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“You won’t ‘share’ a single all-fired thing with them on my watch, pupper. You’ll go straight to—” Stumps began.
But he did not finish.
Godforsaken Brunty bellowed at the ranks of broken toys. He shoved his fist into the remains of his pockets and drew out a handful of the red and glinting sands of time—glinting because the shards of their bottle stuck up out of his palm like an awful garden. He threw the sand in the soldiers’ faces and roared:
“DROP. DEAD.”
A great thrum and buzz filled the cold winter wilds of the Calabar Woods. Far faster than Ryecote had managed to find them in the bowels of Ochreopolis, another elephantine Time Fly skittered toward them across the blasted heath. The soldiers shouted and scrambled to their feet, to their rifles, to their powder. Quartermaster Stumps reached his arms out to Branwell and Anne. But the fly skidded in between them, blocking their rescue with his fat, black, iridescent body.
“Hullo, sirs and ladies!” chortled the fly merrily. “Isn’t it a loverly day we’re having! Air’s crisp as old bread! The name’s Boarham, son of Peachmuck, son of Scraphole, son of Ol’ Cowskin—”
The Magazine Man seized Bran and Anne again, and his arms were no less strong for having been tortured till they’d nearly fallen off. This time, the children just went slack, resigned.
As she fell back against Brunty’s tattered, wheezing chest, Anne could feel the Quartermaster’s flask hidden there. It pressed up against her spine. She glanced over the hump of Boarham’s thorax. None of the soldiers had even realized it was gone yet. But they would, of course. They would know the minute they tried to bring Captain Bravey back. Tears blurred her eyes. The only difference between a thief and a spy is what you steal, Anne thought drowsily. And Brunty’s stolen everything that matters. Poor Captain Bravey. He really was. So marvelously brave.
“Shut your cursed mouth, bug,” Brunty snapped. “You’ll be dead in an hour and no one cares who spat you out. Gondal. Verdopolis. The Bastille. Now, now, now!”
The woods wobbled. Bravey’s Inn shuddered. Anne began to slide her fingers behind her, ever so gently. The silver, frozen, ruined meadow groaned. The whole wintry world seemed to, somehow, and only once, tick. Like a minute hand juddering into place.
And
then
—they were in Gondal. But Branwell and Anne never saw the hills or the blue houses all in tidy rows or the silvery sunlight on Lake Elseraden or the meadows of Zedora or the spires of Regina. They simply disappeared from the meadow and the woods and Bravey’s Inn and reappeared within the walls of a great prison, with the door already locked fast behind them.
SIXTEEN
The Wildfell Ball
Charlotte and Emily stood at the top of a long, curling staircase made of jewels so scuffed and ancient they had faded to the color of milk. Vines of heather and bilberry and lobelia flowers raced up one banister. Wine-grapes and wild lavender tumbled down the other. A man slapped together out of broken brandy snifters looked them up and down with one frosted eyebrow raised disdainfully. Charlotte straightened her back and placed the little card Ginevra had given them into his outstretched hand. Candlelight glanced off her perfectly pinned and curled hair, her skin, her eyelashes, her lips: all painted as gold as a goose’s egg. Not one square inch of plain skin
-and-bones Charlotte was left. She was nothing but gold. Emily raised her own eyebrow at the same angle as the snifter-man, but somehow, on her new silver face it came out less disdainful and more furious and prone to violence. He looked suddenly alarmed and turned away from this terrifying metal girl immediately.
“May I present Lady Currer Bell and Lady Ellis Bell of Thrushcross Grange!” roared the herald to the shimmering throng spread out below the staircase.
No one paid him the least attention.
But Charlotte and Emily could not make themselves move. Now was the time to descend the stairs gracefully and melt into the crowds. That was what was meant to happen next. But they could not force themselves to do it. The great hall dazzled them so completely that they just stood there like two bathers at the edge of a swimming hole where everyone else has already jumped in.
The vast mansion that hosted the Wildfell Ball had no roof. The buttresses and garlands were the wheeling silver stars of Glass Town and a warm evening wind conducted the music. Huge thistle blossoms hung like chandeliers from nothing at all. Their spiky petals burned with blue fire. Indigo couches lined walls sheathed in magenta wallpaper; but the walls ended cleanly twenty feet in the air. Bronze candlesticks as tall as two men stood everywhere like sunflowers, boasting fifty candles each. On a little velvet stage, a quartet in lavender wigs played a maddeningly fast waltz on a violet harpsichord, a plum cello, a bassoon the color of raisins, and a drum hollowed out of mulberry stump. The ballroom floor was checkered amethyst and black marble, reflecting hundreds of feet spinning in steps so complicated Emily thought she could practice till she was eighty and never learn them. The Wildfell Ball was a blur of people. Tall, handsome limeskin soldiers lounged in their uniforms, Lords and Ladies danced in their finery, servants rushed here and there with platters and goblets and armfuls of new shoes in case anyone wore theirs out. And there, there in the middle of it all like a cake topper, stood the Duke of Wellington, his burning iron wings lighting up the dance floor as a laughing young maiden made of playing cards pulled and prodded him to join in the fun.
Each Lord, each Lady, each soldier, each servant was terribly young, just like Wellington, just like Bonaparte, just like Charlotte and Emily. Even the oldest reveler they saw wheel by could not have been much more than sixteen or seventeen.
Strangest of all, a woman made of roses hung miserably in a cage above the party. Below her, Copenhagen, the great blue water-lion, stared up intently, his sea-foam whiskers twitching, batting at the bottom of the cage with one huge, salty paw. The cage rocked back and forth. The rose-lady hissed. The lion purred and chortled in feline glee and whacked it again.
“Come on, Charlotte,” Emily whispered. “Er. Currer. Lady Bell. We can do this. It’s just like playing with dolls and wooden soldiers at home. We know their names and their histories better than they do—we made them up in the room at the top of the stairs! I don’t know how that can be, but it is. We’d better stop marveling at it and start using it to our advantage. This should be as easy as one of our games.”
“I’m more worried about the things we didn’t make up, Ellis,” Charlotte said smoothly. A new name was nothing to a liar as practiced as she. “Wehglon, Acroofcroomb, Captain Bravey, Verdopolis? Those feel good and safe to me. Old friends. But we never imagined Port Ruby or Bestminster or . . . or . . . this. Our games have gone on without us and I don’t think we’re all such good friends anymore.” Charlotte took a deep breath. She put it all in a neat stack underneath her heart to worry at later. “Buck up,” she said.
“Be brave,” Emily answered her.
But there was no one to do the other parts. Two was nothing. What good were two bees out of four?
A voice bellowed out above the noisy throng. Someone was coming toward them, making his apologies as he dodged dance-traffic. Someone made of wood.
“Well, cut my rations and wet my powder! Never thoughtmagined I’d see you girls in a place like this! I hardly recognized you! What’s that all over your face-parts? Did you change your hair?” Sergeant Crashey was panting by the time he got to the bottom of the jeweled staircase. The wood of his face had gone from ash to cherry. “You surely do look grandnificent, if you’ll take a compliment from an old army-man! What’re ya standing up there for? It’s boring up there! Much better down here. Down here there’s me!”
Charlotte and Emily found their feet at last and bolted down the steps toward the one familiar thing in all the world and hugged it fiercely. Sergeant Crashey cleared his throat to rid himself of the embarrassment of this sudden outpouring of breather affection. The song changed to something slower and kinder to tired feet. Dancers drifted toward the wallpaper to rest their nerves.
