I regarded him a moment. It was obvious I would have to touch him in order to help him.
“It’s all right,” he said, but he sounded distant. He held out an arm, and I helped him up.
He was still strong, and needed me mostly for balance as he hobbled along on one and a half feet. Still, his body was quite heavy, and his movements weren’t as smooth as before he went in the ocean. The house seemed very far away.
“Maybe you should wait here, and I’ll get Celestina,” I suggested, when I saw how slow our pace would be.
“I don’t want Celestina. Please. Just you. And let’s never mention this again.”
“All right. I certainly won’t.”
We were silent with concentration a moment, maneuvering past a space where the ground dipped and the depression was full of wet leaves.
“I think it will snow again tomorrow,” Erris said. In the morning, the sky had been a surprising blue, but now the clouds were back and the air smelled crisp. Wind rattled the bare branches of the trees.
I nodded. “Just stay by the woodstove tonight and get warm.”
“I will.”
We were quiet then, each of us no doubt with different but overlapping unpleasant thoughts.
Just before we got to the house, he said, “I am thankful for you, Nim.”
That was about the nicest thing he could’ve said to me just then. It made me strangely shy.
Erris, with the assistance of Lean Joe, mended his foot and sat down by the woodstove with a book. I was helping Celestina with the dinner, putting together a fish stew with salt cod, jarred tomatoes, and some rather withered-looking garlic, while she finished the biscuits.
Violet sat near Erris’s feet and scooped the cat onto her lap. “Uncle Erris?”
He lowered the book. “Hmm?”
“I want to learn magic. Fairy magic.”
Celestina looked sharply their way. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea to learn any magic until Mr. Valdana comes home.”
“I don’t think we can wait until he comes home,” I said. “What will you do if the jinn remembers Violet? If he tries to take her? We can’t hide her in the ocean.”
“She-I don’t think-” Celestina stopped and brushed flour from her hands onto her apron. “I suppose I should tell you this. I didn’t burn my face on a lantern. I burned it trying to do magic.”
“How?”
“I had some idea of how spells worked from reading novels about sorcerers, and I started trying to do magic on my own, without any training. It took forever to learn how to make fire, and I thought it would just be a little candle flame, but it wasn’t. It broke through my hand like a torch. For a terrifying moment I couldn’t get the fire to stop. I caught my hair on fire. My father was so upset I thought his eyeballs might fly right out of his head.” She winced. “They told everyone else it was a lantern, but Mr. Valdana knew it wasn’t. A lot of people guessed it wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to teach you magic properly when he hired you?” Violet asked.
“Oh, he told me when he took me on that he had no time to teach magic,” Celestina said. “But he could offer me a home where my parents wouldn’t frown at me and neighbors wouldn’t preach to me, and a fair wage.”
“I understand your fear,” I said. “But I have to learn. Even if it’s dangerous. I am not going to sit by helplessly while some magical villain hauls off the people I love.”
“I think we could be very careful,” Erris said, almost absently. He seemed to be considering the idea. “Fairy magic is very intuitive, and largely safe. Violet could start there. Human magic tends to be more agressive, but… Celestina, I understand that you are sort of the lady of the house in Ordorio’s absence.”
Celestina shrugged.
“I don’t want to usurp your position, but if we all had some magic, and time to plan, maybe we can thwart the jinn next time.”
She sighed. “I wish I knew what Mr. Valdana would say. But I won’t stop you. You are Violet’s uncle. I would just hate to see anything happen to any of you.”
I wondered if that was a fate we could escape, no matter which course we chose.
Chapter 12
The next day, Celestina handed over the key to the upstairs room in the hopes that I would find a book of magical instruction. Unlocking the door revealed a rather intimidating mess: stacks of books, unmarked crates, desks cluttered with tools and papers and writing implements and candles, things draped with sheets, and everything covered with dust. The walking space would have been almost entirely unnegotiable had I been wearing the standard array of skirts and petticoats.
“I see why the door was locked,” I said, stepping over a globe to get to some of the books. There was a shelf in the corner that looked like it had been arranged in some tidier era; it was all books of magic grouped by subject. There were books about magical species, advanced necromancy, astrology and divination, life after death. I started opening ones with promising titles, but many of them looked too difficult, while others seemed useless, and a great deal of them were written with the air that understanding magic was indeed a sort of gentleman’s club, not something useful so much as something with which to show off.
Erris started going through the books on the desk. While we searched-making feeble attempts to tidy up as we went-Violet opened one of the boxes on the floor. “Doesn’t this look like parts for clockwork?” she said, and then sneezed.
“Clockwork?” Erris turned.
Indeed, Violet was peering into a box full of cogs and gears nestled in hay. The parts were still attached to each other, for the most part, and when Erris lifted them from the box, they formed a small four-legged figure with a tail, like a cat. He set that aside and took out a crudely carved wooden head. It looked like the clockwork would move the eyes and mouth, but some of the pieces had broken apart.
Violet gasped. “A clockwork cat! I don’t remember anything like this!”
Erris was still digging past the hay. “Look at this, Nim.”
I stepped over another box to see an array of crude little clockwork rodents, nestled in the straw with their keys.
“How cunning!” Violet shrieked with delight. “Do they still work?” She grabbed one and began to wind it, but when she released it, it made a rather regretful clicking sound and went silent again without moving. She tested one after another, and some of them didn’t work at all, while others simply didn’t work properly: their gears didn’t catch or a broken foot made them wobble. Erris looked at them with a concerned expression.
“Violet, did your father ever talk about constructing things from clockwork?” he asked.
“No,” Violet said. “I don’t think he built them, or surely he would have made me some dear little clockwork mice.”
I knew Erris didn’t believe for a moment that these crates of clockwork animals were a coincidence. He started opening all the boxes within reach.
“I had no idea he had so many interesting-” Violet’s words cut off abruptly, replaced by a strangled gasp. Erris had thrown back one of the sheets and found a face beneath it.
The wooden face had no hair and was only half painted, yet it was well done, and the staring glass eyes made it look lifelike-or rather, corpselike. In the dim light of the workroom, I could see why it made Violet gasp.
Erris looked at it intently for a moment, and then he started wrestling off the rest of the sheet. It was not easy, for a number of boxes stood in the way of the table on which the clockwork rested. He had to bend and reach, his body tilted awkwardly to favor his good foot, kicking up a great deal of dust in the process.
“What is it?” I said. Her inner workings looked very much like Erris’s. I wondered if the same maker’s mark was stamped on her back.