The Doorway and the Deep

by K. E. Ormsbee

  Eliot grinned and shrugged.

  Fife said, “Hurry back when they’re through fawning over the Heir of Fiske.”

  Once in the hallway, Lottie found the white-haired boy sprinting ahead of her. She had to run to catch up, and even when she did, he paid her no mind.

  “Aren’t you charming,” Lottie said under her breath.

  Rather than waste her time on present company, Lottie turned her attention to her surroundings. They were walking back through the massive, firelit room. There were far fewer people bustling about now than before—all at supper, Lottie guessed. At the thought, her stomach fastened shut as though by tightly drawn laces. Hungry as she should have been, she didn’t feel like eating. Maybe it was the idea of arriving at some strange place called the “suppin’ lawn” and meeting a bunch of Northerly strangers.

  After walking the length of the grand, stalactite-crowned room, they passed into a far narrower passageway. Here, the earth turned moist underfoot. A single splat of water fell on Lottie’s shoulder. There were no chandeliers in this passage, but torches instead—and these were few and far between. Lottie got the irrational urge to grab the boy’s hand for comfort, but she kept her back straight, taking care that her inhalations and exhalations were as measured as ever. She wouldn’t have some Northerly boy she barely knew thinking she was a coward.

  Then they turned a corner and stepped through a wide doorway into the dazzling light of the outdoor world. It wasn’t the light of the sun, which had already set, but that of candles—hundreds upon hundreds of candles hung in bunches and strung along an open field in swooping arches. With the onslaught of these new sights came a hard gust of autumn wind.

  “It’s cold,” said Lottie, ducking back into the shelter of the cave. “I don’t even have shoes on.”

  “I told you,” said the boy, “we’ll visit the launderers first.” Then, after a moment, he gave a frustrated grunt. “Fine, I’ll run to the launderers and bring your precious things back, Heir of Fiske.”

  The white-haired boy ran off, disappearing into the crowded blur of lights and sprites. The laughs and shouts of the sprites mixed in such a dizzying swirl that Lottie wasn’t sure if the majority of them were joking or fighting with each other. They moved about in a great open space, which was bordered by stone boulders. Lottie decided that this place must be a sort of courtyard to the cavern from which she’d just emerged. There was grass everywhere underfoot, and not the long white grass of Wisp Territory, but short and deep, deep green.

  Through the jostle of bodies, she saw circular stone tables set up in the middle of the courtyard. Piles of food were spread upon the tables, and though many sprites already sat around them, they did not yet eat. Somewhere close by, several fiddles played in time with each other, changing hands in a wild whirl of harmony. A pair of dancing sprites waltzed past Lottie, just inches from her nose.

  Confused as she was by the scene, Lottie had to admit it was a glorious sight. She hadn’t realized until now just how quiet and colorless life in Wisp Territory had been.

  “Here.”

  Something rammed into Lottie’s stomach. Her periwinkle coat. The white-haired boy had returned with her clothes in hand. He dropped her boots unceremoniously at her feet, followed by her scarf and dress.

  “Do whatever you want with ’em,” he said, “but hurry up, huh? I’ve gotta deliver you to Rebel Gem before the suppin’ starts.”

  “All right, all right,” said Lottie, who wasn’t as much concerned with getting dressed as she was with finding Trouble. She checked her coat’s left pocket, then the right. As she’d feared, Trouble wasn’t in either. She let out a short groan and then threw the coat over her nightshift, eager for its warmth, buttoning it all the way up to her chin. The tweed was warm and smelled of fresh lavender. Lottie now wished she’d accompanied the boy to the launderers so that she could thank them in person; it had been a long time since her coat had been this clean. She laced her boots on her feet, then stared at her dress and scarf. Though both had been cleaned, they were still stained with faint traces of blood. Fife’s blood. Lottie had less of an appetite than ever.

  “Burn ’em,” suggested the boy.

  “I’m not going to burn a perfectly good dress,” Lottie said crossly, bunching the clothes to her chest.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “Now follow me.”

  He led the way into the crowd, which was thinning out as more sprites took their seats at the tables. The boy brought her to a table that stood in the very center of the lawn. This table was no different from the others—it was just as large and stocked high with food—but at its far end sat Rebel Gem. When she caught sight of Lottie, her face broke into a smile, and she rose.

  “Welcome, Lottie,” she said warmly. “You’ll sit by me.”

  The other bodies at the table shifted and murmured and all, without exception, watched Lottie closely as she took the free chair at Rebel Gem’s right side. Lottie wondered, just as she was sitting, if she was supposed to curtsy or show some other sign of respect. She ended up making a clumsy bob of her head to the whole table, and she felt very stupid afterward for trying anything at all.

  Luckily, her embarrassment was swallowed up by the cessation of fiddle music and the long blast of a horn. The chatter of the crowd died down, and all was quiet on the supping lawn, save for the sound of the wind whistling through the boulders.

  Rebel Gem, still on her feet, now climbed atop her chair and threw out her arms. Those sprites who hadn’t taken their places at the supping tables now fled to the corners of the courtyard. All eyes were fixed on their leader.

  “Friends!” said Rebel Gem, and Lottie marveled that, though her voice boomed loud throughout the courtyard, it still sounded gentle somehow. “This night, we welcome a long-awaited guest to our table. The Heir of Fiske is dining with us.”

  There came a roar from the crowd so resounding that Lottie’s eyes watered.

  “Small she may be,” Rebel Gem shouted, breaking up the sweep of cheers. “Small and young, but she is a Fiske, so she is one of our own, as all Fiskes ever shall be. Make her welcome, friends. Extend the chalice of goodwill toward our halfling guest!”

  Another cheer boomed throughout the courtyard, more shattering than the one before it. Lottie could only stare and swallow, swallow and stare, eyes wide with the spectacle of it all. These Northerlies knew who she was. They were cheering for her.

  “Stand,” said a voice close by. “Stand atop your chair, Heir of Fiske, and show them your face.”

  But Lottie remained where she was, still as the stone chair she sat upon. Her bones were stiff from shock. She looked around her table at the host of faces. Some looked grim, others jubilant, and two—two dirt-smudged, unkempt faces just across from her—looked very familiar.

  “Roote!” she cried. “And Crag!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The House of Fiske

  “DIDN’T THINK she’d remember us,” Crag said for the fifth time that evening. “Didn’t think it was possible, one so ’igh up as the Heir of Fiske.”

  They were well into the second course of supper. The fiddlers had resumed their playing, and the supping lawn was once again filled with the swarming sound of conversation. After Rebel Gem had made her announcement, the eating had begun, and Lottie was grateful that, enthusiastic as the Northerlies seemed to be about a Fiske in their midst, they seemed just as eager to eat the food at their tables.

  Supper here was very different from what Lottie had eaten in the South. Gone were the carefully arranged dishes of berries and nuts and stacked wafercomb. At this table, every diner grabbed what he or she wanted and ate without regard to napkins or manners. They carved off chunks of cheese from a wheel, speared slices of meat from a platter, and tore off pieces of thick, brown bread. Every cup overflowed with what Crag called bramble draught, and which Roote explained to Lottie was a type of ale.

  Lottie sipped the ale just once and didn’t at all care for its bitter taste, but
she did help herself to the cheeses, meats, and breads. After her table had fallen into conversation and removed their attention from her, Lottie found her appetite returning. She hadn’t eaten food so rich and heavy as this since her life at Thirsby Square—and then only on very special occasions, like Christmas Eve.

  The rest of the company at the table—thirteen altogether—talked to each other with no regard to the girl they’d cheered just moments before. Lottie didn’t mind this in the slightest; she was too busy talking to Roote and Crag.

  “Why are you here?” she asked them. “I thought you were stationed at Hingecatch as spies.”

  “That we were,” said Roote, “but our post just ran out. Returned today. Never been to the Northerly Court, me or Crag. Never met Rebel Gem. But we were promised a dinner for our service to the court. Then we found such a hullabaloo going on ’bout the Heir of Fiske we thought we’d be downright ignored.”

  “Certainly not,” said Rebel Gem, leaning into the conversation. “Our court has honored our emissaries time out of mind. We value you immensely, Roote and Crag.”

  “That’s why we’re at a fancy table this eve,” said Crag, looking around their company sheepishly. “With all the other ’ighbrows and such of the court. We get to sit one night at Rebel Gem’s table as thanks for doing our duty in ’ingecatch.”

  “And what a duty it was!” said Roote, after taking a long swig of ale. “Couldn’t be happier to be back in the North, with the fresh wind of the Wolds on my bones. There was a sickly air down in Hingecatch that I didn’t much care for.”

  Someone else at the table called Rebel Gem’s attention away, leaving Roote and Crag with a captive audience of one. Crag scratched at his short brown beard. He’d been staring at Lottie this whole while with an attitude Lottie could only call suspicious.

  “I guess,” she said, “you’re a little upset I didn’t tell you I was a Fiske when we first met.”

  “Befuddled, more like,” said Crag.

  “Confounded,” agreed Roote.

  “My friends and I were on an important mission,” said Lottie. “We couldn’t risk telling people who we were. We didn’t know who to trust. You understand, don’t you?”

  “S’pose,” said Crag.

  “We thought it strange, your company traipsing through the wood like that,” said Roote. “But never did I think we’d be sitting with the Heir of Fiske. And to think, Crag sang a whole song about your kin!”

  Crag turned red. “Wasn’t my best singing, if memory serves.”

  “I thought it was beautiful,” said Lottie.

  Though, truth be told, Lottie remembered the song as more depressing than beautiful.

  “Anyway,” she said, “you shared your food with us and kept us safe, even if it was only for a little while—and all that without knowing who we were. That was very admirable of you.”

  Crag turned redder still, though Lottie couldn’t be sure if it was her words or the ale that was responsible.

  “’Twas nothing,” Roote said gruffly. “What a Northerly’s got, a Northerly shares.”

  Lottie looked around the supping lawn. That certainly seemed to be the case. The Northerlies around her were passing along plates and jokes alike, and a warmth had settled on this place quite unlike anything Lottie had ever felt before. She wondered if this was a little like what it was to be part of a family—a big family with mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. She wondered if this was what a proper Thanksgiving felt like—not one where she sat opposite Mrs. Yates at the kitchen table, surrounded by strange-smelling boarders, eating burnt goose.

  The thought of Thanksgiving reminded Lottie of Eliot and Mr. Walsch. Dorian had assured Lottie that there was a silver-boughed tree in the Northerly Court. Lottie would have to ask Rebel Gem about it the next chance she got. Though she wondered, now that Rebel Gem had Lottie in her court, would she really be willing to let her return to Kemble Isle? And how could Lottie even think of leaving until she knew Oliver and Adelaide were safe?

  “. . . not chopping, and not rotting from Plague. Collecting is what I heard.”

  Lottie’s ears perked at the words being spoken just two sprites down. This was the conversation that had drawn Rebel Gem away, and it had now captured the attention of the entire table.

  “Hush, Cliff,” said a woman with grooved cheeks and gray hair. She waved for the first speaker—a man of her age with a long beard—to stop talking. “Hush. This is hardly conversation for supper, and certainly not one we should be having in the presence of a Fiske.”

  “How so?” said Cliff, turning to Lottie. “I’d say it’s a prime topic for a Fiske.”

  “Rumors,” said the woman. “Only rumors.”

  “Rumors about what?” Lottie asked.

  “Starkling.” Cliff spat his name out with distaste. “Spies say he’s been making a stockpile of those silver-boughed trees, though no one knows where. Say he’s making a world gorge.”

  “Don’t go on, Cliff,” said another man at the table. “Nothing but stories, those tales of world gorges. They can’t be made. Too dangerous. And unnatural, besides.”

  “No, I want to know more,” Lottie said eagerly.

  “Oh, merciful Titania!” cried the gray-haired woman. “Stop filling the child’s head with stuff and nonsense. A world gorge, indeed.”

  Lottie wasn’t paying attention to the old woman. She was watching Rebel Gem’s face for any shift that might give away her own opinion on the matter. But Rebel Gem’s expression had stayed unchanged throughout the conversation, and it remained impassive now.

  “I don’t see the harm in answering the little Fiske’s questions,” said Cliff. “Only natural that she’d be curious.” Turning his attention to Lottie, he said, “You know how gorges are made, then?”

  “From silver boughs,” said Lottie. “That’s why it’s illegal. And they connect one part of your world to another.”

  Cliff nodded. “Well, some say that if you were to hack away enough silver boughs, harvest enough silver, you could make a gorge that reached not just to another part of Limn, not just to the human world, but beyond that—into the unknown worlds.”

  Lottie nodded slowly, uneasy. She remembered what King Starkling had said to her when she’d stood before him in his throne room: I brought the Plague up from my world. He had told her that he wasn’t from Limn, but he wasn’t from the human world, either.

  “See,” said Cliff, “there used to be all types of trees that led to all types of worlds—way, way back, in the most ancient of times. People say those worlds went bad, and when they did, their trees rotted or were cut down, burned, and erased from all memory. But there are some who’ve since made it their mission to find those lost worlds again. Legend has it that, should you collect enough silver from silver boughs, you could create a world gorge—a passage into one of those dark, unknown places.”

  “So that’s what Starkling’s trying to do,” Lottie whispered.

  “So some say,” said Cliff. “So some say.”

  An agitated quiet settled on the table. Lottie felt a sensation she’d experienced many times since she first arrived in Limn—like those around her were holding a silent conversation she could not understand, nor break into. She looked at her plate of crumbled cheese, her mouth suddenly dry.

  “Can’t say I like all this talk of bad worlds and rotten kings,” said Crag. “Me and Roote, we ’eard rumors enough down at ’ingecatch. Rumors ain’t worth a cent, that’s what I say. Pay them no mind.”

  “Excellent advice,” said Rebel Gem, and her smile caused Crag to blush fiercely. “On that note, I propose a toast to this table’s revered guests. Roote and Crag both served faithfully at their post in Hingecatch for a full year, and for that we honor them.”

  Rebel Gem raised her chalice. Lottie quickly did the same.

  “To Roote and Crag,” said Rebel Gem.

  “To Roote and Crag!” the table echoed.

  They raised their glasses an
d drank. After that, there was no more talk of the Southerly King or a world gorge.

  “I’ll confess something,” said Roote, leaning toward Lottie. “I thought Rebel Gem was an ol’ man.”

  Lottie smiled. “So do a lot of people, I think. I wonder why everyone is under that impression.”

  Roote chewed his food thoughtfully.

  The night wore on. Aside from Roote and Crag, no one spoke directly to Lottie. Rebel Gem was busy talking to the other guests, and though Lottie tried to catch her gaze several times, Rebel Gem never held it. After a while, Lottie got the impression she was being purposefully ignored, and Roote and Crag soon downed so many cups of bramble draught that they became rather rowdy company.

  Lottie sank in her chair, wishing she were back within the comfort of the caves, in Fife’s bedroom, huddled in conversation with him and Eliot. She wished that Oliver were here and that he would recite a sonnet with a meaning she might not understand but a cadence that would put her at ease. She wished Adelaide were here, even if it was only to gape at the bad table manners and wrinkle her nose at the meat on Lottie’s plate. More than anything, she hoped Oliver and Adelaide were safe.

  A chirrup stirred Lottie from her thoughts.

  “Trouble!” she whispered.

  The obsidian warbler sat perched on the edge of Lottie’s plate.

  “Trouble, where have you been?”

  Trouble gave an abashed tweet that sounded, surprisingly enough, like remorse.

  “You’ve got to stop doing that,” Lottie said. “I’m worried about so many other people as it is.”

  Trouble tweeted again, this time in an urgent, excited way. He fluttered up from his perch, and Lottie felt a sharp pain just above her ear. Trouble was tugging at her hair.

  “Stop it,” she hissed, glancing around the table in embarrassment, only to find that everyone else was too deep in either drink or conversation to notice.

  Trouble tugged more insistently, and Lottie had to grit her teeth to keep from crying out.