“Good night,” Petra said.
Stay, he wanted to whisper. But with effort he managed, “Good night,” instead.
She let go and backed away, and then she was gone. He counted to fifty in three different languages before he followed, just to be sure she would be safely locked away in her own room before he reached the hall they shared.
In the parlor, Maisie yawned for the third time and stumbled over her feet. Sorcha stepped out of her own dance and caught the girl before she could step on the card castle. “Come along, miss. Let’s get you up to bed.”
“Wait.” Maisie pulled out of Sorcha’s grip and crouched by the structure. She adjusted a single card, then allowed herself to be shooed out into the hall with Sorcha on her heels.
“Thank you for the dance,” Negret called.
“Welcome,” Sorcha’s laughing voice shouted back from the hallway.
Reever put the teapot music box away, then helped Madame Grisaille, who had taken one of the chairs by the half-hour glass, to her feet. “I take it we stand with the woman, if it comes to that?”
“If it comes to it,” Madame said. “If one of them would save the city and one of them would watch it drown, yes.”
The brothers nodded. No more needed to be said. Reever and Madame Grisaille started for the door, but Negret held back. Before he left the room, he banked the fire, doing his best to copy the firekeeping ritual he’d seen Sorcha do over and over since his arrival at the Blue Vein, even singing the words she’d set to the song she’d borrowed from him.
On his way up to his room, after a moment’s listening to be sure he was alone, Negret paused to examine the contents of the bottom shelf of the bookcase where the stairs turned. Then he stretched up on tiptoe and shifted the books on the top shelf, looking at each book and then peering into the space behind it. Finally, not finding what he wanted, he stretched his body another six inches taller so that he could reach one hand into the space between the top of the bookcase and the ceiling. He felt around with his left hand, then reached into the farthest corner with his right. Then he stepped back, empty-handed, and brushed dust and cobwebs from his many-pocketed tweed vest.
“Good grief,” Reever muttered, appearing on the stairs above and trotting down to join his brother. “You’re a giant.”
Negret snorted as he relaxed back down to the twins’ usual, just-shy-of-six-feet height. “They’re all asleep. There’s no one to see.”
“They’re never all asleep.”
“No,” Negret conceded. “That’s very true.”
The two of them stood for a moment, listening.
“Let it go,” Reever said quietly. “This isn’t why we’re here.” He tilted his head upward, toward the second floor. Negret nodded reluctantly, rubbed the last shadow of dust from his palms, and took the stairs two at a time, following his brother to their rooms.
A draft swirled through the parlor as the case clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten times. Captain Frost’s half-hour glass continued to drain in a fine thread of sand. Not a card in the castle so much as stirred, not even when, much later that night, Antony Masseter, on one of his witching-hour perambulations, wandered in, effortlessly picked the lock of the display cabinet, and began winding music boxes one by one.
TEN
THE BLUE STAIR
WHEN THE SUN CAME UP, the rain had not stopped and the waters were still rising. The day that dawned was indistinguishable from the night before in all ways except for the difference in illumination and the height of the water.
Of course, some of the guests were not quite the same as they had been the day before, but those kinds of things are often harder to see in the light of morning, before the coffee has been brought.
From the front door, Petra could see the pebbly mud of the road washing in a brown slick down to the place where it met the vanguard edge of the flood tide creeping upward by agonizing degrees. Between the darkness of the sky and the rough gray curtain of the rain and the still-darker shadows of the blue pines that overhung everything, it felt more like twilight than morning. The threshold where runoff met flood was nothing but a vague and shifting line of frothy mire, but it was now well past the iron arch that had not been there the morning before. The road was going to the river, and the river was coming to the inn.
Gray morning became gray midday, and under occassionally flickering lights and the unpredicatable knocking and sizzling of the reluctant heating coils in their wall cases, the guests haunted the inn like uncertain ghosts. The exceptions were the Haypottens and Sorcha, who had an establishment to run and twelve guests to care for, and Maisie, for whom the Blue Vein and its denizens seemed newly painted in mystery after the previous night’s stories. The innkeepers inventoried food and drink and planned meals and strung lines beside the two kitchen fireplaces and the potbellied stove in order to dry freshly washed linens that couldn’t be hung outside. Maisie crept about the inn, looking for secrets and clues to secrets. And, frequently, finding them.
Sorcha passed from room to room seeing to fires, the little wooden albatross hanging from her neck on its bit of ribbon. After lunch she found Maisie in the parlor, looking adrift; the younger girl had followed one set of clues to what appeared to be a dead end and, stymied, was trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong and where to look for the next one.
Although ordinarily Sorcha was too observant to make this sort of error, she mistook Maisie’s temporary confusion for boredom. She plunked the girl down
