At his table across the lounge, Al Tesserian looked up from his half-built castle of playing cards. “Dear God, yes. No, my dear, don’t bother,” he said as Jessamy made a motion to come around the bar. “Be . . . right . . . there.” He placed a card and got up. The other three held a collective breath—but Tesserian’s castles didn’t dare fall until he gave them permission, which was generally done by calling Maisie, the youngest guest, to do the honors. Then and only then, when Maisie had pulled away a queen or gusted a sharp breath onto an ace, they toppled spectacularly, cards flying in all directions as if the laws of physics held no sway in the realm to which they truly belonged.
Tesserian accepted his glass with a bow, then returned to his architecture. He paused on his way to look at Negret’s handiwork. “Binding another book?”
Negret nodded as he lifted the stack of papers and held the edge he’d perforated up to the light, checking to be sure the holes were lined up the way he wanted.
“It needs covers,” Tesserian observed. He felt inside one sleeve, frowned, then took off the battered and narrow-brimmed porkpie hat he wore at all times except meals. From inside the lining, he produced a pair of aces and tossed them on the bar. “Will those do?”
Negret added the cards to his stack, one on top and one on the bottom. “Perfectly, if you can spare them.”
Tesserian laughed. “An old gambler always has a couple of spare aces someplace.”
Elsewhere in the inn, Petra, the guest who had been there the longest, borrowed from the maid a key to one of the countless glass cases that occupied walls and corners all around the inn so that she and Maisie could take down one of Mrs. Haypotten’s music boxes, very carefully wind it, and dance for a bit.
Maisie Cerrajero was young and had been traveling alone to meet the aunt who was taking her in, with no luggage but an old ditty bag that held everything she owned. Each day someone said something along the lines of, “Won’t your auntie be relieved when she gets here and sees that you’re safe?” Most often that someone was Mrs. Haypotten, who had a habit of misplacing her spectacles or her ring of keys or her best little sewing scissors and was never quite sure what, other than “Thank you,” she ought to say when Maisie inevitably found them for her, no matter in what unlikely place they’d been left. Flummoxed, she always came out with something like, “Won’t your auntie be so happy to see what a nice, polite, helpful girl you are when she gets here, dear?”
Petra, however, never said anything like that, not even when Maisie found the dragonfly-shaped hair clip she had lost at breakfast two days before, half-hidden by the hem of one of the dining room curtains. Petra instead went for a key and a music box, because the unspoken truth was that, given the volume of rain and the slope of the hills, if Auntie had been on the roads at the wrong time, she was never coming—and Maisie was a girl, not a fool. But when that girl danced, sending her short sleek dark hair fluttering and the pleated skirt of her jumper frock swishing around her knees, her face lost its fear. And Mrs. Haypotten had an improbable collection of music boxes—forty-one that Petra and Maisie had managed to count—no two of which, as far as they could determine, played the same song.
Today, with the dragonfly back in its customary place among Petra’s dark bobbed curls, they picked one from the tall cabinet in the parlor, which, like the lounge, looked out over the riverfront. The cabinet had the thick, bubble-pocked green glass that was the only sort that could be made from Nagspeake sand, and Mrs. Haypotten had told them it held some of her favorite pieces, so they took extra care. Maisie chose a music box shaped like a kite with a terrifyingly delicate-looking ceramic key. She wound it gently, the eggshell-colored winder stark against the brown of her fingers. When she set it down and lifted the lid, it took a few notes before the tune resolved itself into “Riverward.” Maisie hummed along as she spun in a wide-armed circle, swirling her shawl behind her as she turned, making the embroidered chrysanthemums upon it float in the air.
Sullivan, the young man who’d been sitting in a chair facing the fire, his eyes glazing over as they stared up at the big antique map that hung above the mantel, shoved himself abruptly to his feet and hurried out, briefly grasping Petra’s wrist in apology as he stumbled past. That was unusual enough to make Petra look after him curiously. In the seven days since he’d arrived, Petra had never seen Sullivan do anything without an almost eerie sort of grace. He was so implausibly elegant when he moved and so bloody good-looking to boot that it was hard to believe he wasn’t a hallucination. Petra had had to stop herself more than once from sticking him with a pin as he crossed a room just to see if then, finally, he’d make a misstep.
But apparently all it took was “Riverward.” Interesting.
The old woman in the corner, thinner even than Jessamy Butcher, rocked her chair gently in time with the song as the music box wound down. Her skin, like Maisie’s and Petra’s both, was dark, but ruddy here and grayish there, uneven and slightly pocked, while Maisie had the clear and perfect skin of a child and Petra the kind of faultless complexion it would’ve taken a motion-picture actress an hour in makeup to achieve. The lady they all called Madame Grisaille spoke little, but she hummed as she rocked. It wasn’t a loud sound—if the hot water coils in the cast iron case mounted on the wall across the room happened to be sizzling at
