The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I

by Marie Rutkoski

  I cannot move. The spider poked Petra’s head.

  “Ow!”

  “What?” Susana looked at Petra, confused.

  “Nothing.”

  Being in your cap is boring. Let me out. If you will not be working in the kitchen any longer, you do not have to wear this ridiculous headgear.

  Instructing the spider to crawl to the side of her head facing away from Susana, Petra pulled off the cap and shook her sweaty hair free. Astrophil happily took up his post on Petra’s ear.

  They walked up a flight of stairs. Guards waved them past when Susana presented Mistress Hild’s letter. Petra noticed that the air had grown fresher, and they even passed a window showing a cloudy sky. They were now aboveground. “Am I being promoted?” she asked cheerfully.

  Susana gave her an apologetic look. “I’m afraid you’re not going to like where you’re going.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “The Dye Works.”

  “I know that. But what’s the Dye Works?”

  “It’s in the Thinkers’ Wing.”

  “The wing? Are we going to visit a bird?” Perhaps Mistress Hild planned on having her fed to an enormous goose with a philosophical mind and a fatty liver.

  “The Thinkers’ Wing is a section of the second floor. It’s a series of laboratories where the prince’s magicians … experiment.” Susana began to walk more slowly. “The Dye Works is where the castle produces all the colors it uses for cloth, hair, wood, and even stone. The woman who runs it has skin that oozes acid, and if she touches you …” Susana shuddered. “She’s got a terrible temper and is always looking for a new assistant because she fires every one she gets in a matter of hours. She and Mistress Hild hate each other. We’re told to spit in the sorceress’s food. I guess Mistress Hild figures you’ll either get burned by acid, drive the Dye Works witch crazy, or get fired quicker than you can blink. Or all three.”

  They turned a corner. The corridor presented many doors that echoed down the hall like two lines of dominoes. They reached a door that would have looked perfectly ordinary except that it had two handles, one made from plain iron and the other painted a vibrant red. “You see?” Susana said, pointing to the red handle. “She needs to have her own special doorknob. The iron one would melt under her fingers.” She knocked on the door. Silence ensued. She knocked again and they both heard a screech: “Go away!” Susana looked like she heartily regretted volunteering to escort Petra. Petra, however, felt more curious than afraid. She gripped the iron handle and pushed the door open.

  The room was like the moon in the middle of the month. It had a domed ceiling and was split into two halves, one sharply bright and the other as dark as a cave. A black velvet curtain separated the two sides almost entirely. It was not quite drawn, and as Petra squinted against the sunshine pouring in from skylights cut into one half of the ceiling, she thought she detected some movement in the shadows behind the curtain.

  Susana gasped when a gray head popped through the opening in the curtain. Two circles of thick glass took up almost all of the old woman’s small, pale face. “What?” the woman howled.

  “Mistress—”

  “I’m very busy! This is a crucial moment! If my lavender turns to purple you’ll pay for it!”

  “Yes, but … your new assistant is here,” Susana explained.

  “Ah, excellent! Dash the lavender! I can always make more later.” She stepped past the curtain and snapped it shut behind her. “Let’s have a look at her.” As Petra walked forward, the woman pointed at Susana. “You! Go find something else to do! Shoo! Get out of my laboratory!”

  Susana gave Petra a look that said “Sorry, but what can I do?” and scurried out of the Dye Works.

  “Now, now, now. What have we here?” The woman stepped closer to Petra, but kept a distance of two feet between them. “Hands!”

  Uncertain, Petra stood still.

  “Hands, I say! Hold them out.”

  Petra lifted her hands and began to extend them toward the snowdrop-white woman.

  “Not so close, cellar brat! There. Now flip them over. Ah. Good hands. Very good, I believe.” She turned her attention to Petra’s face. “Decent color. The nice pink of country life. You’ve got a healthy look about you.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Petra thought of Harold Listek’s ramblings. “What are you wearing on your face?”

  “And the girl’s polite, too!” The woman’s eyes were two foggy pools behind the glass, but Petra thought she saw an eyebrow quirk. “They are spectacles. Are there no spectacles in your hinterland of a home?”

  “What are they for?”

  “For? They help me see, obviously. But these are no ordinary spectacles. Come here.” She pointed Petra toward a table and tapped a metal pot filled to the brim with liquid. “What color is that dye?”

  “Blue.”

  ”‘Blue,’ she says!

  Try again.”

  “Um, light blue?”

  The woman whipped off her glasses and plunked them on the table. “Pick them up.” They were heavy. “Now look.”

  Petra hooked the wire stems over her ears and gazed into the bowl. The liquid was swarming with spots of colors—bits of pink, streaks of white, sprinkles of green, and a nice fat glob of violet.

  “You see?” crowed the woman. “There you have the exact proportions of the different colors that go into making that particular shade of blue. You may very well say that the bowl holds light blue dye, but think how many light blues there are! A robin’s egg, a spring sky, and an aquamarine are light blue. But what a difference lies between the colors of all three!”

  Petra watched the colors surge and mingle like strange fish. “It’s amazing.”

  Perhaps the woman recognized in Petra’s voice the true ring of someone who can judge good work and beauty, for she nodded. Petra placed the spectacles back on the table. The woman blinked, her eyelashes fluttering like two small dusty moths. Then she put the spectacles back on, turned to Petra, and paused.

  She was looking into Petra’s face so intently that the girl felt uncomfortable. But after a few seconds the woman averted her stare and twitched her mouth. As odd as it may seem, Petra felt as if she had passed some exam without even knowing what she was being tested for.

  “I suppose they told you all loads of jibber-jabber about how I’m an old banshee who eats servants alive and has burning-acid skin.”

  If Petra had been intimidated by Susana’s reports, she didn’t feel an ounce of fear now. Maybe this was because when she had gazed through the woman’s spectacles, she felt as if she were at home, as if she were visiting a colleague of her father’s. So she said, frankly, “Yes, they did.”

  “Well, it’s all true. Except the part about eating you alive. I promise I shall just fire you in the good old-fashioned way and maybe throw a pot of something at your head while I’m at it. No hard feelings, you understand. That’s just the way things will be.”

  “As long as you don’t mind if I throw something back, I can live with that.”

  “Cheek! Sauce! You’re lucky that a touch of my hand could make the skin peel off your face, or I’d box your ears for that.”

  “So your skin really does ooze acid?” Petra was fascinated.

  “What do you think I need an assistant for? Of course, it’s not the case that my skin is always acidic, or I’d be wearing no clothes and there might not even be a floor beneath us, for that matter. Right now my skin is in a low-acid phase. But sometimes I have acid attacks, and it’s difficult to say when they’ll come. That’s why the wires and frames of my spectacles, certain bowls in this room, a chair behind that curtain, and the doorknob are made of adamantine.” She noticed the stunned look on Petra’s face. “Oh, I constantly forget how many imbeciles lurk in this benighted pile of rocks they call a castle. Adamantine is—”

  “The strongest metal on earth,” Petra breathed.

  “Why, yes.” The woman did not hide her surprise. “But what would you
know of it?”

  How could you have missed that the doorknob was made of adamantine? Astrophil lectured.

  Why are you accusing me? How could you have missed that? Come on, Astro, she thought defensively, the doorknob was covered with enamel paint. But she did feel a little foolish, for if she had not been so distracted by looking through the spectacles, she would have recognized the dull, dreary color of the stems.

  “Adamantine is indestructible,” Petra said out loud. “Swords made from it can’t be broken or blunted. The metal can’t be melted down. It’s very difficult to find, and almost impossible to forge, which makes it—”

  “Cost more krona than you can shake a stick at. Exactly. And while the prince values my talents, he’s not going to foot the bill for every tool and bit of furniture in my laboratory to be made of adamantine. I could pay for it myself, of course, but why should I? Still, you have no idea how maddening, how heartbreaking, it is to achieve the perfect shade of coral orange and have the bowl suddenly melt in your hands. The dye splatters everywhere and is lost, or the acid gets into the dye and it turns black. So that’s where you come in. You take my instructions. You be my hands.”

  “But if the doorknob is made of adamantine, why do you have two? The iron handle is unnecessary, isn’t it? Even if you touch the red knob, the adamantine would absorb the acid. Everyone else can use it.”

  The woman was scandalized. “But it is my doorknob! What makes you think I want everyone to use it? Do you have any idea how many times a day you swampy servants wash your hands? I’ll tell you: none! You’ll use the iron one, you will!”

  “Yes, Mistress …” Petra trailed off. She realized she had no idea what to call her.

  “Iris.”

  “Mistress Iris.”

  “Just Iris, please. I don’t have time for your mincings and suckings-up. Leave that for the court to do.”

  “Is that your first name or your last?”

  “Well, if you must know, my name is Irenka Grisetta December, the Sixth Countess of Krumlov. But that really is an insane amount of syllables to say. You can call me Iris for short.”

  Krumlov! Astrophil’s legs flickered against Petra’s ear with excitement. She is a member of one of the most powerful families in Bohemia! They are cousins of the prince. Krumlov is an enormous, splendid estate of land, and its main city is said to be a miniature Prague. Whatever is she doing here? She should be holding ball dances and scheming to get her nephew on the throne, not working as a maker of dyes.

  Petra knew that some of the most important positions in the castle were held by Academy-trained members of the nobility. But she, like Astrophil, was surprised to find someone of such high rank working like a normal person in a laboratory, adamantine doorknobs or no adamantine doorknobs. Maybe she likes her job, Petra suggested.

  With the airy ease of someone who has told you her name but finds no need to know yours, Iris ordered Petra to fetch a mortar and pestle and a jar on the topmost shelf near a skylight. The jar teemed with little black insects. Petra brought them to the table.

  “We are going to make a brilliant red dye. Crimson. It will be used to dye the velvet sash of the prince himself, so it must be perfect. These”—Iris pointed to the jar of bugs—“are kermes beetles. They have been harvested from evergreen oaks. You are going to crush them.”

  “But they’re not red.”

  Iris’s face looked strained, like she was just managing not to scream. “No,” she said through clenched teeth, “they are not. But when you pulverize them alive, their blood is red, and a very special red at that. Now, when you tip them from the jar into the mortar, make sure that you grind them up quickly. They are devilishly fast.”

  And so Petra began her second job at the castle that day with a glad feeling in her heart. You might think that crushing bugs isn’t much more enjoyable than chopping onions, and you might be right. But Petra could tell that working for Iris would be, at the very least, anything but boring.

  PETRA’S EYES DROOPED as she walked with several other girls toward the women’s dormitory. It was a long hall littered with many pallets, on which some people were already sleeping. She scoured the hall for another free bed, hoping to see Sadie or Susana. Eventually she spotted Susana, but she was curled up, sound asleep.

  Petra was relieved when Sadie waved and patted the pallet next to her. Petra snuggled under a wool blanket. The pallet wasn’t the thickest ever made, but it was fairly clean and comfortable. Someone blew out the candles. As a smoky, waxy smell filled the air, Petra told Sadie about her day in a low whisper. Sadie had spent most of the afternoon preparing bedchambers for the visiting ambassadors, so her own report was not as interesting as Petra’s—just filled with the tedium of changing sheets and dusting.

  Listening to Sadie’s voice coming out of the blackness, Petra was struck by how perfect it was. She spoke Czech as if she had learned it from birth. Petra whispered, “How do you speak Czech so well? Neel has such a funny way of talking.”

  “He could speak like me if he wanted to,” Sadie whispered back. “We’re both very good at learning languages. We’ve lived in so many different countries.”

  “Were you born here?”

  “No, I was born in Spain. When people ask why my eyes and hair are so dark, I tell them that my father was Spanish. And that’s true. I say nothing about my mother. They assume that she’s Bohemian.”

  “Was Neel born in Spain, too?”

  There was a brief silence. “We think he was born in Bohemia.”

  “You think he was?”

  Sadie was quiet, and Petra listened to the rattling snores of a nearby woman. Then came Sadie’s hushed answer: “Neel was abandoned as a baby. He was left near our clan’s campsite. Nobody wanted to take him at first, especially because he had no token around his neck.”

  “Token?”

  “A string. Or a bit of leather with a ring or a stone on it. Anything, really, that means that a father has acknowledged a child as his. Neel was just wrapped up in a blue blanket, with no clothes or anything else. I was little at the time. I don’t remember much about it. But my mother took him in.”

  “A blue blanket? Is that why his name is Neel? He said that it means ‘blue.’ “

  “Well, yes. It does mean ‘blue.’ But his full name means something more like ‘a stone that is blue.’ ‘Indraneel’ means ‘sapphire.’ “ Sadie paused. Then she said, “Petra, don’t mention any of this to him. He doesn’t like to think about it. Or talk about it. I am his sister. Our mother is our mother. End of story. All right?”

  “Yes.” Petra sighed. It seemed that people were always telling her things she had to keep to herself. Sometimes it was hard not to feel like a Worry Vial with two legs.

  16

  Iris’s Invention

  MORE THAN TWO WEEKS PASSED. Petra hadn’t yet had a free moment to even step outside of the castle, and the only sunshine she saw came in through the skylights of the Dye Works.

  Her life fell into a steady pattern. She woke up at dawn. She powdered minerals or steeped flowers in water or scraped the insides of imported seashells. Dyes stained her hands with interesting colors. She ate lunch with Iris. She desperately tried to forget how the kitchen workers treated Iris’s food. Petra ate dinner with the other servants in their eating hall. Sadie kept her close by, watching over her like an older sister. She taught Petra how to sew money into her skirts for safekeeping. One night Petra took a needle, thread, and Tomik’s Marvels into the privy. There she hid the spheres in the hem of her dress, hoping they wouldn’t break. Although Petra always hated wearing skirts, she now had to admit that they had their uses.

  Many things began to weigh heavily on Petra’s mind. Even though the servants were each allotted a small, locked wooden chest for their most valued possessions, she worried about keeping her father’s notebook in a place that could easily be searched. And she wondered if Lucie and Pavel had left Prague already. Had her family yet learned that she was somewhere among th
e thousands of people in the city? She wished she could write a letter telling them that she was safe, but she was unsure how to send it. Anything mailed from the castle was subject to being read, and would be stamped with a salamander-shaped seal that would betray where she was.

  What troubled her most, however, was that she was no closer to her goal. She had no idea where the prince kept her father’s eyes. She hadn’t even seen anything of the castle beyond the servants’ quarters and the Thinkers’ Wing.

  One morning, Petra strolled down the Thinkers’ Wing, humming a tune. The doors flanked her like silent soldiers. She idly gripped a doorknob. It rattled but would not turn. Petra stopped humming, because she suddenly recognized the melody on her lips. It was “The Grasshopper,” the song she and her father danced to years ago.

  A longing for home filled her heart. She tried to ignore it, staring down the Thinkers’ Wing.

  Surely her father had worked in one of these laboratories.

  Petra tried the doors until she found one that was unlocked. She pushed it open and stepped inside. A shuddering wave of power hit her. Astrophil squealed and pinched her ear. She was thrown back into the hallway on her bottom, her teeth clattering. She stood up, dusting herself off. The closed doors looked smug. “I’m not afraid of you,” she told them.

  Speak for yourself, said Astrophil.

  After Petra rattled several more locked doorknobs, one turned in her hand. She stuck a toe inside the room as if testing the waters of a chilly lake. She and Astrophil sighed with relief when nothing happened.

  Inside this laboratory was a man with paint-smeared clothes. He was staring at a canvas the size of a wall. When he noticed Petra’s presence, he was friendly, and introduced himself as Kristof, an artist from Poland. But he spoke barely any Czech. Soon he forgot that Petra was in the room, and just resumed staring at the utterly blank canvas. Petra saw him use a brush to dab pink paint on the canvas. The color quickly disappeared, leaving the surface as empty as it was before. Kristof looked pleased, but Petra was confused. She didn’t see how an absentminded artist and his absent art would help her quest, so she did not return to Kristof’s studio.