There was nothing inside that looked like a bone. Nothing, that is, until Petra remembered Negret Colophon’s story of the peddlers and the whalebone spring. Then she saw it: the tiny, delicate whorl of pale yellow.
“How did you even manage that?” she asked. “A cat’s bone isn’t pliable. It’s nothing like whalebone.”
“Yours was magic, if you recall,” Masseter said. “And the thing is so nearly complete. I regret to disappoint—”
“Yes, yes, your grand task is nearly finished,” Petra interrupted. “And I know what you came here for.”
He fell silent and looked at her without a word, as if he longed to be able to wish her dead.
“It’s how I knew you would come,” she continued. “Especially once the waters started to rise. You couldn’t risk this place being drowned like my home was. You might never have found it again.”
Still he said nothing. The young woman reached under a throw pillow beside her on the sofa. Then she withdrew her hand and showed him the gold-and-ceramic music box, the one from Madame Grisaille’s room, which lay at the crossroads of the lines in her palm.
“Your machine will want winding,” she murmured, looking down at the scene painted on its lid. “And for that, you will need a very special winder-key that can coil more than metal.” Then she looked up at him. “I think I am right in guessing that a winder that can coil time is rarer even than cat-bone springs.”
The peddler’s face had drained to the color of dry china clay. “Give that to me.”
“No.”
He made a move as if to dart forward out of his chair. Once again, just like the night before, there was a well-intentioned but belated impulse on the part of a number of the guests to try and intercede as things suddenly lurched toward physical violence. But even as Sangwin, Amalgam, Captain Frost, and Mr. Haypotten got moving, Masseter himself stopped cold in his tracks. He fell forward onto his knees before the card castle with a grunt of pain as the very nails in the floor pulled themselves loose and lengthened into grabbing fingers that held his feet immobile.
Maisie allowed herself to be pulled farther out of the way, then wriggled loose from Jessamy’s grip and watched, fascinated, as the grasping iron flexed and tightened its grip on the peddler’s shoes.
Petra looked coldly down on Masseter from her place on the sofa like a queen looking down from her throne. “I have had fifteen years to prepare for this moment.”
“Learned a few things, have you?” the peddler grunted as he shoved himself to his feet. The iron fingers lengthened as he stood, twisting to entwine about his calves.
“I made some friends.” She nodded to Madame Grisaille, sitting like a monarch herself in her seat in the corner. The old lady raised one hand off the arm of her chair and curled her fingers into her palm, and the iron that bound the peddler’s legs tightened, grinding the bones in his feet against each other.
“The lady declares that you will stand where you are,” Reever said from the chair to Masseter’s right. “She prefers that her city not be drowned for the sake of your device.” In the chair to Masseter’s left, Negret said nothing, but he twirled the long, needle-sharp awl he’d been holding in his fingers, and suddenly it was no longer a bindery tool, but a weapon.
The peddler ignored the brothers and stared at the woman in the rocking chair. “So the iron does walk abroad.”
“When she must,” Madame said in her thrumming voice. The peddler shuddered, as if he could hear her words resonating through his own skeleton.
“Now.” Petra held out a hand. “Give me my bone. Then I am going to do what I can to stop this flood.”
“Why?” the peddler snarled. “You’re going to try out your supposed orphan magic now, after all these years? It won’t work.”
“Maybe not,” Petra said. “But I’ll have tried.”
Masseter looked at the box in her palm. “Give me the winder, and I’ll give you the spring.”
Petra’s eyes were hard. “No. Not until I’ve done what I have to do. Then you can have it.”
Masseter’s mismatched eyes bulged in confusion and anger. “When you’ve done what? Gone to the source of the river? Drowned on the way? Died on whatever fool errand awaits you if you arrive? Am I to follow you to the middle country and take my spring and my winder from your corpse?”
“Neither one of them is yours,” Petra spat. “And yes, you could do that. Or you could follow me to the middle country, help me do what needs doing, and have the spring and the winder when you’ve made amends for what you did to my town.”
“What does the winder matter to you, anyhow?” the peddler argued. “You’ll be at the bottom of a river, either way.”
“It matters because you don’t get to lie and kill a whole community and still keep the thing you came for,” she snarled.
“Vengeance?” the peddler said in disbelief. “You’ll keep the thing just so I can’t have it?”
“Yes!” She calmed her voice. “If you like. You have your choice. Make amends and have the spring and the winder with my gratitude, or lose both.”
Masseter put his hands in his pockets. “Or I could kill you and take them.”
To his right, Reever Colophon barked out a laugh. “No,” he said, leaning back comfortably in his chair and watching in amusement as the iron twisted its tendrils more tightly around Masseter’s legs. “You could not.” To Masseter’s left, Negret tapped the stiletto-shaped awl silently against one knee.
“And if you
