Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Not-Triss settled herself on a crate-seat next to Violet. Her pulse was slowing to a normal rate now, and her teeth felt like teeth when she ran her tongue across them.

Violet put an arm around the shoulders of each girl.

‘Now then,’ she said quietly, and waited.

Pen and Not-Triss exchanged a glance, and in fits and starts began to explain.

It was a bit of a scrambled mess, full of meaningful glances while they decided what to say, followed by pell-mell spurts of exclamations, contradictions and repetitions, most of it in the wrong order.

Violet listened without interruption to their account of Pen’s pact with the Architect, the abduction of Triss, the arrival of Not-Triss, the strangeness of the dolls and scissors, the meeting with Mr Grace and Not-Triss’s unnatural hunger. It was only when Not-Triss described the encounter with the bird-thing, and the contents of the mysterious letter she seized from it, that Violet looked sharply across at her.

‘The letter was from Sebastian ?’ Her tone was harsh.

Not-Triss trailed off, afraid that her new ally did not believe her.

After a couple of seconds Violet seemed to realize that she was glaring, and dropped her gaze. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked more quietly.

‘Yes,’ answered Not-Triss timidly. ‘It was his handwriting. And… it had that day’s date.’

Violet stared out towards the doorway, and the crooked square of bright water beyond. She spent a few seconds sucking in her cheeks, as if around a gobstopper.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What did it say?’

Not-Triss recounted the words as accurately as she could.

‘In the snow,’ Violet said at last, almost inaudibly. ‘He’s in the snow.’ She hesitated, and then very slightly shook her head. ‘But he can’t be,’ she added, with soft finality. ‘He’s gone. There was a letter. He died.’

‘But we found out about that!’ exploded Pen. ‘He’s—’ She stopped abruptly, and gasped in a deep lungful of air. She stared at Not-Triss, all the colour draining from her face.

‘Pen!’ called out Not-Triss. ‘Remember, we’re not supposed to talk about what we were told at the—’

A moment later Not-Triss knew precisely what Pen had just experienced. Just as she was about to pronounce the word ‘Underbelly’, she felt a sickening sense of vertigo and imminent peril. It was as if she had one foot on the very edge of a precipice, and the other stepping out over empty and lethal space. Like Pen, she broke off with a flinch and a deep gasp of shock.

They had both promised not to reveal the existence of the Underbelly, or anything they had discovered while they were there. Now, for the first time, she understood the power of that promise. In that moment she had known that if she said another word something terrible would happen to her, something that would make all her trials so far seem trivial in comparison. The feeling of menace had been so intense that she knew she would never muster the willpower to break her word.

‘What is it?’ Violet stared at the two girls in bewilderment.

‘There are things we can’t tell you,’ Not-Triss explained. ‘Just now we tried… and we found we couldn’t.’

‘We made a magic promise, and now it’s stopping us talking!’ Pen joined in, red-faced with frustration.

‘Magic promises,’ muttered Violet. ‘Doppelgängers made of leaves. And letters from… people who couldn’t possibly have written them. If I ever have to explain all this to the police…’ She coughed up a small, dry husk of a laugh. But she was not laughing at them.

‘Violet,’ Not-Triss blurted out impulsively, ‘are you… magical at all?’

‘No.’ Violet gave a short snort and rubbed at her grit-reddened eyes. ‘A spiritualist once told me I had a “soul like clay” because I made fun of her. No, I’m not magical.’

‘Then… why do you make places cold if you stay in them too long?’ asked Not-Triss.

For a long moment Violet looked startled and alarmed. Then she dropped her face into her hands and shook her head.

‘Oh, sweet Peter,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘I only wish I knew .’ She looked up, and in her dark grey eyes Not-Triss saw anguish, incomprehension and a sort of relief. When Violet started talking again, her words came out in a painful rush, almost stumbling past one another, like people escaping a burning building.

‘It never used to happen! Once I could stay in a place as long as I liked without the barometer tumbling. Then, one day, the news came – the news that Sebastian… was gone. There was a letter from his commanding officer, and another from one of the men in his regiment. They didn’t say much. All it told me… All it said about what happened to him was that… he died in the snow.

‘That’s when it started, I think. It was winter then, so I didn’t notice at first. I stayed in my house, and the snow came down a yard deep as if it wanted to bury everything, and I didn’t care. I barely noticed – my head was full of the snow, and when I opened my eyes and looked out through the window there was more snow… It seemed to make sense. It was the bitterest winter in Ellchester anybody could remember.

‘But then the spring came, and the winter didn’t leave. Or at least it didn’t leave me . I stayed in my parents’ house, but after a while I started noticing the way that there was always fresh snowfall outside our home but little or no snow on the rest of the street. Guests shivered when they came in, and put their coats back on. There was always ice on the inside of the windows. I thought there was something wrong with the house at first. But then I started visiting more, getting out… and I realized it was me. Winter was following me.

‘If I stay in one place too long, it starts to get cold. And if I still don’t move on, it starts to snow. Just a few flakes at first, then more, then a blizzard… I always give up and run for it by that point. I just… keep running and running. I don’t want people to notice what’s happening and realize I’m a freak, but that’s only the half of it. I’m afraid that it’s Sebastian’s winter chasing me. I’m afraid that if I let it catch up with me, and I get lost in that blizzard, then I’ll find myself there . In that place, with the wire and the booming of the guns and blood on the snow, with no way of ever getting back.’

She took in a little gasp of air, and Not-Triss might have mistaken it for a sob if Violet was the sort who cried.

‘What are you doing, Pen?’ Violet asked, in a much more normal tone of voice. Pen had her arms as far round Violet’s middle as she could manage.

‘Making you warm,’ answered Pen, her voice muffled by coat.

‘Oh, good,’ murmured Violet wearily. ‘Problem solved.’ She gave Pen’s tangled hair a brusque but affectionate ruffle.

‘Is Sebastian haunting you then?’ Pen looked up at Violet. ‘

Is that why you sold all the things he left you? Was it to make his ghost go away?’

Not-Triss winced. She briefly wished that there was some way of shutting Pen up after she had said something and sweeping away her words before anybody could hear them.

For a moment it seemed that Violet might become angry. Then she let out a long breath and looked tired instead. She gave Pen a little squeeze.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I sold them because I needed the money. They were just things , Pen. They weren’t him. And do you know something? He wouldn’t have minded. Not one little bit.’

After a long period of silence, there came a sense that hugging had solved all it could.

‘We need a plan,’ said Violet. She let out a long breath, and stared at the floor between her feet. For a moment she looked somewhat at a loss, then she sniffed hard and straightened again.