Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Mister… Mr Shrike?’ asked Not-Triss. She was not sure how manners worked in this strange place.

‘Just Shrike.’ The man grinned. For the tiniest flash of a second, Not-Triss thought she saw something that was not a man’s face. A bird’s beak snapping shut. A curved beak – clever, wise, but possibly cruel. Then the impression was gone, and the bowler-hatted man was smiling at her again.

He waved them to two worn-looking stools with blue velvet cushions. As they sat, he appraised them with raised eyebrows.

‘Well. This is unexpected.’ The Shrike sounded interested and genuinely delighted. ‘Yes, I can promise you that I did not expect to see you here. And with little sister in tow! Now, that’s a team I would never have predicted.’ He leaned towards Not-Triss with a confidential wrinkle in his brow. ‘You do know what young Penny did, don’t you? To poor, trusting Theresa?’

‘Yes,’ Not-Triss answered quickly, noticing the way Pen was flushing.

The Shrike nodded, seeming if anything even more pleased, and glanced across at Pen. ‘And you – you’re happy skipping down lanes with this one, are you? She doesn’t frighten you?’

‘I’m not scared of anything,’ Pen declared icily.

‘Marvellous.’ The Shrike looked pointedly at the claw-marks on Pen’s cheek and gave a snicker of pure glee, touched with something like admiration. ‘Why not? What’s a little maiming and treachery between friends? Oh, don’t look so sour. I’m impressed. I don’t remember the last time I was so impressed.’

As he spoke he flashed occasional glances at Pen, but most of the time his gaze was fixed on Not-Triss. There was curiosity in his bright eyes, and approval, but also a hint of pride.

‘Wonderful,’ he said under his breath. ‘You’re wonderful, if I say so myself.’

‘You’re the one that made me, aren’t you?’ asked Not-Triss. It came out sounding like an accusation. The idea also made her feel vulnerable, as if she was a book and somebody had seen all her secret pages.

‘Yes.’ The Shrike twinkled at her, pulling what looked like a silver snuff box out of his top pocket. ‘And when I did, I surpassed myself, I must say. I just never realized how far I had surpassed myself until now.’ He opened the box, and to Not-Triss’s surprise she saw that it did not contain snuff at all. Instead there was a small pat of butter on a wad of muslin. The Shrike licked at it with a slim black tongue, and studied her with narrowed, speculative eyes. ‘I would love – dearly love – to know how you came to find us here. Not to mention how you knew to stick a dirk in the ground, and bring that bird with you.’

Not-Triss had no intention of revealing the way she had gained her information, however. Tricksy as the bird-thing had been, she did not particularly wish it ill.

‘Perhaps my leaves and twigs knew,’ she suggested. ‘You made me in this workshop, didn’t you? Perhaps they remembered.’

‘Perhaps.’ The Shrike did not look particularly convinced, but he inclined his head, conceding the possibility. ‘But… the fact is, by coming here you have put us all in a bit of a pickle. A pretty little dilemma. I might go so far as to call it “a spot”.

‘Here’s the hub of it. This place is secret, and for good reason. The safety of everybody here depends on it. So you really shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t know how to get here. You definitely shouldn’t know that we’re here. And now that you do know, we can’t let you leave. The problem being, of course, that thanks to your cockerel there, we can’t actually stop you leaving.’

‘If we did tell everybody, and the police came and arrested you, it would serve you all right!’ said Pen, with venom.

The Shrike ignored her outburst and paused to lick at his butter again. It seemed that he was waiting for something, and Not-Triss did not know what.

‘So… what are you going to do?’ she asked at last.

He gave a shrug. ‘That, my dear, depends on you. You must have come here for a reason. What is it you want with me?’

‘I have questions,’ Not-Triss replied. ‘Questions about the Architect, about me, and about… other me.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’ The Shrike twinkled thoughtfully, and his black tongue scraped another smear of butter. ‘Dangerous questions, with dangerous answers.’ He drew breath in through his teeth, in a way Not-Triss recognized. It was the mock-doubt of the market stall, the noise somebody made before they started to haggle.

‘You want to make a bargain, don’t you?’ she said.

‘It’s that, or sit here staring at each other until the final trump,’ the Shrike responded placidly. ‘You want questions answered. I want to protect my people here. So we bargain. You hold your tongue, and I loosen mine. Everybody is happy.’

‘Triss, I don’t trust him!’ Pen declared. ‘He was working with the Architect! He’ll lie to us and betray us. We should just set the cockerel on him and run away!’

The Shrike gave Pen a hard, flat flash of a smile. ‘You remind me of a little girl I knew years ago. One day, all of a sudden, her head fell off. It was very sad.’

‘But we don’t know if we can trust you!’ Not-Triss cut in quickly, before hostilities could escalate.

‘That we can mend,’ answered the Shrike. ‘How shall I explain this? There is… a special promise that can be made. If somebody breaks such a promise, then a terrible curse descends upon them. I am willing to promise to answer all your questions truthfully, if the pair of you will promise never to reveal to another living soul anything you have learned in the Underbelly.’

The bargain sounded appealing, but after her experience with the bird-thing Not-Triss took a moment to think about it. Pen, on the other hand, needed no such moment.

‘That’s not fair!’ she announced. ‘That’s two promises for one! If Triss and me are both promising, then you should promise two things!’

‘She’s right.’ Not-Triss nibbled at her lower lip. ‘You’re asking us not to warn people in Ellchester that there’s a camp of… of magical, dangerous things living right over their heads! You have to promise that none of the people living here will cause trouble in Ellchester. No stealing children, or hurting people, or laying traps—’

‘I can’t promise that.’ The Shrike’s smile was gone, and he looked quite serious.

‘Then you admit it – that’s exactly what they’re going to do!’ Not-Triss’s spirits plummeted as she imagined the hissing, half-seen Underbelly mob descending upon the streets of Ellchester.

‘Some of them, yes.’ There was something disarming about the Shrike’s bluntness. ‘And usually – not always, but usually – it’s because a human has wronged them, intruded upon them… or invited them.’ He cocked an eyebrow and glanced pointedly at Pen. ‘Do you think that one is the first to make a deal with one of my people?’

Pen reddened furiously under his gaze, but the Shrike continued with more earnestness.

‘And what promises could you make for the rest of your kind, human girl? Could you promise that nobody in Ellchester would lie, steal, kidnap, harm or kill? No. Of course not. Because Ellchester is a town. Well, so is this. A hotchpotch of the helpful, the harmless, the mischievous and the malicious.

‘Believe me, we did not choose to be mingled so, or even to live so close to your kind. This town is a refugee camp. We are all here, not because we wish to be, but because we have nowhere else to go . The places that were ours… we can longer survive there.’

‘Why not?’ asked Pen.

‘That’s a long story.’ The Shrike gave a wry smile, and Not-Triss thought she understood his meaning. One I will tell you if we make our bargain.