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‘Rourke!’
With short but confident strides, she walked along the perch and climbed down the inside of the cage to the door. Gripping the wire in her powerful beak, she pulled the door upwards and, with a deft and obviously well practised manoeuvre, flipped herself through it. Then she climbed to the top of the cage and fluffed up her feathers.
Jack took a step backwards, unsure where this was going, while Kleo watched from the dragon chair.
‘Is this the first time she’s left the cage?’ he asked.
‘Hasn’t so much as put her head through the door,’ said Kleo, ‘until now.’
Cornelia looked at Jack, and then Kleo. The presence of the cat didn’t seem to worry her.
‘Rourke!’
The macaw’s wings unfolded, flapped, and suddenly she was airborne. She didn’t fly far, just to the other side of the room, where her beak tugged the elephant tapestry aside. Two swift hops took her through the door.
Jack heard her wings flap again. He ran to lift aside the tapestry to see what she was doing. He had a fleeting glimpse of blue flying down the stairwell, then she was gone.
‘Why did she do that? Is she coming back?’
Kleo shrugged. ‘If she won’t tell us, we can’t know.’
‘But she can’t tell us. She’s not like you, a Warden Companion.’ Frustration boiled in him. Had they failed Cornelia somehow by failing to understand?
‘What if we made her a Companion?’ Jack asked. ‘Is there a way to do that?’
‘There is, and it’s very difficult. Far too difficult for troubletwisters,’ said Kleo firmly. ‘Speaking of which . . . Custer left exercises for you. You’ll find them on the desk. I’m to make certain you do them before you go to bed.’
Jack groaned. More homework? It wasn’t fair.
‘I advise getting it over with,’ said the cat. ‘Let me fetch your sister for you. I’ll keep guard for your mother’s return, and check on Cornelia, too, in case she’s thinking of getting up to any mischief.’
‘All right,’ Jack said, rubbing his stomach. He was still looking at the tapestry, worried about Cornelia, but at the same time, their late lunch felt like it had been days ago, and he had shared it with Ari.
He slouched up the short flight of stairs with his sister when she joined him. There he found the homework as promised, a series of fiddly optical illusions for Jack (involving mirrors and lenses and beams of light in a wild variety of colours) and twelve triangular flags for Jaide that she had to make flap in a particular order using carefully targeted jets of air. Jaide joined him, and they set to their tasks with their minds on other things, so that half the time their efforts were to no avail. Flags whipped back and forth, lights flashed on and off, and inevitably their Gifts began to interfere with each other. One particularly uproarious mishap had both of them running for cover under a bureau as objects swept around the room in the grip of an invisible tornado.
The twins each felt five tiny pinpricks of pain in the small of their backs. Startled, they turned around.
‘I’ll take this as a sign,’ Kleo said, as the wind ebbed, normal visibility was restored, and a hundred tiny knickknacks fell with a clatter to the floor, ‘that you are tired and in need of dinner. I suggest you call it a night and head down, once we’ve tidied up here.’
Jaide brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Can I take the Compendium with me to read later?’
‘You may – although your grandmother says it’s terrible bedtime reading. It gives her bad dreams.’
‘Did Custer say anything when he came by today?’ asked Jack as they picked themselves up off the floor.
‘Only that he has observed several unusual meteorological phenomena near the estate.’ Kleo followed them and began batting hidden trinkets into view. ‘He mentioned a storm and all three of you getting wet. But there was no lightning, at least none that he saw. Did you see any?’
The twins shook their heads, wondering why that might be important. Their father travelled by lightning, using his Gift. They didn’t know what the absence of lightning might mean.
‘But the wards are strong, aren’t they?’ This was as close as Jack dared to asking outright if the fight against The Evil that afternoon had gone well.
‘Were The Evil to seriously test the wards,’ said Kleo, rounding up a series of chess pieces that were trying to run away from her, ‘I would know. Wardens aren’t infallible, and as you now know, sometimes they fall ill. They can be distracted by human concerns and affections. That’s why they have Companions: we can see things they do not. We are their eyes and ears when they are blind and deaf.’
With a gentle nip, as if she was picking up a kitten, Kleo scooped up the last wriggling pawn and tossed him into the box with the other chess pieces.
‘Thank you, Kleo,’ said Jaide, rubbing the fur under Kleo’s ears. ‘We’d better go back upstairs before Mum gets back.’
At that moment, the crash of breaking glass sounded from the drawing room.
Kleo led the charge to find out what was going on, Jaide almost treading on the cat’s tail as she ran after her.
Cornelia was crouched on the mantelpiece, clinging to the edge with her powerful claws and peering downwards. On the ground below her was a picture frame lying in a field of glass shards. She glanced up at them, then back at the wreckage. Instead of exhibiting remorse at the accident, Cornelia flapped down and landed gingerly among the splinters and began pulling at the frame with her powerful beak.
‘That’s no way for a guest to behave,’ said Kleo, running towards her.
Cornelia looked up and stretched her wings, flapping them violently.
‘Rourke! Rourke!’
Kleo retreated, and Cornelia returned to the frame, tossing it back and forth with wild jerks of her feathered head until it broke and the picture within fell facedown onto the carpet.
She tossed the frame away, nipped the corner of the picture in her beak, and flipped it over. The picture was a black-and-white portrait of the twins’ family taken when they were nine, showing them all dressed in Wild West outfits. Hector looked out of place in a cowboy hat, sheriff’s badge, and chaps, but Susan looked totally convincing with a six-shooter in her hand, despite her frilly dress. The twins were dressed in old-fashioned ‘Sunday best’. Jack remembered the way his stripy suit had smelled, of mothballs and faintly of sick, as though the last person to wear it had thrown up in it.
‘’ourke!’ said Cornelia, hopping across the floor to him, holding up the photo in her beak.
‘What’s that, Cornelia?’ he asked, crouching down to her level. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘’ourke!’ She dropped the photo in front of him and nodded her head up and down. ‘Rourke!’
‘Something about the photo?’
She stretched out and tapped it with her beak. ‘Rourke! Killer!’
‘Yes, that’s me in the photo, and Jaide, and Mum and—’
She tapped more insistently, putting a hole in Hector’s face. ‘Rourke! Killer! Rourke!’
‘I don’t understand, Cornelia. That’s my dad, yes, but—’
The tapping became more insistent, and the
hole bigger still.
Jaide squatted down next to Jack.
‘Cornelia, are you saying that Dad was the one who frightened Young Master Rourke the night he died?’
Cornelia stopped tapping, hopped backwards and waddled around in a circle. The message was clear: Finally!
‘But that’s impossible,’ said Jack. ‘Dad wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been.’
‘Was he the one who frightened you?’ asked Jaide.
Cornelia nodded. ‘Visitor! Killer!’
‘And is that why you were frightened of us, because you could tell we were related to him?’
Cornelia’s blue head bobbed rapidly up and down. ‘Visitor! Killer!’
‘Stop saying that!’ shouted Jack. The parrot stopped squawking, but gave Jack a very beady-eyed look.
Jack backed away until he bumped into Jaide’s shoulder.
‘Cornelia can’t be right,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Dad wasn’t there, and even if he had been, he wouldn’t have hurt Young Master Rourke. He wouldn’t have!’
Jaide was just as bewildered, but she was trying to think it through. ‘There must be some explanation. Perhaps he was there, and Master Rourke died of fright for reasons we don’t know anything about, or—’
‘There’s very little we can be certain of right now,’ said Kleo. ‘Let’s just be glad that Cornelia is starting to talk about what happened, and worry about making sense of it later.’
‘You don’t believe her, do you?’ asked Jack.
‘I believe your mother will be home soon, and we have some cleaning up to do. It would be best to hide Cornelia, too, to avoid making a scene.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Jaide. ‘Come on, Jack.’
‘But if Dad didn’t frighten Master Rourke, who did?’ he said in a dazed voice. ‘I bet he wasn’t there at all! You’re just making stuff up!’ he yelled down at the parrot. ‘And I thought you were my friend!’
The parrot lunged for the photo but Jack yanked it out of the reach of her sharp beak. He ignored her when she flapped and squawked in protest, thinking only of his father hiding in the forest in the rain, mistrusted by everyone. He couldn’t have killed Master Rourke – he wouldn’t kill anyone.
