Perchance to Dream (7 page)

“That was certainly creative, if not quite hygienic.”

“We are improvising, after all,” Peaseblossom said before rushing to whisper something in Ariel’s ear.

His patter drowned out even the fairies as he beguiled the crowd. “Marvel at the World Premiere of
The Montagues and Capulets Are Dead!
The first four rows are forewarned … there will be spatter!”

The children in the crowd detached from their parents and surged forward, drawn by the promise of bloodshed. The adults followed, and Bertie sidled over to Ariel to watch the performance.

After a bit of scuffling and a protest of “you’re standing on my costume,” the curtain went up. The fairies had tied bits of twine to their wrists and elbows for an ingenious sort of puppet show. Cavorting about the stage and posturing in wicked imitations of the other Players, they launched into their version of
Romeo and Juliet
with gusto.

“Two households, both alike in dignity …”

There were difficulties, of course. Their strings got tangled up in the fight scenes, and there was an unfortunate costume malfunction that exposed Moth’s nether regions to the audience.

“Your bum is showing!” Cobweb hissed at him.

“My what?”

“Your bottom!”

“Bottom is in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I thought we were doing
Romeo and Juliet
!”

“Your arse! Your arse is naked!”

Moth looked over his shoulder at it. “Fancy that! Why didn’t you say something?”

Peaseblossom, left to handle all the women’s roles, handily managed to perform the scene with Juliet, her mother, and her nursemaid.

“The schizophrenia works for me, somehow,” Bertie whispered to Ariel.

He nodded his agreement. “I am horrified to admit that it has a certain perverse charm.”

The fairies then butchered themselves and the lines with enormous quantities of fake blood and groaning, killing every last Capulet and Montague, an acceptable revision as far as Bertie was concerned. The miniature actors took their curtain call to a hearty round of applause.

Less pleasant was the expectant hush that followed.

“My guess,” Ariel said in a low voice, “is that a puppet show and a bit of juggling isn’t going to settle our debt.”

“I’m at a loss as to what to suggest for an encore,” Bertie said, “because my guess is the fairies are out of fake blood.”

“Right then. There’s no helping it.”

“Helping what?”

“This.” He grinned and turned to the crowd. “The lovely Beatrice, Mistress of Revels, will now tell you a tale.”

All the villagers turned as one to scrutinize her, and Bertie froze, pinned against the side of the caravan by the unexpected nature of the attack. With a glance that inferred she would repay him thrice over for this fresh humiliation, Bertie managed to stammer, “I’ll be just a moment” before fleeing inside.

Bolting the door shut was her first priority, and lighting the tiny lantern her second. Cherry-tinted glass filtered the light. For half a heartbeat, Bertie was backstage at the Théâtre Illuminata again, where the red-gelled glow of the running lights was the color of secrets and compulsory quiet. She could almost hear the hushed whispers of the Players waiting in the wings.

The illusion was broken when she had to shove detritus out of the way with her foot in order to open the latch on the closet; while the backstage area smelled strongly of ironwork and rope, it lacked the musty, nostril-tickling tang of mothballs, and Mr. Tibbs would have never permitted it to remain in disarray.

The tiny alcove housed only one change of clothes, and though she half expected it, Bertie was still taken aback to see the Mistress of Revels’s costume hanging inside: the dress of emerald and black silk with embroidery extending from belt to hem, all moons and stars and mystic symbols. The metallic threads winked in the half-light, and Bertie reached out a hesitant hand to stroke it. A gentle jingling of metal proved to be the belt a-dangle with golden disks. The perfect costume for a rhymer, a singer, a Teller of Tales.

The same costume Mrs. Edith had worn all those years ago when, at the Theater Manager’s behest, she’d taken Infant Bertie away from the Théâtre. Away from Ophelia.

Closing the closet door, Bertie exchanged one persona for another, shucking her sadly tattered and muddied Opening Night dress and underthings. If wishes were washcloths, she would have bathed first, but she still managed to hurriedly splash off the worst of the frosting facial with the contents of a battered ewer. Only then did she reach for the Mistress of Revels’s vestments.

While she’d had the occasion to wear all sorts of costumes over the years, none of the spangled capes or thigh-high pirate boots changed Bertie so instantaneously. The moment the silk slithered over her skin, she was someone else: a person as much at home in royal halls as in the village. Campfire smoke kohl-rimmed her eyelids, while the kisses of a thousand courtiers reddened her cheeks and lips. Bertie found a pair of delicate golden sandals, perhaps more appropriate for the Pantheon than a village performance, yet the moment the long ribbons were tied, they were as much part of the ensemble as the countless bronze bangles she threaded on one arm.

When Bertie was done, someone else’s face stared back at her from the tiny, green-tinged mirror: the water-wavering image of another woman ready for her entrance.

I look like Ophelia, the ever-drowned, she of the broken memory.

No flowers twisted in her hair, no gown of floating chiffon, but the shape of Bertie’s face was the same, as was the tilt to her eyes, the bow of her rouged mouth. It seemed impossible she’d never noticed the similarities before, but makeup and lighting—the sort that illuminated thoughts as well as features—made all the difference indeed.

Turning away, Bertie went to slip the journal into her pocket and realized she was still without one. The alternatives—the waistband of her skirt or tucked into the golden belt—were woefully insecure. A second glance at the belt, and clarity jangled like the disks decorating its hem.

I can pay for the fairies’ damage with some of the gold disks!

Hastily adjusting her laces, Bertie managed to squeeze the journal down the front of her bodice. Then, with a deep breath that was almost a gasp, she quickly opened the door of the caravan.

During her hasty costume change, Waschbär had drawn the crowd off some distance with tales and tricks. Bertie spotted Ariel, his back to her as he supervised the sneak-thief’s turn, but before she could tell him about the money, a swift, dark shape dipped out of the sky. It caught hold of Bertie by the back of her fancy dress, talons scratching down her back as it gripped the fabric. The ground fell away from under her feet, her panicked scream lost to a sudden happy roar of the crowd, delighted by some new sleight of hand. There was only time for a single, fleeting glimpse of the troupe, the caravan, the village, before the Scrimshander tilted his massive wings and the trees stepped between Bertie and the possibility of a rescue.

With the wind rushing around them, the Scrimshander lifted her into the sky and spat with ill-concealed fury, “I never took you for a fool, Ophelia.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
You Should Be as Your Mother Was

A
moment of twisting
panic as Bertie kicked her gold-sandaled feet and tried desperately not to look down. “Take me back at once!”

“I will not,” was the grim response. “Then I will—” Here, a squawk threatened to swallow the words, but he forced them out. “I will return and carry Beatrice to the theater as well.”

About to shout that she’d pull every one of his feathers out if he did that, his words penetrated Bertie’s swirling haze of panic. “I’m not—”

“Oh, you
are,
make no mistake!” The Scrimshander’s furious shriek accompanied another surge in height, and the terrible noise was the ragged edge of Waschbär’s obsidian dagger jammed into Bertie’s ears. “Had I realized you were with her, I would have—”

“You would have what?” Seizing an unparalleled opportunity, Bertie took care to pitch her voice a scant measure higher, to soften the edges of her consonants.
If
it’s Ophelia he wants, Ophelia he gets.
“You would have kidnapped me earlier?”

“It’s a rescue, whether you understand that or not.”

“A girl will wonder about her father.” Not entirely true, but it didn’t take a trained musician to pluck heartstrings, if only to slow him down a bit. “She simply wants to get to know you.”

“One so young knows not what she wants.” A noise of disgust, ill-muffled by another massive downbeat.

“You underestimate her.”

A moment of breathless gliding passed before he said, “I haven’t the luxury of entertaining any notion about her at all.”

Bertie’s stomach clenched. “Of course not. Easy enough to shove her back into the theater, to shove all your responsibilities aside.”

“Seeing the both of you to safety
is
my responsibility.”

“Careful now, you almost sound concerned.” Equal parts Ophelia and Bertie that time.

“Seventeen years since we parted, but some things are impossible to forget. Like the fact that there’s no reasoning with you when you’re in this stubborn mood.” The jewel-toned edges of his anger bled color so that, under the vehemence, there was a pale wistfulness.

She didn’t want to feel sympathy for him, but the same would-that-things-had-been-different pricked at the skin around her eyes. Quickly clasping one hand over the medallion, Bertie wiped angrily at her traitorous tears and running nose. The scrimshaw thrummed in response to her touch, a reverberation that moved through her and opened a space inside her chest.

The rhythm of flight settled into that empty place. Heartbeat and wing beats synchronized.

Pieces of her—including the useless, human fear of falling—tumbled to the sullen earth. Aspects of Ariel she’d never understood came into sharp focus as the air grew thin and infinitely more sweet. The wind kissed her skin until it glowed, and her thoughts grew more disjointed as she took in the quilt of the fields, the last sun-shimmer smothered on the horizon, the sky’s loom weaving gray yarn over fading blue.

She stretched out her arms, and time slipped from her grasp. Instead of minutes, hours, she noted the changing position of the sun, the distant presence of other birds, the subtle shifts in the air currents. Only when the Scrimshander adjusted his grip on her dress, scratching Bertie through the rents in the silk, did she recall her human form. A warm trickle wormed its way down her back where he’d drawn blood.

Then she remembered what it was like to fall. “Maybe we should land somewhere.”

He struggled to maintain their altitude. “It’s been some time since I carried you, but I promise I haven’t forgotten the knack of it.”

Below them, the terrain had changed. If her father was a stranger to her, the landscape was just as foreign and unfriendly: Water-filled marshes like holes poked in a pie crust, with ragged cattails and miserable, stunted trees growing at sporadic intervals.

I know it was full dark, but I would remember if we’d passed such pitiful excuses for trees last night.

“This isn’t the right way.”

“‘As the crow flies’ is faster than the twisted abomination of the road.” But his voice was strained, as though he carried more than her weight as a burden, and there was a sudden, stomach-knotting dip.

“You’re going to drop me!”

“Never.”

But the word was a lie; she could feel it in her bones. Bertie reached up, trying to catch hold of something besides thin reassurances, and the journal wiggled its way free of her bodice, spiraling away like a pirouetting ballerina. As she twisted about, trying to see where it had fallen, they encountered another air pocket and plummeted toward the ground. When Bertie screamed, abject terror stripped away the thin veneer of her mother.

The Scrimshander stiffened, scrabbled to maintain his hold upon her. “You’re—”

“Not Ophelia!” Her fingers closed around a handful of feathers; fractal and stiff-soft, they tore free as he struggled against the revelation and the winds.

He immediately headed for the ground, angling over the brackish green dimple of a pond before an icy downdraft hurtled them at the water, tearing Bertie from his desperate grasp even as it tossed him back into the sky like a child’s toy. She fell, the rush the same as it had been when she jumped from the cliffs: hair whipping about her face, her skirts like the unfurling sails of a ship. The Scrimshander cried out, an anxious bird calling to a hatchling precipitously shoved from the nest before Bertie hit the water with a smack and sank like a stone.

The shock of the impact deprived her of all reason as she drifted down, down, Gertrude’s voice from
Hamlet
ringing like a clarion bell in her head:

“‘Her garments, heavy with their drink, pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.’”

Eyes squeezed shut, Bertie understood why Ophelia never fought the written pull of the water that had dragged her under: Everything inside was sharp bits of broken glass from a shattered spotlight, the dull throb in Bertie’s head the same as the time a trapdoor had slammed shut atop her. She held very still for a moment, entangled in pain that was like the rough, coiled ropes backstage, then realized her options were to swim or to drown like her mother.

Opening her eyes, it was impossible to tell which direction was up, but the slime of waterweeds tangled about her ankles gave Bertie one clue, then a glimmer of the fleeing sun overhead gave her the second. Kicking hard, she surfaced seconds later, gasping for air. A few feeble thrusts put sand underfoot, and she staggered from the pond, thinking only one thing:

Ariel wouldn’t have dropped me.

She stood a moment, dripping water from the Mistress of Revels’s skirts, once a lovely emerald green, now sodden and three shades darker than midnight. Twisting around, Bertie tried to get her bearings, tried to pinpoint where the journal might have fallen and prayed it hadn’t been in the pond. When a shadow flickered over her, she tilted her head back, Raven’s Wing Black dye dripping from her bangs into her eyes.

“You aren’t taking me back!” Her hand swept the ground nearest her and closed around a rock.

But the Scrimshander dipped low, no doubt meaning to catch hold of her again, so she threw it with all her strength. The years spent flinging glitter bombs, water balloons, and stale pastry made her aim true; the jagged edge of the rock struck him between the eyes, and he reeled back with a squawk.

“Leave me alone!” For an encore, Bertie threw another rock, larger than the first, and hit him in the breastbone. The Scrimshander only just managed to evade a third projectile. “If you touch me again, I’ll kill you!”

He must have taken her at her word, for he wheeled about and flew, hard and fast. Bertie could hear a thin, golden noise, like a chain hissing along the ground, dragged in the dirt: a reminder of the link between them.

“Not again.” Wrapping her arms about the nearest excuse for a tree, Bertie braced herself for the painful tug that came only seconds later. She ducked her head and pressed her cheek to the rough bark, trying to imagine she had roots that went deep, roots that would tether her to this place. Another tug, harder than the first, that jangled her bones within her skin.

That’s when she spotted the journal, leather cover half buried in the loam. Only a few feet away, it was still too far to reach unless she let go of her anchor. She’d have to time it just right and have luck on her side. Thankful to find the fountain pen still firmly stashed in her bodice, she pulled it out and took a deep breath.

Deadline indeed.

The third time the Scrimshander pulled at the chain connecting them, Bertie waited for the exact moment the line went slack and dove upon the journal. On her knees in the dirt, she fumbled with the cover, traitorous hands trembling as she scrawled,

A single link in the chain breaks.

Bertie felt the
snap
! when their connection gave way. With his tether to humanity severed, the Scrimshander raced from her, taking with him her hopes of finding Sedna, of reaching Nate. Had she been onstage, a tragic, broken heroine, she might have performed a moving soliloquy, a heart-rending aria or, at the very least, crumpled to the floorboards and wept. But she couldn’t cry on the scrimshaw.

And you’re not a soprano, so get moving. You have to find the others before you can even think about rescuing Nate.

She paused only a moment to check her arms and legs, fingers and toes. Though the shock of the water had been frightening, it had also saved her ending up a brilliantly dressed pancake upon the ground and left only a residual ache. Then, cradling the journal and wincing with every step, Bertie picked a delicate path through the worst of the marsh, stumbling twice, refusing to cry out both times. The terrain was treacherous: uneven and damp in the best of places. Without warning, the ground would drop away into sinkholes filled with noisome and brackish water. The Mistress of Revels’s golden sandals were a mucky green-brown, the hem of her damp skirts similarly filthy by the time Bertie climbed a short, steep bank and found herself on a deserted country lane. Although not the road they’d been traveling on, it was nevertheless a welcome change from the mind-numbing slog.

Which way?

She missed the fairies, who surely would have provided ridiculous commentary on her situation. However annoying they might be, however much she’d once longed for quiet and solitude, she’d trade the gold belt around her waist to hear that cascade of infectious giggling, the perfectly pitched straight line of “Shall we go west?” so one of the others could immediately demand, “Your west or mine?”

“True west, I think.” Bertie peered down the road, trying to ascertain which route might lead back to the village. Surely the others would have noted her absence by now, but they’d have no idea which direction she’d been taken. Bertie didn’t like to think what the irate air elemental might do when, or if, they managed to find each other.

“And this wasn’t even my fault.”

Wasn’t it?
he might as well have whispered in her ear.

Shoving away the unwelcome thought, Bertie trudged down the lane. Though she had a lovely view of the mist-enveloped fields, the road rolling out like a rust-colored ribbon before her, she soon learned it wasn’t at all like an idyllic traveling scene at the Théâtre, where a continuously moving backdrop would indicate the passage of both fields and time, and set pieces would fly on and off the stage on wires and wheels. Even after a hundred steps, the distant rock she had chosen for a marker appeared just as distant. And her feet! Heels blistered within the Mistress of Revels’s ridiculous sandals. The sun disappeared, a spotlight switched off, and a chill wind taunted Bertie with icy fingers along her hemline.

“I shouldn’t like the journal to be ruined.” She gazed up at the ominous gathering clouds. “Though it’s not like I can get wetter than I already am.”

No one shared the road with her, neither coach, nor cart, nor rider on horseback.

“That’s a little odd. The bit about not having met anyone else yet, I mean.”

The solitude grew progressively more disconcerting. A thick layer of fog crept over the fields, and Bertie didn’t need the Theater Manager’s pocket watch to know hours had passed since the Scrimshander had so unceremoniously dumped her in the marsh.

A few more steps. Reach that cursed rock, then you can have a moment’s rest.

Her teeth were chattering by the time she collapsed atop the pert granite square marked
MILE
478. Opening the journal, Bertie thought of summoning the troupe to this spot, but feared the caravan might land on her, finishing her off for good.

“Not the sort of finale I’m looking for, not after the day I’ve had.” Surrounded now by shifting layers of fog, she uncapped her pen and wrote,

All roads lead to Bertie.

and crossed her fingers, wondering how long it would take Ariel and the others to reach her.

“I should have eaten something in the village.” She’d had nothing at all today, and a strange buzzing set up between her ears.

The mist swirling about her shifted, revealing a tiny stone cottage that had not been there three seconds before. A large tree crouched over the house, and a woman bustled out to gather the clothes flapping upon a laundry line.

It was a scene straight out of
How Bertie Came to the Theater
, the place she’d always imagined her Mother lived, before the startling revelation that Ophelia was her mother.

Bertie rubbed a hand over her eyes, but the vision remained. “I like to imagine she was a simple person,” she whispered, rising to her feet and drifting across the road, “with an uncomplicated life. She married her lover and raised a family. She looked beautiful, even when doing her chores.” Leaning against the low rock wall that surrounded the garden, she couldn’t find the words to call out.