The little cottage’s shingles were weathered and askew, and the porch looked as though a mouse skittering across would cause it to collapse. A dark gap in the wooden beams propping the porch up caught Evie’s eye, footprints in the dirt leading toward the opening under the house. Twinkly glass enclosed each window, reflecting trinkets hung from the weathered deck’s every beam, catching the few bits of moonlight that filtered down from above.
The whole house seemed to buzz with magic. Evie went up the porch stairs and pushed open the front door, the squished mess of raspberry tart still in her hand. The door hinges gave a haunted squeak as she pulled it open, a crow’s harsh caw-caw! startling her back from the door.
Gisa was right there behind her. “I think the Fel might be the only one home.”
“After we followed the robbers here?” Max puffed up his chest and pulled out his flintlock. “I’ll go in first, just to be sure.”
“What are you going to do with that, ask the Robber Lord to bend over so you can whack him in the head?” Teasing Max made Evie feel a little more herself, so she made sure the hartelismi ring was firm on her thumb, then pushed through the door. Inside, the dark entryway tasted old and sullied, as if the house had once been a living creature but had now expired. And there, hanging from the ceiling high over her head, was a cage where a chandelier should have been. Each bar was made from bone. The cage rattled as the bird inside hopped from side to side, beady eyes peering at Evie. A very large crow.
Not a crow. A Fel.
Evie could feel him pulling at her even before the humming singsong started deep in her chest, just as the Fel King had raked through her thoughts with his unseen claws. Its beak didn’t open as it spoke, the voice a firm print in her mind. “Why, hello there. How can I help you?” the Fel asked. It hopped forward, nipping at the cage’s bleached-white bars. “I see you’ve got an extra tart there.” He sounded young, like a little boy in the bakery who had just caught sight of a hot tray of cookies, not old and tired as the Fel King had.
“Where are the robbers?” Max asked just as Evie demanded, “Where’s Cece?” Gisa’s face had gone pale and she grabbed hold of each of their arms. “Do not speak without thinking first,” she cried.
The Fel cocked his head at Gisa, beady black eyes winking. “Hello there, cousin. This is an odd place to find one like you. In fact, I suggest you run as fast as you can far away. You know they lock up girls here?”
“Yes!” Evie almost shouted it. “Where is my friend? A girl, like you said. Red braids. Freckles. She’s a little bit scared of everything, but she also likes pirates.”
“No, Evie.” Gisa pulled her back a step. “Start with what you don’t want.”
The Fel was already hopping this way and that, eyeing the bit of tart in Evie’s hand. “I’ll make a deal with you, Evie Baker. For that tart, if you like. The robbers are mean and won’t ever give me tarts, and that one’s only a little squished.”
“A deal?” Evie’s plans from before, to ask for adventure, for pirate hats and a sword to match Saint Hart’s all ran through her mind like an overexcited carousel.
“It will have to be a very small deal because it’s a very small tart.”
“I thought you were bound to the Robber Lord.” Gisa peered up at the overlarge bird. “You can’t make a deal with us, can you? Not until your deal with him is done.”
“But raspberry tart! Just one small deal would be all right, don’t you think?”
“I’m not the one who makes the rules, Fel.” Gisa shrank back a bit, as if maybe she wished she were.
“Technically, I’m not supposed to deal with another human while I’m still working with the Robber Lord. I’m hoping you’re not smart enough to know that, and will give me the tart before you realize I won’t be much help.” He fluttered his wings, making the cage shake. “Drat, I’ve thought that out loud, haven’t I?”
“It wouldn’t have been fair if you hadn’t said it. Not saying something that lets someone believe a falsehood is just as much a lie as saying a lie out loud, isn’t it?” Max chimed in before Evie could say it.
“You don’t make the rules, and thinking they’re unfair won’t change them.”
“Right. We’ll have to find Cece ourselves.” Evie looked around the room.
“Wait! What about a bargain instead of a deal? They’re not the same at all—bargains are much smaller. The Robber Lord is mean and wrong about everything. He lied to me, you know, and now I’m stuck just like the king, neck deep in trouble pudding. Maybe more like toffee. Or cream? Please would you give me the tart? I’ll keep a bargain. It’s only magic I can’t share.”
“How are we supposed to trust you now?” Evie demanded.
“Because he can’t lie,” Gisa whispered. “He probably can help us some, so long as it doesn’t mess up anything he’s doing on the Robber Lord’s orders. If bargains are nothing to do with magic, then he won’t be bound to it, though. He’ll only have to tell the truth. We have to do this backward, like in my story.”
“Backward,” Evie whispered. She drew herself up, pointing one finger at the cage. “I will exchange my raspberry tart in a very, very small bargain with you that has nothing to do with magic on these conditions: First, you may not tell anyone that we are here.”
“I won’t. I don’t even want to. You are a much better baker than the Robber Lord.”
“Second, you have to tell us if the Robber Lord comes and protect us from—”
“The first I can do. The second is magic.” The Fel clawed at the cage. “Now hand it over.”
“I’m not finished.” She tried to think of a way to trip him up, to make sure he was going to do as she asked and not something else that only sounded like it. “Third, I want you to tell me where my parents are…”
“Easy, they’re in town like always. Now give it.”
“I hadn’t finished.” Evie breathed out a sigh of relief about her parents, only to snap back to attention. She’d known Dr. Cleat had been lying about something—he’d just wanted the tart recipe. The most important thing right then was Cece. “Tell me how to find my friend Cecily Miller.”
The Fel went still, his curved beak dipping low against his chest. “I can’t.” But then he jumped up. “But I can do something smaller.”
“Maybe for half the tart?” Evie countered.
The Fel clacked his beak unhappily. “No, definitely big enough for the whole thing. I can tell you she’s close.”
“Where?” Max interjected. “Only telling us she’s nearby isn’t enough.”
“It’s the best I can do. It’s very accurate information. She can’t even move and make it so I’m lying because she can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“The Robber Lord says I can’t let her. She’s awfully nice, though.”
The thought of Fel magic keeping Cece in the forest made Evie remember the robber in Captain Garry’s office, stuck as something that wasn’t even him anymore. She shuddered. But she shook off that thought. With hartelismi, the Fel wouldn’t be able to make a puppet out of Cece or stop her going where she wanted anymore. “Well, how close? In the house?”
“She told you where she is, Evie Baker. And I let her because I like both of you.” The Fel flapped its wings, almost falling off his perch. “You won’t find her if you stay here, though. The Robber Lord is coming—see, I kept part of our bargain already. I told you he’s coming just like you asked. Now give me the tart.”
A hollow thunk of boots shuddered through the rotting porch stairs outside, spinning Evie around to check she’d closed the front door. Max drew his flintlock and Gisa grabbed Evie and Max both, dragging them under the Fel’s cage and deeper into the house.
The hallway was long, too long for how small the house had seemed to be on the outside, with doors, so many doors. Cece could be behind any one of them, and they didn’t have the time to open each and every one. Evie peeked through the first doorway, the room inside full to the brim with black metal. She went to the second instead, a staircase on the back wall leading to the second floor. It was an odd place for a staircase, since the room itself seemed to be some sort of kitchen. An open fireplace coated with cold ashes sat on one wall, an array of pie and tart tins arranged haphazardly in rows before it, all of them stained and scorched from the fire. There was one pan so large Evie could have crawled right inside, raw pastry left to crack and dry in its bottom.
The Fel was right. These robbers obviously did not know much about baking.
Next to the fireplace, a half-dismantled wagon wheel was propped up as if it was being used for firewood. The wall opposite the fireplace had a heavy table pushed up against it, soiled pots and pans mixed together with spoiled fruit and long loaves of bread. Evie accidentally knocked the table as she ran to the stairs, oversetting a bottle that crashed onto the floor, leaving a pool of broken glass and foul-smelling liquid. Evie wrinkled her nose, wishing she could light it on fire, just like Pop did with his rum puddings because then it wouldn’t smell so. “Come on! They’re coming!”
Boots were in the hallway just outside, coarse laughter ringing through the house. Something went thud thud thud across the floor, as if they were dragging a heavy trunk behind them but weren’t being too careful about it. Evie opened the door at the top of the stairs for Max and Gisa, then pulled it almost all the way closed behind her just as the kitchen door crashed open. Evie watched through the cracked-open door.
There were two robbers carrying a person between them none too carefully, a man with spectacles somehow still precariously lodged on his nose and a purple coat. Dr. Cleat! He was still unconscious.
Evie could barely breathe as she looked around the upstairs, the passage they were in winding this way and that just as the downstairs did. She didn’t want to leave Dr. Cleat with the robbers, but she wasn’t sure what to do just then. Maybe on the way out, once they’d found Cece, they could take him too.
“Well, what did Cece tell you?” Gisa hissed, moving away from the door. Loud laughter leaked through it, making Evie feel as if she was coated in muck. “The Fel said she told you where she is. What did she write?”
“We can start with Cece, but can’t leave without stopping the robbers,” Max countered, starting down the hallway. “Otherwise they’ll hurt my mum.”
“Cece said…” Evie thought back to her list of odd things. “That it was like being stuck in a tower, waiting for a prince to come save her.” She looked Max over. “She’ll like that, actually, when we find her. Too bad you don’t wear a crown. Did any of you see a tower while we were outside?”
“The house is bigger inside, of course. It was the first thing we did once those foul robbers started taking people off the road so they couldn’t tattle on us.” The Fel’s voice hummed in Evie’s head.
“Why are you helping us?” Max’s voice was quiet, but the Fel heard. “Or are you helping?”
“Of course I’m helping. I want the tart. Maybe more than one tart. Which means helping you so Evie will bake some more for me.”
“Are there more stairs?” Evie asked.
“Down the hall to the right.”
They took the right hallway and came to a bank of windows that looked out on the forest with stairs just beyond. To Max and Gisa she said, “Cece wrote something about trees, ghosts, um, a purple coat—but I think that was about getting Dr. Cleat to bring me out here. She went to visit the boy next door? But he only liked books.”
Gisa frowned, biting her lip. “Were there any boys who lived near her in Paline?”
“We did steal a book from … no, that was from Dr. Cleat.” Evie stopped on the circular landing at the top of the stairs. There were three doors, the one on the left with a book carved into the very center of the red-painted door, the one on the right with a flower painted in bright purple just over the handle, and the one in the middle with a knob that was burnished gold.
Doors. Cece had said she wanted a magical door that led straight to Evie.
“It’s a trap,” the Fel supplied helpfully. “But I can’t help you. I hope you stay alive.”
“Saying it’s a trap is helping us, you know. And I don’t believe you about wanting the raspberry tart so much.” Evie asked, “Why are you bending so many rules for us?”
“Because … the Robber Lord was one of us. But now he’s like Gisa. He wanted to save the king so the rest of us would get better, but now I think he likes his human clothes too much, and is going to keep the king stuck toffee-tight until we all forget we used to be more than crows.”
Gisa looked up from staring at the flower painted on the door in front of her. “Fel can’t use their magic without a deal, but what human would want to make that deal? Could the Robber Lord be a Fel? He’d have to give up his magic to become human, but then once he became human, he could make a deal with a Fel to save the king.”
“But the robbers are still trying to get into the castle. Are they going to kill the queen and the Fel King? And if that’s what he’s wanted all along, why didn’t he just make you do it, Fel?” Evie asked.
“I can’t kill. No Fel can.”
“Can’t they? Why else would Saint Hart have died on the battlefield? Her tricky Fel got out of his bargain and … and … Fel eat people.” Evie looked at the floor toward where she imagined the Fel’s cage hung below them, finally wondering why it was he sat in a cage made of bones. Maybe she was wrong about that too? But she couldn’t be. “The robbers have hurt people. And you felled a tree right on top of our heads less than an hour ago!”
“To scare you. I can’t kill on purpose, Evie Baker.” The Fel’s voice ran hot. “That’s why the Robber Lord brought the rest of the robbers. Humans might not have magic, he said, but they can do more than we can. He’s been dreaming of something more since the first day he shed his feathers.” His words winnowed down to something quiet. “Saint Hart knew she could not ask the king to kill, but she did anyway, and it was what killed her.”
Gisa pointed to the purple flower on the door. “This is a balm for headaches and uneasy stomachs. Does that sound familiar?”
Evie shook her head. “These must be like the Fel doors in Reinstadt. Which one will take us to Cece?” She looked at the purple flower on Gisa’s door. “Cece mentioned purple.”
Max pointed to the door in the middle. “That’s like the door to the Fel King’s cage. It’s magic so it only opens from the outside. The prison doors are all like that too—that must be where Cece is.”
Pointing to the book on the last door, Evie said, “Cece said she went next door for dinner, and the boy had lots of books. So that must be it. Or is it?”
“If you open the wrong door, then you won’t be here anymore, even with your hartelismi to change where it goes. If you choose the right door, you could get to where you want to go, but that might not be here. So, please get it right, Evie Baker. I want my tart.”
“What do you mean won’t be here? Where will we be?” But the Fel only sighed, one long whirrr that sounded like a whole hive of bees. Two of the doors must be magicked so even hartelismi couldn’t change where they went. The third would get her to where she wanted to go, though—to Cece. But what the Fel was saying made it sound like anyone who walked through would go where they wanted, even without hartelismi. A powerful door, indeed.
Unless the Fel was trying to mess them up. Evie looked down toward him, as if that would help her know whether she’d figured out the right answer. “How do I know these doors don’t lead to your cookpot so you can eat us?” she asked. “It wouldn’t be you killing us if we’re the ones who choose to walk through.”
“You hold hartelismi. Don’t you know that name means ‘the fall of Hart’? I couldn’t touch you in a cookpot or otherwise. You’re the one touching the rest of the world.”
Evie shivered, wondering what exactly he meant. She spun the hartelismi ring on her thumb, wishing it didn’t feel quite so heavy, then looked at the three doors.
“Purple?” Gisa said quietly.
“It could all be a trick. The one she didn’t mention could be right.” Max pointed to the one with the golden handle.
“Or the one she did.” Evie looked hard at the one with the book, then turned to the door in the center, the one Max had pointed to. “We have to try all three. The Fel said he can’t kill us. Max and I both have hartelismi, and Gisa can see through magic, so he can’t trick us really. We should be safe.” Stepping up to her door, Evie put her hand on the golden knob. It felt a little warm. “But two of us might end up … somewhere else.”
Gisa nodded. “I’ll do this one.”
Max hesitated, then shoved his flintlock into his coat. “Okay,” he said, stepping forward to claim the door with the book carved into the wood. “I’m ready. If I’m the one who ends up somewhere else, I’ll find the closest guard outpost. They can send messenger pigeons, put together a rescue brigade…” He gulped when the rest of the words didn’t come out. All of them knew no rescue brigade was going to get there in time to be much help. “Just … stop them, Evie. I get the feeling it’s going to be you who pulls through.”
“Because I want to save Cece most?”
Gisa frowned. “This isn’t a story, Evie Baker. It doesn’t really matter who wants what, just so long as we stop the robbers hurting anyone else.”
Evie thought about all her hero stories and how boring all the heroes themselves had been, hardly worthy of such an interesting story. Most of them had no friends or thoughts for anyone other than their horse or trusty dog because not even the princesses they saved seemed to like them much. Evie liked standing there with Max and Gisa much better than she’d liked hiding in the Hollows’ kitchen alone. Minus a horse, dog, and random princess who needed saving, because everyone around her was a friend. It was a real story, not a made-up one.
She reached out to grip Max’s and Gisa’s hands. “I wouldn’t have made it this far without the two of you. If I’m the one who gets sent off, you’ll get Cece? Make sure she gets home?”
“We wouldn’t be here without you either, you know,” Max conceded. “Of course I’ll get Cece home. She got shipped off far away and kidnapped…” He looked down. “That’s probably what will happen to me the moment I get home. The shipping-off part. I’ll find Cece and stop it happening to her if I can.”
“And I was in a prison cell for no reason, just the way Cece is.” Gisa’s frown grew deeper. “I’ll find your friend.”
“I was away from my family. I guess we all were.” Evie made herself look straight ahead. “That all stops now. On three. One. Two. Three!”