I’m going to tell you how it felt, and then you can judge me.
It felt like Hettie’s kitchen. That’s the only way I can put it. One minute I was lying in the moss with hands I couldn’t feel, next to a hole with a stone man in it, with a wizard who wasn’t speaking to me and an otter who’d said both no. The next minute there was an old man on a rock, and four grown-ups in green coats, and somebody had come. Somebody had actually come.
I’d stopped expecting that about fourteen months ago.
“How,” I said. It was all I had.
“Badly,” said Professor Quill. “Slowly. In a cart, and then in a boat with a woman who wanted to tell me about an eel, and then on these.” He lifted his walking stick and looked at his own legs like they’d disappointed him. “I’m older than I look, which I’m aware is saying something.”
“But why—”
“Because I sent a boy off after his brother with half a map and a peppermint, and then I sat in my library and couldn’t read.” He coughed, and waited for it to finish, and folded the handkerchief. “I’m not a brave man, Wick. I’m a tired one. But the morning after you went, I walked down my hill for the first time in forty years, and I went to the watch-house, and I shouted at a sergeant until he gave me four men to stop me shouting. Four. For the Thornwood. He laughed. These four didn’t, which is why I like them.”
The four men didn’t say anything. They stood round him with their lantern-poles, big and quiet, and looked at the trees.
“The man you heard me shouting at,” said Quill. “In my library. My assistant. He vanished the day you came. So did a drawer of my old maps. I made enquiries, which is a thing old men can do, because nobody minds telling an old man anything. His name is Vosk. He has a crew in these woods. And he has had your brother for a year.”
Vosk.
It fitted. It fitted like a tide-mark. The scolding, the lost book, the masks who’d walked past us at the bottom of the hill like somebody had told them to. Somebody had. The old man had told his assistant to watch me, and the assistant had told his masks, and the old man had never known what his assistant was.
“He’s holding him under the ruins,” said Quill. “In the dig. We’ll have him out. Not tonight. Tonight I need to sit down.” He looked at my hands, which I’d been keeping behind me. “And you need to show me those.”
He had a tin.
It was green, flat, the kind that boot-polish comes in, and inside was a yellow salve that smelled of goose fat and something sharp, and he held my hands on his bony knees and worked it into them with his thumbs, the way Hettie works dough.
“Catching,” he said, while he did it. “That’s what the old books call it. And the ones who could do it, the books call kindlers. Your brother wouldn’t tell me, but I’d read enough to guess, and I’ve read everything. Grabbed magic takes its price from the hands. The old catchers wore gloves of it, this stuff, to the elbow.” He coughed. “The recipe’s in a book nobody else has opened since before my grandfather. It’s very dull. I was glad of it today.”
I was looking at my hands and not at him, because I didn’t want him to see my face.
The pins and needles came.
They came like they’d been waiting for permission. Up from the wrists, into the palms, into the fingers, the worst pins and needles I’ve ever had, and I’d have cried if Ilsa hadn’t been sitting six feet away with her back to me. I bit my cheek instead. It took a while. When it stopped, my hands were pink. Pink, like hands. I could feel the moss. I could feel the old man’s knees under them, hard and thin as a chair.
Except for two fingers on the left. The little one, and the one next to it.
I bent them. They bent. They felt like two bits of wood that happened to be joined on.
Quill saw. He didn’t make a face.
“Those two won’t come, will they,” he said.
“No.”
“Then they’re the price.” He closed the tin and pressed it into my good hand. “Keep that. Everything has one, Wick. The trick is to know what you’re paying before you’ve paid it. Most people find out after.”
He hadn’t known my name was Wick. I thought about that for one second, and then I thought: Aldo talked about me. Of course he did. A small one who talks too much. He’d told the Skitter. He’d have told a lonely old man in a library.
I put the tin in my pocket next to the bead.
Quill’s men had made a camp on the far side of the hollow tree, away from the ring of melting hoofprints. A real one, with a fire that was allowed to be a fire, because the watchmen had cleared the moss back to bare rock, and a pot on it, and a smell coming off the pot that made Skritch stand up on his back legs and go very still.
“That’s bacon,” said Ilsa.
“Skritch has heard of bacon.”
It was the best meal I’ve ever eaten, and I’ve eaten Hettie’s pies. We sat on the rock with our boots to the fire, and the four watchmen ate standing up, in a row, like they’d been told to, and didn’t talk, and Professor Quill sat on a folded blanket and asked us about everything.
I told him. The wolves, the steam, the eel. The diary in the tree. He’d laughed at the eel until he coughed, and gone very quiet at the diary. He asked to see it, and I showed him, and he read day forty with his finger under the line and his mouth going thin.
“He looked at me like I was a chest of gold,” he read. “Yes. That’s the man. That’s Vosk exactly.”
“Did he leave you anything else?” he said, after. “Your brother. Here?”
I thought about pencil on a wall at the bottom of a stair. Go home. I thought about a stone man and three crosses.
“No,” I said.
I don’t know why I said it. I’ve thought about it a lot since. It wasn’t Aldo’s letter. It wasn’t don’t trust anyone. I’d stopped thinking that about an hour ago, with my hands on his knees. It was just that the note was mine. Some of it’s mine, I’d said, about the diary. The note was all of it.
“No,” I said again. “Just the diary.”
“Then the diary’s enough.” He gave it back, and sat for a moment with his hands on his knees, looking at the fire, and said, the way you’d mention the weather, “I haven’t got long, Wick. The lungs. I’ve one more thing I want to see before I go, and I’d like it not to be a boy’s funeral.”
Nobody said anything to that. Then he reached into his coat pocket and came out with the paper twist. “Peppermint?”
I took one. I don’t know why I did that either. Yes I do. Because you take the sweet when the old man offers it. That’s just what you do.
Skritch took one. He’d been waiting for this. He’d said for the evidence and he’d meant it. He put it in his mouth with great care, the way he’d handled the lamp, and he closed his eyes, and he sat.
Then he opened his eyes very wide and spat it into the fire.
“That’s not a sweet,” he said, in a voice of real hurt. “That’s a punishment.”
The Professor laughed so hard he had to be thumped on the back, and Ilsa laughed, and I laughed, and the four watchmen in their row didn’t, but I think one of them nearly did.
And in the middle of laughing, I smelled it. The peppermint. On my own breath, on Quill’s, strong and sharp and everywhere. And the cough. And a line in pencil on a wall underground, he coughs, he smells of peppermint, went across the back of my mind like a draught under a door.
I put it down. He’s walked two days on those lungs to find a mudflat boy he’s met once, and he’s brought the watch, and he’s fixed my hands.
Aldo wrote don’t trust anyone who’s nice to you for no reason. But there was a reason. I could see the reason. He was lonely, and he was sorry, and he was dying. He’d said so himself, over the bacon, like he was mentioning the weather.
Later, when it was dark and the fire was down and the watchmen had gone out to the edge of the stones in pairs to stand there with their lanterns, I sat down next to Ilsa.
She was sitting with her knees up and her burnt coat round them, looking at the fire. She didn’t move over. She didn’t move away either.
“I should’ve said,” I said.
“Yes.”
“In the hole.”
“Yes.”
I’d been working on it for an hour. “Ilsa. I’ve got nothing.”
She looked at me sideways. “That’s five words.”
“‘I’ve’ is one.”
“It’s two. It’s I have. You’ve squashed it.”
“That’s not—”
“Four words, you said. ‘Ilsa, I’ve got nothing.’ That’s five. You can’t even do that properly.” But she’d moved. An inch. Her shoulder was against mine. “I’m still angry.”
“I know.”
“Good.” She looked back at the fire. “You went a very bad colour, Wick. I’m not doing that again. If you reach past the shoulder again I’m going to hit you with Skritch’s lamp.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s not fair. It’s a lamp. But I’ll do it.”
We sat. Across the fire the Professor was asleep sitting up, with his chin on his chest and his handkerchief in his lap, breathing like a bellows with a hole in it. One of the watchmen had put a blanket over his knees. I watched the blanket go up and down.
“Their coats are new,” said Ilsa.
“What?”
“The watchmen. Look. Green coats, straight off the hook. Watch coats are never new. They go through three men before they’re thrown out. Everyone knows that.”
I looked. She was right. The one nearest, by the stones, had a coat with the creases still in it from folding.
“The sergeant gave him four men and four new coats,” I said. “To get rid of him. He said the sergeant laughed.”
“Mm,” said Ilsa.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep. You look like something off a fishmonger’s slab.”
I went to sleep. I want you to know that. With the fire going down and a blanket over me that one of the quiet men in new coats had put there, and an old man coughing in his sleep across the rock, and my hands pink and warm and in front of me instead of under my arms, I went to sleep properly, all the way down, for the first time since the storm.
I woke once.
I don’t know what time. The fire was red. The Professor’s blanket had slipped and somebody had put it back. The watchmen’s lanterns were four yellow points out among the stones, not moving.
And next to me, sitting up, with his tail round his feet and his nose in the air, was Skritch.
He wasn’t looking at the stones. He was looking at the old man asleep on the other side of the fire. His whiskers were going. His torn ear was flat against his head, the way it had gone in the warren when the singing bent.
“Skritch,” I whispered. “What.”
He didn’t look round. He kept his nose up, and his black eyes on the sleeping shape with the handkerchief, and when he spoke it was so quiet I nearly didn’t hear it.
“Skritch smelled that man before,” he said. “In the dark.”