YOU WANT to do what?” Tomik gaped.
“It’s not such a bad plan,” Petra protested.
“You want to go to Prague, sneak into Salamander Castle, and steal back your father’s eyes?”
“You don’t have to make it sound like I’m crazy.”
“The word ‘crazy’ doesn’t do you justice. I was thinking something more along the lines of ‘rampaging lunatic,’ ‘mad as a ship of fools,’ ‘scryer-cracked,’ ‘fairy-touched,’ and just plain ‘bone-headed’!”
They were sitting on a heap of moss in the forest. Astrophil had wandered away, expressing an interest in studying the habits of ants. Petra and Tomik heard the chopping of trees in the distance. Summer was over. It was September, and the brassica harvest would be finished soon. The men in the village were beginning to set aside wood for winter.
“It’s a risk-free plan, if you think about it,” Petra said.
“Hmm. Let me think. I’m thinking. And you know what? I can’t figure out how in the name of heaven and earth this is risk-free.”
Petra struggled to keep her temper. When she spoke she strove to sound rational, but her voice was tense. “All I have to do is go to Prague. It can’t be that hard to get hired as a servant in Salamander Castle. The castle has hundreds of servants. The prince probably needs three of them just to wash his socks.”
“You want to wash his dirty socks?”
“No. I’ll get a job doing something in the castle, like”—Petra racked her brain, trying to remember any skills she had—“like mopping floors,” she finished lamely. Then, with new spirit, she said, “Do you think my father lived in the castle for six months without someone noticing that he suddenly disappeared? People talk. I will listen. And then I’ll find out where the prince hid my father’s eyes. If I think I can, I’ll steal them. If I think I can’t, I’ll just come back to Okno.”
“Doesn’t sound too risk-free to me.”
“I don’t care if it is or isn’t.” She gave Tomik a look that he recognized well. It was the steely expression of Petra at her most stubborn.
“I’ll come with you, then,” Tomik said.
She had hoped for this. “Really?”
“Absolutely. I can’t let you be crazy on your own. Madness loves company.”
But Petra grew thoughtful. “No,” she said reluctantly. “You need to help your father design a pair of glass eyes that work. You know that I might have to return to Okno empty-handed. You have to help your father come up with a solution.”
Frustrated, Tomik flung his hands back as if he had burned them. “He’d never listen to me. It would be easier to make the emperor hop like a dancing bear than to make my father hear anything I have to say about magic.”
“Then don’t say anything. Just show him.”
“Easier said than done.”
“You could at least try. What you did with the glass spheres is something I’ve never heard of anybody doing. If you got your father to look at them, even he would have to be impressed.”
“Well, maybe.” She could tell Tomik was pleased that she respected his abilities. “But I don’t like the thought of you going to Prague on your own.” His face clouded.
“Aren’t Lucie and Pavel going to the city soon? Didn’t you say they plan to sell wares from the Sign of Fire?”
“They leave in two weeks. They’re not sure how long they’ll stay, though. It depends on how the sales go. You’d have to figure out fast how you’re going to get inside the castle.” Tomik was focused, the way he always was when presented with a problem to solve. “I suppose you could tell Lucie that your family needs to buy medicine for your father.”
Tomik’s suggestion made sense. Though Okno was a prosperous village, they did not have an apothecary. Varenka, the old, rail-thin woman with brown-spotted skin who had delivered Petra, could brew some drinks that were supposed to cure headaches and fevers. But you do not want to know what Varenka put in her drinks. Let’s just say that powdered chicken bones, crushed fly wings, and snail slime were some of the less disgusting things the woman used as “medicine.”
“Say your family thinks you need a break from home, and you have an aunt to visit in Prague, too,” Tomik continued to counsel. “That way you don’t always have to be at the inn where they’re staying. But you should spend nights with Lucie and Pavel. You don’t want to wander around Prague after dark. It can be dangerous.” Tomik had visited the city once with his father. “Never leave any krona in the inn. It will get stolen. Keep your money pouch well hidden on your body, under your clothes. And whatever you do, don’t let anyone know where you’ve hidden it. There are a lot of Gypsies in the city, and one of their favorite tricks is to jostle you in the street. Then you touch wherever you’ve put your money, to make sure it’s there. And then they know where it is. When you think you’re safe, one of them will trail after you and nick your pouch when you’re not looking. In fact, you should avoid Gypsies altogether.
“Lucie doesn’t keep secrets, so we can’t ask her to take you and not tell,” Tomik continued. “And if we told her beforehand, pretending that Dita said it was all right, Lucie would be sure to mention it to somebody. So the best thing to do is for you to wait at the edge of Okno. When Lucie and Pavel ride past, you run up to them. You can fake Dita’s handwriting pretty well, can’t you?”
“Naturally.” Petra leaned back against a tree, folding her hands behind her head. “I sign Dita’s name better than she does herself.”
“So write a letter from her asking Lucie and Pavel if you can ride with them to Prague. That should work.”
He nodded, satisfied. Then he said that he should be getting back to the Sign of Fire, so they stood up and dusted off their trousers.
“Astro!” Petra called.
“I think that …” Tomik looked at her. “You should. That is,” he began again, “leave your Worry Vial at home, Petra.”
“Why?”
“The Worry Vials have a flaw.” Tomik’s blond hair hung in a short curtain around his face as he looked down. “Father designed them so that the problems and fears people whispered to the vials couldn’t be known to anyone else. When the bottle turns different colors it’s because there are tiny crystals lining the inside, and they bite into the worries like little teeth. The whispers turn green and brown as they’re broken down into fragments. Then the glass turns purple as it absorbs the pieces. The more you use the vial, the darker it gets. But each time you open it, there’s nothing inside, and even if you break the glass, the worries never escape. They stay in the pieces of the glass. But I recently discovered that there’s a way in which you can actually hear whatever somebody told a vial.”
Petra immediately saw that this was a big problem. “But you’ve sold hundreds of them! And to members of the court. I bet they’ve told their vials lots of things they don’t want anybody to hear.”
“Exactly. When I told Father, he was so embarrassed. I don’t know what bothered him more—that there is a flaw, or that I was the one who told him about it. He hasn’t decided what to do. If he tells everybody, it could ruin our business. It would be all right if people who bought the vials just demanded their money back. But what’s worse is that they wouldn’t trust the Stakan name anymore. And if Father stops selling the vials, people might begin to wonder what’s wrong with them, and somebody besides me might actually figure out how to extract the secret worries.”
“How do you extract them?”
“It’s simple, really.” Tomik shook his head miserably. “Lucie decided to use her Worry Vial as a vase for flowers from Pavel. No one thought anything of it when she poured water in the vial, and the glass stayed the same color it was before. It was violet, because Lucie doesn’t have enough worries to make the vial a darker color. The next day, the flowers were withered and Lucie was sad. I was in the kitchen when she poured the water out. I heard her say, ‘That’s odd,’ and turned around to see that her Worry Vial was clear again. Then I realized that the water had somehow sucked the worries out of the glass. The water had been violet, not the vial. I did some experimenting, and discovered that if you put water in a Worry Vial, and pour it out later, the water’s different. It’s dark. It’ll evaporate eventually, like water always does, but vial water leaves behind a light dust. When you stir the dust with your finger, you can hear the whispered worries again.”
“Most people aren’t like Lucie,” Petra comforted. “Who would think of putting anything inside a Worry Vial but worries? Your family is so used to having the vials around that they don’t seem special, but they’re very valuable to everyone else. They wouldn’t treat it like an ordinary bottle. Has anyone ever complained to the Sign of Fire?”
“Not yet,” Tomik said gloomily.
“At least someone will know if his vial has been tampered with. If you walk into your bedroom and see that your purple vial has become clear, you know that something’s wrong. Somebody would have contacted the Sign of Fire if this had happened.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“You should come up with an antidote. Then offer it for free to anyone who has bought a Worry Vial.”
“An antidote?”
“Yes … you know, something that will stop the water from pulling the secrets out of the glass. Maybe you could mix a sort of syrup that you pour into the vial after the glass has absorbed the worries. The syrup could seal the worries into the glass, like melted wax.”
“Hmm.” Tomik became pensive, and they were quiet until a cuckoo called from the trees, breaking the silence. “Hey, where is that spider of yours? I have to go home.”
“Astrophil!”
The spider twinkled toward them, walking across a bed of moss. “The organizational skills of ants are really quite impressive.”
As he approached, they heard a shatteringly loud crack. Astrophil squeaked and jumped to Petra’s shoe, ducking under the hem of her trouser leg.
“Was that a tree falling?” Petra said uncertainly.
“Too loud.” Tomik peered up between the trees.
A flash of light stitched across the blue sky. Thunder shuddered.
“But it’s a beautiful day!” Tomik protested. “This is bizarre.”
Not as bizarre as what happened next. Light brown grains began to sift down through the trees, hissing across the leaves and settling onto Tomik and Petra.
Tomik rubbed a hand through his hair. He stared at his fingers incredulously. “Is it … is it raining sand?”
As if startled by Tomik’s voice, the sandstorm stopped.
Tomik kneeled to inspect the sand-sprinkled moss, muttering in disbelief. Petra and the spider were silent, but they were both thinking about the same thing: the prince’s clock.