Chapter Seventy-Three
A PARLIAMENT OF CROWS
The hedgehog House of Commons was in session—and in full-throated uproar over something called “Breakfast” or “Brex-fast” as Alice Ptarmigan skulked by the doorway. They were also debating the usurper Jules Verne’s attack on the magical wall and not making much progress on that front, either.
She had the right to be there, invited by a member of the House of Lords, and yet still she felt like a thief in the night. Perhaps it had something to do with being neither inside nor outside, the facade of a “room” for the hedgehogs built around the base on the gigantic oak, a good two hundred feet in diameter, that housed Parliament there, close by the River Thames. And the oak itself surrounded by a guardian host of lesser forest trees, stretching a good mile out into the countryside from London proper.
The garrulous hedgehogs were also debating what to do about Verne’s occupation of the wall, in squeaks and clicks that few could understand. A hue and cry, as Alice interpreted it, because the magical wall had been taken by Jules Verne—even though England rarely ruled it themselves. So what the hedgehogs really debated was how to return the wall to a kind of impassable chaos. Most government traffic and merchant trade went by sea to avoid the wall. Much better it would have been, for England, if the land bridge didn’t exist and they were just an island.
Of course, the hedgehogs were drunk on a special kind of honey mead and pissing and shitting everywhere: side effect of their … condition. Thankfully, they were just normal-sized hedgehogs or things would’ve gotten much dodgier, much quicker.
Alice reached the curving walkway that swept up the oak to its upper branches and the chambers of the House of Lords. The crows would be up there, pissing and shitting as well.
Beyond them, at the very top of the oak: the King and Queen, in their tree-house castle. They were made of living stone and had been encased as king and queen for hundreds of years, to ensure continuity. They made decisions very slowly, so the Houses brought few questions to them, as answer or decree might takes years. By now, the stone monarchs were quite mad from lichen cracks and incapable of rule, cared for by tree-climbing magical lemurs brought in for the purpose. Or so Alice had been told. The monarchs had not been seen by anyone other than, presumably, lemurs, for two decades.
It was all rather too much. An insight into governance that once seen could not be unseen, one that did not imbue politics with much respect.
Alice was tired. Ever since she’d gone to Dr. Lambshead’s mansion, things had become a disaster. She wasn’t suited to deception; the rot of it always showed, she thought. Or maybe she’d gotten so used to it—how she must, with each step taken, split the difference. To remain as loyal as she could to the things she cared about, the people she cared about … and yet betray them at the same time. To keep Jonathan out of it, and, then, when it was clear her own attempts to keep him out of it had brought him into it … to try to give him someone trustworthy to rely on, in Mamoud. Even if she had to steal from Jonathan, to leave him at least as well-off as before.
Take something, give something. That’s what Alice kept telling herself. Leave the universe the way you found it, on some level. She couldn’t do good, not right now, but she could fend off the bad.
Except she’d had no idea Crowley would set an insatiable monster on their trail. Or that there would be puffins. Terrible, horrible, awful puffins. They’d not been in the lake last time she’d had to take that path. Some new legacy? Result of someone else’s take something/give something?
It wasn’t just the Black Bauble Alice had sought in the mansion. Papers, too. Dr. Lambshead’s papers about the Order and the aftermath of the War of Order and how terribly wrong it was all going, which Jonathan would no doubt find out at some point. Who could be trusted, for what side. Perhaps even on what days of the week, so many alliances were fickle.
And in there, the same place as on the Allies List: the Alpine Meadows Research Institute. So why not nudge Jonathan in that direction? Sounding so reasonable. A place Dr. Lambshead considered central to preserving the Order. A place where, maybe, knowing its … special properties … Jonathan might be sidelined during the coming war.
Safe. Not in play.
While Alice reached into his pocket and stole the one thing she really needed and deserved. The Black Bauble. The thing he didn’t understand or know how to use. Contain the Golden Sphere? How naive. Nothing could contain what was coming. She had some hint of that. So did others in the Order, the ones with their ears to the ground, not the higher-ups. Mamoud might ignore it for the Republic’s sake, be fixated on Crowley, but Alice already knew Crowley was just a localized problem. Underneath was so much more … rot.
Evading the death piggies, evading the Comet Man, evading Crowley’s monster. Not exactly fun. Not exactly. But distraction. Definitely that, getting her out of her head. More than a fortnight of eluding various types of pursuit and hiding out in underground caverns until she could get to the right door—and out she’d popped at her destination.
By the river. Near the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Tweedledee and Tweedledum at this point. All stuffed into the awe-inspiring tree.
Courtyards in this place seemed redundant. All the old magic smoldering here, the place a ruin and a dump that influenced the decor and culture of an entire nation. But especially spilled out into an au naturel London that had become at once cosmopolitan and insular, one where you were as like to meet a magical hedgehog in a white wig as a fishmonger.
She much preferred Jonathan’s London, filthy though it might be. Even if the pollution made her fade more swiftly, that she must strike out for the countryside every few weeks. Sad but true. True but sad.
No one knew their way through the maze that was the government-in-a-tree. Not really. A little sparkling dandelion sculpted to look like a faery popped up halfway to her destination, because with all the spells of concealment, you’d wander until you died otherwise. Although she’d have to find her way out alone. They didn’t care if you got out, the spells, so long as you didn’t get in without an escort.
Alice had grown up in the country and knew better than most the state of magic in the country. Most of the actual faery folk had died, when farmers started cutting down the verges and the hedgerows. Turned out faery folks could only live on the fringes. Who knew? Well, everyone now. But did that make a difference?
So what protected the Parliament tree wasn’t exactly the old magic. But a kind of nostalgic echo of it, backed up by a kind of cold … weirdness. Cleaner, more current. And the main remnant of what had been existed over at the wall, with its air potato herds and its sarcastic shrubbery.
One reason farmers had destroyed the verges was they hated being talked back to.
Nothing worse than a weed giving you what for.
Finally, Alice had skirted the House of Lords and its caw-caw-caw, to enter a huge dark hollowed-out bole on the side of the oak. The Lords’ private offices. Inside this particular bole, the inner walls were coated in a glow-in-the dark green moss and the high shadowy ceiling illuminated by a trailing ivy of luminous purple morning glories, which shone light down on a thick slab of jutting shelf green-blue fungi the size of a desk. A toadstool stool suitable for a human posterior had erupted in white with red polka dots opposite the desk.
A sickly looking little white crow with blue eyes, one crooked leg, and an unusual upward curve of beak had been fixed to the desk with a dainty silver chain. It cawed, once, twice, thrice, its chain making a glinty tinkling music as it fidgeted.
Alice nodded and crumbled herself into the bole, sat on the cool, clammy stool, which pulsed as if alive. And perhaps it was. The faery folk might be gone, but their residue remained in so many things.
The crow, though, was the work of witches and warlocks, a flesh-and-blood version of an All-Seeing Eye. For no lord from the House of Lords or commoner from the House of Commons came to London anymore. Instead, they stayed home, hovel or estate, and through the arcane remnants of English magic met and debated issues and passed laws through their proxies—the crows and the hedgehogs.
The crow twisted and turned on its perch, the defective beak open in silent protest, the whispering shudder of its wings epic.
Always, these manifestations left Alice cold, frightened her somewhere primal. But she had to keep her nerve. Had to keep her wits about her. Lives depended on it. One life in particular.
The crow settled down as Lord Fenstral’s mind settled within it, from afar. There came an added weight to the blue eyes of the crow. The weight of a human consciousness peering out, and the bird’s legs for a moment buckled, then recovered, and it stooped there, motionless as if showcased in a taxidermy shop.
From the crow issued forth an odd, tinny voice, full of the static between radio stations. For it was not Lord Fenstral’s voice, nor yet the crow’s, but something altogether stranger and more ancient. That much Alice knew.
It was also not a friendly voice.
“Alice,” said the voice, and she winced. “Alice,” said the voice, and it was as if venom had entered her veins. She felt withered and spent, as if only ruin and decay lay before her. “Alice,” and she had to grasp the edges of the toadstool with both hands, as if to avoid falling off the edge of the world.
“I have it,” she said, before he could ask. The asking could be terrible, too. “I have it. I would have been quick, but I was very far and the circumstances—”
“I don’t care,” hissed Lord Fenstral. “I don’t care for your excuses or your pointless stories or your chatter. Show me. Now.”
With care, but in haste, Alice pulled the handkerchief from her jacket pocket. Unwrapped it, held out her hand with the Wobble presented in her palm. She could not say her hand was steady.
The Wobble looked beautiful against the stark white of the cloth, even flecked with death piggy blood: a robust black marble with many a rune and signal etched into its reflectionless surface. The Wobble had burned a hole in her pocket, been such a torment, constantly worried she would rest a moment and find someone had stolen it from her, as she had stolen it from Jonathan.
“The Black Bauble,” Lord Fenstral said through the crow, as if it didn’t care about the consequences of using the true name. And why should he? He wasn’t there. “Black Bauble.”
“The Wobble,” Alice said. “Yes.” Her heart beating hard. So close now. So very close.
“Hold it up to the crow’s eyes, feeble as they are,” Lord Fenstral said.
Alice did as she was told. The white crow’s eyes became cloudy with glints of gold shining through the sudden storm of darkness there.
The crow recoiled from the Wobble, cawed violently, spun on the chain, lunged at Alice, who drew back, cupping the Wobble in both hands to protect it.
“That is not the Black Bauble!” Lord Fenstral cawed. “That is not the Wobble! Not the Wobble at all!”
It was as if Alice had smashed into a block of ice, or her heart had stopped. She felt faint and hot and there was a ringing in her ears.
She heard herself from a great distance, protesting.
“But it is the Wobble. It is! I took it from Jonathan’s own pocket. I took it while he was distracted by the monster Crowley sent. I swear. I swear. It is the Wobble. It is!”
It must be the Wobble, for her sister Beatrice’s sake.
“No it’s not.” Said so cold, Alice came back to her senses.
The crow had stopped twitching, and that was worse, and the eyes had not gone back to blue. The stress of that regard was devastating. To have gone through all of this … for nothing … for worse than nothing. She felt like vomiting.
“It is the Wobble,” she said weakly. Oh, Beatrice. Oh, Beatrice. What have I done?
“Open your precious … Wobble,” Lord Fenstral said in a tone that promised punishment.
“But—”
“Open it.”
She pushed the little hidden button at the base of the Black Bauble. It peeled open like an orange.
The inside had all the same inscriptions and moving parts that she remembered when Jonathan had held it.
“I don’t see—”
“Look more closely,” Lord Fenstral said.
She pushed the one button she’d known, the one that opened up the next layer of instrumentation.
Nothing happened.
“It’s stuck,” she said, pushing it again, to no avail.
“It’s a fake, you stupid cow!”
Betrayed. She felt numb. That was the irony of it all. Someone had betrayed her. Had outsmarted her, had been a step ahead. She should have taken greater care not to show interest in the Wobble. She should’ve done this, done that, instead. All the thoughts running through her in a panic. But mostly: numb. She was exhausted already, mentally and physically. She had nothing left for … this.
“You’ll tell me now you were duped,” Lord Fenstral said, each syllable like a stab in her back with an ice pick. “Or did you think you could dupe me? Is that it?”
“No, I never—not when you …” Could kill my sister.
“Yet here we are. You’ve failed me.”
“I have Jonathan’s Allies List. I have all the papers from the mansion. I have—”
A jeering tone, humiliating, from the crow: “Did I ask you to bring me Jonathan’s sippy cup? Or his dirty socks? Or his diary? No. I didn’t.”
“Please.” Don’t kill Beatrice.
“This is your second failure, Alice. You should have found the Black Bauble at the mansion before the young Lambshead even got there. And then you should’ve taken it from him sooner than you did. Why did you wait, I wonder?”
Because there was never a good moment. Because as long as she was still on the mission, Beatrice was alive. But if she miscalculated, if she’d failed to steal it … and yet here she was anyway.
“I can make it right. I can—”
“Be still! Be quiet!”
Just like that, Alice couldn’t move and she couldn’t speak and her tongue was thick in her throat and she felt like she was choking to death and she couldn’t even scream.
“What should I do with you, Alice?” Lord Fenstral said, much as one would address a spider captured under glass. “We had an agreement. The Bauble for your sister’s life. But I have no Bauble, so it stands to reason you shouldn’t have a sister.”
Still she could not speak, could not move.
“And yet … and yet,” Lord Fenstral said, considering. “I am not by nature cruel. I believe in last chances. The very last. And that is what I am about to give you. Track Jonathan down. Get me that Wobble. And if you can’t get me the Wobble … kill Jonathan Lambshead.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“He’s in Florida, of that alt-Earth the Order likes to use to store their valuables. Everyone knows that.”
Did they? She didn’t.
“He may suspect I’m looking for him.” She knew this wouldn’t please Lord Fenstral, but she had to say it, had to plead for enough time.
“Everyone’s looking for him,” Lord Fenstral said, practically spitting out the words. “Everyone knows that. Are you simple? Here’s a clue: If all else fails, find a Czech magician named Kristýna and follow her. Or become a shadow at Poxforth—he’s destined to return there. Eventually, you’ll find Jonathan, one way or the other. If you ever want to see your sister alive again, that is. Isn’t that right, Beatrice? You know what I’ll do if I don’t get what I want.”
A scream that raised the hairs on Alice’s arms, and then an unmistakable voice, because it was her own voice: “Alice! Please save me! It’s terrible here! It’s horrible! And they’re starving me and I haven’t enough to drink and it’s dark all the time! And I—”
I love you, too.
Alice slumped on her stool, able to breathe and move again.
Then Lord Fenstral was gone and the crow was just a white, crippled crow again, with blue eyes, flapping its wings in confusion.
Alice had gripped the fake Wobble so hard it had burst into pieces. Flimsy after all, and she had held it so delicate for so many miles to protect what was just a sham, a nothing.
But Lord Fenstral had misjudged the situation.
First, she didn’t dare tell Lord Fenstral that the Order might already have told the rank and file to be wary of her, especially if Jonathan had reached safe harbor. Second, Alice didn’t think Jonathan had the Bauble, although she had no choice but to pick up that thread first.
Who had taken the real one? Who had done that?
The answer could only be her sometime ally. The one who always thought ahead.
Mamoud.
For a while, Alice lay on the ground, curled up next to the desk. The floor was cool and soft with loam. It was quiet and comfortable. Nothing entered her mind. She needed nothing for a moment. Several moments.
The situation was so complicated. It would have been simple if only Lord Fenstral had actually been Lord Fenstral. Under cover of night, before she’d left for Earth and the mansion, Alice had snuck onto Lord Fenstral’s ancestral estate. No servants dwelt there. The grounds were overgrown. The many rooms empty. Save for the cupboard with Lord Fenstral’s skeleton shoved into it. A musical instrument impaling his chest.
Whoever had kidnapped Beatrice was impersonating a member of the House of Lords, and there wasn’t a soul she could tell without risking Beatrice’s life.
Another tough chapter in the story of a family half-ruined by the War of Order. Parents dead. Just two sisters now, and it wasn’t as if Beatrice were weak. She wasn’t. She was tough, and they had often been at odds in part because Beatrice could be stubborn, opinionated. Sometimes, Alice felt Beatrice was a test she could never pass. Always difficult. Always felt she was owed something more. But that made the situation worse, not better. Because Alice felt guilty now for each and every ridiculous argument. How small and insignificant those moments felt now, next to the idea of never seeing Beatrice again.
And she was being destroyed by it, too. Felt like the crumbling facade of a building that had seen better days.
Alice sat up, arm resting on the toadstool. She had another chance, that was the main thing, yes? She looked at her hand, where an outline of the fake Wobble now existed like a tattoo. Whatever it had been made of had stained her skin. Would it fade with time? She wiped at it with her fingers, but it didn’t come off. Perhaps some water, later, would help. Or perhaps she would be marked forever. A good reminder.
Although Alice felt a thousand years old, her body as used up as an old dustbin, she lifted herself onto the toadstool once more, leaned over, head in her hands.
Perhaps she would have rested much longer before leaving on her mission, but for the voice that came from the shelf-fungus desk.
“Please, ma’am, may I leave with you? Please?”
She looked over in surprise. It was the crow, of course, talking crow language. One thing she’d become fluent in, growing up in the country. Her and Beatrice on the ancestral farm. Before any of what came next. Before the War of Order.
“Why ever would you leave?” she asked, also in crow language.
The blue eyes stared at her pleadingly. “Please, ma’am, it’s unnatural.”
“What is?”
“Being possessed. It takes a toll. They keep us in cages in the tree branches, feed us slops and garbage. They discard us quick, with no care. I’ve been here a year. I had black feathers once, and a foot that worked. My wings … I haven’t flown in one year. My wings … And being that one’s voice makes me live in a place with dead things as if I were a dead thing—and I am not a dead thing! I am not!”
This last said with an injured dignity at what had been inflicted upon it. The rest said hurriedly, as if she might leave at any moment, and him still chained to the desk.
Tears welled up in Alice’s eyes. She couldn’t say why she found the crow so moving, but she did. Perhaps because she hadn’t considered what it would be like for the hedgehogs and the crows to be inhabited by human minds. Perhaps because a bit of Jonathan’s view of animal life had infected her.
What a listless existence, at beck and call. For, in the end, such a frivolous purpose.
“Won’t Lord Fenstral notice you’re missing?”
“Did he notice the last one missing? Or the one before?”
Alice could guess the answer to that. It’d be like replacing a telephone. Who cared what happened to the old model.
“What’s your name?” Alice asked.
The crow cocked his head, said, “They call me Fenstral Voice 343 here. But my name when I was free was________.” And he made a series of caws that meant something like “curious blue sky” or “blue horizon diving.”
It was folly, but it also felt like a tiny rebellion. An act of defiance. The only one she might be able to afford. Besides, what might the crow know?
“All right, then, you can come with me,” Alice said, examining the chain around the crow’s foot for the best place to break it. “But if you fly away once we’ve left this place, I won’t fault you. And if you stay, you’ll need to learn to perch on my shoulder like a parrot until you’re used to the world again.”
Now she would have to play a role again. To become the person she was on her mission. Someone she didn’t like very much.
The joy on the crow’s face was too intense. She had to look away or she would have started weeping again.
