Thornghost (18 page)

I
n the small, stretched hours, somewhere between waking and sleep, Niklas curled up in a dark cage. The sound from Kepler's pen in the barracks whispered by his ear.

Drip, drip, drip.

He knew he had to stay asleep and stay quiet. If the sound of his heartbeat got too loud, they would hear. His arm burned where Rafsa had marked him, and when he peered out through his lashes to look, his skin glowed with magic. But it wasn't the
break
rune anymore. It was an eye inside a square.

Awake.

Niklas opened his eyes.

He was in Sorrowdeep.

In the middle of Sorrowdeep and so cold.

He saw his mother. Twelve years old and the captain of a small rowing boat. Anders was there, too, and Peder
Molyk. Sebastifer at the bow, barking hard. Wedged between them was the cage. They were sinking.

The little boat foundered fast. The children scooped water over the gunwale, all of them crying, until there was no gunwale anymore, just a pale frame in the dark water. They were all in the lake, and Sebastifer's barks turned to yips as he treaded the water fast, fast. The boys splashed around in panic first, then made for land. But Erika wasn't with them. She was below, deep under. Her pale hair billowed as she clawed at something on the bottom of the lake. Something heavy, something impossible to shift.

The cage.

Bubbles rose in frantic streams from Erika's mouth and from between the bars, but they grew smaller in size now, and farther between. She had no breath left, but Erika wouldn't let go. She kept tugging, kept wriggling.

Pearls of air clung to her lashes as her hands slowed.

A shadow came from above and stuck his snout under her arms, jolting her into action, pushing her up toward the splintered moonlight.

Erika kicked and kicked.

When she broke the surface of Sorrowdeep, she was alone.

H
e rubbed the sleep from his eyes and packed his things into his satchel. Might as well bring everything. Chances were they wouldn't come back here.

“Make sure you get some bread, too.” Secret melted down from her beam. The smell of fresh baking wafted out from the kitchen.

Niklas smiled. “Wouldn't go without.” He would have to learn how to make that bread if they made it back home.
When,
he told himself. No point in inviting the bad luck.

“What was it about?” Secret said. “The nightmare?”

Niklas closed the lid of his satchel. He must have been thrashing in his sleep, then. “Oh, the usual. Sorrowdeep. Drowning. Mixed with some nice troll runes this time.”

Secret tilted her head. “You're scared, and with good reason. I don't need dreams to tell me this won't end well.”

Niklas shrugged, but the image of the pearly air
slipping up through the dark water jostled its way into his head and left his fingers clammy. At the threshold Secret stopped and flicked her ear back. “You can only be brave if you're scared in the first place, cub. Come on. Kepler is waiting for us.”

• • •

D
awn trickled through the leaves of the Rosa Torquata, promising a gray day. Lucky: It might make it easier to escape the hollow eyes of the skullbeaks. Kepler had made a big fuss out of Secret's fur, and she had grudgingly agreed to wear a drab cloak to hide it.

She pulled it on now, one whisker short of pouting, when Castine called behind them, “Wait.”

The squirrel stood on the steps to the Second Ruby clutching something in her paws. “I can't let you go to the Nighthouse without these.” She held out two small discs, each fastened at the end of a leather cord. They were carved from wood and painted in mist blue, dark rust, and gold. She opened the lid. Even in the wan light, Niklas could see what they represented: a boy and a lynx.

Medallions.

She approached Niklas first. The medallion settled against his chest, heavier than he had expected, but also oddly comforting. The lynx's ears were the tips of diamond apple spikes, and flecks of jet patterned her fur. Castine was the one who seemed to hate his mother the most, but
from her tired eyes, Niklas guessed she had stayed up all night to finish these. He smiled at her. “I didn't think the human got one. Thank you.”

She smiled back. “It was Sebastifer who gave me the idea, once upon a time. He couldn't carve for the life of him with his dog paws, but he showed me how to pour the love into the wood. I never got to give him a medallion. He would want you to have one instead.”

Then it was Secret's turn. She lifted her paw to study her medallion. The boy's face within the lid was mostly blank, but the sapphire eyes and mop of dark hair definitely belonged to Niklas.

“I didn't have time to do the features,” Castine said. “I'll finish it when you return. So see that you do.”

For the first time, Niklas felt the sting of the medallion. It was like an extra heartbeat that planted a feeling in his chest. Gratitude. “You're very kind.” Secret shut the lid and looked away. “Maybe you can make a new one for Kepler first.”

Castine frowned at the ferret, who stood by the fountain. Petals drifted down around him, some landing in the water, and he watched them drench and dissolve. “They broke his Marti,” Secret said.

“Okay.” Castine sucked in a deep breath. “Just keep him safe if you can.”

Kepler was supposed to keep them safe, Niklas thought, or as safe as they could be, headed for the Sparrow King's
nest. But as he watched their guide ease his weight over to his injured leg, he knew that Castine was right. “All he needs to do is show us the stairs, and we'll do the rest,” he promised.

Castine nodded and skipped back to the steps, where Odar and Too had come out through the door with the scent of aniseed
.
Kepler stirred, nose twitching. “That's enough for good-byes,” he said. “Let's go before the other Brokeners show up, too. And before . . .” He pointed vaguely at the thousands of thorns around them, each sharp enough to slice through bone. There was no need to add the rest.

• • •

T
hey chose a different path through the garden this time, staying on the seventh circle among the pear and plum trees until they reached the far end of the valley, near the left bluff. There they carved their way down to the fjord, struggling along the tall stone fence that marked the border. The banks were so thick with dark vine that they often had to double back to find another way.

But Kepler brought them down to the shore without once coming near the enemy or exposing them to the pale sky.

“What is that smell?” Niklas crinkled his nose as they crawled to the edge of the fjord. The wind reeked of salty sulfur. “Not trolls, I hope?”

Secret snorted. “No, that's the smell of low tide. Morning breath of the ocean.”

Obviously lynxes got to travel more than farm boys. He felt a sting of jealousy. “How do you know?”

“I've been there, in the cold months. The water is poison. Not good if you want to live.”

Right in front of them, the causeway formed a crescent across the bay. It measured maybe ten yards across and was littered with seaweed that stretched out on the sand, limp and oozing.

Mysterious prisoner or no, Niklas couldn't believe Kepler had gone out there alone. How did he know that there was something to find on the other side?

“Have you done this many times?”

“Just the once.” Kepler's voice came out clipped, as if he had trouble squeezing air out of his lungs. He glanced up at the sky. “Morning has flowed faster than I had hoped. We have to go, or we'll be caught out there.”

The ocean licked at the bank from both sides, lifting the seaweed as it foamed past. The sand was so drenched, it felt wobbly. Their feet made shallow marks that filled with water as they darted along the causeway. Suddenly Secret tugged them to a stop. “Don't move,” she said in the very calm way that Niklas had learned meant deadly danger. They pulled down the hoods of their sand-colored cloaks.

“What?” Niklas whispered. Secret glanced upward. The
Nighthouse loomed atop the cliff, wreathed in wisps of fog. A skullbeak was circling the dome. Now it banked out over the fjord, hollow scream rising as it came closer.

Kepler squeezed his lids shut. His left hand grasped for his Marti medallion, but found nothing. His breath grew so wheezy, Niklas was sure the skullbeak would hear. But it didn't. It turned back and headed for the docks.

“That was lucky,” Niklas muttered as they clambered up on the far cliff.

“Very,” Secret said. But the look she gave Kepler was full of worry.

T
he ledge wound along the base of the cliff at the high tide mark, no more than a foot wide and near impossible to find if you didn't know it was there. Somehow Kepler had discovered it anyway on his previous expedition, and he led them now, inching along the ledge with his back turned to the Frothsea.

Below them, sharp rocks jutted out of the roaring water, and they felt the spray of each wave. Every four feet or so there was a hollow in the rock near their shoulders. They could easily be mistaken for natural cracks, but when you stuck your hand inside, the hollows curled inward to make a concealed handle, perfect for holding on to when the wind gusted or a big wave came in.

Someone had crafted these handles, as well as the path they secured.

Niklas tilted his head back. Far above, the mountain
gave way to smoother stone. The castle leaned out over the edge, and he could see the Nighthouse as a black half-moon. A flock of skullbeaks wheeled over the tower, but whether it was luck or the smuggler's cloaks that kept them hidden, they still went unnoticed.

Kepler sidled along with his eyes shut, as if his fingers knew more than he did. Suddenly he stopped by a narrow opening in the rock. It looked like just another weather-worn crack, and the ledge continued on. Kepler slipped into the opening, spidering along by way of crude footholds. Niklas had to shout to be heard above the din of the ocean. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

Kepler pointed at a blotch in the cliff wall. Niklas had thought it was a patch of lichen, but when he bent down to inspect it, he saw that Kepler was right. The gold leaf of Jewelgard.

The crack turned out to be a cove that curled in on itself like a spiral, and at the deepest crook nestled a staircase. The steps rose beyond the funnel of the cove and climbed wildly along the face of the cliff lined with old seagull nests and tufts of bleached grass. There was no railing and after a while, Niklas decided to stop looking down at the foaming waves. When they took a rare moment to rest, he asked, “How come the skullbeaks haven't found this?”

Kepler put a finger over his lips and pointed up. “Better be silent.” The castle walls loomed taller now, cut from dull, black glass. The ever-present Nighthouse fog trailed
down like hanging moss. It smelled sweet and rotten. Niklas couldn't see any sign of life, and the skullbeaks had not been out for a while. Yet the nightmare feeling had never weighed as heavily on him as on these stairs. The shifting, brooding quality of the air sent prickles down his back.

At last the steps ended with a door in the mountain wall. It was made of weathered wood and reinforced by metal scrollwork of entangled thorns. There was no handle or keyhole, but a single thorn poked out in the middle. Kepler nodded at Niklas, and whispered, “Let it taste you.”

“You're sure?” Secret frowned at Kepler. “That's what you did last time?”

“Yes.” Kepler clutched at his chest where Marti's medallion belonged, his fingers searching until the other paw came up to stop it. “It's just like the gate thorns of the Nickwood. I'm worried it will taste that disgusting troll poison in my blood. But it will let you in. You're a Twistrose.”

“Not a real one,” Niklas said. He pressed the pad of his thumb against the tip until a drop of blood came out. The door swung open with a creak. A passageway continued upward into the mountain, dark but for glimmering tiles of glass on the steps.

A sound whispered down to meet them: a swooshing swelling and dying down, as if the sea had a brother deep in the castle.

Kepler swayed slightly. Niklas was none too certain that their guide could manage more stairs without falling backward, so he put his arm around Kepler's shoulders. “Let's go together.”

Kepler didn't protest. “Careful,” he said. “The door is heavy.”

It slammed shut as soon as Secret had passed the threshold as the last of the three, leaving them in the ghostly sheen. The inside of the door had no handle, no thorn.

Secret's tail thumped against Niklas's legs. “I hope no one heard that boom.”

Kepler turned back. The light picked out only the stripes of his face. “The trolls don't know about this passage, or we would have smelled them.”

“Let's keep going,” Niklas said.

They emerged through a slim, concealed door behind a pillar in the corner of a courtyard. A wooden gallery enclosed the yard, but the rest was all smoky, dark stone. The massive walls had turrets at each corner, and in the middle of the west wall, the hulking round tower of the Nighthouse disappeared into thicker mist. All of it was covered with creeping dark vines.

Niklas had the strangest feeling he had seen this before.

He turned in a circle, taking in the flagstones, the crenellated curtain walls, the gatehouse in the east with the drawbridge raised against the lowered grate. But the pieces didn't click into place until a gust of wind lifted
the fog around the Nighthouse. The dome had a wraparound balcony and a wide band of windows under ridged half-moon tiles that looked like fingernails.

“It's my mother's bird castle!” He rubbed his forehead. How could she have known exactly what it looked like? Somehow the Nighthouse had made it into her dreams with photographic precision.

“What are you doing?” Secret's voice was not her normal calm or even flat. It sounded slurry with uncertainty. She wasn't talking to Niklas. Her eyes were trained on Kepler. The ferret had slipped away from them and made his way to the gate. Next to the gate hung a large bell with a clapper for gripping. An alarm bell.

“Nothing.”

“Then why do you reek like a coward?”

Kepler grasped and grasped at his chest, leaning against the wall. “I . . . I. Ngh.” His other hand flew up to stop the clawing.

“Kepler,” Niklas began, but then he stopped, staring at Kepler's hand in horror as it moved slowly toward the bell. “What are you doing?”

Kepler glared at his fingers on the clapper. His eyes bulged. “It . . . It's my task to ring the bell now.”

“But they'll know we're here,” Niklas said.

“The Sparrow King already knows. He knows everything.”

“I actually trusted you,” Secret said.
“So stupid.
” She
turned to Niklas, eyes watering. “What should we do? Attack him before he rings the bell?”

“No!” Niklas touched her scruff. They'd never reach him in time to stop him. And this was Kepler, brave, hopeful Kepler, who dreamed of freeing Broken.

“Have to . . .” Kepler almost gagged to get the words out. “Ring the bell!”

His hand swung the clapper hard against the metal of the bell. The noise rolled around the courtyard, rose up along the tower of the Nighthouse, and fled into the sky.

The skullbeaks answered, letting their
hooooowooooo
break loose over the ruin city. Inside the castle sounded a long, shrill troll cry. And up in the Nighthouse, a tall shape stepped in front of the window, beak curved like a plague-doctor.

The Sparrow King was watching.