In marble walls as white as milk,
Lined with skin as soft as silk,
Mysteries manifold do appear,
For those who seek them, crystal clear.
Between stardust lessons with Liza and Baxter, apprentice chores in the kitchen, and exploring the Crooked House with Jack and Simon, Wren’s days were busy. Every night she faithfully texted her parents something vaguely related to what she had actually done that day, and their replies gave her fleeting stabs of homesickness. It was hard for her to imagine that her old life was spinning along as usual—her mom was wrapped up in the annual Springfest play and her dad busy teaching courses at the college. How could all that stay the same when her whole world had changed?
Wren wondered what her mom and dad would say if they could see her now. She stood on a balcony that overlooked the Opal Sea and pulled the rope to one of the dumbwaiters that connected the kitchens to the rest of the Crooked House. All apprentices were given a daily job assignment, and Elsa had saddled Wren with the midmorning hot cross bun delivery. Most Fiddlers ate in their rooms or in their laboratories. Baxter had clicked his tongue over the lack of culinary interest, and Wren was beginning to see what he meant. Oatmeal for breakfast, some kind of soup for lunch, and dinner was always a variation on meat and vegetables. Hot cross buns midmorning and midafternoon, like clockwork.
Wren carefully transferred the baskets to her small handcart. Over the years Fiddlers had claimed the natural caverns that pigeonholed the walls of the Crooked House, and an impressive latticework of wooden balconies and staircases connected the labs. Wren steadied the cart with one hand as it tipped its way over the rough planks. “Don’t speak to the full Fiddlers,” Elsa had commanded her that first day. Wren needn’t have worried about breaking that rule. But for the sound of the one rumbling wheel, Wren was surrounded with silence. She wondered what was behind the green doors that lined the wall. Some were marked with cryptic abbreviations and numbers. A few held only a title that seemed connected with a rhyme.
She checked her clipboard. The door marked WILLIAM BLUE was to receive three orders. Her cart was laden with baskets of fresh-made rolls, each expertly twisted into a neat knot and marked with an X on top. Wren prepared the trays and stacked them by the door. Mary had warned her to be careful near the laboratories. She said some of the Fiddlers spent weeks at a time immersed in their research, coming out into daylight surprised to find a whole season had passed. Like Mary could talk. Wren hadn’t seen her for more than a few stolen moments each week, when Mary left her meetings with the Council to give them some odd task. One time it had been to find all the library books having to do with moonlight. Later, Mary had changed her mind and wanted anything referencing Jupiter’s moons. And then she had wanted to speak to Simon alone about the state of the falcon mews. The last time they’d seen her she had quizzed Jack on where exactly he had found Boggen’s stone. Mary was working her way through Boggen’s old research logs, but she wouldn’t tell them anything more than what she needed them to do.
Wren had given up hope that she would ever be able to talk to Mary about her dreams. At first it had been because there never seemed to be time. Mary appeared and disappeared before any of them could say much at all. But the more Wren dreamed, the more she became uncertain. She strongly suspected that her dreams were somehow connected to being a Weather Changer. She was learning to control her emotional response when she worked the stardust, and sometimes she could even get through a whole lesson without freaking out. But when the deep breaths didn’t work and she failed to rein things in, one of the waking dreams was usually the result. If the Council had gotten all weird about her being a Weather Changer, what would they do if she told them the rest of it?
Wren pushed the cart around the curving corner for the next delivery and then came to a sudden stop, scrambling to make sure she didn’t lose her remaining baskets. The door in front of her was unlike all the others. It was wide open. NUMBER 3 was hand-lettered on the sign just outside, and a faint humming sound came from within. Her pulse quickened. She knew what she should do. She should unload the trays and move on, exactly as she had been instructed. Don’t disturb the Fiddlers. But this might be her only chance to get a peek at a real honest-to-goodness Fiddler lab. She tiptoed closer to the door, and she was almost to it—she could even see the whitewashed walls inside—when the humming sound stopped. Everything went still, and the silence of the hallway seemed almost deafening. She set the trays down noiselessly and crept back to her cart. Wren eased it forward, mentally cursing the telltale wheel, when she heard the click of what sounded like dress shoes on stone.
“Ah, an apprentice.” The voice from behind froze her into place. “And just the one I was hoping to speak with. You’re one of the new ones who belongs to Mary, aren’t you? The Weather Changer?”
Wren turned around to see Cole, the leader of the Council, standing in the open doorway. He was wearing the same rumpled sweater she had seen before, but this time no falcon perched on his shoulder.
“Won’t you come in?” Cole said without a smile.
Everything in the Crooked House was a strange mixture of old and new. Kiosks with power outlets and Wi-Fi hubs next door to the library full of ancient books. The kitchen where modern appliances hummed beside old-fashioned cast-iron stoves and spits turning over the fire. But nothing had prepared Wren for what she saw in Cole’s lab.
Once she followed him through the door, it was as if she’d left the Crooked House behind altogether. Gleaming stainless steel tables filled the room, marking stations where white-cloaked Fiddlers bent over microscopes. The Fiddler nearest her stood in front of a huge touch screen adding data to a hovering 3D strand of DNA. The humming sound she had heard earlier came from a robotic laser that someone was using on what looked like an animal pelt. Hanging fluorescent lights replaced the sconces she had become used to. Only the stone floor below her feet reminded her that she was still inside a mountain.
“What is this place?” Wren gasped, taking it all in.
“My laboratory,” Cole said pleasantly, leading her past the maze of tables to a glassed-in cubicle that stood in the center of it all. He gestured to the metal desk with a chair on each side. “Won’t you have a seat?”
Behind him, she could see a Fiddler carefully measuring a steaming liquid from an eyedropper into a glass petri dish. The Fiddler conjured some stardust, and while Wren watched, the liquid flared red and then a bright neon green.
“What are you researching?” Wren managed as she sat down. She couldn’t think what DNA and neon liquid and animal skins had to do with one another.
“Anything and everything. Surely even in your short time as an apprentice, you’ve thought of the potential for stardust.” Cole waved his hand to point to different stations. “Improving technology. Finding cures for terminal diseases. Unlocking the mystery of genetic sequencing. Any new scientific discoveries made in the ordinary world likely have an Alchemist behind them.” He folded his hands flat on the table, interlocking his fingers. “I’ve had to pause my own research, because of this new crisis—this message you’ve discovered from Boggen.”
“I didn’t discover it,” Wren said, distracted by the sight of a stardust explosion on the far side of the room. The woman at that station was now covered in the neon liquid, rescued only by the Fiddler next to her, who wove a rhyme that somehow quenched the glowing fire. “Mary’s the one you should be talking to.”
“Fiddler Mary, you mean? You can be sure that I’ve learned everything she has to tell. Odd, isn’t it, that Boggen was the last Weather Changer before you?” Cole’s voice was low and soothing. “And that you and your friends arrive just after we learn he’s touching our world again. In fact, we believe Boggen has been communicating with someone here at the Crooked House, and we think he meant for that someone to find his message.”
That got Wren’s undivided attention. She snapped her head back around.
Cole’s smile was still in place, but there was a hard look in his eyes. “Or perhaps it’s that someone here is trying to find him?”
Wren’s heart started to pound. Her thoughts felt muddy. What did Cole mean? Why was he asking her these questions? He was saying more now, something about suspecting that Boggen was in another dimension or on another planet and wanted someone from the Crooked House to help him. Someone Boggen had special access to. Her mind whirled at the idea. Cole was talking about space travel and other dimensions. And then things began to come into focus. He wasn’t just filling her in on the latest Boggen research. He was interrogating her. Cole thought she knew something about Boggen.
“But my particular research interest,” Cole was saying, “is in sleep disorders and the psychology of dreams.” His thick-rimmed glasses made his eyebrows look extra sharp as they furrowed down disapprovingly. “Boggen was a Weather Changer and a Dreamer, you know. The two often go hand in hand. Wren, how have you been sleeping lately?”
“Fine,” she lied. One part of her brain was screaming at her to tell the truth. This was proof that the dreams meant something, and Cole could probably tell her exactly what. But the other part instinctively knew that would be dangerous. Here she was, already suspect as the first Weather Changer. There was no way she was going to tell Cole, with his frowning eyebrows and incriminating gaze, that she, coincidentally, was also a Dreamer who couldn’t control her dreams.
“Elsa keeps us so busy, you know?” Wren babbled. “I’m exhausted at night and conk out right away. Never slept so well as I do here.” But the claim sounded false even to Wren’s own ears. Every night was the same. Repeats of the dreams she’d had before, or something very like them. Colorless scenes where strange things happened.
“Fiddler Elsa, you mean” was all Cole said in reply, his frown making two deep lines between his eyes. “Have you wandered anywhere in the Crooked House you shouldn’t?”
“No,” Wren said, wondering if he thought apprentices were stupid.
He folded his hands and leaned in toward her. “Have you touched any magical object you don’t know the purpose of?”
“No.” Seriously? Did he actually think Wren would own up to it if she had? “No, sir.” The creases between his eyes deepened. “I mean, Fiddler. No, Fiddler,” she added belatedly.
“What about Fiddler labs? Have you gone into any of them?”
Wren folded her hands to match his. So apparently he did think apprentices were stupid if he thought she would give a different answer to the same question thinly disguised. She ignored his frown. “I already told you,” Wren said evenly. “I only go where I’m told and do what I’m told.”
“And your dreams.” Cole shifted topics without warning. “Fiddler Liza reports you’ve had some odd moments, when you seem to be somewhere else. Could you explain?”
“I—uh—” Wren hunted for words. Liza had told Cole about their lessons? That was unexpected. “It’s Simon, you see,” Wren said, thinking fast. “I’ve always been smarter than him, but here”—what had started out as a stalling tactic was becoming genuine—“here, he’s better with the stardust. And sometimes having lessons with him and Jack is”—her voice dropped—“really hard.”
Cole sat back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, a look of disappointment in his eyes. “I don’t want to hear about your petty rivalries, Apprentice.” His voice was hard. “Don’t waste my time.”
Wren drew herself up. Waste his time? He was the one interrogating her! “I’m sorry I can’t be more help, Fiddler Cole,” she said in her most grown-up voice. “But I really should get back to my rounds. Fiddler Elsa”—she made sure to enunciate Fiddler—“will be upset if I’m not back soon.” She glanced around the lab, feeling a fleeting sadness that she couldn’t learn more of what was going on here, but even that wasn’t worth the risk of extending her time under Cole’s hawkish gaze. “Thank you for letting me see your laboratory.”
Cole eyed her over steepled fingers. “Very well,” he said. “If you think of anything else, you know where to find me.”