The Crooked Castle Read online

  ALSO BY SARAH JEAN HORWITZ

  Carmer and Grit, Book One: The Wingsnatchers

  SARAH JEAN HORWITZ

  The Crooked Castle

  ALGONQUIN YOUNG READERS 2018

  For Brooke, obviously. This one doesn’t have any cats at all.

  Contents

  The Jasconius

  1. Where There's a Will, There's a Wisp

  2. Bell the Balloonist

  3. Don't You Want to Know?

  4. The Roving Wonder Show

  5. The World's Smallest Cowboy

  6. A Nautilus, Actually

  7. Icarus

  8. The Hand in the Window

  9. Two Heads are Better than One

  10. Witness Protection

  11. Blossoms in a Blizzard

  12. One Boy, Defrosted

  13. Devil Fish

  14. A Traitor in our Midst

  15. Under the Sea

  16. The Throne of Bones

  17. Don't Drown the Messenger

  18. The Crooked Castle

  19. An Impossible Thing

  20. Reaching Toward the Sun

  21. Too Many Tinkertons

  22. Nothing to See Here

  23. Seas Between Us

  24. Do Not Leave Children Unattended

  25. Long Live the Queen

  To the Highest Heights

  Acknowledgments

  THE JASCONIUS

  The day the Jasconius crashed, the cabin boy was late for his shift. He was never late.

  He was never late because he loved his job. He loved his ship and every moment he spent on it, soaring over the ocean from one continent to the other. The Jasconius was one of only three transatlantic airships in the world, making the journey from London to Driftside City, Virginia, every few weeks like clockwork. How many young men could say they flew across the ocean not once in their life, not even twice, but a dozen times a year? How many could say they lived in an impossible thing, a machine great and powerful enough to defy gravity itself, with nothing but open skies ahead and the wind at their backs?

  The cabin boy knew he was lucky. But his luck was about to turn.

  That day, he was late because he loved the ship. He’d been coming off a shift with strict orders to report straight to the crew quarters and get some sleep, young man. But he knew the ship would be docking in the early morning, and he didn’t want to miss the first sight of land for anything in the world. He wanted to be the first one to see it, to feel that little jolt that came with every landing after a few days over open water—the miraculous reminder that they’d made it, that there was a world beyond the endless blue below. So he nodded to his superior officer, quickly changed into his civilian clothes, and tucked himself into his favorite secluded nook on the observation deck to watch the sunrise. It was a tight fit these days—he was still getting taller every year—but he managed.

  He hadn’t meant to fall asleep.

  When he woke up, they were already preparing to land. He’d missed his first glimpse of his favorite city in the world. And something felt wrong.

  But there were no shouts of alarm, no explosions, no panicked passengers clinging to the railings as the ship reeled. In fact, all was quiet.

  The cabin boy stretched and crept out of his nook, surprising a few early-bird passengers nibbling at their breakfasts on the observation deck. He mumbled his apologies and distractedly brushed past them, determined to both find the source of his unease and sneak back to his quarters without being seen. He’d overslept in his hiding spot, and he’d be in for a dressing-down if he showed up for duty late and out of uniform.

  He took a shortcut along the keel catwalk, waving to a few other crew members as he hurried past. But a moment later he was alone, with only the hum of the engines to keep him company. The corridor was deserted, and it should not have been so. Not when they were preparing to land.

  “Hello?” called the cabin boy. He shivered. The air was chilly, but the steam pumping through the pipes in the ship’s envelope should have been keeping them all warm. He slowed down, though he couldn’t say why, and made his way toward the hatch that led to the engine car. The crew would be hard at work coordinating the landing.

  The cabin boy slipped and fell, too quickly to even reach out and catch himself. He lay there on the cold metal floor of the catwalk, a wetness seeping into his back. He sat up, groaning at the bruises already blossoming on his elbows, and rubbed the back of his head. He put a hand to the ground, and his fingers couldn’t quite believe what they were feeling.

  He’d slipped on a patch of ice.

  This was impossible, of course. He looked around for any source of water—a leaky pipe, a spilled bucket abandoned by someone who had been cleaning, but there was nothing. He slowly got up. A trail of the stuff led all the way to the hatch.

  The cabin boy knew he should turn around and get help straightaway, because something was clearly not right. But his feet seemed to move forward of their own accord, carefully dodging the slippery patches. His breath fogged in the air.

  When the young woman darted in front of him, he nearly fell again.

  “Miss, excuse me!” he said, trying to remember his professional courtesies. “Passengers aren’t allowed back here!”

  But then she was gone, only the ghost of a laugh in her wake, and he couldn’t be sure there’d been anyone standing there at all. He shook his head, like he was trying to clear cobwebs out of his brain, when suddenly his face was trapped in the grip of cold, pale hands.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said the young woman. She looked like a girl, really—except for her eyes. There was something older in their gray depths. Something darker. “I’m not a passenger.”

  The boy staggered back, but her icy hands had already clawed up into his hair, fingers snagging in his short, tight curls.

  “You should probably run,” she said, staring straight into his eyes. “Run, little boy, and don’t look back.”

  The cabin boy ran. He didn’t remember much after that.

  1.

  WHERE THERE’S A WILL, THERE’S A WISP

  Felix Cassius Tiberius Carmer III spent his days learning about all the things that wanted to kill him.

  There were not as many of these things as there used to be, for which he was thankful, but there were still enough to be getting on with. He learned about redcaps, who kept their namesake hats soaked with the blood of their victims. He learned about sirens, who lured sailors to their doom among jagged rocks with nothing but a song. He learned about kelpies and banshees and ghouls: where to find them (and how to escape when you did), what they looked like (or how they disguised themselves), even what they ate for breakfast (which was usually never anything good). These creatures all had one thing in common, besides their murderous impulses: they were part of the Unseelie fae. And that made them part of Carmer’s world, whether he liked it or not.

  When one’s new best friend was a faerie princess—and a Seelie one at that—it was important to stay on top of one’s magical education.

  It was for the sake of Carmer’s magical education, or so Grit claimed, that he was now ankle deep in stagnant, freezing water in near-total darkness, trying to distinguish the difference between half a dozen floating balls of light.

  “I think a leech just bit me,” Carmer complained. He shook his leg, sending ripples sloshing through the pond. He could have sworn one of the glowing orbs tittered in amusement.

  “Pay attention to the lights,” Grit scolded from somewhere up ahead. He could tell her golden faerie light apart from the others’ easily, though he couldn’t say why. It was as unique to her as a fingerprint was to humans, though it should have been indistinguishable from the others from this far away.

/>   “I thought I wasn’t supposed to!” Carmer protested. “Or else they’ll . . . ‘enthrall’ me, or whatever it is you called it.”

  “You’ve got to look at them sideways, like I told you,” explained Grit. “Catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye. That’s all you need. Then focus.” Her light bobbed up and down.

  Carmer tried to do as he was told, but like so many things in the faerie world, “looking sideways” was hardly an exact science—a fact that frustrated him to no end. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, shivering in the December air. He opened them again, slowly this time, and looked at the reflections in the water below instead of directly out across the pond. Trying to keep his mind blank, he peered through dark lashes and the bits of hair that fell in front of his eyes. And he saw.

  He saw that most of the balls of light had small figures at their centers—faeries, he knew. Only one or two were truly nothing more than swirling orbs of glowing gas and malicious intent—will-o’-the-wisps and jack-o’-lanterns who (in a less controlled scenario) wanted nothing more than to lure him into the depths of the dark water. Carmer smiled to himself; maybe he really was getting better at this sort of thing. He flicked his gaze upward, more confident now that he’d chosen the right ones, and stared into the center of one of the lights. Was there really nothing inside it at all?

  He didn’t think so. He took a few steps closer, just to make sure. His knees bumped against the thin sheets of ice floating on the pond’s surface, but his legs were already so numb from the cold, he barely felt it. The orb glowed brighter, illuminating more of the pond. Carmer could even see a house on the other side of it. Was that the glow of a fire he spotted through the windows? A fire sounded lovely on a night like this. One more step, just for a closer look . . .

  “CARMER.”

  A streak of gold sparks shot across his field of vision, disrupting his view of both the orbs and the house. Carmer stumbled backward and nearly fell, but the muddy bottom of the pond sucked at his boots, reluctant to let such a willing prisoner go.

  “That’s enough, you lot!” Grit darted in and out of the other lights. “Show’s over! Thank you for your time!”

  The lights dispersed with shrugs of tiny shoulders, more than a few curious backward glances, and one or two teasing giggles. Grit stuck her tongue out at the retreating backs of the gigglers while Carmer staggered onto solid ground. The will-o’-the-wisps sank back into the pond, winking out of sight with little gurgles as they submerged themselves in the inky water. Grit kept an eye on them as she flew to Carmer’s side.

  “Congratulations,” she said, hovering at his knee as he sat down. “You’ve just been enthralled.”

  Carmer shook his head vigorously and ran his hands through his hair. His head felt fuzzy, much like the last time he’d fallen under the influence of faerie magic, but he was already starting to feel the true bite of the cold night air.

  “I-I thought I had them,” he said, a round of shivers clacking his teeth together.

  “You did,” agreed Grit. “Until they had you.”

  Carmer shivered harder. “The house wasn’t real,” he guessed.

  Grit shook her head; tufts of frizzy red and gold curls escaped from her messy bun. “And you should have known that.”

  “Well,” said Carmer with a shrug. He tried to wring out the ends of his sodden pants, but his fingers were numb with cold. “You know what they say. P-practice m-makes p-p-perfect.”

  Grit flew right in front of his face. “Hands,” she ordered.

  “I—I’m fine,” Carmer stuttered through white lips.

  “And I’m a giantess,” she said. “Hands. Now.”

  Carmer blew on his fingers a few times before cupping his hands and extending them out to Grit, who promptly stepped inside them. Almost instantly, warmth began to radiate into his frozen fingers. Having a fire faerie for a best friend did have some benefits, after all. Carmer sighed with relief.

  “That’s the best I can do for now,” Grit said, sitting cross-legged in his palms. “Let’s call it a night, shall we?”

  Carmer couldn’t have agreed more.

  THE NEXT MORNING dawned bright and clear and cold, though not nearly as chilly as the night before. As Carmer had said would happen, their days were growing warmer as they traveled south for the winter, away from Grit’s home city of Skemantis and the rest of New England. Grit stood on her favorite perch at the very topmost turret of the Moto-Manse, Carmer’s three-story motorized house on wheels, and stretched from the points of her tiny toes all the way to the tips of her fingers, yawning. As usual, she was up much earlier than Carmer—faeries didn’t need to sleep at all, strictly speaking, but with her only traveling companion in dreamland for most of the night, there wasn’t much else to keep her occupied. (Carmer, of course, couldn’t understand why she didn’t use the extra time to study his lessons on the human world, but that was because he was boring, and she was not.)

  Grit lowered her arms, watching the pale sunrise, and rolled her shoulders experimentally. The muscles around her left wing had gotten stiff and sore in the night, and the cold wasn’t helping. She held on to the tip of the turret for support—the wind was quite strong that day—and slowly opened and closed both wings. The brass outline of the metal one glinted in the corner of her eye. Grit wondered if she would ever get used to that.

  The Seelie faerie princess hadn’t always had two wings. She’d been born with only one, and it wasn’t until the engineering prowess of Felix Cassius Tiberius Carmer III, combined with the perfect dose of faerie magic, that she flew for the first time. Her new wing—had it really been only a few short weeks since she’d gotten it?—was a mechanical and a magical marvel. But it didn’t come without its own fair share of problems—like a tendency to literally freeze up in the cold. Grit was learning to use her magic to account for such drawbacks, but it was a process that involved a lot of trial and error (and occasionally setting things on fire).

  Grit squinted into the sunrise, where a floating black spot had suddenly appeared over the horizon. It dipped dangerously close to the tree line in the distance before bobbing unsteadily back up again.

  Grit scurried halfway down the Moto-Manse’s roof before she remembered to fly—that was another thing to get used to—the rest of the way to Carmer’s window. He was still asleep, his black hair tousled every which way, snoring soundly. She was loath to wake him, as she knew he didn’t always sleep as well as he could; the nightmares that plagued him from their last major encounter with Unseelie faeries made sure of that. But a skyward glance showed the black spot getting bigger—and therefore closer. It was teardrop-shaped, and not actually black at all, but striped in bright colors.

  She decided to investigate. She pushed off Carmer’s windowsill with only the slightest twinge of guilt—she would turn right back if anything were amiss, she promised herself—and the moment the wind caught under her wings, she couldn’t help but break into a smile. This was the way good days started—with clear skies and the possibility of adventure sailing straight at you—not by burying your nose in books and beakers and belching engines the way Carmer did.

  Truthfully, the possibility of adventure in question seemed to be having a tough time sailing straight in any direction. As she flew closer, Grit recognized the shape as a balloon. These weren’t as big as the hulking airships the humans sometimes traveled in, and they usually carried only one or two people in a hanging wicker basket.

  In addition to being in obvious distress, this one also seemed to be missing a key element: the basket. A lone figure hung directly from the balloon itself, suspended in the air by nothing but a few ropes and straps.

  Grit hung back, hesitating as she glided closer. She landed in a copse of trees a short way from the road and flitted from treetop to treetop, following the balloon’s progress. Surely, someone else would come driving along and see the balloonist. And there was a town just over the next rise—perhaps they could see the mysterious shape floating on
the horizon. They could call for help.

  But a needling voice told her it was still very early, and as untraveled as the country roads they were taking were, the likelihood of anyone else calling for help was slim. Contrary to what Carmer thought, she really did try to pay attention to the human world. Or at least, the practical bits that were worth paying attention to.

  The balloon passed directly overhead, and Grit got her first look at the unfortunate passenger. He was tall, with long legs currently occupied in thrashing about in a panic; gloved hands fiddled helplessly with his harness. He looked down at the ground, which was growing nearer by the second, and then at the countryside around him—and laughed. A small, bemused laugh, to be sure, but a laugh all the same.

  Only a fellow adventurer could find himself in a predicament like that and laugh. And Grit was always game to meet a fellow adventurer. She sprang up from the trees before she could second-guess the impulse and launched herself past the clueless balloonist and straight under the balloon itself.

  I’m a fire faerie, Grit thought. Surely, she’d heard these things called hot air balloons for a reason.

  CARMER DREAMED OF trains.

  He dreamed of trains spewing smoke into claustrophobic underground tunnels, brakes and whistles and other things shrieking into a dark void. Black vines crept along cold concrete walls. Black iron rails twisted with magic. The very mud beneath his feet became grasping hands, ready to drag him down forever. A three-eyed man with a dripping red conductor’s cap beckoned him forward with a pointy-toothed smile.

  He dreamed of running until his lungs and his legs were on fire and feeling, knowing, that he could never run fast or far enough. The train was coming for him. The Wild Hunt was coming for him, just as it had come for Gideon Sharpe.

  Carmer’s eyes snapped open, the image of a blond boy being thrown into that very train still burning across his vision. He shook his head, forced himself to take deep breaths, and focused on the sound that had woken him.