Page 13 of Crown of Wings and Whispers

The sounds came from the menagerie-filled shelves, not the closet. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the age and antiquity of some of the knick-knacks, but I was. Old jewelry, clever gadgets with pointy tips I assumed were weapons, carved statues of imaginary animals, men and women whose importance I couldn’t guess at. A small painting of a dragon with a woman on its back.

If it weren’t for the age and cracking of the paint used, I would have thought the latter was memorabilia from a popular TV series.

I moved a couple of figures out of the way so I could reach a long black leather box at the back of one shelf. The leather was slightly padded, the box well-made and modern with a simple swing latch that looked like the firing arm of a pistol. No locks. As soon as I touched it, I felt vague vibrations, but I ignored them and flipped the latch, determined to look inside before Bridie came back.

I lifted the lid and found just what I’d been expecting—a row of pet rocks similar to mine, though they were different colors of muted stone. Their gems had been chiseled out and there was no trace of the gold webbing that encased Hank. Two of them once had the same nine stones embedded in them. The other four had anywhere from three to five holes where gemstones had once been. Now they looked like children’s ceramic projects gone bad.

Though the hissing never changed, I somehow felt the message was different. They weren’t calling to me, they were begging me, pleading with me—to reach in and touch them, and I was reminded of the four bookmarks at Trinity Library. Daphne had insisted they didn’t want to be touched, but she’d been wrong.

While I was tempted to do what they asked, Hank demanded the opposite, his hiss warning me to drop the box and go. It was odd to assign an actual message to the sound, and I wondered if it was just all my imagination. After all, he’d never communicated with me in nearly twenty years, other than demanding I not leave him behind.

“You’re talking to menow?” I said, my sneer directed at my pocket. “Are you kidding me?”

I took one last look at the stones in the box and closed the lid. The last thing I needed was more petulant rocks in my pockets.

“They’re a strange lot, they aaare,” Bridie said behind me. She held out a glass of water, and when I accepted it, she took the box from me, opened it, and pulled the rocks out one at a time, examined each one briefly, then put them back. Her bare touch earned no reaction at all. “Daphne was obsessed with huntin’ these, but they never performed for her. She called them star stones.”

I choked on the water, wiped away the drops that had come out of my nose, and fought to hold back my excitement. “They perform?”

She shrugged. “Never did anythin’ but lie there. Daphne said there was a way to ooopen them, but devil if I can see hooow.”

She tried to hand one to me—one with an orange cast—but I knew better than to touch it with my bare skin and shook my head. This was no time to be tempting fate. In fact, I was surprised I’d come so close to touching them in the first place and wondered if they’d tried to cast some spell on me with that hissing.

“The Irish call themcloch realtas,but she forbade me from ever speakin’ that name to anyone outside the hooose. Thought they came from the very staaars, she did. When she got wind of a new one, she’d sometimes be gone for years, huntin’ it dooon. They always disappointed her in the end, poor dear. Now, just tell me how a simple rock can disappoint a person.”

I shook my head and played dumb instead of sharing the fact that, at that very moment,Iwas disappointingthem.

Bridie put the long box back in its place and I moved the figurines to where they’d started.

“Lucky thing she never found another,” she said as she shuffled toward the closet.

“Why’s that?”

“No more room in the box.” She slid the door open to reveal a large closet jampacked with clothes, most of which reached the floor. “Griffon says ye have no rigout with ye.”

I’d been around Scots enough to know rigout meant outfit.

“I do not.”

“Then I hope it won’t bother ye to wear somethin’ of Daphne’s tomorrow niiight. Some of these she never found occasion to wear, I trow. But tell me they’re not lovely.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. As she ran her hand along a row of gowns, each and every one of them looked plain and colorless—so plain, in fact, that I couldn’t believe they belonged to the woman with flashing grape-colored eyes and swirling fingernails.

I had no choice but to pick one. I knew nothing about wake protocol, but I was pretty sure jeans would be inappropriate. And since the gowns all seemed to fit a style calledSackcloth and Ashes, or maybeA Bad Year for Peasants, I suggested she pick for me.

She rolled her eyes. “Come now. Which do ye fancy?”

Archer chuckled from the doorway. “Ye should help her choose, Mother.Lucycannae see a thing, yeah?”

Bridie’s eyes flew wide, and she searched my face, then glanced briefly at the rest of me. Her hands fluttered and covered her blushing cheeks. “Oh, forgive me! I just assumed…” She looked desperately at Archer, begging him to save her from some mysteriousfaux pas.He shook his head and disappeared. A wake of mocking laughter trailed after him.

“I don’t understand,” I said as she hurried me out of the room.

“Of course ye don’t. But I’ll not be the one to explain it to ye.Griffon!”

* * *

A minute later,Griffon met us at the head of the stairs, worried. “Archer is laughing, so that can’t be good.”

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