Pikey stared at the gem. Oh, that’s worth a dozen pounds, that gleamer is. Or a hundred. He could buy a caramel apple with it. He could buy a bushel of caramel apples. He could march right up to one of those pretty painted carts with the steam curling off it and the apples behind the glass, and he could buy the whole thing, aprons and all.
Pikey reached out and ran a finger over the stone.
“Boy,” the faery said again, and this time it took Pikey’s hand and wrapped it around the gem. Pikey looked from stone to faery and back again. His heart was making odd little bumps against his ribs.
“It’s for me?” he breathed. He could already see it all: running away, finding someplace good, someplace where there were thick warm socks and a stove and people who didn’t only kick at him and shoo him away when he walked too close, and—
Coach wheels rattled in Bell Lane. Iron horseshoes hammered the cobbles. The faery’s smile vanished. It looked at Pikey an instant longer, its mirror-eyes wide and limpid. Then it whirled, black wings sweeping, and disappeared down the alley.
Pikey watched it go, the gemstone heavy in his hand. The gem was very cold. But it was solid, too, reassuring like nothing he had ever held before. He wanted to laugh, holding it. He wanted to whoop and yell and dance up the alley, and tell all the few people he knew that he was richer than them and the landlord put together. He stared at the gem a second longer, cupping it in his hands and watching his breath cloud around it. Then, with a start, he realized what he was holding and clutched it to his chest. He looked sharply up the alley. He wriggled into his hole and wrapped himself in his blankets, the gem hard against his heart, like a piece of good luck.
He did not dream of apples that night, as much as he would have liked to. He dreamed of the branch-haired girl. The huge dark trees surrounded her, leaning down. Her flimsy nightgown flapped in the wind. She was walking, bent and weary, straight toward him, but she never seemed to get any closer. And she looked so sad. So sad and alone under those soaring black trees.
Nettles and Grout would not have dared peek around its edge for anything in England or the Old Country. They waited nervously, shuffling their feet, and all they saw of the figure were his long, pale fingers, toying with something glinting like glass.
“Mi Sathir?” said Nettles at last. “Mi Sathir, we did as you told us. The illusion in Wyndhammer House? All done, just the way you wanted it.”
The pale hands fell still.
“Yessir,” said Grout, trying to sound brave. He nudged Nettles in the ribs. “Very satisfactrilly, too, if I daresay. There weren’t a fellow in the room what weren’t afraid of his own shadow. And all them generals and lieutenants in Her Majesty’s Army …” He spoke the words with exaggerated contempt. “All standing there gawping. Oh, they’ll make a sight on the battlefield. They’ll be too frightened to lift a gun against you, Sathir. Won’t be much of a fight.”
The figure in the chair laughed, a high, clear sound, like a bell. Then he spoke, his voice soft and lively. “No. It won’t be, will it. They will not fight because half of them are dead, yes? You killed them when you let my little Milkblood open her door under Wyndhammer House. She’s dead, too, by the way. The leadfaces found her body under the rubble.” The figure laughed again, quietly, to himself.
The goblins exchanged looks, and if their bark-brown skin could go pallid, it did. Nettles tried to say something, choked.
“Sathir,” he stammered. “Sathir, we didn’t, we—”
“You were supposed to frighten the English,” the figure in the chair said. “That is what I told you to do. A parlor trick to give them a taste of what was to come. I did not tell you to fuel the patriotic fires of the entire country by blowing up half their aristocracy. You’ve rather ruined everything.”
He sounded as if he were smiling, as if he found it all unbearably droll.
Grout’s eyes darted to Nettles. Then he began to jabber. “No, Sathir, oh no, we didn’t fuel no fires! Leastaways, I didn’t. It was Nettles here as did. He was being horrid to the old Peculiar, called her all sorts of awful names. Oh, Sathir, it weren’t me, I swear it weren’t!”
“Go away.” The figure in the chair laughed, and the sound echoed down the four halls, chilly and gray. “Go away, I’ve heard enough.”
His long fingers snapped together. At the end of one of the halls, two women materialized, richly dressed and wearing beaked masks. One had six pale arms. The other had a key protruding from her back. They glided forward without a sound.
“What shall we do with them, Sathir?” they said, and the voices that came from behind the masks crackled like sparks.
Another laugh. One slender white hand lifted the glass object again, spinning it idly. “I don’t know. What does one do these days with people one doesn’t like? Something ghastly, I hope. Something truly ghastly.”
Hettie and the faery butler stayed in the cottage for what felt like a very long time. Hettie couldn’t decide exactly how long. There were no clocks in the Old Country, or train schedules, and even if there had been, Hettie suspected they wouldn’t have made any sense. Time in these woods seemed to run a different path. Every night Hettie would go to sleep, and every night she would wake up and wander through the house, and watch the sky go from black to very black, but it didn’t really feel like days were going by. Outside in the forest, the seasons never changed. The snow was always on the ground, and no new snow ever fell. Hettie could still see their tracks whenever she looked out a lead-paned window. The labyrinth of tracks going round and round to nowhere.
Ever since the fight with the gray-faced creature, the faery butler had become very silent. The first day they had set foot in the cottage he had propped himself up against the wall just inside the door. He had barely stirred since. To begin with, Hettie had stayed with him, close to his knife and his pale sinewy arms. But as the days went by and all he did was creep out to drink snow and eat the gray mushrooms from the cracks in the trees, Hettie decided she ought to do something else. Bartholomew would come for her eventually, but until he did she thought it would be better to be busy. And she might as well be busy exploring the cottage. The thing that had lived here was dead, after all. It was a heap of ash a hundred steps away and perhaps already completely carried off by the wind. There was nothing to be afraid of.
So one morning, while the faery butler was outside, Hettie went to the end of the passage. It was beam-and-plaster of the sort one would find in a regular cottage. At the end were two doors and a steep wooden staircase leading up. One door was painted blue. The other was painted red.
She tried the blue door first. It opened into a little room that probably ought to have been a kitchen but was utterly bare. There was a stone fireplace, which explained the chimney, and nothing else. The floor was perfectly swept. The walls, though cracked and pitted, were whitewashed. Not even the flat Hettie had lived in back in England had been so bare. At least there had been things in it, bottles and bowls and Mother’s wash wringer and Mother. Even just a spiderweb in a corner. But not here. Hettie hadn’t seen a spider since the day she had arrived. Not even a beetle. Not even a bird in the iron gray sky.
Why would such an ugly faery have such a very neat house? Hettie wondered what