Minnifer pointed out the window. Across the court, through the dancing leaves, I saw the looming black carcass of the castle’s burned wing. Branches of laurel and rhododendron had softened its charred edges and wrapped it in a gentle embrace. But it was a dead, desolate-looking place, and the ivy that poured from its broken windows and crawled across the buttresses looked like nothing so much as thick black smoke.
“What a horrible way to die,” I said. “To know that your whole family has turned against you and wants you gone.”
“Yes,” said Minnifer. “But she deserved it. You know, they didn’t even bury her in the family plot. They put her just outside it, in Pragast Wood. You passed it on the way in. The great big mausoleum? That’s hers.”
“Awful place,” said Bram. “Gives me the shivers just thinking about it.”
We continued down the gallery, peering up at the pictures all around us. I searched for my mother’s face or Greta’s, but I couldn’t find them. No one here looked like me, no one except the wicked Magdeboor. These people were all elegant and hawk-nosed. Their hair was smooth as black oil, their expressions clever or politely bored. I was sure none of them had ever been called gawky or ungainly in their life.
I thought of Greta down in the dining room. She didn’t look like a Blackbird either, but she did look lovely, golden-haired and fashionable. I imagined her wearing the expensive clothes in her closet, marching through the house and brilliantly doing battle against the evils of night and fog. I was no Greta. I wondered if that was why Mrs. Cantanker disliked me so, and I wondered if my mother might have liked Greta more too, perhaps not at once, but with time. . . .
I shook my head to rid myself of these thoughts and followed Bram and Minnifer toward the end of the gallery and a door with the words ANTECHAMBER OF ETERNAL DREAMS in gilded script above it. We were just about to pass through it when something caught my eye: an open panel in the wall and, inside, a staircase, quite narrow, winding upward into shadows. There would have been nothing remarkable about it, nothing to set it apart from the dozens of other staircases we had already seen during our explorations—except that every tread, every panel, and every inch of its railing was painted a deep sapphire blue.
“Where do those go?” I asked, pointing.
“Oh!” said Minnifer, startled. “They do creep up on you. . . .” Then she planted herself firmly between me and the blue stairs and said, “You’re never to go up there, Zita. Never. It’s not safe. I know it’s a witch’s house, so nowhere is safe, but up there . . . really, you mustn’t. Those stairs used to lead to the attic in the north wing—”
“Where Magdeboor was killed?”
“And where she was imprisoned in her last days. The stairs were hacked to pieces so that she couldn’t escape down them, but when the servants came back after the fire, what did they find? The blue stairs, good as new. It’s said they lead straight into the spirit realm now.” Minnifer cast them one more mistrustful look. “Anyway, it’s the rule that no one climbs them, so you mustn’t either. The blue stairs? Utterly, utterly forbidden. Do you understand?”
“Utterly,” I said, laughing as Minnifer herded me along the gallery. But as soon as I’d turned my back on the stairs, I felt a chill pass over me, and the strange weight of a gaze. I glanced over my shoulder. Frost glistened on the blue banister, a little patch of winter, as if something had been standing there moments before, the cold flowing off it. I told myself it was just the way the candlelight caught the blue paint, but I wasn’t sure.
We left the gallery, moving down corridors and up staircases, their banisters casting long shadows over the damask wallpaper. We passed padlocked doors labeled such things as ROOM OF MARBLE HEADS and VESTIBULE OF BLOOD, and one door that was hardly large enough for a cat called the TINY QUEEN’S THRONE ROOM. We passed the chamber mostly occupied by the large, leafy tree, its branches rustling and whispering inside. And then I saw that stupid crow again, perched on a chandelier high above my head. For a moment I was sure it was a sculpture. But then it screeched and took flight, and vanished out of a partly open window, in a flurry of black feathers.
I shook my head. “I thought all of them had left.”
“They had!” said Minnifer. “It’s a good omen, that. You arriving, and a crow coming soon after. It means things are about to change.”
We ended the tour in the servants’ hall, deep in the roots of the castle. It was the warmest place, by far, and the nicest smelling. The bundles of drying lavender filled the air with their pungent fumes. A fire blazed in the huge stone fireplace. When we had finished dinner, we melted an entire block of chocolate into a pan of milk and sat on the floor in front of the hearth to drink it. The wide, polished boards glimmered, warm from the glow of the coals, and we sipped from black china mugs and ate crumbly shortbread in the shape of sickle moons.
It turned out Bram was the cook of all the delicacies I’d had at breakfast, and all of the ones we had just feasted on. He had fashioned tiny amuse-bouches for our supper—buttered sandwiches with salmon florets and cucumber sails and dustings of dill, cherry tomatoes stuffed with savory bread, golden quiches, their fillings lighter than air—and served them on a silver dish. He seemed very proud of himself when I said they were the most delicious things I’d ever eaten.
“He’ll be a great chef one day, you wait and see,” said Minnifer, and Bram reddened and crunched busily at his shortbread.
“Is that your plan, Bram?” I asked. “Are you going to be a cook? I would go to your shop every day if you sold a-moose-booshes there.”
Minnifer laughed at my pronunciation, but I didn’t mind.
“Maybe one day,” said Bram, picking at a splinter in the floor. And then Bram and Minnifer peered at each other, the same sad, odd look they had exchanged the night before. I glanced between them, feeling suddenly left out.
“Why did you stay after what happened?” I asked them. “Not that I’m not very happy you’re here, but you’re both old enough to work anywhere. Bram could be cooking in any great house or big city—”
“I’m in a great house,” said Bram seriously. “The greatest house.”
“Yes, but everyone’s dead or run away,” I said. “And there’s dark sorcery afoot, not to mention Mrs. Cantanker—”
“This is our home,” said Minnifer. “And anyway, Bram’s not allowed to go anywhere without me. We look out for each other, don’t we, Bram?”
Bram nodded. Minnifer nodded too, satisfied. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think this whole place could go to ruin, and all the witches of the world could be working in offices and sweeping train platforms, and Bram and I would still be here as little old people, tending the rosemary and patching the roof. They took us in, you see, from an orphanage down in the valley. I was seven and Bram was eight, and maybe it doesn’t make sense to other people, but . . . it’s hard to leave a place you’ve known so long.”
“It wasn’t hard for me to leave Cricktown,” I said. In fact, it was knowing the place well that had made it easy to say goodbye to its low, peaked roofs and petty people. But then I thought for a moment and added quietly, “I know all about being an orphan, though. I’m glad we all found our way here.”