“No!” Bran yells, shimmying around the platform, hurtling quick as he can toward the control levers to stop the horrific parade. All too slowly, the carousel grinds to a jarring halt.
“Who did this?” I whisper, unable to breathe.
I rush to help Bran tear Emmitt’s body from the carousel. It’s unthinkable for us both to leave him there another second. No one else should see him like this.
“Who would do such a thing?” I look around, fearful.
There is no place to hide up here except the cluttered corners of the tower tiers, and no way down unless the murderer leapt to their own death from the open glockenspiel doors.
We barely manage to lift Emmitt off the jagged spear and drape him on the small platform while wolves and dead-faced soldiers look on. I can scarcely see through my tears. The birds are nervous above, unable to settle, bleating bereft coos. I pry at Emmitt’s torn clothes and attempt to staunch the wounds leaking onto the floor with my cloak, helpless to do anything to save him. Blood bubbles from the corners of his lips, painting his beard red. The three of us are soaked in his blood now, red as the Margrave’s peculiar carmine.
I was too late. Whatever shadow visited the clockmaker came just before we arrived.
“Piro.” Bran shudders, sounding mortally wounded himself. “Look.”
He gently tilts Emmitt’s head from where it rests on his lap, pointing to a brass clock gear the size of a walnut embedded firmly between the clockmaker’s eyes.
CHAPTER 14
BRANCHES SNAP ACROSS MY FACE, TWIGS BITE AT MY CHEEKS and tear at my hair, but I barely feel their claws. I run as fast as I can into the woods, hurtling through the narrow spaces between trunks and the jutting roots that sink knobby knuckles into the forest floor. I register the aching tread of my boots against the ground, the harsh strokes of my pulse carving channels inside my skin.
To avoid the inevitable visits from the makers checking on me, I rose very early, packed a small bag of supplies and left without Burl while there was only a thin, watery spoonful of moon in the sky. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I brought a few woodcutting tools so that if I’m stopped I can get away with the guise that I am scouting for new trees or taking a few samples.
Or, I realize with a jolt, I could say I’m visiting my father’s grave. Haven’t done that yet.
I press ever farther into the trees, like a child running into her mother’s skirts. They welcome me with open arms. Pain prompts me to reach for my nose. The wound from weeks ago is nearly healed, but my heart is still raw. I’m used to the pain of my splinters, but yesterday’s terror—that’s something I’ll never get used to. Seeing Emmitt trussed up in the glockenspiel is an injury that will stay with me long after my physical scars fade.
The isolation of the forest is a salve to my wounds. For two days, I am unable to do anything but lie coiled in the hollowed base of an old beech, not far from the grove where my father now rests. Ingesting the chatter of birds. Watching life skulk along the forest floor. I stare at the light straining through the canopy above, the way it changes from white to gold as the day moves until it is finally swallowed whole by the shadows of night. I make a fire when I grow cold and I eat when I feel hungry. But mostly I just huddle inside the cradle of the beech and cry, letting myself sink into its deeply rooted life, listening to its sonorous voice reassure me over and over, “All will be well.”
It surely does not seem like it.
Having to leave Emmitt’s body and run to tell Anke and rouse the rest of the makers—that is a journey that will haunt me as long as I live. Bran was shattered, wouldn’t leave the clockmaker’s side until he’d been carried from the tower in Fonso’s arms. Anke wept, rocking herself back and forth, a pendulum of disbelief. Bran’s tears finally fell as we left her alone with her son’s body, to grieve.
Before I ran for the others, we removed the clock gear from Emmitt’s forehead—no easy task—so that his mother wouldn’t have to see it. I sense the weight of it now, still in my pocket where I stashed it to keep it from sight. Still crusted with Emmitt’s blood.
I can’t bring myself to touch it. Is there some meaning to the killer striking that first blow against Emmitt using a piece of the glockenspiel? Or did the murderer just pick up something convenient and close? The clockmaker had many such pieces in his tool trunk.
All I know is that my father and Emmitt are dead.
“Yet, the old magic still lives,” the beech tree hums, her voice in my chest evidence of that very fact. “Men may make laws and proclamations, but what are those to powers that spring from the earth unbidden?”
Death has come to us in threes, just like I feared. What else will come marching that I am ill prepared for?
Three tiny ants, bustling with purpose, march across my bare arms, undeterred by the sudden presence of a girl-creature in their path. Beetles scuffle in the rich, dark soil at the foot of the great tree, oblivious to my staring. A pair of chipmunks avoid me until they decide I pose no threat, then begin darting past me to enter their underground tunnels at the mouth of the beech’s hollow. Birds sing their endless pronouncements: Day is here. Night is coming. Where are you? Here I am. Here I am.
On my third night, the cold draws me out of the tree and I sit facing a small fire, trying
