She passed Negret on the stairs. Both Sorcha’s step and Negret’s faltered for a heartbeat, as if, having danced the night before, their feet couldn’t bear to pass by each other so quickly. He stopped and glanced, curious, at the bounty she carried.
“I thought I’d make some fancy spills with Miss Maisie,” Sorcha explained. Then, remembering the book he’d been stitching together the day before, she picked a nice piece of heavy stock swirled with blue and green and gold and held it out. “For your next bookbinding, Mr. Negret. I believe it came from a book of poetry.”
He took it with a brief bow of his head, as if the receiving of the scrap was a great honor. “Would you use it, if I made one for you?”
Sorcha smiled. “I could find a use for a book, yes.”
A different pair of people might have hesitated then, before moving on, but Sorcha had Maisie waiting below, and Negret was not the sort of person to feel he had to capitalize on a chance meeting on the stairs for anything if he thought there might be a better time for it later. So he nodded and murmured, “Thank you,” and tucked the marbled paper carefully into his vest as he continued on up to the second floor. Sorcha continued on down, humming as she went.
In the parlor, she deposited the rest of the paper in front of Maisie, who was waiting obediently but impatiently with her head lying sideways on the tabletop. Sorcha took a box from her apron pocket, and from that produced a pair of scissors she usually used for trimming wicks. Then she picked out a piece of gold paper, tore it into three strips, and cut a fringe into the long edge of one before rolling the paper tightly and at a slight angle into a long, narrow tube so that the frill spiraled elegantly up the outside.
“Now, watch,” Sorcha said with a wink, and she took the tall, fringed tube over to the hearth and reached the end into the fire.
The spill caught, and the flame flickered slowly up to consume the rolled paper, with the gold fringe giving off greenish sparkles as it burned. Sorcha used it to light a candle on the table, then tossed the unburned remnant into the hearth, where the fire finished it off with a bursting pop and a little sizzle of jade sparks.
The two girls laughed, then got to work twisting more scraps into matches as the candle flickered on the table before them. Maisie cut and rolled her pieces into the spiraling fringe Sorcha had taught her, and Sorcha herself crafted ever more complicated spills from the pile of scraps and the occasional dab of melted wax. The first ones resembled long-stemmed flowers, then slender and branching trees. And then, twisting four or six or ten smaller pieces together, Sorcha produced a cavalcade of gaunt, long-legged, long-necked, or long-horned paper creatures. Since these wouldn’t have fit in the spill vase on the mantel anyway, the girls lined them up on the hearth, and when the final twiggy, silver-paper hart stood under the last marbled green-and-white tree, Sorcha held out one of Maisie’s fringed matches. Maisie reached past the menagerie to light it in the fire, then, at a nod from the older girl, began to set the parade aflame, one creature at a time.
The paper animals danced as they burned, as if the fire had endowed them with a literal spark of life, and Maisie watched in awe. So even fire had secrets. Who could have known?
Gray midday became gray twilight, and when dinner had been served, the guests found themselves once again gathering around the hearth while the storm rattled the old windowpanes and the fire smoked as it worked on the damp logs. The dry wood had run low, and even Sorcha’s careful firekeeping couldn’t do anything about that—not if she wanted a normal blaze, anyhow.
Maisie dropped onto the floor next to Tesserian, emptied her pockets of the collection of wooden animals she’d brought down from her room, and began secreting them around the card castle so that they peeked out of windows or perched on balconies. This elicited a wince of concern from Mrs. Haypotten, who set a glass of juice at Maisie’s knee just as the girl balanced the river otter on a tiny ledge that didn’t look as though it could have possibly supported so much as a feather. But Tesserian merely grinned, scooped up the remaining beasts, and began passing them to Maisie one by one. When they were all in place, the two architects began building an addition on the castle, using a different set of cards printed with the likenesses of saints.
Madame Grisaille sat in her usual rocking chair to the left of the fireplace, swathed in her wraps, watching the construction with her hands tucked in her white fur muff. Amalgam, Sangwin, and Masseter sat in chairs drawn around the corner table to the right of the fire, where Jessamy had been the night before. From his waistcoat pocket, Sangwin took a piece of wood Sorcha had passed him earlier in the day, and he began to cut small, neat curls away from it. Periodically one or the other of the men shot curious looks at Petra, who had chosen a spot on the sofa again.
Sullivan entered and, discovering that she had not curled herself against the very farthest edge of the couch today but instead sat a
