A rich purple sunset darkened the horizon when I finally pulled myself from the house cellar. Mr. Morningside was not in his offices, and I stood ready to present him with the first fruits of my labor. I would not say I thought of handing over that first entry with eagerness—unease had settled in my stomach, a general agitation that I could not understand.
It was tempting to categorize what I had read in the journal as nonsense, but I had read Mr. Morningside’s book and called it silliness only to realize that what he had seen and described was true. If Mr. Morningside’s fantastical book held scraps of truth, then so, too, could this journal. Yet the only connection I found between my employer and the journal was the mention of an odd book—the tome in the attic of Coldthistle had been filled with illegible scribbles and burned to the touch. Mr. Morningside even claimed that anyone not of the Unworld would have died from contact with it. Perhaps there were more like it, although ours was decorated with only one eye.
Tired, I forced myself to stand in the kitchen doorway and face the last comforting tendrils of the sun’s heat. I shielded my eyes from the light, finding it made my brain throb after so much time in the cavernous storage room below. I found the yard unusually bustling—Mr. Mason Breen and his betrothed played a lazy game of lawn bowls against Sparrow and Finch near the pavilion, and Chijioke sat on a stump not far from the kitchen door, a whittling project on his knee.
I rolled my translation into a scroll and tucked it under one arm, shuffling into the glow of sunset and standing beside Chijioke. Little wood shavings flew as he attacked the piece of wood furiously, all the while keeping his hazel eyes trained on Sparrow and Finch. Sparrow had changed into a more expected ensemble for lawn darts, a light, breezy dress of ivory that made her look appropriately angelic. It was clear she and her brother were winning, but judging from Amelia’s giggling, the loss wasn’t upsetting the guests. They only had eyes for each other anyway, Mason and Amelia giving no attention whatsoever to the twins or, apparently, their aim.
“Do you know where Mr. Morningside might be?” I asked, watching a stray wood shaving land on my boot.
“In his usual spot, I’d wager,” Chijioke grumbled. I watched the knife drive in and out, an instant later a fin where once a shapeless nub had been. Gradually the lump was beginning to look like a fish.
“He isn’t there, I looked,” I replied. “How can you carve so quickly without looking?”
“Don’t know, lass, just helps me relax.” He flicked the knife twice more, adding delicate little scales to the fish. Finally, he glanced away from the lawn bowls, but not at his carving. Instead, he gazed up at me. I had been staring quite rudely at his handiwork. As soon as he looked at me he turned away again, and I heard him give a sigh. “It’s for Mary. For when she returns. She said fish were lucky; she kept a charm of one in her pocket to rub for good fortune.”
“It’s very nice,” I told him. “Were you two . . . I mean, was there some kind of understanding between you?”
It was the first time his knife slipped, and the edge missed his thumb by a hair.
“An understanding? No . . . Well, maybe. A word here or there, but never the right ones. That was my blunder.” He cleared his throat. “That would have been nice to have. An understanding, that is.”
Mary’s absence made me miserable, but I had known her only a short while—Chijioke and the others must have been suffering terribly. Three-hundred-year contracts. How long had they been here? It was selfish of me not to think of it, and to lose myself in another obsession so quickly. Here he was, carving her a lovely token while I did nothing but plot revenge against a rich father I had never met.
“I don’t blame you, you know,” he said, carving and glaring at Finch and Sparrow again. “She made her choice, too. Someone was hurting and she wanted that fixed, and nothing anyone said would’ve changed her mind. That’s just how she is. Was.”
“Is.” I tried to sound resolute. We were quiet for a moment, but I wasn’t ready to leave in search of Mr. Morningside yet. This was important, too. Mary, Chijioke . . . They had become my friends, and I owed them more than passing consideration. I hoped to fix their general opinion of me very soon. “I did everything right to bring her back,” I said, and my voice faltered, not because I doubted myself but because the failure stung. “I followed Mr. Morningside’s instructions to the letter. It was the same spring, the same man giving the riddles, the same wish. . . . I don’t know what went wrong, Chijioke, I’m sorry.”
His shoulders bunched up and the carving stopped. Then I heard another sigh, this one more forlorn than the last. “I believe you, lass. Her kind are ancient and hard to really know. Someone might have needed her more than you this time. Who can say? Mary will return to us when she’s good and ready, aye? All I can do is hope these Upworlder bastards will be long gone before then.”
“Why do you hate them so much?” I asked, going to his other side and kneeling in the cool grass where it was not snowing wood chips. The sun flared as it lowered, and I shielded my eyes again, watching as Sparrow managed a perfect toss.
Chijioke muttered something dark and unintelligible and then spat in the pile of wood shavings to his right. He squinted at the Upworlders and returned to his blind carving. “Adjudicators are dangerous and odd-like, same as us, but they and their followers have got that self-righteous stink on them. We’re the evil ones, aye? What rubbish. Justice is justice—whether they deliver it or we do. We take souls and so do they, our methods are just different.”
I followed his steely gaze, and while the sight of the twins gave me that cold feeling inside, it was hard to imagine them being killers. That was unfair, of course; I had learned to stop judging on appearances alone. Sparrow stood just behind her brother, rolling her eyes as Amelia missed yet another easy shot.
“Do they have a house like Coldthistle?” I asked. “I thought angels and the like would be in Heaven or something.”
He chuckled and tossed his head, giving me a sideways glance. “I forget that there’s still so much you have to learn, lass.”
“I’m trying,” I said, admittedly exasperated. “It really doesn’t help that I was raised on a Bible and stories that don’t fit anything I’ve seen.”
“Aye, you are at a disadvantage there,” Chijioke replied. With the half-finished fish carving he pointed to Amelia—in red, of course—and her husband-to-be. “What do you see when you look at those two?”
“Must I look?”
He laughed again, or snorted, really, and nodded. “Indulge me, lass.”
“Very well.” I rolled my eyes at him and then studied Amelia and Mason for a moment. I noted that they were doing very badly at bowls, and that of the two Mason seemed to have more aptitude for it, but he frequently made a bad shot because Amelia insisted on draping herself across his arm. “I see two fools oblivious to the fact that they’re being soundly beaten, and that if they wagered anything on the match then surely they will lose it.”
Chijioke tapped his chin thoughtfully with the wooden fish and swayed his head side to side. “Granted. Granted. But I see two people who are so in love with each other they’re not likely to care about losing at bowls or losing coin. I see true love.”
“Goodness gracious.” I glanced up at him, and the look he gave me in return was hooded. Unreadable. “Have you spent even a moment alone with Miss Amelia Canny?”
“I have not.”
“Firstly, I cannot recommend it. Secondly, she has already confessed to me that she did something horrible to win that man’s affections,” I explained. “How can that be true love?”
His smile broadened and he gave me a wink, tapping me on the forehead with the fish. “There are the things that humans see and write down, and there are the things that really happen. Nobody ever said they have to be the same thing.”
“Ah. I take your meaning,” I said. Finch had noticed us watching, apparently, and disengaged from the match, walking toward us at a leisurely pace. I stood and felt Chijioke puff up like a nervous hound as the Upworlder approached. “So the Bible is, what? A misunderstanding? A clerical error?”
Chijioke sprang up next to me, his knife back to work on the fish for Mary. “It’s the best a few could do to describe what the many couldn’t or wouldn’t see. We all make mistakes, Louisa, some are just bigger. A lot bigger.”
“You’re not going to stab him, are you?” I muttered.
That at least made him smirk, but only briefly, for soon he was glowering again. “Adjudicators come in threes, Louisa, so keep your wits about you.”
“Threes?” I frowned and watched as Finch slowed his steps toward us. “Sparrow might think I’m hopelessly stupid, but I can count. Where is the third one?”
“I haven’t the faintest clue,” he said. “Which is why this makes me nervous.”
“Does that mean you’re going to stab him, then?”
“Stand behind me,” Chijioke added, edging out in front of me. “If he tries anything, he’ll get a walloping.”
“He hardly looks like trouble. . . .”
He gave a slight shake of his head. “Oh aye, and that’s because you have never witnessed a Judgment.”
“A what?”
Chijioke didn’t answer. Whatever Finch had seen on or near us had made him change his mind. He stopped abruptly, face falling, before he turned on his heel and returned to his lawn bowls. I felt his presence a moment later at my side and my unease appeared with him. Mr. Morningside had found us, and he loomed tall and narrow next to me.
He nodded politely to Chijioke and then gave us both a brilliant white smile. The sun was almost completely gone behind the horizon, and Amelia whined as they decided to end the game in time for a wash-up and supper. Dimly, I heard Mason Breen congratulate Finch and Sparrow on their win, but I was deaf to whatever they said afterward.
“A game of bowls among friends,” Mr. Morningside crowed, leaning back and adjusting his fine silk cravat. The diminishing light turned his black hair to glossy raven’s wings as he took in a deep, loud breath through his nose. “A crisp evening. The splendor of nature. The fading luster of spring . . .” He extended his hand, sweeping it in front of him. “What a satisfactory sight.”
But he was not looking at the horizon or the trees, or the game of bowls, or even my face. I swallowed, feeling cornered even in the open air. Mr. Morningside had seen the parchment rolled under my arm, and all of his appreciable attention was bent toward it.