The needle quivered in my hand, pulling my fingers towards the lock and seemingly inserting itself without any movement on my part. I heard asnickas 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.
Papers—bundles of them. I shuffled through them. I could sometimes recognize individual letters, although I was unable to replicate them. I found a few papers that had a Q in the address and put them in the pack in case they would be useful. If they had come from Quell, perhaps they would give me some idea of who might have taken Mother, or, failing that, some contact of hers in the city who could prove to be of assistance in my search. Surely I would come across someone to help me read them. I selected all that looked promising.
Underneath the papers was a pouch containing what looked like a good deal of coin to my unpracticed eyes, and I took that as well. As almost an afterthought, I tore the large map of Virelith from the wall and wrestled it into a manageable shape, stuffing it into the top of my pack before climbing down the ladder again.
Now—how to getout? It was a long way down from the Tower. The lifeless shape of the intruder sprawled on the grass and gravel at the bottom was indisputable proof of that. I looked again at the caved-in threshold that led to the stairwell and sighed. Short of suddenly being able to control my magic, or discovering some superhuman strength that had lain dormant for twenty years, I wasn’t going to be able to shift those rocks. So, then, I had to find a way to climb down. The old masonry was uneven, with some missing patches of mortar, so there were footholds and handholds … But how secure they might be was another matter. Just one slip and I would be down on the groundwith my attacker. I didn’t flatter myself that Baldbeak would refrain from eating my eyeballs, either. He would probably consider it bad mannersnotto eat my lifeless body.
“Right,” I said, trying to sound decisive. I threw my Hair over one shoulder and started to tie it up. It shivered under my touch.
“Look, you’ll just have to put up with it,” I said under my breath as I wrested the sections one over the other. “Unless you have any better ideas.”
If it did, of course, it couldn’t share them, and so it lay, practically vibrating with dissatisfaction, while I plaited it into a long, ropelike braid.
Better to have wings, said Baldbeak.
“Yes, very helpful, thank you.” I examined the braid. It looked strong enough, and it was impossible to pull my magical Hair from my scalp—so it would hold. It would be painful, but it would hold. Baldbeak watched with head cocked and an expression that mourned the uselessness of wingless humans as I fastened the end of the braid to a hook protruding from the stone and hefted the very full pack onto my back.
I took a deep breath and climbed over the windowsill, straddling it for a moment. I knew I shouldn’t look down—the dead body at the base of the Tower was the opposite of the encouragement I needed. I swung my legs over the sill and found footholds, hands still clinging to the sill. Baldbeak flapped around me, watching with more interest than concern as I lowered myself inch by inch, making sure to test each crevice before I let it hold my weight. There were a few unexpected crumbling patches, and once a whole chunk of rock slid out from under my foot, but I made it to within a survivable distance of the Tower base without injury.
“All right, you can let go now,” I whispered to my Hair. There was a complicated slithery sound from above as it extricated itself from the hook, and then the whole coppery mass came down about my shoulders, seizing the opportunity to unwind itself from the braid, as well, and hang loose again. Ihad to cling tightly as the heft of it threatened to pull me off the wall, but I hung on, and when it stopped swinging, I was still plastered flat to the stone like a terrified lizard. I clambered down the last several feet and then jumped down to land with an ignominiouswhumpin the tangle of weeds at the base of the Tower. Baldbeak fluttered gently down beside me and landed with great care, as if to make a point.
I took a moment to feel a small glow of pride at having managed to escape the Tower on my own, with no help. The Hair twitched a little at that thought.
“Besides you, of course,” I said to it.
The air had that odd stillness that comes before a storm, which made my voice sound very loud in my ears. I knelt beside the body of my attacker, trying not to look too closely at his face and his complete absence of eyeballs—although I was curious to see a man’s face in detail, having never seen one before. I got a general impression of “hairy” and “ugly” before I had to look away. I took one of the silk pieces from my sewing basket and draped it over his head so I wouldn’t have to look at him while I gleaned what information—or goods—I could.
As it turned out, the intruder had precious little to help me. I emptied his pockets and found a handful of coins in a leather bag, which I kept. When I had finished, I stood and looked up at the only home I had ever known.
The Tower looked just as it always had from the outside—tall, dark, and lonely. The attic window was open for the pigeons, so they would be able to come and go as they pleased, and there was plenty of food for them to find in the meadow. There was nothing else living for which I was responsible—nothing keeping me here, without Mother. It was time to leave First Nest. I feared my wings were terribly stunted, however, and I wasn’t sure if they would carry me. Still, what else could I do?
I took a deep breath.
“Goodbye,” I whispered, and I turned my back on the Tower.
Chapter Two
The Running Hare
‘A simple straight stitch designed for tacking down pieces in preparation for more complex work later; or for covering distance at speed if a work must be completed rapidly.’
—An Exhaustive Compendium of Stitches
Both Holy and Base, 4th Edition
I understand a talking raven needs a great deal of explanation. He surprised me, too, when he first showed up. But to understand Baldbeak, you first have to understand the nature of the life we led in the Tower—my mother, Margotte Edevane, and I—and something of my own nature as well.
Silly. Soft. Slow.I heard these words more often than my own name (which is Persinette, shortened to Netta for my mother’s sanity), as a child and all the way into young adulthood. I knew Mother loved me, but I also knew I was not the sort of daughter she had imagined, and that my vagueness and tendency to daydream often frustrated her.
Silly girl, because I was preoccupied with songs and stories, pretty stitchery and gowns. Prone to dreaming. Fond of staring out the window. Always humming under my breath.Generally driving Mother to distraction. Head as full of feathers as a pillow.
Soft, because I cupped spiders in my hands and carried them outside rather than squash them with the broom-end, and because of my love for the pigeons, ducks, and geese that were our only livestock (of a sort). And because of Baldbeak—but more on him later, as I have said.
Slow, because no matter how hard I tried, I was completely unable to learn to read—a cardinal sin in Mother’s world. The letters scattered like ants under my gaze, too quickly for me to see them clearly, let alone decipher their meaning. When Mother tried to get me to recall the shape of one letter, just one, it would immediately seem to curl away from my mind like smoke. Put a quill in my hand, and it would wobble, refusing to press its tip steadily onto the paper, as if I held nothing more substantial than a thread.
I wanted desperately to be able to read. I couldfeelthe words inside the books all around me, almost hear them knocking against their covers, full of stories and knowledge that I could not access. And more than that—Mother’s whole life was books and words. She spent every day working in her upper room, poring over her spellbooks and crafting that one unimaginably complex spell that she had been working on since before I could remember, a hundred or more pages long it seemed, wrestling it into shape and crafting the physical book that would be its vessel.
