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  “What did you think I meant?” said Lucy.

  “I thought you meant you… liked me. In a special way,” said Georgiana, uncharacteristically stumbling over the words.

  “But did you not see the poor burning girl?” Lucy asked, trying a different tack.

  “Burning girl?” said Georgiana. And then she cleared her throat and tossed her head as if shaking the instant of unguarded awkwardness away. “No. I did not see a burning girl.”

  “Fine,” said Lucy. “Doesn’t matter. In fact, lucky you. But you know what I mean.”

  “No,” said Georgiana. “No, I don’t. Not at all. Are you drunk?”

  “Drunk?” said Lucy. “No. I’m not drunk. Why do you—?”

  “Because you were sick and you’re behaving very oddly,” said Georgiana.

  All at once Lucy realised that the reason Georgiana was being so strange was because she didn’t know how Lucy knew her secret: she didn’t know she’d been seen with the sea-glass.

  “I saw the glass, your heart-stone–I saw you take it out of your pocket and then hide it when it flashed,” she said.

  “When it flashed?” said Georgiana. “It didn’t flash. It’s just a bit of glass.” Her tone shifted. “Wait. Were you following me?”

  “No,” said Lucy. “No, it doesn’t matter; I just saw you when you came out of the apothecary shop…”

  “It’s medicine,” said Georgiana sharply. “It’s special tonic. Father has nerves. It isn’t what people say. It’s just a soothing draught—”

  The intensity of her tone and the speed with which she leapt to the defence of Na-Barno, even if he wasn’t being attacked, was striking. Lucy swallowed and regrouped.

  “I have one too,” she said, and pulled her stone from her pocket. “See? We’re safe.”

  Georgiana looked at her and at the stone, and then pulled the ring with the stone from her pocket, and in that moment, seeing the pale flash of the skin at her wrists, Lucy understood in an instant that she had made a terrible mistake.

  Georgiana’s hands were bare. They were always bare. She had never resorted to gloves or even rags to protect her from inadvertently touching a loaded stone and glinting the past. She had not covered her hands for the simplest of reasons: she was not a Glint after all, and when she said she had not seen the glass ignite and blaze a warning about the approaching walker in the glass, she was doing no more than telling her own truth. For had Sara Falk not said that the rest of the world saw the heart-stones as mere sea-glass, and that only a Glint could see the light it shone when peril approached?

  This shocking fact that Georgiana had no idea what she was talking about hit her with almost the same stunning effect as when she had earlier seen the sea-glass in her hand and assumed that she too was a Glint. And what was worse was her stupidity: like any flat at the fair she had fallen under Georgiana’s spell and drifted into a kind of infatuation that made her not think about something so very obvious.

  “Where did you get it then?” she said.

  “Get what?” said Georgiana.

  “The heart-st—The sea-glass,” she said, correcting herself and pointing. “That ring?”

  Georgiana looked at the thing in her hand.

  “This old ring?” She looked away to her left. “Charlie gave it to me.”

  “Charlie?” said Lucy.

  “Yes,” said Georgiana, looking back at her, eyes wide and composed again.

  This information took the wind out of Lucy’s sails, and she took a breath and slowed down.

  “Why did Charlie have it?” she asked, the words out of her mouth before her cleverer self could tell her that there was no reason for Georgiana to know this. “I mean, why did he give it to you?”

  Georgiana’s mouth made a perfect moue, a slow-motion pout of flawless innocence so perfect it was almost pantomime.

  “He gives me things because he likes me, I think. I don’t know why he gave me this…” Her eyes sharpened as she looked at the now dull piece of glass in her hand. “It’s not valuable, is it? I thought it was just some pretty coloured piece of old glass…”

  “Yes,” lied Lucy.

  But the sharp eyes had snagged the truth.

  “What’s the trick of it?” said Georgiana. “There’s a trick to it, and I’ll wager something to do with the mirror that you smashed too.”

  She giggled and twined a finger in one of the ringlets cascading down on either side of her face.

  Lucy was glad she giggled at that point. Lucy hated girls who giggled, and she needed something to push her away from the unconscious magnetism of Georgiana and let her think straight.

  “It was quite a thing, smashing that mirror. I shouldn’t be surprised if there’s not a constable coming after us as I speak,” said Georgiana, craning her head down the dusty road towards the town. “If you won’t tell me what the trick of the glass lumps is, tell me why you did it?”

  “I just lashed out,” said Lucy, aware how weak her reply was: she felt too worn out by the glinting and seeing the girl burned, and then running the mile or so from the town to think in her normal straight line and produce a better lie.

  “No,” said Georgiana, taking her arm gently. “No, you don’t want to tell me. I upset you by not understanding about this glistering thing you were talking about…”

  “Glinting,” said Lucy despite herself.

  “Glinting,” said Georgiana, twining an arm back around Lucy’s waist. “There, I have it right now. And so you must tell me all about it, and we shall be friends again.”

  Lucy shrugged out of her grasp and began to walk towards the camp.

  “Maybe later,” she lied. “I feel too ill to talk now. I must lie down. It may be that I have a fever coming.”

  CHAPTER 57

  PACKING UP

  The arrival of the lead caskets in the Red Library was a strange thing for the whole house. The already oppressive atmosphere, occasioned by Sara’s injury and all that surrounded it, became successively heavier with each muffled thump made by Emmet laying the metal boxes on the floor of the room as he brought them up from the secret passage to the river.

  Of course, he was tireless and strong enough to carry two of the boxes at a time, but Hodge and Mr Sharp helped, managing to bring up a single box between the two of them for every four that Emmet brought up the stairs. Hodge was limping and his side still clearly hurt from the boot-storm it had absorbed, but no one commented, nor mentioned the black eye which was still swollen to a slit and gone all the colours of the rainbow, mauve and indigo in the ascendant. The Smith and Cook busied themselves in the library, packing the books and objects in muslin and straw.

  The Smith had a good blaze going in the cavernous marble fireplace and he kept a salamander crucible filled with molten lead in the heart of the fire. Whenever they had packed a casket and could fit no more inside, they put the close-fitting lid on it, and he took long-handled tongs and thick leather gloves and gripped the salamander, lifting it out of the fire. He then poured lead into the waiting runnels around the lid with unwavering hands to make a waterproof seal.

  The first thing that had been sealed in the only casket which was double-walled, and lined with both fire-clay and chalk, was the innocent-looking single candle that always burned at the centre of the kitchen table. They carefully seated it in the middle of the casket and took care to transfer the five leafy twigs surrounding it without disturbing the star shape made by the oak, ash and thorn interlaced through the apple and hazel.

  The Smith then carefully unscrewed the candle-sconce from inside the Murano Cabinet, wrapped it in red silk and sealed it in the same box.

  “Wildfire and Discriminator can sleep safely together beneath the water,” he said.

  “You’d know if any of us would,” said Cook. “Though why anyone would call a candlestick a key is beyond me. It’s just confusing.”

  “Nothing wrong with a little confusion when you’re hiding something,” said Hodge, puffing past them carrying a s
maller lead box.

  “Look who’s cheered himself up,” said Cook.

  “He still has hopes of the Alp,” said Mr Sharp quietly. “The Raven is abroad and Jed is still casting about for the trail. Think the beating he took knocked a sense of proportion back into him.”

  “Good,” said Cook. “Because I was worried you were all going hysterical on me.”

  They worked quietly and efficiently, and part of the silence between them was due to the fact that none of them felt good about what they were doing, or what it signified. The Smith had been right when he had told them that ends of things come quicker than most people realise, and they were each in his or her own way absorbing this new and bitter truth.

  The only item which was not due to be casketed was the Murano Cabinet itself. Mr Sharp had insisted, and since it was the biggest object anyway, it had been decided to carry it down and put it in the brick arched room at the end of the secret passage lined with the handprints of the doomed victims of the Disaster.

  “It’s where it used to be anyway,” said Mr Sharp. “That’s where they went into the mirrors, and it’ll stay well enough hidden there for now.”

  They agreed more easily than he’d expected because they knew why he wanted it kept above water. They had each talked about it with The Smith and had agreed that, since they were a Free Company, he should be allowed the liberty of leaving of his own volition, and leaving in the way he thought most fit.

  “And if it’s off on a wild goose chase into the mirrors. Well, good luck to him,” Hodge had said. “He’s an obdurate fellow, and we won’t argue him out of it.”

  “Said the pot about the kettle,” said Cook darkly.

  The other thing they agreed was not to tell Sara. She had been declining so rapidly that she had stopped coming out of her room and was now only capable of making the short journey from her bed to a table by the fire where she insisted on eating her meals, although “eating” was a euphemism for “leaving most of it on the plate” in Cook’s view. Cook had suggested that she take a tray in bed to save her the evident exhaustion of walking shakily across the carpet, but a spark of her old fire had kindled in her eyes as she announced that “only invalids eat in bed, and I haven’t given up yet”.

  At the end of the day, Cook brought a tray of hot broth and two poached eggs on toast up the stairs. She stopped in the doorway, for there was someone else in the room.

  Sara was asleep, her face slack and her breathing so light as to be almost unnoticeable. Cook saw Mr Sharp lean in and check that Sara was actually inhaling and exhaling by holding the back of his hand close to her nose. His other hand gently held hers, an intimacy Cook had never seen before.

  She was about to clear her throat and give him a moment to compose himself before she entered, when he reached down and back into his coat and drew a blade that caught the candlelight in a short flat flash of highly sharpened metal.

  Cook breathed in in shock, and was about to cry out, but stopped as she saw him gently take the end of Sara’s hair, which was loose and tumbled around her head on the pillows, and cut a short length from it. The knife disappeared and he pulled a length of dark ribbon from his pocket, and quickly bound the stolen lock together.

  Cook took a quiet step backward. Then another. Unfortunately there was a loose floorboard and it creaked loudly. She harrumphed and walked forward, eyes on the tray, and entered the room.

  “Oh,” she said, “there you are.”

  Mr Sharp was standing by the bed, no hint that he had ever been holding Sara’s hand, the tell-tale lock of hair nowhere to be seen.

  “She is no better,” he said.

  “She looks no worse,” she replied.

  “No better, no worse is not acceptable,” he said. “I just came to bid her farewell. If you would be so kind as to tell her I came, and that I… wish her the very best of everything.”

  He stopped with his hand on Cook’s shoulder.

  “As I do you, my dearest old friend. As I do you all.”

  He shocked her by taking her hand and kissing it, and then walked stiffly out of the room without a backward glance. She put the tray down and wiped her eye.

  “Bloody dust,” she said to no one in particular. “Gets everywhere.”

  And she reached into her sleeve, fetched out her sail-sized handkerchief and blew a brisk cannonade into it.

  Sara stirred but did not wake, even at that.

  CHAPTER 58

  A DECISION DEFERRED

  On the morning of the day when Na-Barno Eagle (the self-styled Great Wizard of the South) was due to have his long-awaited and much-advertised contest with his arch-rival Anderson (the likewise self-styled Great Wizard of the North) Lucy woke late with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  She lay with her eyes closed, listening to the sound of the showmen all around her getting their attractions ready for the holiday crowds, and tried to think why she should be feeling such a strong urge to run. She had certainly been feeling too happy and secure travelling with the Pyefinches, and having overheard them the night before last she was more than suspicious about their motives for being so kind and accommodating. Rose in particular seemed able to fire the most innocent-seeming yet pointed questions at her when she was off her guard, and Charlie definitely kept an eye on her, even when he thought she wasn’t noticing. But it was more than that: something of what had passed between her and Georgiana on the previous night stayed with her. Although she knew Georgiana was a sharp and calculating girl and had been wary of her, all it had taken was a tearful appearance of vulnerability and the disconcerting warmth and closeness of her body to make Lucy open up so perilously. It was almost as if Georgiana had feigned weakness to pierce her well-placed defences.

  And once that thought had occurred to her, she knew it was so: Georgiana was good at reading people and using what she read to manipulate them. Lucy had seen her do that in the mind-reading show, and she had seen her do it around the camp.

  The sickness in her stomach was partly disgust at herself for being needy enough to respond to Georgiana’s pretended weakness. She had wanted Georgiana to be something she was not just because she, Lucy, was alone; that the Georgiana sobbing so artlessly in her arms might be a fellow Glint had been enough to make her betray herself. Softness and warmth had undone her.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling.

  She was done with softness. She had no need of warmth.

  And the only thing that stopped her leaving immediately was the matter of the heart-stone in Georgiana’s possession.

  She did not quite want to believe that Charlie had given it to Georgiana. The girl had looked to her left as she had said it, fluttering her eyes in a way that made Lucy think it was a lie. But she wanted to know how she had got it, and why she had lied. So Lucy ignored the voice telling her to run, and run right there and then, and instead remained at the fair for one more fateful night. Her innate curiosity, and something she couldn’t quite put her finger on about the specific stone in Georgiana’s possession, overrode her natural caution. If she ran now, she reasoned, she would never know what it was. If she stayed just one more night, she might be able to put her finger on it–indeed, by the time she had washed her face and gone to find the Pyefinches she had decided to do more than that. She had decided that since Georgiana had no need of the heart-stone ring, and since it was only the third that Lucy had ever seen, she would steal it before she left.

  If one heart-stone was good, two would be better, and she would be insured against the frightening possibility that one day she might lose her own.

  She rose quickly and rolled her blanket around a small bag of food she had been storing up for this very moment, and then walked out into the pre-dawn and hid them both behind the water butt on the side of the wagon in case she needed to make a fast getaway.

  So as the day broke and she hunkered down next to Charlie at the camp-fire and asked for an egg with her bacon, Lucy had already determined to turn thief ag
ain, though by the time the day ended, the fruits and object of her larcenous impulse would turn out to be much darker and more perilous than she could possibly have imagined.

  The day passed quickly as all fair days did, and she was so busy selling baskets of peppermint rock that she had little chance to do anything but take the money, smile at the customers and shuttle back and forth to Rose Pyefinch for new supplies each time she sold out. Rose thrust a piece of bacon sandwiched between two pieces of crusty bread into her hand at one stage and told her to sit down and take ten minutes’ break, but Lucy smiled it off and said she was much happier eating as she went. Rose watched her dart back into the crowd with the basket crooked in one elbow, the other hand holding the sandwich as she bit chunks out of it, then turned to Charlie who had just come in the other side of the tent, looking for his and his father’s lunch.

  “She’s got something on her mind,” said Rose, nodding after Lucy.

  “Nothing fresh there then,” said Charlie with a smile. “I think she’s just got that sort of mind.”

  “No,” said Rose. “She’s itchy about something new.”

  “Think she knows she’s being asked after?” he said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “She’s got keen ears as well as sharp eyes.”

  “Then maybe we should bundle her before she takes fright and does a runner,” he said.

  “We can bundle her any time we like,” said Rose. “That’s not the problem. It’s how we keep the package safe once it’s bundled. Lose the package and no one wins.”

  “I thought Pa had that in hand,” said Charlie.

  “I do,” said his father, ducking his head under the flap in the tent. “Where’s my sandwich?”

  “You got it in hand?” said Rose. “Since when?”

  “Since Hobb told me of the tattooed man asking questions in the shadows. I sent word up and down the water,” he replied. “Well, word’s come back. We have friends going east and west after the fair.”

  “Maybe that’s it then,” said Rose, looking at Charlie. “Maybe it is soon.”