Violet,’ Trista said softly, ‘when you stay still, how long does it take before the snow starts to fall?’

  ‘It varies.’ Violet tipped her head back and studied Trista interrogatively. ‘Sometimes as much as five hours, sometimes as little as two. Why?’

  ‘I . . .’ Trista bit her lip. ‘I’ve just had an idea. It’s true, I did lose the riders last night. They dropped, and rose, and changed direction so quickly I couldn’t keep track of them, not without moving fast enough to rip myself to pieces. But I saw them, Violet! Some of them were flying, but others were leaping from roof to roof, like me. And the Architect’s car was driving – up walls, over roofs, along the roads. They touch down – and if there’s snow, they’ll leave tracks.’

  Violet stared at her. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that I . . . ?’ She broke off, and was uncharacteristically speechless for a moment. ‘But I can’t!’ she hissed at last. ‘I don’t control this. I don’t summon the snow, it chases me.’

  ‘I know.’ Trista glanced furtively round the room, then clasped Violet’s hand in both of hers. ‘You’re so brave, and fearless, and . . . and I know you’re ready to drive into any kind of danger. I know you’d fight the Architect and Mr Grace and the bird-things and the police and everybody until they were black and blue. And I know this is the one thing you don’t want to face, and it’s really scary and difficult, but—’

  ‘But you want me to stop running.’ Violet finished Trista’s sentence and cut it dead. ‘You want me to wait for the snow.’

  Trista hugged one of Violet’s arms and buried her face in her jacket.

  ‘I know you want to protect me,’ she said very quietly, ‘but you can’t. Whatever you do, I only have this day. I want to make it matter. Please, please let me do some good with it. Let me choose.’

  Violet said nothing. Nothing was not a yes, but neither was it a no. Trista felt Violet’s hand gently rest on the back of her head. Just for those few seconds their silence felt like a little fortress against the world.

  ‘Pen,’ said Violet, in tones of affectionate irritation, ‘will you please stop doing that?’

  Trista looked up in time to see Pen with her hands pressed against the window, sticking out her tongue at somebody down in the street.

  ‘He started it!’ Pen exclaimed defiantly. ‘It’s rude to stare!’

  ‘Pen, the Besiders are staring because they think I’m one of them!’ Trista pointed out.

  ‘But it wasn’t one of the Besiders.’ Pen dropped back into her chair and filled her mouth with crumpet. ‘It was the man who didn’t eat his lunch.’

  ‘What?’ A spider-tingle of alarm crept up Trista’s spine.

  ‘He was over there.’ Pen pointed to a nearby table. ‘And they brought him sausages, but he didn’t eat them. He just went away.’

  ‘Violet,’ Trista whispered urgently, ‘that’s where the young man was sitting – the one with the . . .’

  The newspaper. Over on the abandoned table, draped over the neglected plate, was a copy of the Ell Chronicle. The trio exchanged glances.

  ‘We need to get out of here right now,’ hissed Violet. She rose from her chair and then froze, still half stooped. Looking down into the street, Trista could see exactly what had caught her eye. Two policemen were hurrying across the road towards the entrance of the tea room.

  Violet pressed the heels of both hands against her temples and stared down into the street. She was breathing quickly, in a way that made her nostrils flutter.

  ‘Violet . . .’ Pen’s voice was a rising curl of panic.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ Violet said through her teeth. Some resolution clicked into place behind her gaze and she gave a short, sharp nod. ‘Follow me – quick!’

  The three of them weaved hastily between the tables towards the back of the d
ining area, to the dark doors of the ‘conveniences’.

  ‘In here!’ Violet shoved open the nearest door, and the girls bundled in after her.

  Immediately Trista knew they were in the wrong place. The walls were a sombre olive instead of powder-pink. It smelt strange, a little like cologne and men’s hair cream . . .

  ‘Violet, this is the wrong—’

  ‘Shh!’ Violet braced herself against the door. Her gaze fell on Trista and Pen and she gave them a dark, wry smile. ‘Both of you – listen to me. When I say run, you run. You don’t wait for me. You find somewhere to hide. Do you understand?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Take care of each other.’ Violet turned to place her ear to the door, eyes closed as she listened. ‘And, Trista – good luck in the snow.’

  Outside came a soft tumult of steps, then a thunder of knocks at a door, but not the one to which Violet’s ear was pressed. Trista guessed it must be the door to the ladies’ convenience. Of course it never occurred to them we would come in here.

  ‘Miss Parish?’ It was a male voice, polite, youthful and slightly out of breath. ‘If you would be so kind as to come out, we can avoid a scene.’

  Violet’s mouth twitched with the shadow of a grin, her hand curled around the door handle.

  ‘Miss Parish?’ A different male voice, deeper, gruffer and a bit uncle-like. ‘At least send those children out. Then perhaps we can talk more calmly.’

  A long pause. A sigh. Then the sound of the ladies’ convenience door being barged open and a clatter of boots on a tiled floor.

  Violet’s reaction was instant. She flung open the door and leaped through it, closely followed by Trista and Pen. The two policemen who had charged into the ladies’ powder room turned in time to see Violet slamming the door behind them. She grabbed a chair from beside a neighbouring table, and wedged it under the door handle. The door jerked in its frame, and there was the sound of pounding fists and irate voices from the other side.

  ‘Run!’ she shouted.

  Dozens of Besider eyes stared as Violet, Trista and Pen sprinted back through the tea room, knocking over chairs as they went. They all but tobogganed down the stairs, stumbling, slithering and bruising knees. The bread girls gaped as they raced down the aisle to the front door.

  The young man with the newspaper was loitering outside, but was apparently not expecting the three of them to barrel out into the street. He tried to call out, and made a snatch for Pen, but Violet used her momentum to shoulder-charge him. Violet and the stranger hit the pavement in a sprawl.

  ‘Keep running!’ she shouted, elbowing her opponent in the head.

  Trista grabbed Pen’s hand and kept sprinting, taking turns at random. She did not know where she was or where she was going. All that mattered was that they kept moving. The riverside kept appearing solicitously on the right, like an over-attentive nanny.

  Her feet were silent, but Pen’s steps echoed with painful clarity. How obvious they were! Tell me, have you seen two girls running? They needed to hide.

  ‘There!’ she hissed, and pulled Pen over to one of the jetties, beside which a rowing boat bobbed. She clambered down into the boat and helped Pen in after her. Then, pulling at the underside of the jetty with all her might, she managed to drag the boat under it, so that they were hidden from casual view. There was a sodden blanket in the belly of the boat, which she pulled over them for good measure.

  As they lay there gasping, trembling, listening, a familiar sound reached Trista’s ears. It was a guttural, rebellious rumble, the sound of a not-too-distant motorcycle engine throbbing to life.

  ‘It’s Violet!’ squeaked Pen in stifled excitement. ‘She got away! She got away!’

  The motorcycle’s tune rose into a crescendo, accompanied by the percussion of running steps and shouted demands. A roaring ribbon of sound . . . and then a long screech of distressed rubber, and a sustained, painful rattle of impacts. There was a ting, tinkle, clatter of settling fragments, followed by a gouging silence.

  The hush held its own for seconds, then gave way to a growing murmur of voices, a bubbling swell of concern and curiosity, punctuated by urgent shouts.

  Chapter 38

  GREEN BOTTLES

  Trista lay in the bottom of the boat with her arms tightly around Pen, feeling as if all her bones had been turned to jelly. She could hear Pen making little hiccupy noises that sounded like sobs.

  ‘Violet . . .’ whispered Pen. ‘She crashed – she died.’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ Trista said very quickly. She clenched her eyes tight, but that did nothing to shut out the deluge of imagined images. A body flopped over the bonnet of a car, or perhaps a broken windscreen with reddened shards . . . Just for an instant she hated Pen for saying aloud everything she was trying not to think.

  But Pen was too little and miserable for her to hate. Instead Trista tried to take her few rags of hope and wrap them around the smaller girl.

  ‘Violet isn’t dead,’ she told Pen and herself. ‘She had a plan, and her plan wouldn’t involve being dead.’

  Silence. Snuffle, snuffle.

  ‘What was her plan?’ asked Pen, her tone of misery tempered by a touch of reluctant hope.

  Trista stared into the darkness of the blanket, desperately trying to make sense of Violet’s last words.

  Good luck with the snow.

  ‘She decided to let them catch her.’ Trista blinked at the revelation, and clung to it. ‘She let it happen, so we could get away, and so they would put her in a police cell. That way she stays still . . . and the snow comes. Now hush, Pen, please hush! Or they’ll find us!’

  For what felt like an age, there were sounds of running steps in the street and conversations in urgent tones. Occasional words and phrases were audible.

  ‘. . . ambulance . . .’

  ‘. . . two girls come by this way?’

  At one point she actually heard several sets of feet walk out on to the jetty directly above them. Trista tensed, and even Pen’s snuffles became more muted.

  ‘Please take a moment to think, madam.’ It was the voice of the younger policeman, the one who had asked Violet to surrender. ‘The two little girls – where did they go after that?’

  He sounded harassed and concerned. In an odd, distant way Trista felt sorry for him. She wondered if he had a nice face, and a wife who would be sympathetic when he got home after a hard day. At the same time she wondered what would happen if he found her, and whether she would have to bite him in order to get away.

  There was a pause, and then the response came in a voice that sounded like the combined sobs of children in a distant cavern.

  ‘I remember quite clearly. They carried on running down the street – that way. Then they got into a car. A yellow car.’ It was unmistakably the drowned-looking Besider woman from the tea room.

  ‘I saw them too,’ insisted an unfamiliar voice which rasped like crab shells chafing against each other. ‘Definitely a yellow car. It drove away.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed a hiss like sand seeping through an hourglass. ‘The girls are gone. Take your snooping elsewhere.’

  Trista could hear the faint scratching of pencil on paper. She wondered how many of the Besiders’ actual words the policeman could hear with his conscious mind, or whether he was jotting down ordinary-sounding statements.

  The Besiders were lying, to send the police off on the wrong trail. Why? They believed Trista was one of them, so perhaps they were protecting their own. Or maybe they did not want police paying attention to the Old Docks while it was full of Besiders.

  To Trista’s enormous relief, the young policeman seemed to heed the eerily similar statements given by the witnesses, and his footsteps creaked off the jetty again. For a while she made out his voice asking the same questions of passers-by, then she heard him no more.

  There were still many sounds of hubbub and inquisitive exchanges in the road above, however. Perhaps the Besiders would not turn them in, but there were plent
y of ordinary people in the street, who would doubtless soon connect the policeman’s questions about two young girls with the missing Crescent daughters in the newspaper.

  ‘We have to stay here for now.’ Trista racked her brain, trying to form a plan. ‘We’ll wait for the snow. It’ll be easier to walk around without people spotting us when there’s snow.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t snow?’ demanded Pen, sounding only slightly mollified.

  ‘It will.’

  It has to snow. If it doesn’t, then it means that Violet isn’t sitting still in a cell, or even a hospital. It means that she’s on the move still . . . or that she’s dead.

  The next few hours were the longest that Trista could remember. They were also painful in a very real sense, because Pen fidgeted hopelessly, sighing every minute or so and shifting position in ways that always involved elbowing Trista.

  There were whispered complaints too. Pen was bored. She was hungry. It was damp, and the blanket smelt funny. Trista was taking up all the room.

  Trista told Pen to sing One Hundred Green Bottles in her head. Pen settled for whispering it huskily to herself, and soon Trista regretted making the suggestion. There was something terrible about the countdown. The last hours of her life were falling away from her and smashing silently like so many imaginary bottles, and she was stuck in a musty boat watching it happen. She tried not to think about the fact that her not-sister was full of unspent years, like pips in a robust little apple.

  After a long while, however, she noticed a change in the atmosphere. The bobbing of the boat altered its rhythm a little, betraying a shift in the direction of the wind. The blanket flipped and flapped. Pen was now complaining of being cold. At last Trista dared to tug aside the blanket and peer out.

  The September sky had curdled and was now an intimidating yellow-grey, its tobacco-stain hues reflected in the shivering surface of the river. Stray gusts of wind tore in from the estuary with a shark-bite fierceness and a chill that made her eyes stream. The riverside road was now all but empty of pedestrians.