Fifteen

Mr. Hardwick dreamed. Trees bent over him, limbs grasping at his clothes and shoving him into the depth of the dark woods. Orcas swam through the air, passing through branches, flying and playing and singing with their family. He missed his family—his wife who had died and his son who had left. He struggled through the forest to reach Filemon, continuing on, even when twigs left scratches on his skin.

When Zilpha dropped Eliza off at the Jester, it was to discover Sheriff Olavi sitting at the counter across from Pa, eating a bowl of lentil soup. The bun at the nape of her neck frizzed, as if she’d spent the day hurrying and hadn’t had the chance to tidy up her hair.

“Baron Dire wrote letters to you,” Eliza blurted. Her insides burned, even though she hadn’t worn the thin coat Zilpha had made her take.

Sheriff Olavi sat up, pulling back her shoulders that had been hunched over her dinner. “And how do you know that?”

“I cleaned his house with Zilpha.”

“Why were you cleaning Dire’s house?”

Eliza wasn’t about to tell Sheriff Olavi that she’d wanted to interrogate Dire. Not that it’d worked. Feeling defensive, she said, “Barons need their houses cleaned too.”

“As if he’s a real baron,” Sheriff Olavi said. “He’s not anything related to nobility. His grandmother stole the title!”

“Olavi,” Pa said, low.

Sheriff Olavi sucked in a breath. She nodded once, then scraped the last dregs of soup from her bowl with a piece of bread and said. “You’ll do as I asked?”

“I’m not as influential as you seem to think I am,” Pa said.

“All the same.” Sheriff Olavi took up her hat from where it sat on the counter and set it on her head, nice and straight. She patted Eliza’s shoulder as she walked past and headed down the street into the night.

Eliza shut the door behind her. The fever setting her skin afire made her fingers damp with sweat, leaving behind a thumb print on the metal doorknob. She wiped her hands on her dress, praying Pa wouldn’t notice. If he noticed, he’d ask what was wrong, and she’d have to admit she didn’t know. She didn’t feel as if she were getting sick, but still—

“Did cleaning Dire’s house go well?” Pa asked.

Eliza looked at him, remembering him as he’d been before Ma left. He’d smiled a lot, and the restaurant hadn’t closed in winter. Everyone in town would stop by during the week, passing on gossip and buying bottles of Ma’s sleeping draught, especially if they’d bargained with Dire and had a difficult time sleeping dreamless on their own. Pa had been influential, but at some point, that had stopped being important to him.

“Eliza?”

Cleaning Dire’s house had gone terribly. She said, “It went okay. How did fixing the schoolhouse go?”

“Well enough. It’ll take more time to finish the roofing.”

“Oh,” Eliza said, feeling bad for Miss Alayna, and also feeling bad for Filemon and the niece or nephew he would have soon.

Pa nodded, looking as if he wanted to say more. Instead, he handed her dinner bowls to clean. Eliza headed into the kitchen and found Winnie standing on the countertop, one ear pressed to the wall.

“Sheriff’s gone?” Winnie asked. “Pa said I had to stay back here while they talked about ‘adult things’, but he didn’t tell me I couldn’t listen.”

Colby had been right; eavesdropping came natural to the Parletts. “Did you hear anything good?”

“‘Adult things’ meant stuff about the Wolf. Sheriff wants to make a hunting party to catch the Wolf and run Dire out of town. She wants him gone.”

“If Dire leaves, we might all find a way to be free,” Eliza said as she helped Winnie off the counter. If everyone would be free, it meant she and Winnie could find Ma on the continent, and it meant Pa would stop being so sad. The thought of it fluttered inside her lungs.

Winnie shrugged. “They didn’t say anything about that.”

Eliza’s fingers snagged on the back of Winnie’s head where the snarl had gotten worse. Strands of hair clung to her sweaty palms. A shudder went through her. She had to admit at last that it was no use trying to untangle it. She may not have answers to most of her questions, but she could fix this one small problem.

She asked, “Are you ready for a haircut?”

Winnie flopped her arms at her side. “I’ve been asking for one for six hundred years!”

“Four days!” Eliza laughed, tension releasing inside her at her sister’s exaggeration. “You’ve only had the knot for four days.”

She shook off any last nerves or thoughts that she’d failed Winnie somehow by not having taken care of her better, found Pa’s silver scissors, and set Winnie before the fire where she could feed locks of hair to the flame. Wiping her hands on the bottom of her skirts, she smoothed them over Winnie’s head. Her sister smelled of the night sky. Of stars and the moon and the sort of darkness that birthed dreams. It was fresh and sweet, almost like the birthday butter cookies Winnie loved so much.

“Maybe Pa would let us climb onto the roof and watch the stars tonight,” Eliza said. “You’d like that.”

“Could we bring a snack?” Winnie asked.

“Didn’t you just eat dinner?”

“Yes, but I’d like a snack too.” She looked back at Eliza, her eyes the same shade of black as the silent witching hour her mother used to speak of: It’s the most wondrous time of the night, when the best dreams are brewed. Careful of it, Eliza.

Eliza shoved away thoughts of Ma and made Winnie turn her head. Snip, snip. Fine white hair dusted Winnie’s shoulders and fell to the floor. Eliza cut in a straight line at the base of her skull, shearing off six inches of hair. The knot had grown to the size of a golf ball, and it resisted the scissors, almost as if Eliza were trying to cut through tree bark or a skein of yarn or a damp fishing net.

Eliza called, “Pa, we need to sharpen your scissor—”

The lump severed in half. A chunk of hair dropped into Eliza’s lap. What hair remained at Winnie’s neck unspooled, and from between the strands, a white and gray feather emerged.

One. Eliza stopped breathing.

Two. She pulled the feather, tugging when it didn’t come loose.

Three. She wrenched hard, yanking it free and causing Winnie to cry out and clap a hand to her scalp. Winnie spun on her knees, facing Eliza with fury tightening her brow.

Four. She set the feather on the floor, not tossing it to the fire as she had all the others.

Five. She cradled Winnie’s face between her clammy hands.

“I keep finding them everywhere I go,” Winnie whispered.

Eliza breathed. In, out, in, out. But her racing heart refused to slow.

“Hoot, hoot.”

Fear trembled out of Eliza’s mouth along with her words, “It came out of you…out of your head. How long has that been happening?”

“Six hundred years.” A too-wide, panicked grin stretched across Winnie’s mouth.

“Four days? Four days feathers have been falling out of your head and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t know they were coming out of my head. I’ve just been finding them. They were on my pillow and on the floor and outside and everywhere.” Winnie pulled away from Eliza’s grip. She scrubbed her fingers through her hair, tugging at the chin-length locks. Scrubbing and tugging and scrubbing and tugging until another feather tumbled to the floor.

Desperately, Eliza scratched at the roots of Winnie’s hair, finding little downy feathers hidden along her scalp. The fluff of it smoothed against Eliza’s skin, fuzzy and newborn-owlet soft.

“What’s happening?” Winnie said, hiccupping as tears pooled in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks.

She’s turning into an animal! Zilpha had shouted at Dire.

“You’re okay. It’s okay,” Eliza said, lying to make Winnie feel better, even though everything had gone horribly wrong. She forced herself to stop touching Winnie’s hair and pressed her cheek to her sister’s. “It’s okay. I promise I’ll figure this out. I’ll fix everything.”

“It hurts,” Winnie whimpered. She grabbed up the fallen feathers on the floor and scrunched them in her fists. “It feels like I’m tearing in half. I’m two. It feels like I’m two.”

Eliza pulled back, her aching hands frozen in midair.

“There are two of me!”

The two parts of Eliza that had pushed farther apart at Dire’s house chafed against one another. They pressed against her skin, warming her insides. She spread her fingers wide, feeling an invisible tug between each finger, a web of skin she couldn’t see. “Winnie. There are two of me too.”

Winnie sucked in her lips. Her tears stopped flowing, though one trembled on the edge of her nose. Eliza dabbed it away. It felt as if she’d sunk into a shadow with her sister, as if together, they’d stepped onto the dark side of the moon. Up there, spinning outside the earth, Eliza saw not two sisters, but four. Two Elizas and two Winnies. And from off the back of Winnie’s head, feathers scattered.

“What’s happening?” Winnie asked.

I don’t know, Eliza thought to say, though she dared not admit it aloud.

Eliza’s insides heated, scalding her until she sweated beneath her thin clothes. All the scents around the Jester intensified: the Wolf who had walked circles around their home, Pa’s sleeping draught, the soup Pa had made, small mice that had made a home in their attic, and Winnie—pine trees and ocean fog and columns of warm air meant to lift birds into the sky.

“I brought the sharpening stone for the scissors,” Pa said from the doorway. “Eliza? Winnie?”

Eliza spun, doing her best to hide Winnie and the feathers behind her, but one glance at Pa’s face and she knew it was too late.

Pa stood at the door, gripping the frame with one hand and holding the whetstone with the other. Red rimmed his eyes. “What’s happening?”

Eliza’s fists shook at her sides, as all of her confusion burst free. “Ma made a bargain. Dire told me so. He said it ends on my birthday. You said not to worry! You said Winnie should be safe. Well, she’s not safe. She has feathers coming out of her head. That’s the opposite of safe!”

Pa squeezed his eyes shut, wrinkles puckering across the weathered skin of his face.

“What bargain was it?” Eliza forced out. “What bargain did Ma make? Why does Winnie have feathers in her hair? Why did Ma bargain Winnie away and not me?”

Here was the awful truth of it—why would Ma have let Winnie be hurt? Of all of them, Winnie was the most precious.

Winnie tugged at the back of Eliza’s dress. “It shouldn’t be you either, Liza.”

Eliza couldn’t look at her, not because of the strange feathers lining her scalp, but because of the first time the Wolf had attacked. Eliza had tried to sacrifice herself then, and Winnie had stared at her with a cross, how dare you expression. Eliza couldn’t stand it if that’s how Win looked at her now too.

Pa deflated in the center. His chest turned bowl-shaped and shoulders drooped and head fell forward, and really—this was not her pa. “I told you Winnie wasn’t the cost of anyone’s bargain. That’s not possible. No one can bargain anyone else away. But you can bargain for someone, placing the cost on yourself.”

“Mrs. Chess said that, but I don’t understand.”

“It’s what Mr. Chess was telling us—he bargained for his wife, placing the cost of the new bargain on himself.” Pa met her gaze, and Eliza found herself caught there—snagged in the same sorrow she’d seen reflected in Dire’s eyes earlier that night. “The only bargain I know your mother made happened a long time ago, Eliza. Before you were born.”

“But then why did she leave on my birthday? Did she bargain again?” Two bargains? Her ma had made two bargains?

“No.” Winnie spoke from behind her. “Momma didn’t leave.”

Eliza steeled herself. The pain of the story wrapped tight inside her. She tested the truth of it, letting it burn her as it always did when she remembered. “Ma rowed into the ocean, Win. She rowed away on my birthday and left us.”

“She did not! She disappeared.”

“She took a rowboat into the bay, and she didn’t come back. She left.”

“No!” Winnie stomped both her feet. Her chest rose and fell rapidly and her cheeks burned red.

Eliza reached for her, but she darted away. This wasn’t a conversation they’d ever had as a family. They hid their secrets; they didn’t share things like the Hardwicks. Eliza closed her open hand and let it rest at her side, remembering Filemon’s easy friendship and the truth that existed between him and his Pa, even when it caused them pain. Even if it hurt, Eliza wanted that same understanding. She wouldn’t lie anymore. Not to Winnie. Not to Pa.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re growing feathers or what the bargains were or how to stop them, but I do remember Ma rowing across the ocean. I know she’s on the continent somewhere.”

“You know she’s gone,” Winnie said. “You remember all that, but I remember Ma rowing into the bay to catch fish. I remember sitting on the beach while she fished and you swam. After dinner and presents and cookies, she cleaned up, then went out into the street and disappeared. I saw it through the window. I remember.”

Eliza’s truth and Winnie’s truth were not the same. They both held different pieces to the same puzzle. She said, “I’d gotten sick. I ate too many cookies.” Her knees gave out. She thumped into a chair. She remembered eating butter cookies until her stomach expanded, nearly pushing the food back up her throat. She’d fallen asleep early and in the morning, Ma had been gone. Everything had blended together until it’d become a confused mess.

“She poofed,” Winnie said. “She was there, then not.”

Eliza’s breath grew short. She didn’t know where to put the sudden hope that lit inside her. If Ma poof-disappeared, then her bargain couldn’t have been like Bri Hardwick’s. Bri had swapped places with Miss Alayna and their baby, and he’d walked straight over the bridge to the continent. He certainly hadn’t poof-disappeared.

“What do you remember, Pa? Please,” Eliza said.

Pa ran his hands over his cheeks, then said, “It was all for you. Your mother said she bargained for you. That’s all I know, I’m sorry.”