The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

groan of ice against the hulls of ghost ships—voices with an arcane music to them that will make poor Mr. Masseter’s head, always tortured by patterns, ache for days. But he will cheer through it. And the Devil will rise in a fury, because although he is bound to abide by the rules of his own wagers, there’s no law that says he’s got to be a gentleman about it. But when at last he has finished venting his fury, our friends will be left standing tall at the crossroads. And someday, someone will tell their story, as I have told it to you.”

“But differently,” Maisie put in, “because it will have happened.”

“Yes.” Jessamy nodded, then tilted her head as she considered. “Or perhaps the truth is more complicated. If, as Mr. Masseter told us, time is not a single thread, then perhaps, somehow, in some way, it already has happened. Or perhaps it’s simpler still. Perhaps in some way it already has happened, merely because I’ve told it.”

Maisie nodded. She looked out at the Skidwrack through the dwindling rain for a long time. The adults in the room behind her waited, none of them quite willing to walk away, just in case, in spite of everything that Jessamy had said, in spite of the music Negret was still whistling, the girl broke her reverie and darted out to fling herself onto the river.

At last, Sorcha came to stand beside Maisie at the door and took her hand. “Think of the stories she will have when she comes back.”

Maisie sighed and turned back toward the parlor, and the dissatisfaction on her face reminded Amalgam of the strange blend of gratification and discontent that occasionally seemed to follow even his best-told tales. Because sometimes the better the story, the greater the restlessness that comes when it ends and the listener has to go on, imagining the story continuing somewhere, but untold and out of sight.

Then: “I’m hungry,” Maisie announced, and the spell was broken.

“Come on, then,” Mrs. Haypotten said briskly, crossing the room and holding out a hand. “Let’s find you an apple.”

“Cake,” the girl specified, correctly guessing that, in this moment, she could’ve asked for a marzipan turtledove in a spun-sugar tree and gotten it.

“Cake it is,” the innkeeper’s wife agreed.

As Maisie crossed the room to claim her dessert, Tesserian cleared his throat from the hearth. When she looked over, he nodded at the castle that now stood almost as tall as Maisie herself, with all her wooden creatures peeking from its windows and doors and porches and balconies.

“Shall we?” he asked, pointing to a card that made up part of the very top of the cupola.

Maisie grinned and all but pranced over to the castle. She reached out and plucked the card the gambler had indicated from its place. The others watched curiously; surely it would’ve been more effective to topple the structure by taking a piece from the foundation. But when Maisie removed the queen of puppets from its place, the castle exploded outward in all directions, including upward, as if that single queen had been anchoring the entire assemblage to the ground.

The cards rained down as the sparks of Sorcha’s border fire had done. Except, somehow they never quite fell all the way. Caught, perhaps, in some sort of vortex, the cards swirled like confetti in the air, and Maisie twirled again, dancing this time with scores of assorted kings, queens, knaves, jesters, and saints, and a tiny menagerie of wooden beasts that paraded through the air as if they were nothing more than paper themselves.

Jessamy watched all this from beside the glass doors, her attention divided between the child and the river. Reever Colophon came to stand beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

“I wish I could have gone too,” Jessamy said. She looked down at her gloved hand, which lay against the glass of one of the French doors. “But there’s no knowing how long these hands will do what I ask them to.”

Reever said nothing, but he held out his own palm. Jessamy considered, then put hers into it.

“Still yours?” he asked.

She nodded. He interlaced his fingers with Jessamy’s and glanced over his shoulder, to where Negret sat on the arm of his chair, still whistling the song that was everything and nothing, but laughing now in between lines as he watched Maisie twirl with the cards and creatures that somehow still refused to fall to the ground.

“Will you dance, Miss Butcher?” Reever asked. When she didn’t answer right away, he leaned close to her ear and added quietly, “I promise I’ll keep your secrets.”

She let out a long breath. “All right.”

So one High Walker danced with the Headcutter as the other whistled the only song the Devil cannot play, and the folklorist ordered chapters in his mind and the printmaker imagined how he would carve the scene. The gambler watched his cards parade, and the captain forgot to turn his glass, and the innkeepers held hands and smiled as the Queen of Building Castles of Cards reached a hand out first to the firekeeper and then to the lady who was the avatar of the city’s wild iron, and she pulled them into the dance too. The flames in the hearth sent a flurry of sparks up like tame fireworks to illuminate the parlor as the three dancers, the youngest and the eldest of the storytellers, spun each other round and round, laughing.

So they danced away their secrets. Outside, unnoticed, the floodwaters of the Skidwrack began to fall.

A NOTE ABOUT THE CLARION BOOKS EDITION

Many of you will already be familiar with The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book from Greenglass House and Ghosts of Greenglass House, in which a mysterious guest at the Pine family’s inn shares the book with Milo during the winter holidays. I first encountered Raconteur’s and its author, Nagspeake folklorist Phineas Amalgam, back in 2010, while working on an as-yet-unpublished book called Wild Iron, the first story I ever wrote that was set in