Darkwood (14 page)

Annie tried to smile, but her lips felt stuck to her teeth.

Traffic from the city had started to clog the roadway. Workhorses rubbed shoulders with courtiers' mounts. A wagon full of turnips was forced into the ditch by a carriage as white and round as an egg. Gold velvet curtains fluttered at the window as the horses charged past.

“Ridiculous, with their new-bought names,” Serena muttered, but Annie was watching a sheep farmer hustle his flock across the road. A black and white dog nipped and nudged the sheep along. Annie thought of the kinderstalk she had seen in the road. There was no reason not tell Serena. In fact she
ought
to tell Serena. But she didn't.

Then, as they crested a hill the great city itself appeared, a shimmering white mass, with the palace perched above it like the top layer of a wedding cake.

“Looks good enough to eat, doesn't it?” said Serena.

The inn was simple by Magnifica's standards, but far grander than any building in Dour County. As soon as they reserved a room Serena stumped off to investigate the kitchen, leaving Annie alone in the foyer with the innkeeper. She was a thin woman with a white starched collar that matched her teeth.

“What pretty red hair you have,” the innkeeper said, and Annie knew immediately the wig looked a fright.

As she followed the innkeeper past the kitchen, Annie saw Serena sitting around a big table with the maids and stable boys. She was laughing and gesturing broadly with one hand; in the other she held a tankard filled with foamy ale. Annie hurried up the stairs.

The room was clean and impersonal, with a square bed in the center that looked big enough even for Serena. The innkeeper walked over to the window and twitched back the curtains. The sky was filled with pale, hazy light.

“You got here just in time. Snow is coming, our first big storm of the season. They say the roads will be impassable by
morning.” She all but smacked her lips with satisfaction, and Annie realized that if the guests were snowed in they would all have to pay for a second night.

“Is there anything I can get you?” she asked.

Annie shook her head and the woman left, closing the door smartly behind her.

The room looked out over the stables behind the inn. She could see Baggy, Serena's horse, munching hay with the other horses. Annie pressed her nose up against the glass. There was Izzy, an orange crescent on the floor of the stall, and Prudence, harder to distinguish from the matted hay, curled around him.

Annie sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. Every time she opened Page's book she felt the same irrational burst of disappointment that the words hadn't magically resolved themselves into sense. But this time she saw something she had missed before. At the bottom of the paper Page had penciled a few lines, then rubbed them out. Annie squinted at the words:
The cion preserves its natural purity and intent, though it be fed and nourished by a mere crab
.

Below the quotation Page had written:
Scion? Fruit Trees? What mark? What!

None of it made sense, but Annie liked the evidence of her sister's impatience. It made her seem alive.

Serena, meanwhile, had challenged the stable boys to arm wrestling. She came up the stairs humming the strains of
Schragg's “Triumphal March” and opened the door with a flourish, brandishing a loaf of bread and a round of cheese.

“Behold! The spoils of—Child! What are you doing here in the dark?”

Annie raised her head and looked at Serena blankly.

“Child?” Serena's voice quavered.

Annie answered in a rush, fumbling and babbling.

“Serena, hello! It
has
gotten dark … must have dozed off … Sorry about the cold, I meant to call the maid. Let me get the …” But Serena had already crossed the room in a swish of skirts and ale fumes and yanked the curtains shut.

“Let's have some light then, anyway.”

Warm light filled the room. Serena glanced at the book in Annie's lap. She opened her mouth, then shut it. She raised her fingers to her eyes and pressed them closed. Then she began to laugh, a big, shaking belly laugh.

“How Beatrice would chew my ear if she knew! Not the drinking. After such a long day on the road even she might take a drop. Still, that's no excuse.” As she spoke she began to fumble with the buttons at the neck of her dress, then stopped in the middle to take off one shoe, then stumped around in her stocking foot because she decided she had better wash her face.

“They're all abuzz downstairs, Annie. The king's marriage this! The king's marriage that! There's a grand party tonight to formally introduce his betrothed to the court. A foundling they say, turned up at the palace gates these two years past, and now the king in love! Of course she's the picture of beauty. They've been carting food and frippery up the
hill all week—even a cage of live peacocks, someone said! Oh!” Serena grinned through a mask of suds. “Do you think the clock is for his bride? A wedding gift? How romantic!”

Ghastly romantic
, Annie thought, but she nodded and smiled. When Serena's back was turned she rolled to the side of the bed closer to the door and eased under the covers, fully dressed.

The bed gave a deep groan and Annie smiled despite herself at the sight of Serena swathed in yards of white nightgown—easily enough fabric for a full set of sails—her long red hair undone around her shoulders. She'd made a kind of poultice, smelling damply of chamomile and some stronger, more bitter herb, which she laid across her eyes.

“Keeps off the headache, no question.” She reached out to pat Annie goodnight and nearly broke her nose.

She fell asleep like that, one arm across Annie's sternum like a lead weight, snoring so loudly that Annie half expected the innkeeper to come up and boot them both out into the snow.

Annie lay there thinking for a long time. She didn't know what to do. She knew what she
should
do, what she had been planning to do, but now that the opportunity had finally arrived—the perfect opportunity, really—she felt afraid. Not of what might happen to her, but of what would never happen. She would not wake up to Serena clucking about the snow. They would not play cards and eat warm dinners until the roads cleared. She would not try and fail to get an audience with the king. She would not return with Serena to the cottage.
The little room with the bird-patterned quilt would not be hers.

Annie squeezed her eyes shut, but it wasn't Serena laughing or Bea combing her hair that she saw. It was Gregor, with his old man's face and his child's body. She had to tell the king about Gibbet and the children at the Drop. She had to do it tonight.

Annie lifted Serena's arm from her chest. It took both hands to do it. She had no paper or ink to write a note, but she did have a hard cheese and a dull knife. “My thanks” she carved into the top of the cheese. Then she cut a big piece off the bottom and popped it into her mouth.

The front door was heavily barred, but the bar wasn't as heavy as Serena's arm. The outside air hit her face, swept into her lungs, and made her ribs ache. Snow was falling thick and fast, brittle flakes that stuck to the fabric of her cloak like burrs. As she crossed the yard, her feet left dark prints that filled in with snow almost as soon as she made them.

The cats were waiting for her by the stable. Prudence waved her tail.

“Are you ready?” Annie whispered, more to herself than the cats. Isadore turned and trotted out of the yard. Annie couldn't help smiling at the familiar sight of his orange hindquarters bobbing along in front of her.

They followed the same road Serena had driven during the day, heading steadily east. The dark here was nothing like
the dark of Dour County. Torches burned in every doorway. Lanterns hung on posts along the road. The firelight confused her. Could others see as well as she could? She hugged the ditch, the darkest part of the road, and stopped often, vainly, to listen. The white noise of falling snow swallowed every other sound.

Once inside the city proper, the road branched off a dozen times or more, each route marked with a sign. Annie's heart sped up when she saw the name of the road they were on: Royal Way.

Quite suddenly, the road flared into a semicircle and ended. No, it didn't end, exactly, just narrowed as it wound around the sides of the hill like a white ribbon. Serena had not exaggerated: the road was so narrow and the switchbacks so tight that only the lightest, nimblest carriages could navigate it. Tradespeople, unless they wanted to proceed on foot, would have to wait at the bottom for someone from the palace to come to them. When the snow cleared, Serena would be waiting here to deliver her clock.

They had taken three turns of the switchback and already Annie was out of breath. She counted fifteen more turns to the top.

“Izzy, slow—”

But he had already stopped. His ears stiffened. The tip of his tail flicked from side to side. An odd sound reached them.
Like Aunt Prim sifting flour
, Annie thought as she turned. Royal
Way stretched out below her with its dozens of small roads branching off. From every road, at every turning, kinderstalk appeared, until the avenue was filled with black bodies, all running toward her. Their feet sifted the snow,
shush, shush, shush
.

“Hurry!” Annie cried to the cats. “This way!”

But they didn't hurry. Only when Annie left the road to clamber up the rocky hillside did they follow her, and still they moved as if half-asleep.

Snow stung her bare hands. The rocks were all roughly the same shape and size, and she began to be familiar with their spacing—hand up, foot up, push with other hand, straighten leg. This wasn't a real hill at all, but man-made. She remembered what Beatrice had told her.

Can you still visit the mine
?

Of course not, dear. That's where they've built the palace
.

The kinderstalk were close now. She couldn't see them, couldn't afford to stop long enough to turn around, but she knew they were on the road. The shushing sound grew louder as they reached the turns nearest her, then faded as they followed the switchback in the other direction.