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So Silver Bright

Lisa Mantchev




  For Amélie, who is princess and pirate both, and for Xavier, who agreed it should be “never jam today”

  CAST LIST

  MEMBERS OF BEATRICE SHAKESPEARE SMITH & CO.

  Beatrice (Bertie) Shakespeare Smith, a seventeen-year-old girl

  Ariel, an airy spirit from The Tempest

  Nate, a pirate from The Little Mermaid

  Waschbär, a sneak-thief

  Varvara, a fire-dancer

  AT THE CARAVANSERAI

  The Scrimshander, Bertie’s father

  Serefina, an herb-seller

  Aleksandr, Leader of the Innamorati

  Valentijn, Keeper of the Innamorati Costumes

  Various Innamorati performers

  AT THE DISTANT CASTLE

  Her Gracious Majesty, the Queen

  Fenek, a servitor

  AT THE THÉTRE ILLUMINATA

  Ophelia, daughter of Polonius in Hamlet, and Bertie’s mother

  The Theater Manager

  The Stage Manager

  Mrs. Edith, the Wardrobe Mistress

  Mr. Hastings, the Properties Manager

  Mr. Tibbs, the Scenic Manager

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Cast List

  Chapter One: We Will Persuade Him, Be It Possible

  Chapter Two: As Confident as Is the Falcon’s Flight

  Chapter Three: Thou Shalt Have the Air of Freedom

  Chapter Four: Another Spur to My Departure

  Chapter Five: So Quick Bright Things Come to Confusion

  Chapter Six: I Must Attend Her Majesty’s Command

  Chapter Seven: If You Do Take a Thief, Let Him Show Himself

  Chapter Eight: A Fair Hot Wench in Flame-Colour’d Taffeta

  Chapter Nine: This Scepter’d Isle, This Earth of Majesty

  Chapter Ten: Tell O’er Thy Tale Again

  Chapter Eleven: Her Acts Being Seven Ages

  Chapter Twelve: I Summon Up Remembrance of Things Past

  Chapter Thirteen: Like Bubbles in a Late-Disturbed Stream

  Chapter Fourteen: Come Not Home in Twice Six Moons

  Chapter Fifteen: The Next Tile That Falls

  Chapter Sixteen: For a Fantasy and Trick

  Chapter Seventeen: There Is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook

  Chapter Eighteen: That Thing That Ends All Other Deeds

  Chapter Nineteen: So Do Our Minutes Hasten to Their End

  Chapter Twenty: Of These Most Brisk and Giddy-paced Times

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  We Will Persuade Him, Be It Possible

  It is a nipping and an eager air.

  Except, for once, Beatrice Shakespeare Smith was thinking of the weather and not Ariel. With a frigid coastal wind tugging at her hair, she sprinted up the stairs set into the White Cliffs. Questions flitted about her mind on the wings of tiny white moths, all drawn to a central, gleaming hope: the chance to have family—her family—reunited. She rehearsed her query for the Scrimshander as she raced ever higher:

  Will you come with us to the theater? I promised my mother I’d bring you back with me.

  Bertie would have made her plea that morning on the beach, fresh from the triumph of rescuing Nate and escaping the Sea Goddess’s clutches, except her father had not lingered one moment longer than necessary. Perhaps it was in his avian nature to seek solitude; more likely, Bertie’s news that Sedna—his former ladylove—had dissolved into a plethora of tiny sea creatures had come as something of a shock. A few hours had passed since the vengeful deity had tried to kill Bertie, first by drowning, then by strangling, and finally by collapsing her underwater lair, but the Sea Goddess’s promise to gather her strength and revisit her vengeance upon them all still reverberated through Bertie’s very bones. Trying to escape it, she ducked her head and entered the Scrimshander’s Aerie.

  “Dad?”

  The single word echoed off the walls; it only took a few heartbeats for Bertie to understand something was amiss. Softened by a gray blanket of fog, the meager, midday sunlight did little to illuminate the cavern’s depths. Lanterns hung askew, while the embers in the hearth lay dying, the coals abandoned like broken eggshells in a nest. A haphazard assortment of the Scrimshander’s carving tools was spread scattershot across the stone floor. The room was a tomb—gloomy, stale, silent—and it was Bertie’s hopes that had died.

  He’s not here.

  Bertie circled the cavern, peering into the innermost recesses, praying he’d retired to sleep or retreated to an unknown nook. She moved as a wraith would, gliding from one bit of furniture to another, haunted by the ghosts of a thousand fears but none so terrible as the one confirmed by the tattered scrap of paper she found pierced to the wall above his desk.

  I have gone to find her.

  The handwriting was nearly illegible, the scrawl trailing off as though the weight of the pronouncement had caused him to drop his pen. On the desk lay a single ink-tipped quill. Bertie picked it up, the fog in her brain clearing enough for her to notice something.

  That’s not tipped with ink.… It’s blood. He ripped the feather from his wing to write the note.

  Which meant that her father was once more a bird. Once more the creature in love with Sedna. And that he’d abandoned his daughter and his humanity in favor of the Sea Goddess.

  I have to call him back.

  Perhaps it was for the best that the notebook was tucked into Waschbär’s bag for safekeeping; its magic was flawed and subject to creative interpretation at the best of times. Instinctively, Bertie knew something more powerful was needed here: blood-magic, bone-magic, word-magic. Combined, they had helped her escape Sedna’s underworld after the cavern walls collapsed atop her, allowed her to return to the surface and to the company of her friends. But could they summon the Scrimshander back on the winds?

  The attempt and not the deed confounds us.

  She must try.

  Taking up one of her father’s carving tools, Bertie scored the tip of her finger until a droplet of blood oozed from it, darker than a ruby. “For the blood.” Reaching out, she touched the nearest of a hundred carvings etched into the massive whale ribs that formed the Aerie’s rafters, then the scrimshaw medallion hanging about her neck. “For the bones.”

  As for the words, those she held in her mouth, some faceted and glowing like the blood ruby, others delicate and rounded like ivory spellicans: Let him be summoned.

  The earth thrummed in response, and the floor underfoot shuddered, as though the stone tried to lift her into the very skies. Seconds later came the water, a gift from her mother, Ophelia. It sloshed from abandoned pots and pans, from inky cups and tiny indentations in the floor, mimicking waves swirling about her ankles, inciting the seagulls to gather outside. The winds answered Bertie’s command last of all, nudging the birds into a circular pattern, carrying with them the faintest of cries:

  “Little one—”

  And a second, stronger voice:

  “What are you playing at?” Ariel posed his distant query with an interesting mixture of irritation and anxiety. A subsequent puff of wind signaled a hasty approach.

  Except it was Bertie’s summoned winds that arrived first, roaring into the Aerie and prompting the near-dead coals in the hearth to blaze back to life. Blue and green sparks exploded outward to alight upon furniture, wadded scraps of paper, tattered bits of sailcloth, and oily cotton rags left in forgotten corners. All that had been earth-grown provided sustenance for the fire and, within seconds, the Aerie filled with thick, choking smoke. Trembling like an inferno-trapped sapling, Bertie crouched down in the narrow space where the air was the cleanest and coolest, then tried to bend the fire to her will.
<
br />   Controlling the earth was simply a matter of filling up the back of her head and the hollow of her throat and the place just behind her eyes with green tendrils and dark soil and crumpled pieces of leaves, and then thinking please down to her toes. Soon she realized fire was an altogether different beast, with claws of red and yellow and orange. Bertie tried to catch hold of them, but they twisted out of her reach, as capricious as one of Ariel’s spring gales and infinitely more dangerous.

  Unable to bear the smoke and the heat any longer, Bertie crawled forward on her belly, trying to locate the Aerie’s exit. Tears streamed from her eyes now; when they spattered on the hot stone floor, she half expected them to skitter in all directions like water tossed into a frying pan. A sudden gust of wind shoved the smoky cloak from Bertie’s shoulders only seconds before Ariel’s slim hand clamped down over her wrist and he towed her out of the Aerie and into his arms.

  “I leave you alone for five minutes, and you go up like a Roman candle.” With a lazy smile, he decanted clean air into her lungs. “If you wanted to play with fire, milady, you could have simply asked me for a kiss or three.”

  Bertie tried to tell him she wasn’t playing and to let her go, thank you, but all she could manage was a series of coughs into the front of his linen shirt and the words, “My father—”

  “Stay put.” Ariel pressed her against the cliff face. “I’ll get him.”

  “He’s not—” Ye gods, it hurt to breathe, much less speak. “He’s not in there.”

  One raised eyebrow was all the answer she got before there was an ominous crackle of glass. One of the oil lanterns, perhaps, or an unseen cache of sparking powder exploded, and the force of the blast shoved Bertie off the tiny ledge.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As Confident as Is the Falcon’s Flight

  Only in Sedna’s underworld had Bertie flown before, inadvertently shape-shifting into a bird after slipping off a tightrope. That time, she’d saved herself—and Ariel—from falling into a cauldron of boiling ice.

  Similar self-preservation instincts made her cast her arms wide-open again. Every tiny hair upon them stiffened like the nub ends on a thousand quill pens. The rush of air was the same, through her hair, in her ears, but something different emerged in place of feathers. This time, Bertie heard the echoes of wishes never made. Nameless longings leapt inside her heart of hearts like acrobats. Recognizing kindred magic, the scrimshaw medallion hummed against her skin, warming in response—

  Seconds before she would have smashed into the rocks, Ariel caught her about the waist, tethering her body to his chest. He fought the heart-stopping plummet with only a small exhalation of breath to mark his efforts.

  His smile was quizzical as they landed. “Did duress get the best of you?”

  Thankful that the sands welcomed her feet instead of her face, Bertie couldn’t quell the disappointment that burbled up inside her. “I’ve forgotten the trick of flight, if ever I knew it.”

  “Given enough time and practice, you’ll harness the winds again.” Ariel ran his hands down her arms, as though searching for feathers that had refused to manifest. “Especially since you have the best of instructors at your disposal.”

  “It’s not your responsibility to teach me such things.” Remembering her father’s defection, the words came out harsher than she’d intended. Bertie wrestled to contain her misdirected anger as she looked up at the Scrimshander’s Aerie, reduced by distance to a tiny hole in the side of the White Cliffs.

  Ariel spared a glance at the cavern’s entrance, which was exhaling smoke like the Caterpillar’s hookah in Alice in Wonderland. “He’s gone so soon after your glorious return? That’s hardly good manners.”

  “A lack of manners is the least of his transgressions in my opinion.”

  “Just say the word, and we’ll give chase through the skies.”

  “And you’ll carry me, hanging about your neck like the proverbial albatross? Don’t be ridiculous. You’d tire of me before the day was out and drop me in the nearest gully.” But sarcasm couldn’t stop Bertie’s heart from slamming into her ribs as an errant wind howled around them. Deep inside her, all the unnamed longings of her soul raised the question:

  What is it you really want?

  Nate appeared in the distance, approaching at a run even as Ariel leaned closer, his hand sliding along her arm in invitation.

  “I wouldn’t, and well you know it.”

  Bertie gathered up the feathered bits of her mind that knew the joy of flight, carefully tethered them with red thread, and shoved them as far down as she could into the dark earth of her soul. “I can’t just leave.”

  “He’s out there somewhere, isn’t he? Circling the skies as a fulmar.” The air elemental took her hand in his own, threading a bit of wind between their enmeshed fingers like the captured ribbon tail on a kite. “Give chase. You promised Ophelia, didn’t you?”

  I have gone to find her.

  Bertie could picture the Scrimshander’s note, though it had surely been reduced to cinders and ash by the fire. “My father made his decision. He’s gone after Sedna.” Pulling away from Ariel, she clasped her elbows for warmth, suddenly freezing now that she wasn’t burning, and began to climb the nearest dune. Half a second later, she slammed into Nate’s chest, as solid as an anchor when the world around her was a storm-tossed ocean.

  “Are ye hurt?” Without waiting for an answer, he ran his hands over her arms, squeezing to make certain her bones were just where they ought to be. His dark eyes took in her soot-smeared clothes, her no-doubt disheveled hair and face, the blistered skin upon the very end of her nose that even Bertie could see when she went a bit cross-eyed. “I take my eyes off ye fer a second an’ the next thing I realize, there’s smoke pourin’ out o’ th’ cliffs! I thought ye’d been burnt t’ a crisp until I spotted ye on th’ beach!”

  The worried look on his face shouldn’t have irritated her, but it implied everything she hated most about damsels in distress. “The fire was an accident, one that won’t be repeated.”

  Despite three trips to one of the Caravanserai’s famed bathhouses, he still smelled of salt and seaweed, Sedna’s fragrance yet clinging to him in the way that her starfish hands could not. “Ye shouldn’t ha’e wandered off wi’out me.”

  “Perhaps the Mistress of Revels wanted a moment without her loyal hound nipping at her heels.” The air elemental’s soft laughter acted like gasoline upon a fire, and Nate flared up.

  “She left ye behind as well. Mayhap she wanted a moment wi’out ye makin’ cow eyes at her.” Nate looked at him as though he could cheerfully tear Ariel’s head from his shoulders and stuff it down whatever remained of his neck.

  Mustardseed grinned at Bertie. “I was never any good at geometry, but you’re stuck in a triangle, aren’t you?”

  “Shut up,” she ordered even as Moth asked, “But what if there were four of them?”

  “That’s a love rectangle, and five people would be a love pentagon.”

  “And what are six people in love?” Cobweb demanded.

  Mustardseed thought it over a moment. “Manslaughter, I suppose.”

  “It might yet come to that.” Trapped once more between sky and sea, Bertie looked from Ariel to Nate.

  I have flown and fallen, and I have swum deep and drowned, but there should be more to love than “I survived it.”

  Nate spit once in the sand as he turned back to her. “I just wish ye’d be careful.”

  “Unless you plan on covering me head to foot in cotton wool”—a notion Bertie didn’t put past him—“you’re going to have to come to terms with the idea that I might occasionally encounter something dangerous, be it Sea Goddess or wayward fire or questionable meat on a stick.”

  Here the fairies broke into delighted cries of “Where!?” and “Bugger, she’s just trying to illustrate her point” followed by “She’s illustrating with meat? Whatever happened to pen-and-ink sketches?”

  Ariel contributed nothing to the
speculation, instead crossing his arms one over the other. The action recalled his butterfly familiars from the skies, and they flocked to him with eager wing beats.

  “Bats!” Moth flailed at the air. “Vampire bats!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Peaseblossom said with a sniff. “Vampire bats don’t sparkle.”

  “They do! They’re a great glittery menace!” Moth countered, still cowering behind Cobweb and Mustardseed.

  The butterflies disappeared under the collar of Ariel’s silk shirt, and if winged insects could shoot withering glances, then surely they disappeared with great disdain. Peaseblossom took advantage of the silence to begin the Inquisition.

  “But you haven’t told us what happened in the Aerie. Did you try to ‘kindle a fire’ again?”

  “When will you learn the words you write have consequences?” Moth said, wagging a finger under Bertie’s nose.

  “I didn’t write anything.” She gestured to Waschbär, standing just behind them. “Our friend still has the journal among his things, I hope.”

  Despite a long-distance sprint through the sand, the sneak-thief was neither red nor panting. He yet wore his rucksack slung about his impressive shoulders and patted the bag with one dexterous hand. “As you commanded me, good Mistress of Revels.”

  “But what about the Scrimshander?” Cobweb wanted to know. “Did he turn into a rotisserie chicken?”

  Flinching at the suggestion, Bertie shook her head. “No. He was gone before I got there.”

  “Don’t worry!” Peaseblossom hastened to reassure her friend. “He can’t stay away forever.”

  “Sure he can,” Moth said, oblivious and cheerful as the boys skimmed about Bertie’s head. “He’s a wild animal, isn’t he?”

  Mustardseed and Cobweb added their thoughts, which included, “I guess he could fly until his arms give out” and, “They aren’t arms, stupid, they’re wings.”

  Bertie was suddenly very tired: tired of walking, tired of explaining, tired of dealing with her fae friends, and tired of catching the surreptitious glowers exchanged by Nate and Ariel. As the fatigue seeped inward, it brought with it the mocking laughter of the Sea Goddess. Every breaking wave along the shore seemed to echo her voice, every foam-tipped eddy looked like the crooking of a starfish finger, the strands of seaweed Sedna’s vicious tresses. Bertie licked her lips and tasted evil in the air. “She can’t have coalesced yet.”