Chapter One #2
I hitched up my skirt and climbed the ladder to her workspace at the very top of the Tower.
I didn’t spend much time there, as she didn’t like me hovering while she worked, but on the few occasions she allowed me up, I loved looking out the row of narrow, deep-silled windows that ran around the perimeter and gave a patchwork-quilt view of the fields, forest, and river that separated us from the rest of Virelith.
It looked like you could reach out and pluck a tree from the ground between finger and thumb.
Right now, the clouds hung heavy and threatening with rain that had not yet fallen.
Mother’s workroom was also a mess. Not its usual mess—open books and loose papers scattered everywhere, cobwebs and crumbs—but a violent tumult of ripped paper and splintered wood. And, in the middle of the stone floor, a few spots of fresh blood.
Blood. My stomach turned.
The spots were already dark and sticky at the edges where they were starting to congeal.
I stepped around them carefully, pulling the hem of my skirt aside, and moved to the desk where Mother’s wooden book wheel stood—a contraption she had built herself that looked something like a mill wheel, allowing her to have many spellbooks open at once and to rotate them up and down as she consulted them.
All the books had been dashed from their shelves, and the wheel itself lurched at a crazed angle, thrown off its treads.
The largest stand, where she kept the great spellbook bound in pale, flesh-toned leather that was her life’s work—her life’s purpose—was empty.
It had lain there so long that the wood beneath it was still dark red-brown, while the table around its edges had faded to almost orange in the light from the many windows.
So—someone had come here for the book, and Mother had fought them …
or at least got in their way. And she had been injured, or worse. And taken. Alive or dead.
A sharp toc-toc-toc came at one of the windows and nearly made me jump out of my skin. A familiar beady eye glared in at me, distorted by the thick glass.
“Baldbeak!” I cried in relief.
In in in, he insisted. He was always eager to come inside the Tower when Mother wasn’t there.
I creaked open the window and he hopped in, clacking his formidable beak. Even for a raven, he was large—easily reaching my knee when he stood on the ground. He looked around the room with mild curiosity.
For why the blood? he asked silently. His speech, or whatever it was, had gotten a lot better over the last several months, but there was still something stilted about it.
“I don’t know,” I said. I sent him the images as best I could—the man holding me. The struggle. My Hair throwing him out the window. The other man who had caused the stairwell to cave in. It was quicker than speech, and he understood it just as well.
I saw him on the ground, said Baldbeak. I ate his eyeballs.
I tried to avoid picturing it. “Er … thank you.”
He gave the quick ruffle of his wings that usually meant you’re welcome.
“Mother is gone,” I told him.
Good.
Baldbeak didn’t like Mother, and the feeling was mutual.
Mother had always hated ravens, although I was never sure exactly why.
Her wards were meant to keep them out, but, like the spiders, Baldbeak seemed to be an exception.
She said often that ravens were bad luck, and untrustworthy, and had been absolutely furious when Baldbeak first appeared in my life.
Even after all this time, she still shooed him away from the window whenever she saw him and called him vermin.
It was a wholly inaccurate word for Baldbeak—a dignified, darkly gleaming bird with a powerfully solid beak, dangerous claws, and intelligent, coin-bright eyes.
“No, I mean she’s missing. Those men—I think they took her.”
He hopped onto my shoulder. The Hair didn’t like it when he did that and slithered about his gray legs, trying to push him off. He worried at it with his beak, tasting the strands.
Have to go, he said to me. Not safe.
“I know. Not if someone knows where we are, now.” I shivered. “No one has ever known where we are.”
Except me.
“Well, you don’t count. In a good way,” I added hastily.
They had come for Mother’s work, as she had always feared—but they had taken her, too. Perhaps they would have taken me as well, if I hadn’t woken. Had they drugged us, perhaps, to put us to sleep?
I saw them coming, said Baldbeak. He showed me a succession of images—two men on horseback, seen from above, at tree-height.
They looked small and unthreatening from Baldbeak’s bird’s-eye point of view, but I felt a chill as the picture shivered behind my eyes.
These men had come into our safest, most secret place and left it desecrated.
One of the men in the vision—the one who now lay dead beneath the Tower window—turned his head to the other and said something with a smile.
It was a nice smile. It seemed wrong for them to be smiling and laughing like two ordinary men out for a ride when with every hoof step they had brought doom closer to our door.
A flash of black, and then another mind-picture—one man, the one who had brought down the stairwell, moving at speed.
I could see that there was a large bundle tied to his horse’s back, but it was difficult to gauge its size.
It could be Mother’s large spellbook in sackcloth, or Mother herself tied to the saddle, or both. I shook my head in frustration.
“He is going to Quell,” I said. “I will go after him.”
Baldbeak looked at me sidelong.
“Well, I have to,” I said.
He cocked his head. For why?
“She’s my mother!” I said. “I know you don’t like her, but I do.”
He managed to exude a general sense of skepticism. Mother pushed me from First Nest when I was fledged, he said.
“Well, humans are different.” I sighed. “And I’ve never left the nest.”
You leave now?
I felt a tingle of fear and excitement both.
I had never been farther from the Tower than the little stream that ran along the bottom of the hill and marked the placing of Mother’s wards.
I had never even crossed it. Now it looked like I was going to be walking across half of Virelith.
Quell was the nearest large city—although, of course, nearest was relative, as our Tower was in the middle of nowhere.
I had spent my whole life staring at the map of Virelith that Mother had nailed to the wall, and so I had a pretty good idea of Quell’s direction.
I did not know what I would do when I got there, but what choice did I have?
Maybe she is dead, said Baldbeak. He always spoke so casually of death, as if it were merely hopping from one perch to another (and the death of others meant a potential good meal, I supposed).
“Maybe,” I said, feeling cold creep across my chest. “But I need to at least know what has happened to her, or I will spend my life wondering.”
He seemed to accept that, making his raark sound of agreement.
I went back downstairs to get the worn knapsack that Mother had owned for as long as I could remember and stuffed it with anything I fancied might be useful.
I couldn’t bear to part with any of my skeins of silk thread, nor any of my needles—I would go mad without my stitchery, I was sure—and so I packed the full contents of my sewing basket, hoops and squares of fabric and all.
I told myself that I could sell them if need be.
I kept my favorite needle, a slender sliver of bone, between my fingers as I packed.
It always soothed me. I also selected a small cooking pot, the few coins we had, a thin blanket—then cast about, looking for anything else that might prove useful.
We had so little, really, and so much of it had been destroyed by the intruders.
I climbed the ladder once more to look around Mother’s room, in case there was something I had missed that I could use on my journey.
The books might have been valuable, of course, but I had no way of telling one from the other—and so many had been damaged.
Not for the first time, I felt a shame-filled burn of frustration with myself at being unable to read.
There was undoubtedly information here that would prove useful in finding Mother’s contacts in Quell, but what did any of these scrawls mean to me?
Absolutely nothing. They might as well have been the scratchings of hens in the dust.
Part of me, a secret and spiteful part, was glad to see Mother’s precious books so scattered and torn. They had never let me in, no matter how hard I tried, and she had always preferred to spend her time with them rather than me.
I walked over to the little chest that Mother kept in the corner of the workroom—the one she opened with her magic key.
It had enchanted me since I was a little girl.
She used to tickle my nose and cheeks with the little key she made from a strand of her magical hair—but I had never been allowed to look inside. I did not know how to open it.
The needle quivered in my hand, pulling my fingers towards the lock and seemingly inserting itself without any movement on my part. I heard a snick as the chest unlocked itself. My mouth dropped open. How on earth …?
The needle fell to the floorboards with a tinkle, lifeless again. I picked it up cautiously, as if it might swivel its head like a snake and bite me—but it was just a needle. I put it into my pocket and lifted the lid of the chest.