Thornghost (19 page)

K
epler kept the bell ringing, ringing. The peals thundered in Niklas's head, making it impossible to think. They had to hide, but where? The door where they had emerged from the sea stairs had closed. The only other exits from the courtyard were the drawbridge and the castle door, behind which thundering footsteps approached. The trolls were awake in there. Outside the walls, the skullbeaks howled.

Hooooowoooo.

Secret turned her mangled ear to him, as if to say,
You decide our next move.

Niklas couldn't think of any moves. There was nothing to do but wait to be captured.

Dark vine was creeping up where the concealed door had been, smothering the wall with its thorny web, exactly
like the roses his mother had carved on the Summerhill birdhouse.

Wait.

If this was his mother's Nightmare castle down to every detail—if she had really dreamt about this place back in her bed in Summerhill—then maybe she knew more about it than what the surface showed. In the birdhouse, she had hidden two secret compartments. One at the top of the tower, and one beneath the round flagstone! Niklas searched the courtyard, and there it was: right at the foot of the Nighthouse, a round stone etched with a thorn.

He sprinted over to it. The flagstone measured two feet across. It lay completely flush with the rest of the courtyard. He needed to spring it open, but how?

He pressed the stone. Nothing.

He knocked on it, stepped on it, scratched the thorn, used his fingernails to dig into the surrounding mortar. Nothing.

Hooooowooooo.

For a short, desperate moment Niklas wished Lin were there. She solved riddles all the time, like it was nothing, but he had never been able to figure out the answer to anything.

Except he
had.
This past week he had. He had found out his mother's secrets.

Exactly how the worlds were connected, Niklas had no idea. But maybe there was some of Erika in this place,
too? With her, things always moved in circles: The spire must be screwed off, the statue spun around, the medallion twisted to open the secret chamber of her heart.

He put the heels of his hands on the stone and used his whole weight to turn it around. It moved with surprising ease. When it had turned full circle, it lifted two inches out of the ground, revealing a handle along the edge.

“Quick,” he said to Secret. “Help me get it out!”

Secret lifted the hatch, but at the last moment, she glanced across the courtyard at Kepler.

Tears leaked down the ferret's face as he rang the bell harder and faster, filling the castle with a mad clangor. His eyes were shut. He couldn't see where they were going.

Niklas and Secret jumped through the hatch.

• • •

T
he cellar echoed with sounds: hooting and screeching from the courtyard above, footsteps pounding through hallways. Doors slammed and voices shouted, but no one came running down the same tunnel as Secret and Niklas. He almost dared hope they moved in a separate, concealed grid, until they found a lone, lit lantern on the wall, sputtering with rancid oil.

The trolls had been here not too long ago.

Niklas patted Secret on the back. “At least we'll see where we're going. Maybe we'll luck out again and find another exit.”

“We're moving deeper into the mountain.” Secret turned away from the flickering light. “And it was never luck. Not Kepler's rescue, not the sneaking. Odar was right. It was too easy.” She hissed. “I shouldn't have trusted him.”

“We shouldn't have brought him in the first place. He changed after the barracks, Secret. They broke him.”
And it was my fault he ended up there,
Niklas thought. They couldn't hear the bell anymore. Either they had come too far belowground, or Kepler had stopped. But the desperate ringing still played in Niklas's head.

“Not so soft-hearted, cub,” Secret said, but the angle of her neck was anything but hard.

Dirt and half-gnawed animal bones lined the hallways, and the sour-milk stink wafted out of the stairwells. Secret sniffed the empty frame of a door that had been torn clean off its hinges, revealing a nest of dirty beds within. “Used to be oak.”

Niklas grimaced. “Rafsa is nothing if not thorough.” He could very well imagine the troll witch striding down these tunnels, bone armor clattering, claws scritching against the stone, ordering doors to be removed.

Secret stopped, nostrils flaring.

“What is it?” Niklas couldn't smell anything other than troll stink.

“Fur and old piss,” Secret said. “But something else, too. Something sweet and burnt, like in Kepler's pen in the barracks.”

They turned the corner.

“Oh no,” Niklas whispered. “No, that can't be right!”

Kepler hadn't lied about everything, not about the troll conversation he had overheard. But he had guessed wrong about the prisoner. It wasn't Marcelius.

They stood on the doorway of a dank cell, full of filthy rushes. Behind the bars, the sole prisoner slept in the middle of the floor. He was hooked up by needles and long, snaking tubes to a flask mounted on a hospital rack. The flask contained a black liquid that dripped, dripped, dripped into the veins of a bone-thin dog.

Niklas knew this dog: the floppy ears, the black patches, and the gentle curve of his snout. And not just from the figurine in his pocket. From his dreams as well.

“Sebastifer?”
Niklas took a step forward. “Can you hear me?”

Sebastifer whimpered in his sleep. Just like Kepler had done.

“Don't be scared,” Niklas said. “I'm Erika's son. Your girl Erika? I'm going to help you.” He tugged at the heavy padlock on the cell door. “Just please wake up?”

But Sebastifer didn't stir. The liquid dripped and dripped. Troll poison, Kepler had called it.

“We have to get in there,” Niklas said. “We have to get that stuff away from him.” He began kicking around in the rotten straw.

“What are you doing?” Secret murmured into his ear. “We won't be able to break that lock.”

“We won't have to.” Niklas found what he was looking for. Trolls were messy. Of course they had tossed discarded needles on the floor. They were gooey and horrible, but they would work. He wiped them off on the rushes and stuck them into the padlock.

“You know how to pick a lock.” Secret couldn't hide the pleased smirk on her face.

“I borrowed one of Lin's dad's research books. How else would I get into the Fale cellars for plum jam?” Niklas wiggled the final needle into the hole. “Don't tell Mrs. Fale. Or my grandmother.”

The lock sprang open, and the cage door creaked on its hinges.

Sebastifer still didn't move. When Niklas unhooked him from the needles and untangled him from the tubes, he kicked and yelped in his sleep. He was dreaming. Niklas tried shaking him and even pinched his wet black nose, but no matter what he did, Sebastifer would not wake.

“I don't think he can.” Niklas felt his chest clench. “Look at his fur.”

Sebastifer had been marked, top to bottom, with troll runes. Niklas recognized the one from the sleeping stone trolls in the cave, the eye that meant
awake.
He had to use his mother's rune book to decipher the others:
Sleep.
Dream.
A long fang meant
obey.
And one he had only seen twice before, on the lid of his mother's troll-hunting casket. And on Rafsa herself, cut deep on her entire lower arm. A four-pointed star that meant
power.

“They've bound him with magic.” Niklas closed the book. “We're going to have to lift him up and take him with us.”

“And go where?” Secret's bad ear drooped. “We don't know where we are, and we may have to bolt at any moment. You know we can't outrun the trolls if we're carrying him between us.”

She lifted her paw and put it gently on Sebastifer's shoulder. At the touch, Sebastifer turned over in his sleep and whined. “The night grows dark, Erika. But I can't find you!”

That's because she's gone,
Niklas thought.
She can't help you, or us, or anyone.
His eyes stung.

As his vision blurred, Sebastifer's whimpers filled his head. There was something about them. They were just snippets, but there was a pattern. A melody. One Niklas had heard before.

“Wake now, little rose,” he sang, trying to fit the song over the sounds. “The night grows dark and old . . .” He faltered. It was all he could remember of his mother's lullaby. But for a brief moment, Sebastifer's tail and ears had twitched.
Had he heard?

At the bottom of his satchel Niklas found a wrinkled
sheet of paper and smoothed it out on his knees. He had jotted down the words from the tape in Morello House, only a few days ago, although it seemed like a thousand.

He couldn't bear to look at Sebastifer as he sang, so instead he watched Secret, and her golden eyes rimmed in black and white, and her lone ear tuft and spotted fur, so out of place in this cell.

Wake now, little rose,

The night grows dark and old.

Your feet must find the trail tonight,

To Sorrowdeep the cold.

Wait now, little dog,

Your voice will carry through.

The key lies in her hand tonight,

Sebastifer the true.

Sleep then, ghost of thorns,

If you can't play the part.

Your love will lead you nowhere when

It's locked inside your heart.

Somewhere during the second verse, Sebastifer fell silent, and when Niklas finished the last line of the song, he turned back, expecting to see the dog resting peacefully. Instead Sebastifer sat upright, staring right at him.
Clouds of black drifted across his eyes, but his nostrils flared.

“Erika, is that you?”

“No,” Niklas said. “She couldn't come. I'm sorry.”

The dog scratched his ear, and when he looked at Niklas again, his eyes were weary, but clear. “You smell like her. Like woods and night mist and fun.”

The black liquid leaked down his face like ink tears.

“Here.” Niklas held out his water bottle.

Sebastifer drank in big gulps. He looked terribly weak. Secret gave him her loaf of aniseed bread, and it was gone in two bites.

“Thank you.” Sebastifer sighed. “It's been a long time since I had fresh bread.”

Very long, Niklas thought, since before Erika carved the bird castle, at the very least. How else would she know where to place his prison? Suddenly he remembered what Kepler had said: The prisoner would destroy the Sparrow King's plans if he escaped. “Do you know why they kept you down here?”

“To keep the canyon gate open.” Sebastifer's eyes clouded over, as if the words were pulling him back into the dream. “I have to keep it open for my girl, Erika. She is a Twistrose. I'm waiting for her.”

“I know. I'm sorry.” Niklas took a painful breath. “Erika isn't coming. She's dead. She died seven years ago, when I was little. I'm her son. Niklas.”

Sebastifer shook off the drowsiness again. “I . . . know. Yes, I remember. I felt her slip away, but I get so confused. You're Niklas?”

“Yes.”

The dog wagged his tail. “I've been dreaming about you. Something about boots with muck in them? And a girl named Lin who left? And Alma is old now?”

Niklas nodded. “Lin left, but I have Secret now. And Grandma Alma is old, but she's okay. Except . . .” He wondered how lucid the dog was. He looked so weak. But he had to try to explain. “I came here to close the gate in the canyon. The one you've been keeping open? Magic from the Realms is leaking through it into our world, poisoning the Summerchild. There are trolls in the woods.”

Sebastifer's eyebrows shot up in the middle. “Trolls? They went to Summerhill?”

“That's not even half of it. The Sparrow King is doing something terrible here, in this world. I don't know what it is, but it involves the Rosa Torquata and the dark vine that is spreading everywhere. I think it's breaking the canyon gate open.”

“Yes.” Sebastifer blinked. “You're right. That's what they want. They want to make a big hole to Summerhill.” His ears wilted. “They told me I could see Erika if I only kept waiting. Instead I've been helping them with their plan. I'm so sorry . . .”

“It is him, then,” Secret said. “Sebastifer is the prisoner
Kepler talked about. The one whose rescue would ruin the whole plan.” She wrinkled her nose at the medical equipment that lay in an ugly pile on the floor. “So is it ruined now?”

Niklas had no idea. “Only one way to be sure. Sebastifer, we have to get you out of here.”

A door slammed. Troll voices bellowed, still a ways off, but closer than before. Niklas put his hand carefully on the old dog's shoulder. “Do you know a way out? We can't go back where we came from. The skullbeaks will probably be waiting by that trapdoor like Tobis by his favorite mouse hole.”