Eyes Like Stars (21 page)

Not waiting for his protests or promises, Bertie knelt in front of him with the medallion warm between her fingers. She looked past the delicate features, the composure and grace, to stare into the liquid black of his pupils. In the dark, she found the soul-winds he rode, peeled back the currents like so much gift wrap, and there she spotted the windmill.

“Oh, Ariel.” Bertie managed a short laugh at his cleverness before issuing her command. “Call in the
Man of La Mancha
set.”

“No!” he cried out.

“Not another word,” Bertie said as she stood, “or I’ll burn your butterflies to ash. Spirits of the air wouldn’t take kindly to fire.”

He made a choking noise of protest but didn’t speak again.

Peaseblossom peered into the flies. “What about the trees? They’re holding the ceiling up.”

“Keep them in the background,” Bertie said. “We can’t risk moving them out completely.”

The canopy of branches overhead parted, permitting an
enormous windmill to descend. It landed with a hollow thud. The impact sent a spiral of cracks skittering along the wooden floor, though long, luxuriant grasses soon obscured the fault lines. The stalks swayed in the breeze as the windmill began to rotate.

Bertie clasped The Book to her chest and held her breath. “Please let this work. Please.”

Everyone waited. Another rotation of the windmill’s sails marked the passing seconds like a madhouse clock. Bertie’s hair unfurled over her shoulders and gathered in snarls. Caught in the same breeze, a single piece of golden paper fluttered down from the windmill and tumbled across the stage. It glowed with its own faint but undeniable light. Bertie leapt upon it and scanned the words:

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. ACT I, SCENE I.

“It’s a page from The Book.” Her words spread like wildfire through the dry grasses as everyone took up the whisper. A second page fluttered down. Bertie caught it mid-flight and unfolded it.

LONDON. A GALLERY IN THE PALACE.

“This one’s from
Henry the Eighth
!” Bertie smoothed it out and placed it with the other one as dozens of pages fluttered loose from the windmill’s sails. “We need to gather all of them! But be careful!”

Everyone shed their cloaks and set to work.

“Mr. Hastings would love this,” Moth said, dropping three more pages on Bertie’s head.

“We might have to get him up here. This is ridiculous.” At first Bertie tried to identify each page and sort them into some semblance of order, but she gave up as the pile in her arms grew. “All these couldn’t have fit in The Book.”

“That was part of the magic,” Peaseblossom acknowledged, then broke off to yell, “Cobweb, stop trying to tip that thing over! You’re only supposed to
tilt
at it.”

Bertie glanced down at Ariel. He had his eyes closed, but she knew better than to think he was praying. “I think that’s all for this set.”

“Where to next, m’lady?” Mustardseed mopped his brow.

Bertie stared hard at the prostrate air elemental, remembering how he’d tried to tempt her after the Stage Manager announced she was to leave. She heard his beguiling, mesmeric voice say, “The London that doesn’t appear in
Peter Pan
.”

“Bring in the London set again.”

The city returned just as they’d seen it at the
Hamlet
rehearsal, with cobblestones, pea-soup fog, and gaslight. The Company looked about them in confusion when no pages appeared.

“Maybe the garbage in the gutters?” Ophelia suggested.

“We’re not that historically accurate,” Bertie said, thinking
of the rows of shelving the Properties Department would require to hold that much trash.

“Then where?” Moth demanded.

The lights shifted as ghostly actors streamed onstage. Flower girls offered their bouquets to the gentlefolk. Jack the Ripper stalked his prey while Mr. Hyde chased Dr. Jekyll. The Queen and her courtiers took the air. Shades of the past, dressed in all manner of top hats and gowns with swishing petticoats . . .

Made of paper.

“Get their clothes!” Bertie ordered. “They’re wearing the pages!”

The Company blinked at her, then looked more closely at the costumes. Origami-folded flowers decorated hats and filled Eliza Doolittle’s basket. Moth and Cobweb chased three Darling children flying in their pajamas until they procured a paper top hat and teddy bear. The fairy that accompanied them had a page folded into her wings. Peaseblossom and Mustardseed wrestled her to the stage and extracted it along with quite a lot of pixie dust and tinkling profanity. Mustardseed seemed quite smitten, though she gouged up his face with her tiny, glittering fingernails and bit him for an encore.

“Hurry!” Bertie commanded. “I don’t want a single page loose when the lamplighters come around.” She shuddered at the idea of fire.

But there were other hazards to consider first. It took three members of the Company to divest Mr. Hyde of his waistcoat. Her Royal Majesty was so loath to part with her overskirt that Ophelia was forced to sit upon her and wrestle it off. A miserly gentleman tried to bat the fairies out of the air with his umbrella when they went after his coin purse.

“Be careful!” Bertie yelled at them. “Don’t rip anything!”

“Mrs. Edith is going to raise a ruckus,” Peaseblossom noted. “We’re dismantling her work.”

“I’m not certain these are hers,” Bertie said. “Have you ever seen paper clothing in the Wardrobe Department?”

“No,” Peaseblossom admitted. “But who made them, then?”

Moth jumped up and down on their captive’s back. “Did you do this?”

Ariel shook his head. “I scattered them, but the theater did the rest.”

“Did we get them all?” Bertie asked him, holding the medallion. “Answer me true.”

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more,” Ariel said as though against his will. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

“Macbeth’s line,” Bertie mused. “Nothing, nothing . . . You speak an infinite deal of nothing. More than any man in
all Venice.” She turned to Peaseblossom. “We need to go to Venice.”

“Scene change!” the fairy called out.

There was an immediate blackout. Bertie felt the Players gather around her, the rush of air as one set of buildings flew out and another replaced them. There was the rustle of pages and the sickening lap of water against docks.

When the lights flooded up, Bertie indulged in a laugh that bordered on hysteria. “Truth has indeed come into sight.”

The age-worn buildings that lined the back wall, the gondola they sat in, the water of the canal itself were all made with pages from The Book.

Ariel lay prostrate in the bottom of the boat. “I guess I should be thankful I wasn’t left on the stage to drown in paper.”

“That’s only because no one asked me my preference.” Bertie sucked in a deep breath. “We need to strike the set.”

“Mr. Tibbs will have our guts for garters!” Moth said, appalled.

Bertie overruled the protest. “I’m the Director, and I need the pages.
All
the pages. Take it apart. That’s an order!”

Everyone dove overboard and swam in all directions at once. Two of the girls shinnied up the barber poles and pulled off the stripes. The burlier men dismantled the other boats. Ophelia sat in the gondola, very still, with her eyes closed.

“You don’t want to jump in?” Bertie asked her.

“The weight of words is far heavier than water,” Ophelia said. “They would drag me to the bottom and hold me captive there.”

As though to prove her wrong, Macbeth backstroked through the vellum waves. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?”

Moth considered the proffered appendage. “Nope, you still have jam on you.”

Mr. Tibbs entered Stage Right, scattering cigar ash and sawdust in his wake. He came to a dead halt when he spotted one group tearing down the back wall while three other members of the Company captured canal water and stacked it into piles. “What in the name of the sweet god’s suspenders is going on here?”

“We had a little incident.” Bertie put herself in harm’s way between the irate Scenic Manager and the nearly demolished set.

“Who authorized constructing scenery out of paper?” Mr. Tibbs chomped down on his cigar so hard that he bit the end right off. Peaseblossom caught the smoldering chunk before it could hit the page-covered floor, whisking it off to the ash can with her little nose wrinkled up.

“I’m afraid he did, sir.” Bertie nudged Ariel with her foot. “Such a silly thing to do, I know. But who can understand the mental workings of such impractical creatures?”

Mr. Tibbs dismissed the captive air elemental with a wave of his hand and another flurry of sawdust. “This is a cursed waste of time and glue, as well as a fire hazard!”

“Just what I told him, sir,” Bertie said. “Yet Mr. Hastings seemed most taken with the idea. He even took one of the gondolas down to the Properties Department to examine the craftsmanship.”

“He did!” The revelation gave Mr. Tibbs pause. “The nerve of that sticky-fingered shoplifter! Something as large as a gondola is a piece of scenery!” He twitched, clearly conflicted.

Bertie hastened to reassure him. “If you want to reclaim it, I’ll supervise the cleanup here, sir.”

“I’ll be back in just a minute! And I’ll tolerate no more of your shenanigans, miss!” Mr. Tibbs turned on his heel and marched off.

Bertie sent a silent apology in Mr. Hastings’ direction and hoped Mr. Tibbs wouldn’t return anytime soon, as she was quite sure there were a few more shenanigans to get through.

“We got all the papers that were here,” Mustardseed said.

Moth shook his tiny head. “But I’m sure some are still missing.”

“Yeah, I feel pretty free,” Cobweb said, “and it’s not just the lack of underpants.”

When Bertie reached for the scrimshaw one more time,
the words of the Sea Goddess drifted through her head, unbidden:
His magic! The blood, the bones. You are
his
child!

Bertie had devoted countless daydreams to her mother, but now there was an unnamed “him” to suddenly consider.

My father.

It was too big an idea; it wouldn’t fit inside her already crowded head. She tried not to think of it, tried not to think of Nate, of where he might be or what might have happened to him by now. Longing for the quiet, reassuring presence that would have dispatched all this turmoil with one solid blow of his cutlass against Ariel’s neck, Bertie forced herself to concentrate only upon the prone figure before her. “Are we still missing pages, Ariel?”

He didn’t answer.

“Where, oh, where have you hidden the rest?” Bertie looked about them. With Venice completely dismantled, the cracks in the stage floor were once again visible, as was the half-circle of ancient trees. Bertie reached out to stroke the gnarled bark, watching as a single, yellow leaf fluttered from the rafters, drifted in a downward spiral, and landed at her feet. She peered up at the thousands of leaves rustling in the boughs of the ancient trees. “They’re up there.”

The fairies disappeared within the branches, causing pages to rain down upon the stage.

“Be careful!” Bertie yelled.

“We are!” answered four voices. After that, the only noise came from paper fluttering through the air.

“Tricky, Ariel. Tricky, tricky, tricky.” Bertie knelt next to him. “But not tricky enough.”

“You can’t be sure you have all of them,” he muttered.

“Oh, yes,” Bertie said. “I feel it, Ariel. Not in my head, or my heart, because you taught me not to rely on those. But I feel it.” She leaned very close to him, until her lips brushed against his ear. “I feel it in my
bones
.”

W
ith The Book’s
leather cover still in her arms, Bertie felt a sudden sympathy and kinship with Juliet upon waking to find Romeo poisoned. She held what remained, the cooling corpse of something beloved, wishing to all the gods that she could turn the hourglass over and set things to rights.

The scene onstage was a
tableau vivant
of gloom and despair. The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Choruses gazed helplessly at the pages, stacked in some places on the stage as high as their waists, countless more filling the orchestra pit and half the seats in the auditorium.

“Fixing this is gonna take a metric buttload of glue,” Moth said.

“Are you insane?” Bertie asked. “All of these won’t fit back between the covers. It’s physically impossible.”

“Maybe you could write them back in,” Mustardseed said. “The scriptwriting worked to capture Ariel.”

Bertie’s heart leapt at the idea and plunged just as suddenly. “My words don’t affect The Book, remember? I kept trying to rewrite the ending of the scene so that The Book wasn’t destroyed, but we still went to blackout. We’ll have to find another way to fix it.”

“It’s not going to be easy.” Peaseblossom shook her head. “It’s a magical object.”

“Or it was,” Mustardseed said. “Now it just looks like a pile of recycling.”

Bertie surveyed the pages piled around her. Feeble fingers of power reached out, struggling to prevent further destruction to the Théâtre.

But how long do we have before that power fades?

“There’s still magic here,” she said. “I just need to figure out how to use it.” Picking up one of the pages, Bertie held its edge against The Book’s inner spine and willed it to stick. When that didn’t work, she added, “If this page goes back in, I won’t make a mess on the stage ever again.”

“Wow,” Moth said, impressed by the enormity of her offering, but nothing happened.

“Maybe it wants something more than that,” Peaseblossom said. “A bigger sacrifice.”

Bertie closed her eyes. “If the pages go back in The Book, I’ll stop smoking.”

“Double wow!” Cobweb said, peering over her shoulder. “But it’s holding out for something else.”