Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘He wanted to know if our family would be going to the countryside any time soon, and I told him about the holiday. Then he said he wanted to make a bargain with me. I had to give him lots of things belonging to Triss – he said the diary pages were the most important bit – and then, when we were on holiday, I had to get Triss to come with me to the Grimmer. He said that if I did that, then he…’ Pen paused, biting her lip. It was hard to tell in the firelight, but Not-Triss thought she might be flushing somewhat. ‘He said he’d take Triss away so she’d never come back and everything would be better,’ she said, adding in a mumble, ‘and neither of us would ever talk about it to anybody.’

‘So you lured the real Triss down to the Grimmer—’

‘Don’t say it like that!’ hissed Pen. ‘And don’t look at me like it’s all my fault! I just wanted everything to stop being horrible, and that’s your fault. Well, real Triss’s fault, but you’re just like her!’

‘Well, if you hate me so much, why did you bother saving me?’ snapped Not-Triss. Her paper-thin self-control was stretched to tearing point, and there was a sea of grief behind it.

Pen glared at Not-Triss. Her eyes were shiny with angry tears.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘This morning, when everybody was driving away without me, I thought you might do something horrible to Mother and Father if I wasn’t there. So I hid in the back – down on the floor under the blanket. Then when the car was stopped outside the cottage for ages I got bored and cold, so I sneaked out and hid in the kitchen. Then everybody found out you were a monster and caught you, and at first I was really glad, because it meant you wouldn’t come home and scratch my face and try to break into my room.’ Her tone held a mixture of malice and fear. ‘But… then they wanted to burn you. And you started crying. And it wasn’t real tears, but it was real crying. You were really scared , even though they kept saying you weren’t.’

‘Then why couldn’t Father see that?’ Not-Triss felt despair and hurt welling up inside her again, and it was all she could do to stop her teeth sharpening. ‘Why couldn’t Mother see it?’

‘Because they’re stupid,’ growled Pen, rubbing at her nose with her sleeve. ‘They can’t tell when real Triss is fake-crying, so of course they can’t tell when Fake Triss is real-crying.’

‘Don’t call me that!’ It was hard to say why the words stung so much.

‘If you don’t like it, that’s too bad,’ retorted Pen with a sudden gleam in her eye, ‘because that’s what you are. Fake Triss. In fact, that’s your name now. You don’t have a name, and I saved your life, so I get to choose what your name is. And it’s Fake Triss.’

‘I’m not—’

‘Shut up, Fake Triss. You’re lucky I’m letting you have a name at all.’

Not-Triss closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She thought of Pen dragging her by the hand from the cottage kitchen. She thought of Pen sprinting by her side through the moonlight.

‘Tell me more about the Architect.’ Not-Triss thought it safest to change the subject. ‘He gave you a way of calling him on the phone, didn’t he?’

Pen gave a short nod.

‘I had to say, “Waste, wither, want,” before I picked up the mouthpiece, and then when I pressed the button for the switchboard, the voice on the line wasn’t a normal operator. There was this whispery woman instead, and I just had to ask her for the Architect, and she put me through.’

At last Not-Triss understood why there had been no record of Pen’s mysterious phone call from the Crescent household. It had not gone through the usual switchboard at all. No wonder the operators knew nothing of it.

‘Did he ever tell you where he lived, or anything else about him?’ continued Not-Triss.

‘Not really, just that he was an architect.’ Pen scowled in concentration. ‘Wait – he said that’s why he was watching us. Because he knew Father. Through their work. But he said he’d decided he liked me better than Father, because I seemed more “honourable”.’

A blizzard of fragments were flurrying through Not-Triss’s mind and trying to form a picture. She remembered the overheard conversation between Piers and Celeste Crescent, regarding the mysterious he that Piers wanted nothing more to do with. She remembered the article in the newspaper concerning Piers’s new building project. Last of all, there was the mystery of the envelopes in the desk drawer, their existence so carefully concealed. Her mind was too tired to make further sense of the fragments, however.

‘We have to find out more about the Architect, Pen.’ Not-Triss saw her not-sister flinch, and after a moment’s hesitation aimed a comforting pat at the smaller girl’s foot. ‘I know you don’t want to, and I don’t really want to either. But we have to. He doesn’t just have Triss. He has Sebastian.’

Not-Triss was woken by the sound of a solitary cock crowing. She lay on the floor staring at the dim, cracked ceiling and listened, remembering where she was. No, she was not in the countryside. The bird she could hear must be in somebody’s backyard coop. It was a bold, brass sound nonetheless. It would not be cowed into silence by the invention of alarm clocks, the subdued buzz of the city or the fact that it was still hours before dawn.

Memories of the previous evening crept back into her head, but did so numbly. They made her feel scraped out and empty. She wondered if soldiers felt this kind of blankness when they looked out at battlefields that had been pounded into mud and stark wasteland. There was no grieving for the lush valley that had been. Its destruction was too complete.

From this dull desolation surfaced a single thought.

I have only two days left.

As the cock crowed again, it brought with it another set of recollections, from her conversation with the bird-thing. What had the creature said?

Find yourself a cockerel, and a dagger or knife… Go down Meddlar’s Lane under the bridge’s end, turn your face to the bricks and start walking…

You want to talk to the Shrike .

The Shrike had made Not-Triss. Perhaps , whispered a stubborn voice in Not-Triss’s head, perhaps he knows a way to stop me falling apart. Perhaps I don’t have to die in two days.

Even if he had no such answer for her, she knew she had to talk to him. He had worked for the Architect and might know about his plans. He might know what had happened to the real Triss, and perhaps even something of Sebastian’s fate. Whatever had befallen them, it sounded as if both were in desperate need of rescue.

I don’t want to die. I’ll fight to the last moment to stop myself falling apart. But if all I have is two days, I’ll make them count. Every last minute of them.

Not-Triss sat up, accidentally nudging Pen, who was curled up next to her.

Pen scowled bitterly and rolled into a tight ball like a sullen hedgehog.

‘Go ’way,’ was her barely comprehensible response. ‘ Hate you.’

Not-Triss gazed down at her not-sister, and in spite of herself found a smile creeping on to her face. Pen was still managing belligerence even while asleep, but the frown made her look vulnerable, young and a bit comical.

‘All right.’ Not-Triss slipped out from the small portion of blanket she had retained and tucked it around Pen. ‘You stay here and sleep.’

Violet’s coat and motoring cap were slung over a chair, a sign that their owner had returned and gone to bed. Not-Triss tiptoed to the window, shivering at the cold, and pulled back the curtain. When she rubbed at the clouded pane with her sleeve, the latter came away with a crumbly smudge of white. The mistiness of the window was not steam, she realized to her surprise, but a thin layer of ice. Beyond the cleared pane the sky was low and grey with a yellowish tinge, the street deserted.