“That isn’t possible,” Mrs. Cantanker hissed, staring around the room. “They cannot get in!”
She raced to the desk and jerked open a drawer, hurling a handful of salt into the air. Then she ran for the dish, her hands gripping its edges as she stared into it. I knew at once she couldn’t see the girl in the rafters. Whereas I had just realized I could see the ghost, dish or no. She was writhing, stretching down toward us. Toward me.
“Kaithus!” Mrs. Cantanker bellowed. “Kaithus mihalit!”
The shape recoiled, her hair flaring out behind her. I thought I recognized her face. Green eyes, like pine needles.
Then it was over. The red lamp extinguished. The dish of water overturned, and silvery liquid flooded silently across the desk. Mrs. Cantanker looked at me, breathless. Mr. Grenouille extricated himself from the drapes with whose help he had tried to make himself invisible. “Is it gone?” he whispered. “Are we safe?”
“Safe?” Mrs. Cantanker practically shouted. She strode across the room, scanning the ceiling with a jewel-lensed pair of opera glasses. “A spirit got into the High Blackbird’s study. Of course we’re not safe.”
“But there are spirits everywhere in the house,” Mr. Grenouille said. “What does it—”
“There are no spirits in this part of the house!” Mrs. Cantanker roared, and Mr. Grenouille flinched so violently I worried he’d thrown out his back. “The old inhabitants know well not to enter here, and no new ones can get past the wards in Pragast Wood.” She wheeled about to face me. “What are you playing at, hmm? What have you smuggled in under all that mangy hair?”
“I didn’t bring anything with me,” I snapped. “You told me to find the spirit and I did, so I don’t see why you’re angry with me.”
Mrs. Cantanker glared at me. I glared back. Seeing a ghost should be a momentous occasion in anyone’s life, but Mrs. Cantanker had managed to ruin it entirely. I was about to tell her what I thought of her when Mr. Grenouille stepped between us.
“Well, whatever it is, it’s gone now,” he said. And then his weak little face began to beam, and he threw up his hands in a cheer. “There can be no doubt now! You, Miss Zita, are a Blackbird. Oh, your mother would be so proud. And to think she missed you by such a small margin. . . .”
His words cut through the haze of my anger. I thought of the blurry figure from my deepest dreams, a sweet voice, and the scent of violets and rosemary.
“When did she die?” I whispered.
“Just a few months ago! Not long. Not long at all.”
Just a few months . . . To think that all this time I’d had a mother and a family, that if only the scarecrow had walked faster and the letter had arrived sooner I might have been welcomed home as a daughter instead of a legal term in a sheaf of papers.
Or you’d be dead too, I thought. Frozen over your dinner and dripping stone from the end of your nose, and your ghost flitting about in the rafters.
“What happened to me?” I asked. We were back in the morning room, Mrs. Cantanker, Mr. Grenouille, and me, seated in front of the windows and watching the sun skim in a slow arc across the tops of the trees. “Why was I only found now, after they’d died?”
Mr. Grenouille’s face sagged. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I spent the last ten years searching for you, up mountains and down rivers, into woods and deep caves. I’ve been everywhere, followed every lead. But every road ended in failure, and with every passing year, my hope dwindled. Were you kidnapped? Lost? Dead? No one had the slightest idea. All we knew was that on the fourth of March, in the Year of the Wild Boar, you vanished.”
Vanished? But why? Who had left me, covered in soot and my hair full of twigs, on the orphanage doorstep? I wished I could remember. Something had happened, something in between my life as the beloved daughter and my life as an orphan. But what?
Mrs. Cantanker swirled her tea and made a small, bored tch with her tongue, as if settling herself in for a tale she had heard many times before. Mr. Grenouille’s gaze turned to the window. “You were still so small then, barely two winters old,” he said. “You’d gone out to play in the garden with your little dog. I was with your mother in the study, drawing up some papers. We heard you laughing, and the pup barking. And then all went quiet. A nanny saw you walking toward the woods a few minutes past three o’clock, your hand outstretched as if someone was just ahead. But she swore there was no one there.”
I shuddered. I couldn’t remember any of this. My memories began at the orphanage, where I woke up cold in the morning and went to bed filthy and tired from working the enormous, clanking, wool-spinning machines. It made me feel odd, hearing of nannies and castles and witches. It sounded like the story of a different girl, someone exceptionally interesting, not Mrs. Boliver’s maid.
“We turned this world inside out in search of you,” Mr. Grenouille continued. “And the next world too. We sent out affidavits into the spirit realm, swore terrible revenge on any dead thing that did not accommodate the search. We did not find so much as a shoe or button. Not a single sign pointed to where you might have gone. It was as if you had vanished into thin air.”
“It was very sad to see,” Mrs. Cantanker murmured. “Your poor father . . . driven to distraction with grief. He died in a shipwreck six years ago, on his way to fumigate a haunted wood. But I suppose one saves oneself all sorts of trouble by dying.”
I frowned at her, but the words caused a memory to bloom in my mind: firelight, the smell of oak and tobacco, me sitting on someone’s knee, someone very tall and wearing a scratchy coat. Papa?
“And your mother . . . ,” Mr. Grenouille said in a trembling little voice. “Georgina never stopped looking. She believed your disappearance to be an act of revenge, planned by some dead thing. I tend to agree. The Brydgeborn family has battled many horrible creatures over the centuries. They have disturbed things deep in the spirit realm, things that do not forget and do not forgive. One of them might have hidden you away with some spell, shielding you from all our powers of detection.”
“But you did find me,” I said. “Eventually.”
“And entirely by accident!” Mr. Grenouille exclaimed delightedly, though he took one look at my blank, sad face and deflated again. “A tip came in from beyond the veil, a letter written in some nasty, sticky ink, saying to look for you in Cricktown. Now, as you can imagine, I fed a scarecrow a drop of Brydgeborn blood, wound a lock of hair from your childhood through its rib cage, and sent it there at once. Three weeks later, it returned with news that it had delivered the letter to the owner of the lock of hair, Miss Zita Brydgeborn herself! I don’t know if I believed it. I don’t know if you believed it. Perhaps we’d all given up on each other by then. But as I waited for you to arrive, I became rather certain it was you. . . .”
Mr. Grenouille took my hand, his little eyes searching my face. “I’m sorry it took so long,” he said. “But you’re here now. You’re alive. You must be very careful, Zita. Whatever came for you all those years ago, whatever killed your family, may well still be lurking nearby. You must begin your training at once.”
I pulled my hand away. The room felt suddenly stuffy, as if it were full of people I could not see, all peering over my shoulder and breathing down my neck. I looked out the window, across the garden to where the woods rose sharp and dark against the flat white sky. They seemed familiar for a moment, as if I’d sat here before, looking upon this exact view.