Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Oh.’ A memory seeped belatedly into Trista’s mind. ‘Oh, that frog.’ She met Violet’s questioning gaze. ‘It… It really wasn’t Pen’s fault. It was about two years ago. The cat caught a frog, and left it on our doorstep. So Pen gave it a funeral, with rose petals, and a barley-sugar tin as a coffin, and buried it in the garden. Then, um, much later she dug it up again—’

‘I just wanted to see if it was a skeleton!’ protested Pen. ‘But it wasn’t. It was just really… dead and dry and flat. And… And it wasn’t in the same place in the box – it must have moved – it must have still been alive when I buried it…’

It was all flooding back to Trista now, the memory of the frog drama. She felt a wave of horrified fascination and sympathy for the poor frog that had suffocated alone in darkness, but just as strong was the tide of exasperation and pity for guilty, miserable Pen. The feelings were not new, nor were they entirely her own.

Then this surge of emotion changed course as she understood what Triss had meant.

‘He’s going to bury her alive,’ she said. ‘The Architect’s going to bury Triss alive.’

A few seconds passed before Violet broke the stunned silence.

‘That’s… medieval . We have to stop him.’

‘We probably don’t have long.’ Trista tried to remember the Architect’s exact words. ‘He said I might “outlive my namesake” – and I only have a day or so left.’

‘But if they bury her in the churchyard, won’t everybody hear her banging to be let out of the coffin?’ asked Pen.

But Trista did not think that the Architect would be burying Triss in a coffin or in the churchyard. On the telephone he had hinted that he would arrange Triss’s fate through things that he could do better than Piers Crescent. She knew where his talents lay, had seen his space-twisting masterpieces of brick-and-mortar magic. He was quite capable of building a fatal prison for Triss that Piers would never find in a million years, let alone one day. With the Architect’s strange gifts, he could hide a dozen such prisons within a space no thicker than a coin. If he was building such a prison for her, it could be anywhere in Ellchester.

Trista opened her mouth to say so, and once again choked on the ‘magic promise’.

‘Once he buries her, we’ll never find her,’ she said instead. ‘But… he said something about taking Triss for “midnight rides”. Maybe if we see them on the move, we can follow them – even rescue her.’

There was a doubtful pause. It sounded a forlorn hope even to Trista. However, they were short on more robust hopes, so after a moment Violet nodded slowly.

‘There won’t be many cars on the roads at midnight. If we can get to high enough ground, we might be able to spot the Daimler’s headlights, or hear its engine. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try. And thanks to your father, there’s some very high ground. Come midnight we’ll be on the Victory Bridge.’

Needless to say, Pen was sullenly insistent that she was coming on the midnight mission. Pen was not tired. Pen was not going to bed. Pen was… asleep. So impenetrably asleep, in fact, that she was tucked into one of the attic beds without waking, to the relief of Trista and Violet.

Even when she was back in the sidecar again, Trista kept seeing in her mind’s eye Pen’s small, curled form under the thin blanket. There was a tempest in her stomach made up of guilt, anguish, conflict, shame and dread. She hoped that there was no hunger in the mix as well.

The night streets were still warm, and Trista could not stop herself twisting her head to peer at the lit windows of public houses, from which poured piano music and occasional gaggles of figures. Other worlds that she had never seen, by virtue of her age and the ‘niceness’ of her family.

When the motorcycle rose up above the city on the vast, curved back of the Victory Bridge, the winds grew fiercer and more irregular. Remembering the Underbelly beneath them made Trista feel giddy, and she wondered whether this was really a wise vantage point.

At the crest, Violet let the engine idle, then stop. There was nobody else on the bridge, nobody to observe as Trista and Violet dismounted, walked to the barrier and peered down at the nocturnal city.

It was not like looking at a map. The hills left Ellchester looking crumpled, lights nestling in dark folds like glow-worms in the crags of a tree stump. The river was ink, jewelled by the tiny hurricane lamps of occasional boats. A few squares and streets flared with electric light, the whiteness like an ache. Lesser streets were murky necklaces of dim gas lamps. On one side the dark outline of the new rail station cut a triangle out of the sky.

The wind blew Trista’s hair around her face, and she caught at it to push it back. The stray tress turned to dry leaves in her hand. So little time left…

…so was that why she had not told anybody about the Architect’s last words to her? Was she keeping her options open after all? Had she always been keeping Pen around for that reason, like a packed lunch?

What was she?

‘Violet.’ It came out as a husky whimper.

‘We’ve got a minute or two, I think.’ Violet had her goggles raised to her forehead and was scanning the scene. ‘Drat! I thought we’d be able to see more.’

‘Violet!’ Trista’s exclamation was a muffled yelp, and when Violet turned to look at her in surprise, the rest came out in a tearful, choked gabble. ‘TheArchitecttoldmetoeatPen!’

‘Do you want to try that again, but with words?’ Violet suggested.

‘The Architect – he said I could live longer than seven days. But… he told me I had to eat Pen.’

Violet stared at her for a second, then gave a hearty snort of mirth.

‘He really doesn’t know you very well, does he?’

‘But… B-but I could eat Pen,’ stammered Trista. ‘I know that now. I can feel it.’

‘You’re not going to though, are you?’ answered Violet without hesitation.

‘How do you know?’ demanded Trista. In spite of herself, she found her horror receding a little in the face of Violet’s tone of calm certainty. ‘ I don’t know. How can you know? I… I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything .’

‘Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you.’ Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. ‘I know, you woke up one day and found out that you couldn’t be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be. You just weren’t her any more, and there was nothing you could do about it. So your family decided you were a monster and turned on you.’ Violet sighed, staring out into the darkness. ‘Believe me, I do understand that. And let me tell you – from one monster to another – that just because somebody tells you you’re a monster, it doesn’t mean you are.

‘Just now you told me what you did because you want me to stop you from eating Pen. If you were a real monster, you wouldn’t have done that, would you?’

Trista’s eyes stung, and she wiped strands of cobweb away with her sleeve.

‘Idiot,’ added Violet, for good measure.

‘Violet,’ Trista began again when she thought she could keep her voice steady, ‘can I ask you something?’

‘Ye-e-es,’ came the answer, ‘but not right now. There’s something strange happening down there – a sort of flickering. There! Can you see it?’

Trista became aware that from the city below her she could make out the sounds of church clocks chiming midnight, each voice lonely and cold.

She hurriedly cleared the remaining gossamer from her eyes and stared down into the city, following Violet’s pointing finger. Down in the poorly lit docklands by the riverside, she thought she made out a moving glint, or perhaps a host of tiny glints, fizzing and zigzagging across a square like champagne bubbles.