Winterspell (4 page)

Clara stared at the mess of information in her hands. She could not yet make sense of it, and she shook with fury and fear, but three
things she did know—that her mother's murder, and the other murders as well, could not have been the work of the street gangs; that her mother's body had been the only one marked in that strange, savage way, and this was somehow significant; and that, yes, she had seen those symbols before.

In Godfather's shop.

G
odfather Drosselmeyer was a man of clockwork: he used it in his creations, and he hated spontaneity. He would be distinctly bothered that Clara would dare to show up at his shop without advance notice. And the excuse she had given Mrs. Hancock about being out this afternoon was thin. If Clara was too long in getting home, she would have some explaining to do.

She did not care one bit.

She burst into Trifles & Trinkets at the corner of West Twenty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue ready to erupt with temper. Lucky for her—and unlucky for Godfather—this was the one place she did not have to stifle it.

“Godfather?” She locked the shop's door behind her and pulled the drapes down against the late afternoon light. “Are you decent?”

A metallic clatter, a spat curse, and Godfather emerged from the back room, mouth downturned irritably. Today he wore his most voluminous greatcoat, the one with unfashionable ruffles along the collar and falling down the back; under that, a dark frock coat, a fine red silk vest, and a tattered lavender cravat; faded striped trousers and beautiful square-toed boots that looked fit for a Concordia gentleman; and his “dress” eye patch, the one sewn of black silk.

The familiar sight of his mismatched eccentricity would normally
warm Clara; obviously he had guessed she might visit today and had dressed for the occasion—never mind that, after a day of work, oil and grease spotted his once-fine garments and the end of his nose. But Clara felt no such warmth today. Had he known about the markings on her mother's body? And if he had, why hadn't he told her?

Since her mother's death, Godfather was the only one with whom she could speak honestly and without fear. From childhood he had always told her everything—even made-up things, which nevertheless entranced her. He'd told her about magic, and how it could sometimes hurt to use it, how you could soothe animals with it and use it to hide yourself, and even, though it was in poor taste, craft curses with it. Magic, he had warned her, should not be used to hurt. And she had listened to every word, rapt.

All of that fanciful talk, and nothing of real importance. Oh, how could she have tolerated him filling her head with such nonsense for so many years?

“Clara!” He smiled his crooked, unsettling smile—as though he knew secrets he not only would never tell you but would also use to play tricks on you, should you give him reason. That you could never be certain of what he would do next or what he was thinking was one of the things Clara loved about him—that and the fact that despite his unpredictable nature, she could always be sure of his love for her.

Or she had been, until today.

“You know, dear heart, that I prefer you to make appointments before coming to see me,” he said, shaking out soot from his clothes as he approached her. “I was in the middle of a most precarious project.”

She waited until he was close enough to touch—and then, giving in to the fury swelling within her, she turned on him, shoving him against the wall.

He nearly fell. His dragon-headed cane went flying, clattering against the stone floor as he stumbled to regain his footing. Normally, even with her extensive training, Clara would not have been able to
knock her tall, lean Godfather off his feet, but she had surprised him, and her rage and confusion gave her unnatural strength.

The shelves behind him rattled; the figurine of a masked wolf dancing on its hind legs crashed to the ground and shattered; a clockwork soldier fell and cracked open, spilling his gears and shooting tiny pellets from his gun. Overhead, lanterns quivered like roosting bats. Godfather's birds—crows, pigeons, a tiny hawk; animals had always had an affinity for him—squawked and flapped on their perches near the thrumming back room, into which Clara had never been allowed. The familiar taste of spice, sweat, and tools flooded her mouth.

“Clara, what in God's name—?”

“I snuck into Patricia Plum's office today.”

Godfather paused, blinking. “You mean you snuck into Rivington Hall?”

“That is the location of her office, yes.”

“I have warned you—”

“Yes, you have warned me not to go there without you, even though the whole point of your teaching me how to do things like sneak into Rivington Hall is, I assume, so I can actually do things like sneak into Rivington Hall and not, in fact, to fill my head with useless covert skills.” Her heart pounded in her ears. This wasn't the exhilaration of a nice, healthy evening of sparring; this was a new exhilaration, a furious one. “I was looking for answers, you see, because no one else would give me any.”

Godfather interrupted her quietly. “The ribbon-cutting ceremony. It was today, wasn't it? That's why you did this.”

She glared at him, irrationally cross that he should know her so well. “I snuck into her office and found something of great interest.”

With that, Clara reached into her coat pocket, withdrew the paper onto which she had copied the markings on her mother's corpse, and thrust it into Godfather's face.

She watched his expression as he took in the sketched symbols—the
symbols, Clara had realized in Plum's office, that covered the hard metal body of Godfather's statue by the hundreds. Godfather's skin, pale from too many days hunched indoors over his toys, grew even paler.

“Ah.” Clara felt a terrible, grim satisfaction. “You recognize them, do you?”

His voice was steady, even cool, but he would not look at her. “Of course I do.”

“As do I.” She nodded toward the statue. Its markings repulsed her with their new, sinister meaning, yet the sight of the statue itself still heated her blood. It had always fascinated her, even at a young age; she had made a strange, secret game of talking to it and imagining how it would answer her. But in the months following that night, when she had learned against the planes of its body how to melt into the shadows, her fascination had evolved into something more, something she couldn't describe. Something, she often thought, alone in her bedroom, like
need
. She'd begun sending Godfather into the back room on pointless errands, to fetch her something or other for a project she was fiddling with, so that she could spend a private moment with the fearsome-looking thing. She would sneak over to it and press close, fancying it, in her more foolish moments, a stoic suitor who, with those hard arms as thick as her waist, would encircle her, bend her back, and whisper secrets into her hair.

The truly great thing was that no matter how shocking her fancies grew, the statue never did a thing. He stood there, unmoving, and he did not lick his lips or pin her with hot, uneasy stares.

But now, everything had changed. Now, Clara shoved such thoughts away, stalked over to the statue, and held up her sketches against it. Clusters of harsh lines, like the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt gone utterly savage, echoed one another—some on the paper, some on the statue.

“Tell me what it means.” Clara whipped her head around to glare at Godfather, who looked suddenly lost, ancient and small. “This was
carved on Mother's throat, cut into her skin. And here it is on one of
your
possessions, as plain as daylight, and you never told me. They kept the photographs from me, but you . . . you know everything, Godfather. You must have known.” She paused, feeling childish and tired. She could not meet his eye. “Did you? Did you know these were left on her body?”

Godfather watched her quietly for a moment. “I did.”

A cruel, cruel punch to the gut. “
How
did you know?”

“I cannot tell you all of my secrets, Clara.” That look crossed his face, that secret, sly look that sometimes overtook him at his most genius moments, and his most rageful. It never failed to frighten her. She took a step back, choosing her words carefully. She always felt far from him at these moments, never more aware of his . . . otherness. Godfather was not like normal people.

“Why didn't you tell me about them?”

His face closed, and he turned away. “Your mother wanted me to keep you and your sister safe from harm, and that is what I have chosen to do—obey her wishes.”

“How does divulging one measly bit of information put me in harm's way?”

“Oh.” He chuckled to himself. He retrieved his cane and studied the dragon's head. “Oh, it is anything but measly.”

Now was the time to catch him. Now, when he was distracted.

Clara approached him. “Tell me, Godfather. What do the symbols mean? Why were they on Mother's body and not on the others'?” She put her hands on his, pressed her cheek to his arm. He loved her; he would not be able to refuse her. “Mother would want me to know.”

He stepped away, his sharp face in profile, his eye gleaming in the lamplight. “You know very little of what your mother would want, my Clara.”

An even crueler punch. She backed away, brittle and confused. “How dare you! I knew my mother well.”

“I didn't mean that.” Godfather came back to himself, as if the veneer of madness had been ripped away. “Of course you knew her. I only meant that there are things young girls oughtn't to know.”

“That's rich, coming from you, who teaches me to fight and fashions me trousers.”

“All right, then. There are things
as few people as possible
ought to know. Dangerous things that grow more dangerous as knowledge of them spreads. Will that explanation suffice?”

Such cryptic words. Even as Clara grew impatient with them, they made her think of Godfather's strange stories, stories he had often told her and Felicity when they were small, and then told Clara alone, for Felicity had grown frightened of “wicked old Godfather” and stopped accompanying Clara and her mother on their outings to the shop. And then, as John Stole had sunk further into Concordia, and Hope Stole had had to fight harder to keep him afloat, Clara had gone, with her mother's reluctant permission, to visit Godfather by herself.

And on those days—oh, on those days—his stories had grown in magnitude and frequency. He would wrap her in his coat as he had when she was little, or sit with her by the hearth with mugs of spiced coffee, and tell her one of his peculiar, dark stories in hushed tones. Afterward, at home, she would drift into dreamlands of blind dragons and singing palaces, and hooded men living in mountain clouds with the birds.

Clara frowned at him. “But she was my mother, not yours. I deserve to know why her corpse was desecrated in this way, even if it
is
dangerous to know.”

Godfather was still for a moment, regarding her, and then he dropped into his rickety rocking chair, resigned.

Clara gave a halfhearted smile. He was cracking. She knelt before him. “Tell me what the symbols mean, Godfather. Why were they . . . They were
carved
 . . .”

She paused, grief flooding her.

He took pity on her. “The statue was given to me, as I've always told you. You remember?”

It was all he would ever say when asked about it. “It was a gift,” he would say, scowling, and he would stab whatever lay nearest him with whatever sharp tool he held at the time, promptly ending the conversation.

“Yes, I remember,” she said, trying to be patient. Where Godfather was concerned, kernels of great, frightening truth were often buried in ramblings and dark fancies—if one had the persistence to listen through the nonsense and find them. “But you never told me who gave it to you.”

His mouth twisted. “It was given to me by a mad queen. Or at least an angry one.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was a punishment, a taunt. You see, we thought we had escaped, but then at the last moment—” He clapped his hands together, startling one of his sparrows off its perch. “And it's bound with a strange magic, a thick and twisty one. You don't know how diligently I have worked to find an answer, to understand what they mean, and how it has smarted—how it has
eaten
at me, Clara—but I think I've finally done it.”

He rose to his feet and approached the statue. With one long finger he traced a symbol on the statue's chest, and then another on its shoulder. “I used to wonder, do the symbols tell a story? This particular piece of the queen's magic was unlike anything I had ever seen.” He paused, smiling absently. “
Then.
But now—now I'm close.”

Clara was barely keeping her temper. “Magic. You're telling me that those symbols are some sort of magic.”

“Well,
they
aren't magic, no, but rather I've come to understand them as a sort of
manifestation
of magic. A cruel, vengeful one. I'm not sure the symbols themselves mean anything at all, actually. I think they are merely the remnants of what is left behind when terrible magic is
performed.” He gazed at the statue's face as though looking at something far away. “Terrible magic,” he whispered. “Terrible. And I regret nothing I have done.”

Clara went to him, slowly. Terrible magic, mad queens, vengeance. They were familiar words, ones Clara had heard in Godfather's stories since she was a small girl.

Hope Stole had brought Godfather—Drosselmeyer, he claimed was his name—in from the streets when Clara was still a baby. Hope had seen him performing on the road, a common street magician—but then, so much more than that. She had always said she sensed a talent in him, a diamond talent, and that she could not bear to leave him out there on the freezing streets without proper tools or work space. He would be part of the family, Clara's mother had said, as a sort of joke, but then she herself had started calling him Godfather Drosselmeyer, and the whole idea had stuck. To the Stole girls he was always Godfather; and to Clara he was all mystery and strangeness with his eye patch and his muttering, but perhaps she would not have grown to love him so much had he been more ordinary.