“He left me behind,” he rasped.
“Tell me who sent you,” I said again. My Hair tightened about his torso. He cried out. A thick tendril closed about his throat andsqueezed.
“Quell,” he managed to say. “Quell.”
I had studied Mother’s maps long enough to know the city of Quell, but I had never heard her speak of it.
“Who in Quell?”
He summoned all his strength to lunge at me one last time. I flinched, expecting a blow, but, acting of its own volition, my Hair gave a powerful, snapping movement like the cracking of a whip and flung him backwards.
He tumbled over the sill.
The sound as he hit the ground was rather like thefwoompof fluffing up a goose-down pillow. It was such an anticlimactic noise that I peered over the edge to make sure he really had fallen. Sure enough, he lay still, far below. Somehow he had landed with his head on top of one arm, like a sleeping child. I could see no blood, not from up here, but I was pretty sure no one could survive that fall.
I put my shaking hands to my Hair and smoothed it back, soothing both it and myself. It poured itself over my hands and around my wrists, sleek and shining as a red-furred otter, soft now and compliant after its fury of a moment before. I could feel its concern.
“I’m all right,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “Are you?”
It put up a strand to touch my cheek.
“Thank you,” I said.
I turned to face the mess behind me.
“Mother!” I called out, as I should have done at once. There was no reply. The Tower air hung stale and still, the only movement the tiny scurryings of a spider in one corner, no doubt overcome by all the unaccustomed excitement. Where was she? Last I remembered, we had been sitting down to our morning meal together in relative peace—or as close as Mother ever got to it, preoccupied as she always was with her work.
The place was a ruin. Our little rooms were modest to say the least, and we owned very little of value besides Mother’s spellbooks, but seeing our few possessions so disarranged made my stomach ache. Even my sewing basket, which held my precious needles and hard-won thread, had been upended and its contents strewn around the room. I found myself falling to my knees to gather them up—as if needles mattered in this moment! Still, it gave my trembling hands something to do as my thoughts drew themselves back from whatever strange and distant place to which they had been banished.
I had no idea how I had come to be pressed against the window. I had no memory of anything immediately before the attack, in fact. Where my memories should have been was a white, crowded space, full of furious movement but no words or images. Maybe I had fallen, or been knocked down, and hit my head? Perhaps that was why there was this strange gap in my mind, this swirling, chaotic mess where my memories should be, like dust disturbed by vigorous cleaning?
The last thing I remembered was breakfast, but I could see that the kitchen table was bare, and our plates were clean. Well, clean, but smashed into pieces, as the shelves we used for our few cups and plates had been dashed from the wall. Still, it meant that Mother and I had eaten and tidied away our things—some time ago, it seemed, for the basket I used to take our washing-up to the stream was dry and still hanging on its hook. How much time had I lost, and why?
I felt something tucked into the long sleeve of my dress and pulled it free. A grubby tangle of silk. When I opened it,it bloomed like a flower—a cream square embroidered in a riotous tangle of color and pattern. A piece of my own embroidery—I recognized my own stitches as you know the sound of your own voice. I ran my finger over the silk and dislodged what at first I thought were loose threads, but finer and glossier than any threads I’d ever used. Three of them. I rolled them beneath the pad of my index finger—three slender strands, two dull copper and one gray. Mother’s hairs, folded into the handkerchief like a keepsake. I stared at the strands for a minute, their familiar gleam, and then gathered them back into the fabric and stuffed the whole package into my pocket. I would find out what that meant later, I hoped, but first I had to look in Mother’s workroom, on the chance that she might be there—injured, or worse.
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, allowingher 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. Andtaken. Alive or dead.
A sharptoc-toc-toccame 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.
