Chapter One
IT was the first day of autumn when I came to Blackbird Castle, the trees copper and green, pumpkins growing along the ditch by the side of the road, a moon like a lidded silver eye already visible in the evening sky—in short, an excellent day for a witch to return to her ancestral home. But of course I knew nothing of witches then. My mind was on simpler things: the spring that had wormed its way through the velvet of the coach bench and was poking me in the back; the fact that I was cold and stiff; and also the fact that we had just stopped with a jolt in the middle of the road.
The coachman thrust his red-cheeked face through the window. “That’s that, miss,” he growled. “That’s all the farther I’ll take you.”
I blinked at him. Then I clambered out of the coach, dragging my carpetbag with me. We were on a desolate mountainside, forests to my left, a precipice to my right, a river rumbling somewhere far below.
“Blackbird Castle,” I asked. “Where is it?”
“Not far,” the coachman said, pointing up the mountain. “If you can fly.”
My gaze followed his wizened finger, my heart sinking. There was a path, stitched with bridges, wending to and fro among the cliffs and forested slopes. And far, far back, its towers barely poking over the crowns of the great old trees, were the spires of a house. A few glowing lights pierced the gloom like watchful eyes.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way to get the carriage up there?” I asked as politely as I could. “I paid for the full journey.”
“You didn’t pay me near enough to take you right up to the Blackbirds’ front door,” the coachman said, and spat onto the road. His great inky horses were pawing and snorting, their breath steaming in the chilly air. “Not for all the gold in Westval . . . What’s a girl like you doing going up there anyway?” His gaze darkened. “You’re not one of them, are you?”
“No,” I said, but what I meant was “I hope to be, very soon.”
The coachman peered at me more closely, his eyes glinting like a pair of coins under the wide brim of his hat. “I trust you know the rumors? About their old witch queen, how she ate the hearts of her enemies for dinner, boiled on a bed of greens? How they’ve all got pairs of silver scissors hanging from their belts, and no one knows what for? And listen to this . . . Betsy Gilford once told me she crept up to a window and saw them dancing around a circle of chalk on the drawing-room floor, and all the spiders in the room were dancing with them!”
I squinted suspiciously at the coachman. “That sounds highly unlikely.”
He snorted, but he looked confused. I suppose he had expected me to be frightened.
“All I’m telling you,” he said, “is you’d better watch yourself. Odd things happen in these hills. Betsy Gilford’s cow once wandered up that very path and was next found atop Pot’s Peak, its hide written all over with gibberish.”
“I think perhaps you shouldn’t believe everything Betsy Gilford tells you,” I said, pulling down my hat. “But thank you for the warning. I’m sure I’ll be all right.” I smiled at him. “They’re expecting me.”
The coachman guffawed. “No doubt they are.” He gave me one last sharp look, which I did not like at all. Then, with a flick of his reins, he turned the coach on a precarious corner and thundered back down the mountain into the gathering gloom.
I had been the last passenger on the stagecoach. I’d boarded it in the city of Manzemir, squeezing myself in between the door and a many-chinned old lady eating plums. She had been very nice and had shared her plums with me, as well as everything I could possibly want to know about her seven children and thirty-two grandchildren. But she’d disembarked at Gorlitz, and slowly, one by one, all the other passengers had gotten out too, at villages and hamlets and farms. I’d watched them embracing old acquaintances, vanishing into houses and through creaking garden gates.
It made me excited for my own journey’s end. I was an orphan, and until three days ago had believed I would remain so for the rest of my life. But fate had other plans, and let me know of them in the oddest way imaginable.
I was in Mrs. Boliver’s back garden, balancing on a chair, on top of another chair, on top of an enormous pink hatbox, trying to lift a cat from its precarious position atop the boiler, when the scarecrow arrived with the letter.
“Just a moment!” I called above the shrilling doorbell. The cat hissed and batted at me with its claws. It was an odd-looking thing, rather shadowy, its teeth a bit too long. In a stern voice I said to it, “Look, you’re going to be stuck up there forever if you don’t let me help you.”
The cat gave me a supercilious stare.
“Isn’t it a bit hot up there? Aren’t you burning?”
Now the cat looked as if it were grinning at me. The bell rang again.
“I said just a moment!” I shouted, and from inside Mrs. Boliver shouted too, her ancient voice only slightly less shrill than the bell, “Who is making that infernal racket? Go answer the door, girl!”
I was employed as a maid by Mrs. Boliver, who was a widow and lived in Cricktown, far out in the middle of nowhere. Mrs. Boliver was ninety-seven and walked with a cane. As for me, I was twelve, tall and underfed, with wild black hair, the sort of hair you might call curly if you were charitable, or, if you were Mrs. Boliver, “a hopeless briar patch so bewitched by the fairies that combs and hairpins become irretrievably lost in it.”
“What an extraordinary-looking girl,” she had said when I’d first arrived from the orphanage, and I don’t think she’d meant it as a compliment.
I must have taken too long to answer the bell, because in the end the scarecrow clambered right over the garden wall to reach me. I had just landed with a squelch in the grass when I was confronted with a pair of legs clad in ragged paisley trousers. My gaze traveled upward until I was looking into eyes made from large silver buttons. Oh! I thought, flinching a little.
The scarecrow was very old, practically falling to pieces. Mushrooms grew from its face, and its coattails were rotting and mossy. But the envelope it held was not old. It was thick papered and creamy, stamped with a knobble of black wax in the shape of a raven. The scarecrow said nothing to me. It only bowed very low, handed me the letter, and then clambered back over the wall, its wooden bones creaking. I saw the top of its stovepipe hat skimming away as it sauntered down the alley.
I stood for a moment, looking at the letter. For Zita Brydgeborn, it said in large, coiling script, and that made me flinch all over again, for I’d not seen that name, nor heard it spoken, in ten long years.
“Who was that?” Mrs. Boliver asked, hobbling up next to me.
“A scarecrow,” I said, and Mrs. Boliver nodded grimly. She did not hear very well, but she didn’t like to admit it.
“And what have you got there?”
“A letter.”
“For me?”
“No,” I said, not quite believing it myself. “I think . . . I think it’s for me!”
Mrs. Boliver squinted at the envelope through her little spectacles. “Zita who?” she demanded, giving me a resentful once-over, as if seeing me for the first time as a human girl and not a walking broom. And then I could not wait a second longer. I ran up to my attic, my heart squirming in my chest, and for a good minute I simply sat on the floor, cradling the letter in my hands. It was like a beacon, this letter, or a life ring tossed into a stormy sea. I was no longer adrift in the world. Someone, somewhere, knew I existed. Fingers trembling, I broke the seal.