“Nimira was just talking to me about things,” Violet said. “I was upset.”
Celestina nodded. This seemed to appease her a bit. Maybe she was relieved I had talked to Violet.
I hadn’t realized how cold the upstairs had been until I was near the heavenly warmth of the woodstove again. Erris really should be by the woodstove, drying out. I stared out the window for a long moment, willing him to return.
“Where is Erris?” Celestina said, apparently reading my mind. “It’s cold out there.”
I had a sudden image of Erris’s wet gears clogging with ice, trapping him in a cold prison, and I shuddered.
“I don’t know,” I said. My throat was tight. “He wants to be alone.”
“I wonder if he wants to be alone as much as he thinks he does,” Celestina said. “When I burned myself, I said I wanted to be alone, but I didn’t. I just didn’t want people to look at me the way they did. He must feel kind of burned all over.”
I nodded slowly. “I just don’t know how to… I mean… I feel like he already hates me sometimes.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Violet said. “He talks about you. He says you’re such a good singer.”
That was almost worse. I didn’t want to be just a “good singer.” “I mean in some deep down way,” I said.
I couldn’t tell them how Erris and I had argued, how I felt or how I thought he felt. My pride was like a web of knots encasing me, holding everything in, and while the tension could be uncomfortable, it was more terrifying to think of everything spilling out.
“I know he doesn’t hate you,” Celestina said. “I see how he looks at you.”
“How does he look at me?”
“I don’t know. He just looks happy.”
I shrugged a little. “These are not the most convincing statements.”
“I think you should go find him and tell him to come sit where it’s warm.”
It was getting colder, and the sun was setting. She was right; he shouldn’t stay out, however comforting he found the outdoors to be at a time like this. I put on my coat and boots and headed for the shore again, pausing at the apple tree to regard the hoofprints of the fairy horse.
Past the apple trees, the forest started to thicken, and it already seemed dark here, with the bare limbs of trees casting complicated skeleton shadows, and the sun at my back to the west. A branch cracked beneath my sturdy shoe, and I heard Erris call distantly, “Nim?”
“It’s me,” I called back, stopping in my tracks.
“Can you come here? I’ve hurt my foot.”
There was nothing more he needed to say to set me running, terrified that he would be broken but just a little glad to be wanted and needed too.
I had once wondered if Erris had feet beneath his fairy shoes, back when he was a doll trapped at a piano. Now I came across him sitting on a fallen log, inspecting what appeared to be half of a foot. My heart sped up quite alarmingly.
“Don’t panic,” he said. “I think it can be fixed. Maybe the water weakened the wood, I don’t know.”
“Your feet…” They looked so unnatural that between his feet and the earlier glimpse of his insides, I was beginning to feel sick with what an alien thing he’d become-what an alien thing I’d turned him into.
He cringed with almost a hint of amusement, as if the situation were so unpleasant that he found it almost humorous. But I couldn’t find any humor in this. He held up the front half of his foot. It had a sharp piece of metal, like some sort of screw, jutting from it.
“What happened?” I said, walking over to sit beside him.
“Well, I haven’t felt quite right since I went in the water. My joints are a little sluggish. I guess I should have been more careful, but I was very upset and… a little desperate to feel alive. So I was running, like maybe I could shake off the stiffness, and I jumped off this tree trunk-and felt the snap.”
His feet were much like a cobbler’s form for making shoes, only with a joint that allowed a natural bend where toes would be. It appeared that the heel had cracked and the joint had broken off. I barely smothered my panic as he showed me the damage. I was always worried about him breaking down. In an ordinary person, the correlation between health and life was obvious, but I didn’t know if Erris could die if something happened to him, or if he would remain trapped in the body even if it broke. I could presume, however, that he couldn’t wake up if his mechanism failed and I couldn’t wind him. This was just a foot, but what if it had been something worse?
“I think it could probably be glued, or maybe I could get Lean Joe to help me fashion a new foot,” Erris said. “But… I’ll need help walking back to the house.”
I regarded him a moment. It was obvious I would have to touch him in order to help him.
“It’s all right,” he said, but he sounded distant. He held out an arm, and I helped him up.
He was still strong, and needed me mostly for balance as he hobbled along on one and a half feet. Still, his body was quite heavy, and his movements weren’t as smooth as before he went in the ocean. The house seemed very far away.
“Maybe you should wait here, and I’ll get Celestina,” I suggested, when I saw how slow our pace would be.
“I don’t want Celestina. Please. Just you. And let’s never mention this again.”
“All right. I certainly won’t.”
We were silent with concentration a moment, maneuvering past a space where the ground dipped and the depression was full of wet leaves.
“I think it will snow again tomorrow,” Erris said. In the morning, the sky had been a surprising blue, but now the clouds were back and the air smelled crisp. Wind rattled the bare branches of the trees.
I nodded. “Just stay by the woodstove tonight and get warm.”
“I will.”
We were quiet then, each of us no doubt with different but overlapping unpleasant thoughts.
Just before we got to the house, he said, “I am thankful for you, Nim.”
That was about the nicest thing he could’ve said to me just then. It made me strangely shy.
Erris, with the assistance of Lean Joe, mended his foot and sat down by the woodstove with a book. I was helping Celestina with the dinner, putting together a fish stew with salt cod, jarred tomatoes, and some rather withered-looking garlic, while she finished the biscuits.
Violet sat near Erris’s feet and scooped the cat onto her lap. “Uncle Erris?”
He lowered the book. “Hmm?”
“I want to learn magic. Fairy magic.”
Celestina looked sharply their way. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea to learn any magic until Mr. Valdana comes home.”
“I don’t think we can wait until he comes home,” I said. “What will you do if the jinn remembers Violet? If he tries to take her? We can’t hide her in the ocean.”
“She-I don’t think-” Celestina stopped and brushed flour from her hands onto her apron. “I suppose I should tell you this. I didn’t burn my face on a lantern. I burned it trying to do magic.”
“How?”
“I had some idea of how spells worked from reading novels about sorcerers, and I started trying to do magic on my own, without any training. It took forever to learn how to make fire, and I thought it would just be a little candle flame, but it wasn’t. It broke through my hand like a torch. For a terrifying moment I couldn’t get the fire to stop. I caught my hair on fire. My father was so upset I thought his eyeballs might fly right out of his head.” She winced. “They told everyone else it was a lantern, but Mr. Valdana knew it wasn’t. A lot of people guessed it wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to teach you magic properly when he hired you?” Violet asked.
“Oh, he told me when he took me on that he had no time to teach magic,” Celestina said. “But he could offer me a home where my parents wouldn’t frown at me and neighbors wouldn’t preach to me, and a fair wage.”
“I understand your fear,” I said. “But I have to learn. Even if it’s dangerous. I am not going to sit by helplessly while some magical villain hauls off the people I love.”
“I think we could be very careful,” Erris said, almost absently. He seemed to be considering the idea. “Fairy magic is very intuitive, and largely safe. Violet could start there. Human magic tends to be more agressive, but… Celestina, I understand that you are sort of the lady of the house in Ordorio’s absence.”
Celestina shrugged.
