“And you can have it. Only stand on the side of right. Stand with us. We only want to retrieve the crown from the thieves who stole it.”
No, the wind pushed. No.
Didn’t the man remember what the fawn-like girl had said? Didn’t he remember what he’d told the boy? What he’d lived his life for?
“Let me think on it,” the man said. “I’ll give my answer before sunset. Only, let me think on it.”
The wind didn’t dare move. It didn’t stretch or yawn or make a sound. The only noise was the awful scrape of the wakened creature in the walls.
“I would think,” the cruel one said, “it won’t require too much thought, as it was the Smiths who murdered your heir.”
“And me who murdered the father,” the man said, although no one but the wind noticed the hollow note of his voice.
The Clark smiled. “Give our regards to your dear wife. We’re very sorry for her absence.”
The wind moaned at the threat. Would they kill the man’s wife if he failed to join them? They might try.
Perhaps . . . perhaps they should go north. They could sail through the pines. They could skim the surface of the blue, pearl-strung lakes.
When the man reached the open sky and the bright, muggy, concrete scented street, the wind shoved at him, pointing. North?
The man laughed, shaking his head. “Good to see you too. But why north? I’m going to Queens. I have a meeting with Wolfgang’s son.”
The wind shrieked.
The son?
Which son?
The man hurried down the sidewalk, aiming toward the shadow of the church spires. The wind raced after him.
“I know,” the man said, smiling over his shoulder at the wind. “You think it’s trap. Don’t worry. It is.”
10
The Smith mansion was a flat-faced, eyeless stone fortress. Gray, rectangular, unmoving, and unchanging. The wind rarely came to the Smith home. There was nothing interesting about a flat, four-sided building with no spires to slide down, no gutters to bang or whistle through, and no marble bas-reliefs to weave over and stroke.
The Bard mansion was fun, with its dramatically dizzying heights. The Clark home had catacombs and the nearby church bells and the sycamore ghost tree. The Ward mansion on Fifth Avenue had—once had—the boy with his sunlit room, the dog-eared paperbacks the wind loved to whir the pages of, and a cup of strongly scented black tea never quite finished. Even Hell Gate was fun, with its crowded corridors and the grotesques on the roof that the wind poked and prodded laughingly.
But the Smith mansion? There was nothing interesting about a flat, unadorned building. There was nothing in nature like it. Even mountain cliffsides had crags and caverns and cracks for the wind to zip through. But this mansion was only a flat, unadorned thing. It was like the wolflike one: single-minded and stoic. Hard and unyielding. He’d been that way even in death.
The wind had never understood the Smiths, it hadn’t understood the wolflike one, and it understood the solange-eyed one even less.
For the length of southern Manhattan, across the river, and up the edge of Queens, the wind had blustered and blown at the man, urging him away from the Smiths and their hard, unyielding home. Once, it gusted so hard it threw the hat off a passing man and kicked it down the sidewalk. It tossed newspaper and plastic bags in the air and blew them in a whirlwind, but the man wouldn’t listen.
“I know you’re worried,” the man said in his soothing, melodic voice, “but I have to do this.”
Worried? The wind didn’t worry. It never worried. It shoved the man, and he chuckled.
Across the street, the gray stone mansion was bathed half in shadow and half in sunlight. The sun was high in the sky, leaking wavy heat over the city in suffocating waves. The wind blew over the man, brushing aside the sweat on his brow.
Usually, when the sun hit stone, it dazzled, reflecting specks of quartz and clusters of pyrite. But the gray stone stayed dull and lifeless. The wind shivered, remembering the bitter smoke taste of the solange-eyed one. Cruelty had twisted him. The wind didn’t want the man to step inside that flat, coffin-shaped home.
It moaned.
The man sighed. “You’re right. Perhaps they will try to kill me. All the same, they’ve invited me to discuss a truce. I have to speak with Wolfgang’s son. I have to tell him about Viola. I’ve seen a million ways she dies, and only one way she survives. What? You didn’t think there was even one way? You have no faith in me.” The man laughed as the wind shoved him again, but then he sobered. “Do you remember the glade? I went back last night. It was the same.”
Was he surprised? Of course it was the same. Deep, forested places didn’t change as quickly as humans expected them to.
