Cinders and Sparrows Read online

  Dedication

  For Hanni and Leo

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  IT was the first day of autumn when I came to Blackbird Castle, the trees copper and green, pumpkins growing along the ditch by the side of the road, a moon like a lidded silver eye already visible in the evening sky—in short, an excellent day for a witch to return to her ancestral home. But of course I knew nothing of witches then. My mind was on simpler things: the spring that had wormed its way through the velvet of the coach bench and was poking me in the back; the fact that I was cold and stiff; and also the fact that we had just stopped with a jolt in the middle of the road.

  The coachman thrust his red-cheeked face through the window. “That’s that, miss,” he growled. “That’s all the farther I’ll take you.”

  I blinked at him. Then I clambered out of the coach, dragging my carpetbag with me. We were on a desolate mountainside, forests to my left, a precipice to my right, a river rumbling somewhere far below.

  “Blackbird Castle,” I asked. “Where is it?”

  “Not far,” the coachman said, pointing up the mountain. “If you can fly.”

  My gaze followed his wizened finger, my heart sinking. There was a path, stitched with bridges, wending to and fro among the cliffs and forested slopes. And far, far back, its towers barely poking over the crowns of the great old trees, were the spires of a house. A few glowing lights pierced the gloom like watchful eyes.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way to get the carriage up there?” I asked as politely as I could. “I paid for the full journey.”

  “You didn’t pay me near enough to take you right up to the Blackbirds’ front door,” the coachman said, and spat onto the road. His great inky horses were pawing and snorting, their breath steaming in the chilly air. “Not for all the gold in Westval . . . What’s a girl like you doing going up there anyway?” His gaze darkened. “You’re not one of them, are you?”

  “No,” I said, but what I meant was “I hope to be, very soon.”

  The coachman peered at me more closely, his eyes glinting like a pair of coins under the wide brim of his hat. “I trust you know the rumors? About their old witch queen, how she ate the hearts of her enemies for dinner, boiled on a bed of greens? How they’ve all got pairs of silver scissors hanging from their belts, and no one knows what for? And listen to this . . . Betsy Gilford once told me she crept up to a window and saw them dancing around a circle of chalk on the drawing-room floor, and all the spiders in the room were dancing with them!”

  I squinted suspiciously at the coachman. “That sounds highly unlikely.”

  He snorted, but he looked confused. I suppose he had expected me to be frightened.

  “All I’m telling you,” he said, “is you’d better watch yourself. Odd things happen in these hills. Betsy Gilford’s cow once wandered up that very path and was next found atop Pot’s Peak, its hide written all over with gibberish.”

  “I think perhaps you shouldn’t believe everything Betsy Gilford tells you,” I said, pulling down my hat. “But thank you for the warning. I’m sure I’ll be all right.” I smiled at him. “They’re expecting me.”

  The coachman guffawed. “No doubt they are.” He gave me one last sharp look, which I did not like at all. Then, with a flick of his reins, he turned the coach on a precarious corner and thundered back down the mountain into the gathering gloom.

  I had been the last passenger on the stagecoach. I’d boarded it in the city of Manzemir, squeezing myself in between the door and a many-chinned old lady eating plums. She had been very nice and had shared her plums with me, as well as everything I could possibly want to know about her seven children and thirty-two grandchildren. But she’d disembarked at Gorlitz, and slowly, one by one, all the other passengers had gotten out too, at villages and hamlets and farms. I’d watched them embracing old acquaintances, vanishing into houses and through creaking garden gates.

  It made me excited for my own journey’s end. I was an orphan, and until three days ago had believed I would remain so for the rest of my life. But fate had other plans, and let me know of them in the oddest way imaginable.

  I was in Mrs. Boliver’s back garden, balancing on a chair, on top of another chair, on top of an enormous pink hatbox, trying to lift a cat from its precarious position atop the boiler, when the scarecrow arrived with the letter.

  “Just a moment!” I called above the shrilling doorbell. The cat hissed and batted at me with its claws. It was an odd-looking thing, rather shadowy, its teeth a bit too long. In a stern voice I said to it, “Look, you’re going to be stuck up there forever if you don’t let me help you.”

  The cat gave me a supercilious stare.

  “Isn’t it a bit hot up there? Aren’t you burning?”

  Now the cat looked as if it were grinning at me. The bell rang again.

  “I said just a moment!” I shouted, and from inside Mrs. Boliver shouted too, her ancient voice only slightly less shrill than the bell, “Who is making that infernal racket? Go answer the door, girl!”

  I was employed as a maid by Mrs. Boliver, who was a widow and lived in Cricktown, far out in the middle of nowhere. Mrs. Boliver was ninety-seven and walked with a cane. As for me, I was twelve, tall and underfed, with wild black hair, the sort of hair you might call curly if you were charitable, or, if you were Mrs. Boliver, “a hopeless briar patch so bewitched by the fairies that combs and hairpins become irretrievably lost in it.”

  “What an extraordinary-looking girl,” she had said when I’d first arrived from the orphanage, and I don’t think she’d meant it as a compliment.

  I must have taken too long to answer the bell, because in the end the scarecrow clambered right over the garden wall to reach me. I had just landed with a squelch in the grass when I was confronted with a pair of legs clad in ragged paisley trousers. My gaze traveled upward until I was looking into eyes made from large silver buttons. Oh! I thought, flinching a little.

  The scarecrow was very old, practically falling to pieces. Mushrooms grew from its face, and its coattails were rotting and mossy. But the envelope it held was not old. It was thick papered and creamy, stamped with a knobble of black wax in the shape of a raven. The scarecrow said nothing to me. It only bowed very low, handed me the letter, and then clambered back over the wall, its wooden bones creaking. I saw the top of its stovepipe hat skimming away as it sauntered down the alley.

  I stood for a moment, looking at the letter. For Zita Brydgeborn, it said in large, coiling script, and that made me flinch all over again, for I’d not seen that name, nor heard it spoken, in ten long years.

  “Who was that?” Mrs. Boliver asked, hobbling up next to me.

  “A scarecrow,” I said, and Mrs. Boliver nodded grimly. She did not hear very well, but she didn’
t like to admit it.

  “And what have you got there?”

  “A letter.”

  “For me?”

  “No,” I said, not quite believing it myself. “I think . . . I think it’s for me!”

  Mrs. Boliver squinted at the envelope through her little spectacles. “Zita who?” she demanded, giving me a resentful once-over, as if seeing me for the first time as a human girl and not a walking broom. And then I could not wait a second longer. I ran up to my attic, my heart squirming in my chest, and for a good minute I simply sat on the floor, cradling the letter in my hands. It was like a beacon, this letter, or a life ring tossed into a stormy sea. I was no longer adrift in the world. Someone, somewhere, knew I existed. Fingers trembling, I broke the seal.

  Dear Miss Zita Brydgeborn, the letter began, and again my heart gave a strange little lurch. That name was secret. Everyone knew me as Ingabeth, because that was the name the great wimpled nun had given me upon my arrival at the orphanage. I’d been two, and according to orphanage lore, had been left on the doorstep precisely at sunset, my hair full of twigs and the rest of me entirely covered in soot.

  “Think you’re the queen of everything, do you?” the nun had said, while I’d sat on a chair in the front hall. “Zita, indeed . . . what a frivolous name for a little girl no one wanted!”

  And so I’d tucked the name away, a little treasure all for myself. No one else should have known it. And yet someone did.

  Dear Miss Zita Brydgeborn,

  I write to you as the solicitor of the Brydgeborn estate. I have reason to believe you are the sole heir to Blackbird Castle and its environs, as well as any monies, accounts, lands, and property within. I bid you come at your earliest convenience to Blackbird Castle, north of Hackenden village, in the Westval, where, if it can be proven you are the heir, we will complete the paperwork posthaste.

  Your humble servant,

  Charles Grenouille, Dubney & Sons, Esquire

  Of course, I hadn’t believed the letter right away. I’d walked to the post office and asked about the address. “From the Brydgeborns of Westval,” the clerk had said, looking down at me incredulously from behind his desk. “Very great family. Very important. Whyever would the Brydgeborns send a letter to you?”

  I’d told him I had no idea. I still had no idea. But I was not about to let such an invitation go unanswered, and so twelve hours later I left Mrs. Boliver and set off on the steam train to Hackenden, my wages inside my coat pocket and a new hat on my head.

  It had been a much longer journey than I had expected. Steam train turned to donkey cart, which turned back to steam train, until at last, three days later, I’d boarded the post coach in Manzemir. I had been ready to burst from my skin the entire way, the excitement dulling every jolt and rattle. It was a lovely thing, feeling that perhaps I had my own door and welcoming embraces waiting, that perhaps I was going home.

  Chapter Two

  THE woods reared up above me, wild and twisting, a dark mass of evergreens and gnarled oaks. Night was falling quickly, and I could hear the infinite layers of sound from the forest’s depths, the hoot of owls, the whispering of leaves, the creak of branches . . . the rustle of small paws in the undergrowth, and then a sudden cry as the creature was caught.

  Well, better get on with it, I thought, hoisting my bag onto my shoulder. And shrugging off my weariness, I began to climb.

  It was a steep, tiresome journey. The steps were made of coiled roots. Rocks jutted overhead and shrubs pressed close on either side, but the path wasn’t quite overgrown. At least that meant someone lived up there. I had begun to wonder if perhaps this was all an elaborate scheme to get a foolish servant girl into the middle of nowhere to rob her. Then again, the joke would be on the robbers, going through all this trouble for the contents of my carpetbag. It contained everything I owned in the world, which was hardly anything—a toothbrush, a bar of soap, a wooden comb I had been given upon leaving the orphanage. My friends had put together their pennies and bought it for me the day I left, scratching their names into the bone handle with a pin. Other than that, there was only a threadbare nightgown and a Sunday bonnet with a large purple flower on it. If the robbers fancied the bonnet, I’d let them know they could have it.

  The sun was completely gone by the time I reached the top. The moon, red and rusting, seemed to watch me from between the snow-covered peaks. I passed under an eerie Gothic archway, all twisted vines and goblin faces, and trudged up some steps.

  I could make out the house more clearly now. It was not exactly a castle, though it had towers and battlements, and not precisely a palace or a mansion either. It might have been all of those things at one point, but parts of it looked abandoned, and parts looked as if they had burned down, and so there were grand bits, and fancy bits, and ancient, pagan, strange bits, all sewn up with copious amounts of black ivy. Only one or two windows were lit, very high up, and curtains were drawn against the panes, giving the light a red, warning hue.

  I climbed the steps, past several terraces of overgrown shrubbery and a fountain, now quite dry. At the front doors, I set down my carpetbag with a gasp. I smoothed my coat, arranged my hat, took a deep breath, took another deep breath for good measure. . . . Then I gripped the great brass knocker, which had been wrought to look like the nose ring of a scowling three-toothed ogre. “Sorry, old chap,” I said, letting the knocker fall against the ogre’s chin.

  The sound it made was not at all what I had expected. It was like a bell, far off and mournful. It tolled once, and even the woods seemed to go still, as if they too anticipated whatever lay behind these doors.

  Would a butler answer? Or a footman? Or a shrunken housekeeper with a single candle illuminating the grooves in her face? I had been the only servant at Mrs. Boliver’s and was hardly an expert in grand houses. But I didn’t expect nothing, and nothing was exactly what happened.

  I waited. I walked around a corner to peek in a darkened window. I stood back, hands on my hips, to survey the towers and roofs. . . .

  Behind me in the woods, I heard the trees creaking, boughs whispering in their cunning language. When I spun to face them, I could have sworn there were eyes among the branches, dark and cold, watching me.

  Just when I was sure I had made a terrible mistake and I’d better run back down the mountain, carpetbag flailing, and beg Mrs. Boliver to hire me again, I heard the sound of many locks being unlocked and bolts being drawn back, and a much smaller door swung open in a corner of the great doors. A lit candelabra floated in the dark beyond, clutched in a plump, pale hand.

  “Oh!” said a voice, presumably belonging to the hand. “Oh, it’s you! Come in, come in, quick!”

  I ducked in gratefully, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the candelabra was held by a maid. Like me! I thought, feeling instantly more at ease. I smiled at her, and she smiled back and curtsied. I’d never been curtsied to before. I curtsied too, not wanting to be rude. This only made her giggle, until another figure emerged from the shadows and poked her shoulder. This person was a very tall boy in a black uniform; it looked like a cross between a soldier’s and a footman’s.

  “Minnifer!” he scolded under his breath. “Are you seven?”

  “It’s all right,” I said, glancing between them. The boy was melancholy looking, his brows dark. Minnifer was short and round, and she had little twinkling eyes and a neat bun of brown hair.

  “We’re so glad you came,” said Minnifer. “We hope you’ll love it here.”

  “We do,” said the boy, in a very soft, very polite voice.

  “I’m Minnifer,” said Minnifer. “And he’s Bram.”

  She curtsied again, and Bram bowed, and they reminded me suddenly of wooden dolls on strings, standing there in their neat black clothes.

  “I’m very pleased to meet both of you,” I said, shaking their hands. “I’m Zita.”

  Bram and Minnifer continued to smile awkwardly, as if they weren’t quite sure what to do with me.
/>   “She might like to eat,” Bram murmured to Minnifer. “We have all those leftovers from dinner.”

  “Or she might like a bath,” said Minnifer, sizing me up. “Did you walk the whole way from Hackenden?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I said, adjusting my hat for what felt like the twentieth time that evening. “But no, just up the hill.”

  “Minnifer,” said Bram, shaking his head. “You practically called her filthy.”

  “I did not! I offered her a bath! That’s manners.”

  “She just doesn’t think very often,” said Bram to me.

  “And Bram thinks so much he forgets to breathe sometimes,” said Minnifer. “In fact, you’ll find us all insufferable once you get to know us. Now, how about food and a bath, and then—”

  Just as I was thoroughly charmed by both of them, another voice sounded from the top of the stairs. A ball of light from a kerosene lamp was descending toward us, and I saw for the first time the enormous hall that we were standing in. The floor was a checkerboard of black-and-white marble. A chandelier in the shape of a flock of crows attacking a serpent hung from the ceiling. Tapestries lined the walls, their faded threads depicting parties of men and women in black cloaks and pointy shoes trooping through woods and fording rivers. And on the landing of the staircase, half illuminated by the lamp in her hand, stood a woman.

  She was very pretty, very pale. Her fingers were encrusted with jewels, like some sort of sprouting multicolored fungus. Her auburn hair was swept up into lacquered curls, and her dress was deep blue silk, dark and frothy as the breakers against a nighttime shore. I could not tell if she was young or old—she looked confusingly ageless—and as she stood there on the landing, one arm curled around the newel post, I felt she reminded me most of a glamorous cat.

  “There’ll be no baths,” she said, in the loveliest, chilliest breath of a voice I had ever heard. “And she can have a tray in her room. No need to make a fuss. Mr. Grenouille will be here in the morning to sort out this . . . unfortunate mistake.”

  Mistake? My heart sank. I could tell by the way she looked at me that the “unfortunate mistake” was me, standing there in my scuffed shoes and patched coat.