Down Among the Sticks and Bones

by Seanan McGuire

  Let Jack throw away the chance to be a princess and live in a castle. Jack already knew what it was to be treated like royalty, to have the pretty dress and the shining tiara and the love of everyone around her. She’d realize her mistake and come crawling back, and would Jill forgive her?

  Probably. It would be nice, to share this adventure with her sister.

  “The Master is waiting, miss,” said Mary. “Are you ready to see him?”

  “Yes,” said Jill, and no said something deep inside her, a still, small voice that understood the danger they were in, even if that danger was shadowy and ill defined. Jill stood up a little straighter, raised her chin the way she’d seen Jack do when she was showing off a new dress to their mother’s friends, and swallowed the fear as deep as it would go. “I want to tell him that I’ll stay.”

  “You haven’t a choice now, miss,” said Mary. Her tone was cautioning, almost apologetic. “Once your sister chose to go, you were set to stay.”

  Jill frowned, the still, small voice that had been counseling caution instantly silenced in the face of this new affront. “Because she chose, I don’t get to?”

  “Yes, miss. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but you may wish to approach the Master with deference. He doesn’t like being selected second.”

  Neither did Jill, and she had been selected second all her life. In that instant, hot, fierce love for the nameless man in the lonely castle washed over her, wiping any remnants of caution away. The Master was second-best for no good reason, just like she was. Well, she would make him understand that it wasn’t true. She’d chosen him before Jack had even known her stupid Dr. Bleak existed. They were going to be happy together until the door home opened, and they were never going to be second-best again. Never.

  “I chose him first. Jacqueline skipped breakfast so she could look like the star,” said Jill, all bitterness and cold anger. “I’ll tell him so.”

  Mary had seen many foundlings come and go since her own arrival in the Moors. She looked at Jill, and for the first time, she felt as if, perhaps, the Master might be pleased. This one might live long enough to leave, assuming the door home ever opened at all.

  “Follow me, miss,” she said, and turned, and walked down the stairs to where the Master waited, still and silent as he always was when he saw no need for motion.

  (How the children who tumbled through the occasional doors between the Moors and elsewhere couldn’t see that he was a predator, she didn’t understand. Mary had known him for a predator the second she’d seen him. It had been a familiar danger: the family she had been fleeing from had been equally predatory, even if their predations had been of a more mundane nature. She had been comfortable in his care because she had known him, and when he had revealed himself fully to her, it had come as no surprise. That was rare. Most of the children she walked through these halls were terribly, terribly surprised when their time came, no matter how often they’d been warned. There would never be warning enough.)

  The Master was sitting at the table when they stepped back into the dining hall, sipping moodily from a silver goblet. He looked at Mary—and hence, at Jill—with narrow, disinterested eyes. He lowered his drink.

  “I suppose we’re stuck together,” he said, looking at Jill.

  “I chose you,” said Jill.

  The Master lifted his eyebrows. “Did you, now? I don’t remember seeing you in front of me before your foolish sister left with that filthy doctor. I seem to recall sitting here alone, no foundling by my side, as she came down those stairs and declared her intent to go with him.”

  “She said she didn’t want to stay,” said Jill. “I thought it would be better if I ate my breakfast and let her go. That way, I’d be ready for whatever you wanted me to do today. Skipping meals isn’t healthy.”

  “No, it’s not,” said the Master, with a flicker of what might have been amusement. “You swear you chose me before she chose him?”

  “I chose you as soon as I saw you,” said Jill earnestly.

  “I don’t care for liars.”

  “I don’t lie.”

  The Master tilted his head, looking at her with new eyes. Finally, he said, “You will need to be washed and dressed, prepared to live here with me. My household has certain standards. Mary will assist you in meeting them. You will be expected to present yourself when I want you, and to otherwise stay out from underfoot. I will arrange for tutors and for tailors; you will want for nothing. All I ask in exchange are your loyalty, your devotion, and your obedience.”

  “Unless her door comes,” said Mary.

  The Master shot a sharp, narrow-eyed glance in her direction. She stood straight and met his eyes without flinching. In the end, astonishingly, it was the Master who looked away.

  “You will always be free to take the door back to your original home,” he said. “I am bound by a compact as old as the Moors to let you go, if that’s truly your desire. But I hope that when that door eventually opens, you might find that you prefer my company.”

  Jill smiled. The Master smiled back, and his teeth were very sharp, and very white.

  Both girls, through different routes, down different roads, had come home.

  7

  TO FETCH A PAIL OF WATER

  DR. BLEAK LIVED OUTSIDE the castle, outside the village; outside the seemingly safe bulk of the wall. The gates opened when he approached them, and he strode through, never looking back to see whether Jack was following him. She was—of course she was—but her life had been defined by sitting quietly and being decorative, allowing interesting things to come to her, rather than chasing them through bracken and briar. Her chest felt like it was too tight. Her heart thudded and her side ached, making speech impossible.

  Once, only once, she stumbled to a stop and stood, swaying, eyes fixed on her feet as she tried to get her breath back. Dr. Bleak continued onward for a few more steps before he stopped in turn. Still, he did not look back.

  “You are not Eurydice, but I won’t risk losing you to something so trivial,” he said. “You need to be stronger.”

  Jack, who could not breathe, said nothing.

  “We’ll have time to improve what can be improved, and compensate for what can’t,” he said. “But night comes quickly here. Recover, and resume.”

  Jack took a vast, shaky breath, following it with a step, and then with another. Dr. Bleak waited until he heard her take the third step. Then he resumed his forward progress, trusting Jack to keep pace.

  She did. Of course she did. There was no other choice remaining. And if she thought longingly of the soft bed where she’d spent the night, or the comfortable dining hall where the Master had served them delicate things on silver trays, well. She was twelve years old; she had never worked for anything in her life. It was only reasonable that she should yearn for something that felt like a close cousin to the familiar, even if she knew, all the way down to her bones, that she did not, should not, would not want it for her own.

  Dr. Bleak led her through the bracken and brush, up the sloping side of a hill, until the shape of a windmill appeared in the distance. It seemed very close, and then, as they walked on and on without reaching it, she realized that it was, instead, very large; it was a windmill meant to harness the entire sky. Jack stared. Dr. Bleak walked, and she followed, until the brush under their feet gave way to a packed-earth trail, and they began the final ascent toward the windmill. The last part of the hill was steeper than the rest, ending some ten feet before the door. The ground all around the foundation had been cleared and covered in raised planter beds that grew green with plants Jack had never seen before.

  “Touch nothing until you know what it is,” said Dr. Bleak, not unkindly. “No honest question will go unanswered, but many of the things here are dangerous to the unprepared. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” said Jack. “Can I ask a question now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you mean before, about drawing on me to save Jill?”<
br />
  “I meant blood, little girl. Everything comes down to blood here, one way or another. Do you understand?”

  Jack hesitated before shaking her head.

  “You will,” said Dr. Bleak, and pulled a large iron key out of the pocket of his apron, and unlocked the windmill door.

  The room on the other side was vast, large enough to seem cavernous, bounded on all sides by the curving windmill walls, and yet no less intimidating for its limitations. The ceiling was more than twenty feet overhead, covered with dangling things the likes of which Jack had never seen before: stuffed reptiles and birds and something that looked like a pterodactyl, leathery wings spread wide and frozen for eternity. Racks of tools and shelves laden with strange bottles and stranger implements lined the walls.

  There was a large oaken table near the smallest of the room’s three fireplaces, and what looked like a surgical table at the very center of the room, well away from any source of heat. There were unknowable machines, and jars filled with terrible biological specimens that seemed to track her with their lifeless eyes. Jack walked slowly into the very center of the room, where she could turn, taking everything in.

  A spiral stairway occupied the center of the room, winding down into the basement and up into the heights of the structure, where there must be other rooms, other horrifying wonders. It seemed strange, that a windmill should have a basement. It was something she had never considered before.

  Dr. Bleak watched her, the door still open behind him. If the girl was going to flee screaming into the night, it was going to happen now. He had been expecting the other one to come with him, the one with the short hair and the fingernails that had been worn down and dirtied by playing in the yard. He knew more than most that appearances could be deceiving, but he had found that certain markers were often true. This girl looked cosseted, sheltered; girls like her did not often thrive in places like this.

  She stopped looking. She turned back to him. She plucked at the stained and increasingly stiff skirt of her dress.

  “I think this will get caught on things,” she said. “Is there something else that I could wear?”

  Dr. Bleak lifted his eyebrows. “That’s your only question?”

  “I don’t know what most of these things are, but you said you were going to teach me,” said Jack. “I don’t know what questions I’m supposed to ask, so I guess I’m going to let you give me the answers, and then I can match them up with the questions. I can’t do that if I’m getting snagged on everything all the time.”

  Dr. Bleak gave her an assessing look, closing the door. Somehow, he no longer worried that she was going to run. “I warned you that you’d work if you came with me. I’ll put calluses on your hands and bruises on your knees.”

  “I don’t mind working,” said Jack. “I haven’t done it much, but I’m tired of sitting still.”

  “Very well.” Dr. Bleak walked across the room to one of the high shelves. He reached up and lifted down a trunk, as lightly as if it were made of cobwebs and air. Setting it down on the floor, he said, “Take what you like. Everything is clean; nothing is ever put away here without being cleaned first.”

  Jack heard that for the instruction that it was, and nodded before walking carefully over to the trunk and kneeling to open it. It was full of clothing—children’s clothing, some of it in styles she had never seen before. Much of it seemed old-fashioned, like something out of an old black-and-white movie. Some was made of shimmering, almost futuristic fabric, or cut to fit bodies she couldn’t quite envision, torsos as long as legs, or with three arms, or with no hole for the head.

  In the end, she selected a white cotton shirt with starched cuffs and collar, and a knee-length black skirt made of what felt like canvas. It would be sturdy enough to stand up to learning how to work, unlikely to snag or stop her in her tracks. The thought of wearing someone else’s underthings was unsettling, no matter how many times they’d been bleached, but in the end, she also selected a pair of white shorts, her cheeks burning with the indignity of it all.

  Dr. Bleak, who had watched her make her selections (all save for the shorts; when he’d realized what she was looking for, he had turned politely aside), did not smile; smiling was not his way. But he nodded approvingly, and said, “Up the stairs, you will find several empty rooms. One of them will be yours, to keep your things in, to use when you need to be alone. You will not have many opportunities for idleness. I suggest you enjoy them when you can.”

  Jack hesitated.

  “Yes?” asked Dr. Bleak.

  “I’m … it’s not just my dress that’s filthy,” said Jack, grimacing a little, like she had never admitted to dirtiness in her life. Which perhaps she hadn’t: perhaps she had never been given the opportunity. “Is there any chance I could have a bath?”

  “You will have to haul the water yourself, and heat it, but if that is all you desire, yes.” Dr. Bleak closed the trunk, lifting it back onto the shelf where it belonged. Then he took down a vast tin bucket from a hook that dangled from the ceiling. It was shallow enough that Jack thought she could crawl into it if she needed to, almost as large as the bathtub at home.

  Her eyes widened. The bathtub at home. This and that were the same, separated by centuries of technological advancement, but serving an identical purpose.

  Dr. Bleak set the bucket down in front of the largest of the three fires before lifting a kettle down from the shelf and handing it to Jack. “The well is outside,” he said. “I will be back in two hours. Figure out how to clean yourself.” Then he was gone, striding back to the door and stepping out onto the Moors, leaving Jack to gape after him, the kettle in her hands, utterly bemused.

  * * *

  “THE MASTER WANTS YOU cleaned and smartened up,” said Mary, dragging a brush through the tangled strands of Jill’s hair. Jill ground her teeth, trying not to flinch away from the bristles. She was used to brushing her own hair, and sometimes she allowed knots to form for weeks, until they had to be cut out with scissors.

  The room she’d been removed to was small and smelled of talcum powder and sharp copper. The walls were papered in the palest pink, and a vanity much like her mother’s took up one entire wall. There was no mirror. That was the only truly odd thing about the room, which was otherwise queasily familiar to Jill, the sort of feminine stronghold that she had always been denied admission to. Her sister was the one who should have been sitting on this stool, having her hair brushed, ready to be “smartened up.”

  “It’s a shame it’s so short,” said Mary, seemingly unaware of Jill’s discomfort. “Ah, well. Hair will grow, and at least this way, he’ll be able to decide what length he likes best without cutting off something that’s already there.”

  “I get to grow my hair out?” asked Jill, suddenly hopeful.

  “Long enough to cover your throat,” said Mary, and her tone was dire, and Jill missed it entirely. She was too busy thinking of what she’d look like with long hair, how it would feel against the back of her neck; wondering whether adults on the street would smile at her the way they smiled at Jack, like she was something special, something beautiful, and not just another tomboy.

  The trouble with denying children the freedom to be themselves—with forcing them into an idea of what they should be, not allowing them to choose their own paths—is that all too often, the one drawing the design knows nothing of the desires of their model. Children are not formless clay, to be shaped according to the sculptor’s whim, nor are they blank but identical dolls, waiting to be slipped into the mode that suits them best. Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long.

  Jill had always wanted to know what it was like to be allowed to wear her hair long, to put on a pretty skirt, to sit next to her sister and hear people cooing over what a lovely matched pair they were. She liked sports,
yes, and she liked reading her books; she liked knowing things. She would probably have been a soccer player even if her father hadn’t insisted, would definitely have watched spaceships on TV and superheroes in the movies, because the core of who Jill was had nothing to do with the desires of her parents and everything to do with the desires of her heart. But she would have done some of those things in a dress. Having half of everything she wanted denied to her for so long had left her vulnerable to them: they were the forbidden fruit, and like all forbidden things, even the promise of them was delicious.

  “Your hair will take time,” said Mary, seeing that her warnings had gone unheard. “Your clothing, we can fix right away—in time for your lunch. A bath has been drawn for you.” She set the brush aside, motioning for Jill to get off the chair. “I’ll have your new attire ready when you get out.”

  Jill stood, all eyes and anticipation. “Where do I go?”

  “There,” said Mary, and indicated a door that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  Jill hesitated. Doors were dangerous things. The Master (and that dreadful Dr. Bleak) had talked about doors that would take her home again, and she wasn’t ready to go home. She wanted to stay here, to enjoy her adventure in a world where she was allowed to have long hair and wear skirts and be whoever she wanted to be.

  Mary saw the hesitation and sighed, shaking her head. “This is not your doorway home,” she said. “The Master’s castle is malleable, and matches to our needs. Go. Clean yourself up. It doesn’t do to keep him waiting.”

  Mary’s warnings might have gone unnoticed, but Jill had grown up surrounded by adults who said one thing and did another, adults who were so consumed with wanting that it never occurred to them to wonder whether children might not know about wanting too. She knew better than to disappoint if she could help it.

  “All right,” she said, and opened the door, and stepped into a mermaid’s grotto, into a drowned girl’s sanctuary. The walls were tiled in glittering blue and silver, like scales, arching together to form the high, pointed dome of the roof. It was a flower frozen in the moment before it could open; it was a teardrop turned to crystal before it could fall. Little nooks were set into the walls, filled with candles, which cast a dancing light over everything they touched.