Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them.
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Jill took Wren, Simon, and Jack to the kitchens, which were filled with bustling apprentices. Jill served them bowls of hot soup and then disappeared without a word.
“Well, that wasn’t very nice.” Jack spread a thick layer of butter on his bread. “No ‘Welcome to the Crooked House. We’re so pleased to meet you.’” He licked the crumbs off his fingers. “But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We’re here now, and I bet we’ll find out all kinds of cool things.”
Wren shook her head. “You amaze me, Jack. You’re still excited to be here after what we went through up there?”
Jack slurped a spoonful of soup. “Gotta stay positive.”
“I bet it’s hard for Mary to stay positive,” Simon said in an even voice, but he stayed focused on his food. “Seems like she’s in a lot of trouble.”
Jack set his bread down. “Maybe. But she can hold her own. And what do you think about that message?” He looked at Wren. “And the weather-changing thing! That was awesome!”
“You mean the thing that was the same thing the horrible Magicians did?” Wren let her spoon fall back against the bowl. “It was the opposite of awesome, Jack. It was awful. I don’t even know what I did. It just happened.” Simon and Jack must have read her mood, because they focused on their food and didn’t ask any more questions.
Wren took a sip of the hot sweet drink the apprentice-cook had brought her and looked around at all the activity. The kitchen was similar to the rooms she’d already seen in the Crooked House. Rough walls hewn from carved stone surrounded a workspace covered with wooden tables. In every corner, thick, wax-covered candelabra sconces lit the room. There was an arched doorway that led out to one of the falcon ledges, where Wren could see the clear night sky. The aurora they had flown through was fading now, and only a thin stream of pale blue was visible along the horizon.
Inside, there was a constant flow of apprentices coming and going. Kids their age were filling dinner plates. Some older ones prepared trays for delivery. A couple of boys were scrubbing huge pots on one side of the room, and opposite them other apprentices scraped leftovers into a bucket. Unlike the serious-faced Fiddlers they had passed on their way down, most of the apprentices were laughing and talking. Apparently, they hadn’t yet heard about Boggen, or if they had, they didn’t care. Wren felt herself relaxing. Away from that horrible amphitheater and all the Fiddlers who now probably thought Wren was an evil Magician come again or something, the Crooked House didn’t seem that bad.
When they were finished eating, Jill reappeared to escort them to a different level of the Crooked House. “This is the apprentice wing,” she said as they wove between a pair of whispering girls who seemed to size them up as they passed. Most of the apprentices appeared to be in their teens or twenties. Some of them looked completely grown up, though they still wore the telltale black-and-gray apprentice cloak.
The apprentice quarters were somewhere between the lower-level kitchen and the amphitheater. The boys’ rooms came first, and Wren told them good-night a little wistfully. She wished she could somehow bunk with them. Being alone in the Crooked House felt awfully intimidating.
The room Jill showed her to wasn’t much bigger than her walk-in closet at home. A single twin bed took up most of the space, with a simple table holding a pitcher of water and a shallow bowl situated to the left of it. A few pegs on the wall behind the door where she could hang her cloak and a hard wooden chair made up the rest of the furnishings.
“Thanks! This is great,” Wren said, mostly because she couldn’t really think of a non-complaining adjective to describe the sparse accommodations. Besides that, no matter how Wren phrased what she said, Jill only responded with monosyllabic replies. Wren had learned nothing. Not where Jill was from. Nor when she became an apprentice. Nothing.
Jill’s head bob was barely discernable over the blankets she’d been carrying.
“So, maybe I’ll see you around?” Wren tried again, but Jill only dropped the blankets on the bed and turned to go. Wren smiled in what she hoped was a friendly way. “Thanks again.”
“Now is when you should sleep,” Jill said before she shut the door, which Wren took as her way of saying good-night.
Wren stared at her cell phone for a long time after she had climbed into bed. She had been surprised to easily get a signal, and now her mom’s latest text blinked at her: Miss you already. Love you so much! xoxo Mom. Wren should send a reply—she wanted to, in fact—but anything she thought of sounded stupid, not to mention vastly incomplete. It felt like a whole year—no, a whole lifetime—had passed since she had last been in her old home. She finally settled on a brief reply: Turning in for the night. Love you, too!
There was a small skylight cut into the rock ceiling, and Wren looked out to see a smattering of constellations glimmering like a sea of jewels flung across the sky. Wren thought of the night before, when her mom had dropped her off at Pippen Hill, and wondered if things could get any crazier. If the past twenty-four hours were any indication, she was betting they could.
When Wren woke, the sun was full-on blazing through the window. Her room was hot but not uncomfortably so. She sat up and poured some water from her pitcher into the bowl, slurping a sip to quench her dry throat. In the harsh daylight, she noticed what she must have overlooked the night before: a rounded door tucked in the far corner of the room. She put on her cloak and her shoes and made her way outside.
The world was bathed in a bright light that set her head pounding and cast everything in a palette of grainy gray and white and black. She wasn’t two steps outside when she heard the door slam behind her. When she turned back, the door was gone, replaced by the jagged exterior wall of the Crooked House.
Heart pounding, she ran her hands along the place where it should have been, feeling for some kind of latch, but there was nothing. She would have to go forward. She set off on the path in front of her that wound down an exterior stairway toward an outbuilding planted in the middle of the valley floor. She shaded her eyes against the light, but she couldn’t see if anyone was there.
Up close, the shed was weathered gray, with strips of paint curling up in disrepair. The twin doors hung ajar, flanked on either side by intertwined cogs and gears that were rusted from disuse. The stillness of the morning let Wren know the building was empty, and she didn’t think there had been anyone there in a long time. She took a few steps into the dark interior to make sure, and as she moved back outside, she caught a familiar metallic smell. She tried to place it—something like chemicals and lab experiments and—she froze in the doorway as recognition crashed into her mind. Blood. Just beyond the barn, there was a black tree, barren of leaves and made out of some kind of metal. Below it shone a puddle of dark liquid. The blood was fresh, not yet congealed, and she could see drops falling from the things hanging over the empty branches, spaced every foot or so.
Wren moved closer, burying her nose in the crook of her elbow to hide the smell. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like animal pelts had been set out to dry. Wren had seen taxidermy exhibits before, but even so, her empty stomach turned. She moved closer, noting that there wasn’t a whole animal hanging, only a woolen mass. Now she was near enough to see that each one was nailed to the tree. Tails of some kind. Sheep, perhaps? She scoured the ground for a stick and poked at the furry blob closest to her. Wisps of black wool clung to the stick. Then, as she watched in horror, the wool began to change and grow, creeping up toward her hand. She threw the stick down, but there was no releasing it. She watched powerlessly as her skin was drenched with the bright red liquid, the only color in a world framed with shadows of black, white, and gray.
She tried to scream, but her voice was muffled as though someone had put a pillow over her face or trapped her words in a cramped little box. She heard a sound from somewhere near the edge of the woods and saw a girl about her own age, a shepherd’s crook raised high above her head. Wren couldn’t tell if she was frightened or excited. Her mouth was open, and she was shouting something at Wren, waving her crook, as she ran toward her.
Wren held out her hand, her voice still paralyzed with fear. She wanted to warn the girl to stay away. That something horrible was going on here. That there was blood and sheep’s tails, and the nightmare of not being able to speak. The girl was closer now, and Wren could see that she was indeed a shepherdess, because her flock was following her from the cover of the trees. Behind them was a shadowy shape that tickled Wren’s memory.
“A Dreamer,” the shape said, and Wren heard a man’s voice that was full of surprise. “Come closer, Dreamer, so that I can have a look at you.”
Wren’s feet were rooted in the ground, but even if they weren’t, she would never come closer. He seemed made of shadows, despite the contrasting landscape, and his words sounded almost robotic.
“Dreamer!” he said, much louder this time. Wren tried to speak, but her voice was trapped inside, her chest squeezed with the pressure of it. She couldn’t look away. Couldn’t run or move. He had her in some strange spell, and even though he hadn’t moved from the forest’s edge, she knew he was coming for her. Wren fought against it. If she could tear her gaze away, perhaps the rest of her would follow.
“Dreamer!” It was the girl’s voice this time, and it was what Wren needed. She wrenched her thoughts away from the man, reaching for some protective wall, and she saw his look of astonishment as she eluded his control. Wren’s limbs were free now, and she moved toward the girl.
The shepherdess was almost to the tree, her mouth open, wailing at the sight of the tails hanging there, and then she turned to Wren, her dark eyes wet with tears. “Dreamer,” she said. “You have to help us.”
The shepherdess didn’t see the man behind her, didn’t see how he clapped his hands in delight at the sight of her dismay, didn’t see how he looked over the top of her head at Wren, his soulless black eyes piercing her skull. “You will be mine, Dreamer.”