Dana giggled. “I’m sorry. But your hair has grown, and gotten darker, glossy. I was trying to pay you a compliment.”
“In her own illogical way,” Sadie added. She looked at the empty bench. While they were speaking, the other girls had plunged into the bath. “Where’s Susana?”
“I haven’t seen her all day,” Petra grumbled.
Dana had a stricken look on her face.
“What’s wrong, Dana?” Sadie asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Susana’s village, Morado, was burned to the ground. I heard that … that there was a freak lightning storm. It was a nice day. Cold, windy, but nice. Then suddenly several buildings were struck by bolts of lightning. They caught fire, the fire spread, and … Morado’s small and, well, kind of poor. Everything was built with old wood and thatch. Everything burned. Susana’s family died in the fire.”
“All of them?” Petra was horrified.
“Her parents. Her brothers and sisters. Susana has a cousin, though, that lives in a village not too far from Morado. She sent for Susana. Master Listek said she packed up her things and left in the night. She was too upset to say goodbye to anybody.”
“I can’t believe it.” Sadie shook her head. “Who expects a lightning storm this late in the year? It’s such bad luck.”
No, Petra thought. It is worse.
“NO! NO, no, NO!” the prince howled, sweeping pieces of metal to the floor. They glittered in the dark, torch-lit clock tower. The prince pressed his gloved hands to his head and listened to machinery spinning around him, to the cogs of the Staro Clock fitting and turning together like something inevitable. He listened to the clanking, he saw the pendulums swinging, and he thought his head would explode from frustration.
The guards who flanked the entrance to the inner chamber of the clock tower gazed straight ahead. They kept their faces as blank as if their lives depended on it. And their lives did.
The woman at the prince’s side exchanged a glance with the wispy-haired, pointy-chinned man standing at the other end of the worktable.
“Your Highness,” the man began hesitantly. “I have a small gift for metal. If I might try —”
“I want to do it myself,” the prince snarled.
“Yes—of—I—course—”
The gloved hands dropped from the prince’s face. The fury of his expression smoothed away. His silken black fingers reached for a small scrap of metal that still rocked on the table. He approached the pointy-chinned man, who backed away, skirting the table’s corner. “Your Highness, I apolo—apologize …”
“Stop.”
The man stopped. He gazed into the marble features of the prince’s face and trembled.
“Open your mouth,” the prince said, his voice soft. “You will like this.” He offered the glittering metal. “It is sweet.”
“No!” the man cried. “Please! I’m so sorry! I’m so —”
“Your Highness.” The willowy woman approached. “It would be a shame to let Karel go to waste. May I have him? As it pleases Your Highness, of course. But I am working on an experiment for which he might be apt.”
“Ah, Fiala.” The prince gazed at her. “I always admire your flair for invention. Take him, then, if he is useful to you. Karel, you will go with Mistress Broshek to the Thinkers’ Wing.”
The man nodded, but was still shaking. He looked at Fiala. “An experiment? What kind of—?”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby, Karel,” she snapped. “Of course, if you prefer your other option”—she tilted her blond head toward the metal scrap in the prince’s hand—“just say so.”
Karel shook his head and backed away until he bumped into one of the guards.
The prince let the glittering fragment fall to the table. “I cannot assemble it properly,” he muttered to himself. “Nothing is working the way I wish. I cannot control the clock’s power if I cannot piece together the heart.”
“You will,” Fiala Broshek consoled. She pulled on an extra pair of silk gloves and gathered up the metal pieces, placing them in a silken bag that she slung over her shoulder.
They exited the inner chamber of the clock tower, the guards forming an armored shell around them. They didn’t notice that one of the guards had an unfamiliar face. Nor did Prince Rodolfo and Fiala Broshek notice, after they had mounted a carriage, crossed Karlov Bridge, and reached the castle, that the unknown guard did not follow the other soldiers to the barracks, but slipped away to meet his true master, the English ambassador.
THE ORANGE AND CLOVE SCENT drifted from Petra’s pocket, making her feel drowsy. Nobles often carried such oranges in their pockets as perfume, but Petra began to hate the smell. One evening, when she finally dragged herself into the sleeping hall, she barely murmured a greeting to Sadie before she tumbled down onto her pallet and fell asleep.
At first, she slept soundly. But in the middle of the night she began to twitch and turn.
She dreamed of John Dee. He was dressed in robes the color of the night sky. Stars glimmered. You must not waste any time, he said.
She turned onto her side and tried to dream of something else. The snow is falling. The snow will hamper your escape—if, indeed, you hope to escape. Go away, Petra thought.
The day after tomorrow, he insisted, would be the perfect time to strike. Do it during the prince’s dinnertime. He will be dining with several European ambassadors, including myself.
She tried to wake herself up. When Dee continued to hover before her in his night-colored robes, she frowned in her sleep. You just want the perfect alibi, don’t you?
Naturally. But breaking into the Cabinet of Wonders then will also suit you. I doubt the prince will wear your father’s eyes to a meeting where he must concentrate carefully, when he must try to persuade all of us to lend Bohemia our support, without admitting that he plans to defy his brothers if his father chooses one of them to become the next emperor. The meeting will also take place when it is just dark enough outside for you to try to escape after breaking the clock’s heart. You must destroy or steal it.
What do you mean, the clock’s heart?
But his face faded, and if he replied, Petra didn’t hear it. She was waking up. She caught his last words: Don’t fail me, Petra Kronos.
She opened her eyes.
PETRA FLUNG THE ORANGE into the woodpile. It sat there, prickly, squat, and reproachful.
“Good throw,” Neel commented. The belladonna had worn off, and today he looked more like himself and less like some odd offspring of a bumblebee.
She told him what had occurred over the past several days, of the prince’s letter, his private chambers, and the door that she was sure led to the Cabinet of Wonders.
“Tell me about that door again.”
“Well, it’s plain—”
“No, the one with the lion and the lizard.”
She described it, and Neel’s face grew grim. “And the window ain’t a window?”
Petra nodded.
“Then there’s no way I can help you. Danior’s Fingers won’t trick a lion and a lizard like that. There’s no keyhole?” She had to admit that there was not.
Neel shook his head. “Even if there was, I guess the lion would just roar like anything while we tried to bust in. It won’t work.”
“I already thought of that,” she said excitedly, and produced a sheet of paper stamped with the prince’s coat of arms. “It’s your documentation.” She explained her plan.
“All right. When are we going to do this, then?”
His question raised a subject that she was reluctant to discuss, but did anyway: her troubling dream the night before. “Dee said we should do it the day after tomorrow. That is, tomorrow.”
“You dreamed this?”
“Look, I’m not the type to go around believing in dreams either, but—”
“That’s what he did!” Neel slammed his fist into his palm. “It was no dream, Petali!”
&nbs
p; “Come on,” Petra scoffed. “What else would it be? I don’t have the Second Sight or anything.” But she was uneasy.
“You don’t need to have the Second Sight! It was the scrying that did it!”
“What do you mean?”
“When you met with Dee, he asked you to scry. You didn’t see anything, right? That’s because what he wanted was to make a link between your mind and his.”
Disgust oozed all over her flesh. “He can read my mind?”
Neel shook his head. “I don’t think so. But I’ve heard of this sort of thing before. It’s been used in war, to make it easy for generals to send messages. The Roma use it sometimes for tricksy things. The Company of Rogues, they do it, too, if they can lay their hands on someone able to do the scrying. But it’s risky. It can wreck the mind of the magician and whoever’s doing the scrying. It can scramble your brain like an egg.”
“But … but what does this mean? Am I going to dream of”—she shuddered—“Dee all my life?”
“It means that he can talk to you when he feels like it. It’ll be easier for Dee when you’re sleeping, because your mind will be relaxed. It means you weren’t dreaming, and we should listen to him.”
“We should not! It could be a trap!”
“Just find out if the prince really is eating with those foreigners. If so, Dee’s idea is probably right on the money. Plus”—he gri-maced—“I got my own reasons for wanting to move fast.”
“The snow?”
“There’s that, too. But I was thinking about Sadie. You see, she spotted me lurking in the castle cellar today. Tabor’s kept quiet about my working here, like I asked, but I guess it was only a matter of time before she saw me. She’s no fool. If she catches hold of me, she won’t let go until she shakes the story out of me.”
Petra looked at him with scorn. “Just don’t tell her, Neel.”
He spread his hands. “I can swear up and down and on the grave that I won’t tell her a word, but the fact of the matter is that she’s been waiting for this ever since you talked to her and Ma in the vurdon. She was always worrying that I’d want a piece of your scheme. If she corners me, I can lie my head off, but she won’t believe a word I say. If I say nothing, she’ll know I’m stirring up trouble. Either way, she’ll figure out that what she thinks is going on is going on.”
“So what’re you going to do?”
“Avoid her. You should, too, cause I don’t suppose she’s thinking of you as one of her best pals now.”
Petra winced. She wanted to explain everything to Sadie, but the plan was moving much too quickly now, like one of her father’s music boxes when the wind-up key was cranked too tightly. Would she have time to ask Sadie to forgive her, to make her understand her feelings, and Neel’s? She pushed aside these thoughts, for they reminded her of something she and Neel had to discuss: time.
“When we get past the lion and the salamander—”
“If.”
“Trust me, we will! Now, when we get into the Cabinet of Wonders, we’ll have to move fast.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said coolly.
“The Cabinet of Wonders is a collection. The prince is rich. He probably has mountains of things in there.”
“I’m still waiting to hear something I don’t know.”
“We have to move quickly to find the eyes.”
“And stuff to steal,” he reminded.
“And stuff to steal. So the question is: how are we going to be able to get in and out with what we need in a short amount of time? We can’t count on the prince being occupied by his dinner forever.”
Astrophil cleared his throat. “I believe I can help,” he said proudly.
AS PETRA NEARED Iris’s laboratory, she heard a great crash of glass against the door, which flung open. A wild-eyed boy darted out. As some sort of lumpy blue slime trickled down the door, the boy stared at Petra. “Run!” he shouted. Taking his own advice, he sprinted down the hall.
Petra stepped into the room warily, but Iris looked normal. That is to say, she looked highly vexed, but at least her clothes were still on and she wasn’t making the floor melt beneath her.
“What did he do?” asked Petra, relieved to see that Iris wasn’t in the middle of a full-blown emotional disaster.
“Do? Do? He existed, that’s what he did! And you”—she narrowed her eyes—“what are you doing here, Viera, Sweeper of the Prince’s Study? Don’t you have some royal feet to kiss?”
“Um, actually, I wondered if I might sleep on the floor of the
Dye Works?”
“What’s the matter with the servants’ sleeping hall?”
Aside from the fact that it houses someone who would like my head on a platter, nothing at all, Petra thought. But she said out loud (and somewhat truthfully), “The girls there don’t like me.”
Iris put her hands on her hips, considering. Then she said, “What have you done with your eyes?”
Oh, no. Petra wanted to bury her face in her hands. How could she have forgotten about the belladonna? “Well, you see,” she stammered, “it’s, um, really popular to have dark eyes and I wanted to impress the other girls and I heard that belladonna could—”
Iris raised her hand. “I’m not even going to ask how you managed to get hold of belladonna. I’m just going to tell you that no, you may not sleep on the floor of my laboratory, because you no longer work here.”
Petra’s heart sank. Where would she go? She was already starving from having skipped yet another dinner to talk with Neel. Over the past weeks, she had found herself fantasizing about Dita’s cooking. Astrophil had said she was getting thin in the face. Now, on top of her hunger, she was dead tired. But she had no idea what Sadie would do if she saw Petra. Would she announce Petra’s plan to the whole sleeping hall? Would she march Petra before Master Listek and demand that she be fired? No, Petra couldn’t risk seeing Neel’s sister. She would have to find some corner of the castle where she could spend the night. Maybe there was a cupboard somewhere, or she could enter the library and sit at a desk and sleep with her head on her arms …
Iris interrupted Petra’s train of thought. “Follow me,” she commanded, and led Petra past the black curtain. Iris lit a candle and opened the door that Petra had noticed a long time ago. “These are my private chambers,” she said, ushering Petra into the room. “I don’t care to keep company with those fourth-floor flibbertigibbets. Here I’m closer to my work.”
It was a very simple room, bare of any furniture except a wooden table with chairs, a wardrobe, a large bed, and a small bed made in a boxy shape. There was a tiny window and a closet door.
“It’s not a luxury suite, but fancy furniture is hardly practical when you can burn them down to cinders once a month. Well. You can sleep there, if you like.” She pointed at the boxy bed.
“Really? Iris, that’s so —”
“First things first. Sit.” She waved Petra toward the table and then left the room.
She returned bearing a tray with bread and butter and a cup of warm milk. “Young girls like their bedtime snacks, if I remember correctly.” She set the tray down in front of Petra. Iris ordered her to eat, and Petra was glad to obey. As Petra chewed large mouthfuls of buttered bread rinsed down by gulps of frothy milk, Iris pulled bed linen out of the wardrobe. “My niece Zora used to sleep here sometimes.” She waved her hand as if dismissing the memory. “But that was a long time ago.”
When Petra had curled under a feather blanket and Iris was settled in her own bed, Petra felt such grateful fondness for Iris that it took her a few moments to speak. Then she said softly, “Iris, thank you so much. This is perfect. I—”
“Oh, don’t get too comfy! I snore.”
MEANWHILE, several floors above Petra, something small and sparkling crept along the ceiling. The spider sauntered over the heads of the fourth-floor guards (who, it is shameful to say, were sleeping). Astrophil ducked into the corner where the ceiling met the wall, and carefully inc
hed toward the pine and oak door. The lion and the salamander stared into the hallway, but they didn’t see the spider as he made his way toward the entrance to the prince’s suite. When Astrophil reached the wall in which the double doors were set, he walked carefully down the side of the door frame until he reached the floor. The lion and the salamander continued to gaze calmly ahead. Astrophil slipped under the door.
He began to creep over the red, furry carpet of the hallway, but this was as difficult for him as it would be for you to push your way past vegetation in an Amazonian rain forest. So he shot a spiderweb to one of the walls and walked along there under the glow of the brassica lamps.
When he reached the chamber with seven doors, he crawled toward the door that Petra thought led to the Cabinet of Wonders. To his frustration, however, the crack between the door and the floor was extremely narrow. He tried to flatten himself out and push his way under the door, but the most he managed to do was wiggle a few legs into the crack. He pulled back. If he was the swearing type of spider, he might have cursed. But he just grimaced, and tried to think quickly.
Now, thinking quickly is what Astrophil did best, so he soon had an idea. He twinkled toward another door, avoiding the one he knew to be the prince’s study. He managed to slip under the second door, but frowned when this new room turned out to be an armory. He tried a third door, but walked into a bathing room with a tub the size of a small swimming pool.
The fourth door, however, led him exactly to where he wanted to go: the prince’s bedchamber. The sumptuous room was almost entirely taken up by an enormous four-poster bed. Normally this type of bed has curtains hanging on every side to help keep the sleeper warm during a cold Bohemian night, but in the prince’s room flames crackled in two fireplaces. Probably for security reasons, the bed was bare of any curtains, and the prince slumbered under thick blankets. His pale face seemed to be the same color and made of the same fabric as the white silk pillows.
Astrophil’s gaze was drawn to the nightstand. He shuddered. There, in a room filled with soft and polished things, was a fierce plant that someone in Astrophil’s position likes least out of all the plants in the world. It was a Venus flytrap. A large bell jar covered this botanic beast. Instead of flowers, it had wide mouths trimmed with jagged teeth. They were wide open, waiting for some insect to step inside. Astrophil had read about these plants, which don’t survive on only sun and water. The insides of their mouths are sweet and sappy. Many bugs, not just flies, are attracted by the smell. As soon as they step inside a mouth, it slams shut.
The Cabinet of Wonders: The Kronos Chronicles: Book I Page 19
