Page 21 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

Sister Cook shoved both her hands in her apron pockets. “Pfenix breast, though I’ve diced them small and disguised them as chicken fingerlings so our dear old Mother Rush-to-Judgment doesn’t have a conniption stroke. Don’t forget to come down when you hear the dinner bell; we don’t get Pfenix around here very often, Animal or otherwise.”

She lingered a moment longer and watched Candle hold the red feather. It was almost two feet long and still retained some of its vital elasticity. “Well?” said Sister Cook. “I can’t stand here forever. Play a dirge for the Pfenix, who never made it to his Convention or his class reunion or wherever he was going. He was interested in your playing, I saw. Honor him by accepting his gift.”

Candle tried to remember what she had seen of the domingon when it was played by its maker. She had swooned, for music or love or both, and in her exhilaration, maybe she’d overlooked an aspect of the instrument’s construction. Maybe it had had a pfenix feather, and the master had removed it—pfenix feathers weren’t easy to come by. And a Pfenix feather, freely given besides! What she might learn to play now.

She leaned down and laid the quill end of the feather against the empty notch at one end of the domingon’s lower soundboard. It settled in perfectly, as if the domingon had been built to accommodate this exact feather. Then Candle gently coaxed the feather flat. There was a hasp at the soundboard’s far edge, a leather tooth on a sprung hinge that clamped down hard to hold the pinion end of the tailfeather in place.

Candle turned the pegs, listening to calibrations of tuning too precise for Sister Cook to appreciate. Then Candle flung out both her hands at Sister Cook: Go! Go!

“Ungrateful, the both of you,” said Sister Cook. As she descended the stairs, she heard the first few notes of an exquisite instrument being played by an expert. So suddenly it took her back to school days—when she was a nervous slip of a thing at Madame Teastane’s Female Academy, not the cow she’d become—that she had to steady herself against the wall. She was thirteen, and suffering her first menses. Coming back from a dawn visit to the cold lavatories on the third floor, she’d spotted a red pfenix on the roof of the Master’s lodge. The trees had been airy, just budding, struck with first light, and the bird had looked like red cloisonné set in warm stone. A stab of loveliness unmerited, unexpected. It had cheered her then. She continued down the stairs back to the mauntery’s kitchens, cheered again at the long-forgotten thought, though perhaps she was also happy to anticipate a fine, fine meal that night.

Southstairs

1

THE SUPERIOR MAUNT made it her business to get to the infirmary on a daily basis. She didn’t like what she saw. The young fellow made no discernible progress; indeed, a yellowish sweat rolled off him, hinting of turps. His skin was cold to the touch. He was still breathing, however.

“You may wipe him down when he becomes too clammy,” she said to Candle, and showed her how. The girl seemed reluctant to touch her charge, but did as she was bade.

Holy intuition, the Superior Maunt felt, did not figure among her own administrative talents. She was a common-sensist. She thought the Unnamed God had given her a brain to use, not to ignore as a snare of the devil. She had tried to lift herself up by clear thinking, and others, too, when she could.

Nonetheless, it was intuition as much as charity that had inspired her to call for a musician. This Candle seemed perfect: demure, even of temper, and increasingly proficient at her instrument.

The Superior Maunt wasn’t overly worried that whatever had befallen Liir—whatever it was, those bruises, those broken bones!—would afflict her pair of investigators. The young missionaries from the motherchapel in the Emerald City, whose faces had been scraped—the boy himself—were possessed of the loveliness of youth, youth’s fine ignorance of its own fleeting grace. The same couldn’t be said of Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire. Through long years of dedication and hard work, they had grown wizened and doughy, respectively. They would be safe from the attention of those who wanted to despoil the innocently beautiful. And their training in medicine had fostered keen observational skills; they could protect themselves, if anyone could.

The Maunt Superior noted that though her hearing wasn’t good anymore, the music of the repaired domingon had a way of traveling. The entire mauntery was filled with its soft phrases. Sister Linenflaxen said it was elegiac, damn it, Candle was wooing the lad to his final sleep. She should play something peppier. Everyone else said shhhh. The whole place had fallen under a sort of spell. They were waiting to see what would happen, but the music made them patient.

Sister Graveside ironed a fresh winding cloth and refilled the corked jug with anointing oil, to be ready.

CANDLE WAS MORE OBSERVANT than the Superior Maunt credited, though. She could see that Liir’s respiration responded to her choice of music. He went through periods of rhythmic breathing, like someone sleeping peacefully enough, followed by patterns of shallow flutterbreath.

Restored to glory by the feather of the Pfenix, the domingon had become responsive: the harmonic overtones hung in the air and complemented one another. When the invalid seemed too agitated, she would bring him back with long furling phrases. But too many of those and she was afraid he would deliver his last, deep outgo and breathe in no more: and then he would be dead. So she would agitate him with pizzicato comments and thumb-struck flat-tone responses, to alert his lungs and stimulate his heart.

She was guiding him. She knew it. She just didn’t know where he was.

LIIR WAS IN THE STOLEN BLUNT-BOAT with the Scarecrow, heading along one of the waterways of the Emerald City. It was a week or two after the Witch had died. There was trouble behind, and darkness ahead, but the windows of the town mansions that lined the canal—one flight above street level, above the barricaded stables and stout front gates—threw trapezoids of gold light onto the stinking canal water. Liir and the Scarecrow passed in and out of one another’s view.

“What will you do?” asked the Scarecrow. “Where will you go?”

“I have no place to go,” said Liir. “I’m not going back to Kiamo Ko. Why should I? Only old Nanny there.”

“Have you no obligation to her?”

“Now you ask me? In a word, no. Chistery will mind her well enough.”

“The Snow Monkey? Yes, I suppose he will. Well, the story of Dorothy is done. We won’t see her like again.”

“And a good thing, too,” said Liir. “Off and away with the fairies, just like that, and not so much as a decent good-bye!”

“Her depar

ture was precipitous,” agreed the Scarecrow. “Glinda made the arrangements in something of a hurry.”

The light from a party, candles laid out on a balustrade. The music wafting out open doors: agitated phrases, comments and responses, from some instrument with multiple voices, or many instruments playing very close together. Haunting!

The Scarecrow said, “Don’t fasten on Dorothy. Only unanswerable longing lies down that road. Gone is gone.”

“How wise you are, now that you’re packed with brains. Everyone got some party favor from the Wizard except me. Everyone’s got somewhere to go.”

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