“Certainly,” the Devil said in his most gentlemanly voice.
“Two teeth, then. And keep your favor.”
“Done,” the Devil snapped, only a little surprised. “What’s the game?”
“Not a game,” the scavenger corrected. “A challenge. If you can guess what I plan to do with your tooth, you win and I lose. If you can’t guess”—here she paused to look thoughtfully up at the clocks tick-tick-ticking away—“in sixty seconds, then I win.”
“How many guesses do I get?” the Devil asked.
The scavenger smiled thinly. “As many as you have time for.” And she reached up for the lowest-hanging of the clocks, a large pocket watch, and untied it from its faded blue ribbon. She held it high so that the Devil could see its face, and the two of them watched the second hand as it climbed toward the twelve: tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
“Begin,” said the little scavenger.
The Devil, of course, had already been racking his brains to remember everything he knew that could be done with teeth. He figured he had a clue in that he’d seen what the silver-eyed girl had done with the saint’s blood and the martyr’s ashes, so he tried to think about what could be done with the hard bits of a body.
“You’ll make it into porcelain,” he suggested.
The scavenger shook her head.
“You’ll use it to make a cupel to separate silver from ore, or some other alchemical thing.”
“No.”
“You’ll make some sort of bone oil from it, something to burn in a lamp or to poison a well.”
“No.”
“I don’t suppose you’d use it for something as simple as scrimshaw, or making needles or awls with, or that sort of thing?”
The scavenger shook her head again. “I have plenty of bones I can use if I want to do that.”
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Twenty seconds left. The Devil was starting to get frustrated.
“You’ll make it into baking powder. You’ll make it into neat’s-foot oil for getting rid of scales. You’ll bury it and hope it grows into something interesting, a dragon, or some sort of warrior prince. You’ll . . .” No more ideas came. Now the Devil was completely at a loss.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
“Time,” the scavenger sang. The Devil grabbed the watch, but of course the girl had no need to lie. A minute is a minute—usually, anyway—and the Devil’s minute was up.
“Bad luck for you. You came up with some good ideas, though.” With one hand the scavenger took a wooden stool from where it hung on the wall, and with the other she pushed the Devil out of the wagon into the night.
She put the stool on the ground, and the Devil sat, because what other choice did he have? He’d made a deal and he’d lost. All he could do was look up and try to focus on the stars while the little silver-eyed scavenger girl put her dental key into his mouth, tightened the claw around one of his canines, and wrenched it out by slow turns.
She’d lied about how badly it would hurt.
The other one she took was a molar from the back, and when it was all over, she packed the holes in his mouth with cotton soaked in moonshine liquor and handed over the carved pastern bone the Devil had bought with his pain and his teeth. Somehow he couldn’t quite look at it now, so he just tucked it right into his pocket as he stood up to make himself scarce.
Before he left, though, the Devil turned back to the scavenger. “What’s the answer?” he asked indistinctly through his mouthful of cotton and firewater.
The scavenger rattled his bloody teeth in her palm, looking like she was deciding whether or not she thought he deserved an answer. At last she simply smiled, pulling up her lip with one little finger, and all at once everything, including the lisping tone of her voice, made perfect sense.
There was a gap right where her left eyetooth ought to have been.
“I needed it to replace one I lost,” she said. “Although you sure came up with some good ideas, and I’m plenty glad I asked for two teeth instead of one.”
You can imagine the Devil got out of there as fast as he could manage without looking like he was trying to get out of there as fast as he could.
And that’s how a scavenger girl with a missing tooth beat the Devil.
INTERLUDE
NEGRET WAS RIGHT: Maisie liked that story a lot. She applauded energetically along with the others. “So usually the Devil wins?” she asked as Tesserian tugged up the hem of his right trouser leg to retrieve a queen of signs and a two of points from inside the ankle of his sock.
Negret’s smile twitched. “Usually.”
Maisie made a steeple of the two cards and looked up again. “Are there many of those stories?”
“Of the Devil making bets?” Negret glanced from her to Amalgam, whose chair almost directly overlooked the castle construction. “Rather a whole mess of them, yes?”
“I believe I’ve heard Phin tell one or two of those,” Mr. Haypotten said, rubbing his balding head. “I seem to recall something about a guitar player.” He brushed a few crumbs from the sideboard into his pocket.
“There are, in fact, a mess of them,” Amalgam confirmed. “And more than a few with musicians. When it’s a musical challenge, it’s called a duel, or a headcutting. The Devil almost always wins those. I’ve heard there’s one song and one song only that beats the Devil, but it’s a beast to play. Not just anyone can do it.” He stirred his coffee and tapped the spoon on the lip of his cup once, twice. Then he looked at Jessamy Butcher.
The gloved woman had still been seated at the corner table at the start of Negret’s tale, but during the telling she’d strayed closer to the fireplace. Now she faced the flames, her own cup and saucer abandoned on the mantelpiece.
