Cuckoo Song (23 page)

‘Oh, for pity’s sake! No. No, I won’t.’ At the door she paused, her eyes lingering on Not-Triss again, her narrow, painted mouth drooping into its habitual frown.
‘Triss, do you need any . . . any medicine or anything before you go to bed?’

‘No.’ Not-Triss shook her head, feeling abashed at her outburst, but still only half-reassured. ‘No, thank you. I . . . I don’t think they really help.’

The door closed behind Violet, and Not-Triss sank down to sit on the cushions near the now-caged fire.

‘It’s all right,’ Pen said, pulling blankets over her own knees. ‘I’ve stayed here before. She
always
does that. Last time she stayed out until
seven
in the morning
. I know because she woke me up coming in. She sleeps till ten, then gets up and goes to work.’

Work.
Again not entirely the ‘high life’ Celeste Crescent had described. Apparently Violet Parish did not spend her whole time sitting around and drinking cocktails at the
Crescent family’s expense. Not-Triss had a dozen new thoughts about Violet Parish, and yet these were not the most important things on her mind.

She glanced across at Pen, who was nestling herself in the blankets like a dormouse and refusing to meet her eye.

‘Pen,’ she said gently, ‘I think we need to talk. About everything. About the Architect.’

Pen chewed hard on her upper lip, and for a few seconds Not-Triss thought the younger girl might ignore her, or give vent to one of her fits of temper. Instead she wound the blanket tassels
around one finger and shrugged.

‘You have to promise not to get angry,’ she mumbled belligerently, ‘or scratch me with your claws or bite me with your thorn-teeth.’

‘I promise,’ said Not-Triss. ‘And I’m really sorry I hurt your face.’

‘Good,’ answered Pen sullenly.

‘So,’ Not-Triss prompted, as patiently as she could, ‘the Architect. Where did you meet him?’

Pen gave her a sly sideways glance. Perhaps she was weighing up a lie, like a snowball in her hand, seeing if it would hold together. Or perhaps she was trying to judge whether Not-Triss might
become a screaming thorn-monster at a moment’s notice if she said the wrong thing.

‘He just turned up one day. Three weeks ago. The day after my birthday. And Mother and Father promised we would all go to Bowgate’s Picture House, because they were showing
Peril
on Park Avenue
. But then when we were about to go, you said – I mean,
real
Triss said that she had a headache and a fever. She did it on
purpose
, so we couldn’t
go, I know it, I saw her looking at me, I
know
it. So I called her a liar and a rat, and then everybody shouted at me and I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema at all.’

Not-Triss said nothing. She could vaguely remember the incident, could recall a sense of outrage at being yelled at while she was ill. Had there been a certain hint of spiteful satisfaction as
well at seeing Pen robbed of her birthday treat? Perhaps there had.

‘I ran away again,’ Pen whispered. ‘I hated you
all
. I went and sat on the seesaw on Gramhill Park, and it was raining, and I hated you all so much I wished I had a
gun
. Or a gang, so I could go home and you’d all be scared. But then I thought I didn’t want to make Mother and Father scared, just you, because it was all your fault, and you
made
them like that. And when I was thinking that, a big black car stopped by the park, and a man got out and came right up to me. He called me “Miss Penelope Crescent” and
held his umbrella over me, and said no gentleman should let a lady sit in the rain.’

‘And that was the Architect?’ asked Not-Triss, trying to untangle her thoughts. She had wondered how Pen had managed to contact the Architect in the first place.

Pen nodded. ‘I was a bit scared of him at first, particularly when he said he’d been watching us for some time. But then he said he didn’t like the way everybody else treated
me, that it wasn’t fair, and he wanted to help me. He said sometimes families are like fruit bowls, and if one of the pieces of fruit is rotten it makes everything rotten. So you have to take
that fruit out of the bowl, and that makes everything better. And I said that you – I mean, the
real
Triss – was rotten and made everybody unhappy. And he agreed.’

Not-Triss could feel some of her previous anger and hurt stirring in her, but the misery was so vivid in Pen’s face that she forced herself to rein it in.

‘He wanted to know if our family would be going to the countryside any time soon, and I told him about the holiday. Then he said he wanted to make a bargain with me. I had to give him lots
of things belonging to Triss – he said the diary pages were the most important bit – and then, when we were on holiday, I had to get Triss to come with me to the Grimmer. He said that
if I did that, then he . . .’ Pen paused, biting her lip. It was hard to tell in the firelight, but Not-Triss thought she might be flushing somewhat. ‘He said he’d take Triss away
so she’d never come back and everything would be better,’ she said, adding in a mumble, ‘and neither of us would ever talk about it to anybody.’

‘So you lured the real Triss down to the Grimmer—’

‘Don’t say it like that!’ hissed Pen. ‘And don’t look at me like it’s all my fault! I just wanted everything to stop being horrible, and that’s
your
fault. Well, real Triss’s fault, but you’re just like her!’

‘Well, if you hate me so much, why did you bother saving me?’ snapped Not-Triss. Her paper-thin self-control was stretched to tearing point, and there was a sea of grief behind
it.

Pen glared at Not-Triss. Her eyes were shiny with angry tears.

‘I didn’t
mean
to,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘This morning, when everybody was driving away without me, I thought you might do something horrible to Mother and
Father if I wasn’t there. So I hid in the back – down on the floor under the blanket. Then when the car was stopped outside the cottage for ages I got bored and cold, so I sneaked out
and hid in the kitchen. Then everybody found out you were a monster and caught you, and at first I was really glad, because it meant you wouldn’t come home and scratch my face and try to
break into my room.’ Her tone held a mixture of malice and fear. ‘But . . . then they wanted to burn you. And you started crying. And it wasn’t real tears, but it was real crying.
You were
really scared
, even though they kept saying you weren’t.’

‘Then why couldn’t Father see that?’ Not-Triss felt despair and hurt welling up inside her again, and it was all she could do to stop her teeth sharpening. ‘Why
couldn’t Mother see it?’

‘Because they’re stupid,’ growled Pen, rubbing at her nose with her sleeve. ‘They can’t tell when real Triss is fake-crying, so of course they can’t tell when
Fake Triss is real-crying.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ It was hard to say why the words stung so much.

‘If you don’t like it, that’s too bad,’ retorted Pen with a sudden gleam in her eye, ‘because that’s what you are. Fake Triss. In fact, that’s your name
now. You don’t have a name, and I saved your life, so I get to choose what your name is. And it’s Fake Triss.’

‘I’m not—’

‘Shut up, Fake Triss. You’re lucky I’m letting you have a name at all.’

Not-Triss closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought of Pen dragging her by the hand from the cottage kitchen. She thought of Pen sprinting by her side through the moonlight.

‘Tell me more about the Architect.’ Not-Triss thought it safest to change the subject. ‘He gave you a way of calling him on the phone, didn’t he?’

Pen gave a short nod.

‘I had to say, “Waste, wither, want,” before I picked up the mouthpiece, and then when I pressed the button for the switchboard, the voice on the line wasn’t a normal
operator. There was this whispery woman instead, and I just had to ask her for the Architect, and she put me through.’

At last Not-Triss understood why there had been no record of Pen’s mysterious phone call from the Crescent household. It had not gone through the usual switchboard at all. No wonder the
operators knew nothing of it.

‘Did he ever tell you where he lived, or anything else about him?’ continued Not-Triss.

‘Not really, just that he was an architect.’ Pen scowled in concentration. ‘Wait – he said that’s why he was watching us. Because he knew Father. Through their
work. But he said he’d decided he liked me better than Father, because I seemed more “honourable”.’

A blizzard of fragments were flurrying through Not-Triss’s mind and trying to form a picture. She remembered the overheard conversation between Piers and Celeste Crescent, regarding the
mysterious
he
that Piers wanted nothing more to do with. She remembered the article in the newspaper concerning Piers’s new building project. Last of all, there was the mystery of
the envelopes in the desk drawer, their existence so carefully concealed. Her mind was too tired to make further sense of the fragments, however.

‘We have to find out more about the Architect, Pen.’ Not-Triss saw her not-sister flinch, and after a moment’s hesitation aimed a comforting pat at the smaller girl’s
foot. ‘I know you don’t want to, and I don’t really want to either. But we have to. He doesn’t just have Triss. He has Sebastian.’

Chapter 22

Not-Triss was woken by the sound of a solitary cock crowing. She lay on the floor staring at the dim, cracked ceiling and listened, remembering where she was. No, she was not
in the countryside. The bird she could hear must be in somebody’s backyard coop. It was a bold, brass sound nonetheless. It would not be cowed into silence by the invention of alarm clocks,
the subdued buzz of the city or the fact that it was still hours before dawn.

Memories of the previous evening crept back into her head, but did so numbly. They made her feel scraped out and empty. She wondered if soldiers felt this kind of blankness when they looked out
at battlefields that had been pounded into mud and stark wasteland. There was no grieving for the lush valley that had been. Its destruction was too complete.

From this dull desolation surfaced a single thought.

I have only two days left.

As the cock crowed again, it brought with it another set of recollections, from her conversation with the bird-thing. What had the creature said?

Find yourself a cockerel, and a dagger or knife . . . Go down Meddlar’s Lane under the bridge’s end, turn your face to the bricks and start walking . . .

You want to talk to the Shrike
.

The Shrike had made Not-Triss.
Perhaps
, whispered a stubborn voice in Not-Triss’s head,
perhaps he knows a way to stop me falling apart. Perhaps I don’t have to die in
two days.

Even if he had no such answer for her, she knew she had to talk to him. He had worked for the Architect and might know about his plans. He might know what had happened to the real Triss, and
perhaps even something of Sebastian’s fate. Whatever had befallen them, it sounded as if both were in desperate need of rescue.

I don’t want to die. I’ll fight to the last moment to stop myself falling apart. But if all I have is two days, I’ll make them count. Every last minute of them.

Not-Triss sat up, accidentally nudging Pen, who was curled up next to her.

Pen scowled bitterly and rolled into a tight ball like a sullen hedgehog.

‘Go ’way,’ was her barely comprehensible response. ‘
Hate
you.’

Not-Triss gazed down at her not-sister, and in spite of herself found a smile creeping on to her face. Pen was still managing belligerence even while asleep, but the frown made her look
vulnerable, young and a bit comical.

‘All right.’ Not-Triss slipped out from the small portion of blanket she had retained and tucked it around Pen. ‘You stay here and sleep.’

Violet’s coat and motoring cap were slung over a chair, a sign that their owner had returned and gone to bed. Not-Triss tiptoed to the window, shivering at the cold, and pulled back the
curtain. When she rubbed at the clouded pane with her sleeve, the latter came away with a crumbly smudge of white. The mistiness of the window was not steam, she realized to her surprise, but a
thin layer of ice. Beyond the cleared pane the sky was low and grey with a yellowish tinge, the street deserted.

According to the clock it was ten past four. With every passing hour, there would be more people abroad on the streets. If she wanted to sneak through Ellchester without a risk of family friends
spotting the eldest Crescent daughter, it had to be sooner rather than later. Not-Triss dug through the boxes of Violet’s belongings by the wall, until she found a carving knife and a cloth
bag that she could ‘borrow’.

It’s best to leave Pen behind
, she thought, as she donned her jacket and started looking for her shoes.
She’s only little, and she talks too much, and I might be going
somewhere dangerous
—

There was a rustle of blankets behind her. She turned to find Pen sitting up, rubbing at her hair in a disgruntled way.

‘Where are you going?’

Not-Triss hesitated. Her tongue seemed to have run out of lies.

‘I’m going to steal a cockerel, then walk into the Victory Bridge,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll be back in a few hours. Go back to sleep – it’s four in the
morning.’

‘You have to let me come! You were sneaking out without me!’ Pen rubbed her eyes, scowling, and Not-Triss could not tell how far her own words had penetrated. ‘And I’m
hungry,’ Pen added as an afterthought.

‘Then stay here,’ answered Not-Triss, almost keeping the snappishness out of her voice as she continued the search for her shoes. ‘Violet will feed you when she gets
up.’

‘But I’m hungry
now
,’ Pen declared obstinately. ‘Aren’t you?’

Slightly to her surprise, Not-Triss realized that she
wasn’t
hungry. But she had been at one point in the night, ravenously so. She had sat up, wildly famished, and the first
thing her eyes had settled upon had been . . .