The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(77)
“Not dead,” the Spinner said. “Just stopped. Missing a gear.”
I startled. “How did you—”
She shook her head, impatient. “The quicker it begins, the quicker it ends.”
The clockwork bride in her litter had eyes like the Spinner’s, I realized. If the Spinner created everything, had she made some of us in her own image? She could wear any face, but she couldn’t get rid of those eyes.
I blinked and saw my hand pushing open the door to the Hazel Wood. Then here, now, pushing at the tall stone doors of the castle.
28
The first thing I heard was the music. A hectic, two-bar tangle, played over and over again. We entered a hall so high and vast it felt like a gym, its gilded corners softened by mossy masses that had to be birds’ nests. A U-shaped table in the center of the room was lined with people. People eating, laughing, whispering to each other, stabbing at their meat. In the center of the room was the source of the awful music: a man in dirty green with a head of dark curls, holding a violin. He sawed at it savagely, in a jerky motion that looked painful.
I froze, and the Spinner stuck hard fingertips in my back. “We are the scariest things in this castle.”
So I crept forward like I was moving through water, waiting every moment for the violinist to turn, to stop playing his horrible song. But he didn’t. Nobody at the table took notice of us, the Spinner in her armor and me in my jeans. The wrongness of their movements crawled over my skin, and in a sudden, horrible flash, I realized why.
They were stuck. All of them. They were moving like butterflies stabbed through with a pin, enacting their last shiver of freedom.
The musician’s tormented playing of the same wild notes. The woman in a heavy headdress, lifting a knife to her mouth, then lowering it, then again. The man who threw his head back and laughed, a gusty sound scraping dryly over a throat that must be bloody-raw. Slowly I circled the musician till I could see his eyes. His head was cast down over his instrument, his hair a curtain between us, but they met mine, straining up in their sockets so I could see their dark blue anguish.
I did this. My leaving—it did this. I broke free of the musician’s gaze with a feeling like gauze unsticking. But now I saw them: all over the room, eyes running over me like searchlights. Dozens of moving points of misery and fear and appeal, as they ate, talked, laughed, a murmur that rose beneath the violin’s twisted notes in a madhouse swell.
I felt myself sinking, and the Spinner buoyed me up, her mouth amused.
“Leave them,” she murmured. “They’ve been alright without you for seventeen years—what’s another minute or two?”
Seventeen years. Seventeen years in this rictus. Finally I was grateful time worked differently here. Maybe it felt faster to them, like time passing in a dream.
I shrugged her off. “You could help them,” I hissed. “You could make them … make them sleep, at least.”
“Nobody can fix a broken machine if they don’t have the parts,” she said, and led me into a passageway whose floor prickled with rushes. Here and there they rustled with tiny things moving in circumscribed paths.
The walls of the passage were hung with tapestries that tugged at my mind like stories left unread: A girl standing on a dock at the edge of a subterranean lake, an empty boat waiting in the water. A woman with a cut-glass face dancing with a man whose eyes were hidden. A little girl I recognized, standing at the prow of a ship.
Against a shadowy corner a man stood bracing himself, forever caught in the act of undoing his belt. In a hell-hot kitchen, a trio of women with burst-red faces made a chorus of ugly music: clank of spoon, thump of dough, eerie scrape of knife over whetstone.
At the center of a room filled with instruments, a child threaded her fingers around the strings of a harp, under the eye of a woman sipping, endlessly, from a teacup. A maid leaned against the wall in another dark hallway, her face wet with ancient tears.
In the castle’s center was a perfectly round courtyard, where snow fell on small figures moving in shudder step: an arm rearing back with a snowball, a slip and a thump on hidden ice. The same shrill cry of hilarity as a snowball hit its mark, which sounded in repetition like the shriek of a dying animal.
I knew I was being corralled toward something, not just by the Spinner but by the bob of the compass hidden in my chest, tugging me toward the heart of the castle, to the foot of a winding staircase of stone.
“Almost there,” the Spinner breathed.
The only way out is through. I climbed. We rose and rose, past landings and tapestries and people stuck in a long record skip: A little boy crying out as a cat bit his finger, the cat rearing in a painful strike. A man and a woman wrapped in a rolling embrace on a lonely landing.
The stairs narrowed into a tight seashell whorl as we climbed into a room that appeared in pieces as we rose. A stripe of cold fireplace, a woman’s goose-pimpled legs where her skirts rode up. A wall unsoftened by tapestries, the bed where a second woman lay with her hair gathered around her like a cloak.
The room was dim. It smelled like a blown-out match and the close breath of the women—one whey-faced on the bed, her belly an oceanic swell and her hands squeezed into angry balls. Her breath was caught in a staccato beat; she’d been arrested at the crest of a wave of labor pain. A midwife with a blunt face hung over her, making a noise that was meant to be soothing.