Illuminations, page 17
“It’s all right,” said Rosa mechanically. She hated to see anyone so upset, even if she knew that she had every right to be mad at the crow. But being mad didn’t seem like it would help much. She had other concerns right now. “Do you think I’m going to die?”
“You won’t!” said Payne. “I mean—you—no, you couldn’t—”
Rosa stared at her arm. Her mouth felt dry.
“Tybalt probably didn’t die of scribbling stings, then,” said Aunt Nadia, “if he made it thirty-five years after. But somebody should still probably look that up.”
A tear leaked down Rosa’s face.
“No!” said Cousin Sergio. “Don’t cry!” He looked as if he might cry himself. “Saved box! Very brave!”
“I refuse to die until I’ve had coffee,” said Aunt Nadia. “I won’t do it.” She leaned over the table and tapped Rosa’s cheek with her finger. “I’d hold out for some hot chocolate, if I were you.” Rosa managed a weak smile.
“No one is dying,” said Grandmama angrily. She bustled back into the room, holding flat green leaves. “Sergio, stop lurking around and go find me some of those new bandages with an illumination for healing on them.” She paused and rolled her eyes. “Assuming the accursed things haven’t gotten into those, too.”
“There’ll be some at my house,” volunteered Serena. Rosa wondered how long she’d been there. She wiped her face with her free hand. She didn’t want Serena to see her crying.
“I’d be grateful if you could run and fetch two,” said Grandmama. “Give my regards to your mother.”
Serena nodded. She hugged Rosa awkwardly, her eyes lingering on the swollen arm. “I’m sorry I didn’t come help,” she said. “I wasn’t really awake yet and I didn’t realize what was going on.” She hurried out of the room.
Grandmama began to rub the leaves over Rosa’s arm. They were cool and took the itch away. Rosa stared at the tabletop and hoped that no one else was going to apologize to her today. She was getting very tired of holding everyone’s apologies in her head.
When she’d rubbed every sting with the leaves, Grandmama dabbed honey on each of the spots. “Honey’s got healing properties,” she said. “It’s practically magic. Nadia, you’d better put it on your ankle, too.”
“I feel terribly weak,” murmured Aunt Nadia. “As if the life was draining away from me…oh wait, it’s just that there’s no coffee.”
Sergio made a rude noise and poured the freshly brewed coffee into her cup. The kitchen filled with the rich smell. Rosa sighed. She didn’t like the taste, but the smell was heavenly.
“Now,” said Grandmama. “Wiggle your fingers.”
Rosa wiggled them. The skin no longer felt strange and tight. Her arm still had a vague itchy ache to it, and her elbow was stiff, but it seemed to be working. “I’m better!” she said.
“Don’t overdo it,” said Grandmama. “You should probably be in bed with hot tea, but the way things are going around here, I doubt there will be time for that.”
Uncle Alfonso poked his head in the kitchen. “Marco is guarding the paintings,” he said. “Serena told me what happened. I’m sorry I was so slow.” He shook his head ruefully. “If it wasn’t for you young people with your reflexes, we’d have lost the charcoal.”
Rosa, Nadia and Sergio exchanged glances. Rosa felt a flush of pride to be one of the “young people.”
Grandmama exhaled through her nose, the way she did when she was deciding not to be mad about something. Carefully not looking at Payne, she said “I think we’ve learned that we can’t rely on just reflexes. Or any one person to stand guard. If it’s so important that we keep this thing safe, we’ll need to do more.”
“It’s true,” said Rosa. “If it hadn’t been for the chain, I think they’d have gotten it open.”
“We could take it far away from here,” said Uncle Alfonso, a bit doubtfully.
“The Scarling will come for it,” said Payne. “It’s drawn to it like a magnet.”
“Better to fight on ground you know,” said Uncle Marco. “They taught us that in the military. We live here. We know it better than the Scarling ever could.”
“To say nothing of what that thing might do out in the world!” said Nadia. She shook her head. “It nearly gave me heart failure. Can you imagine what it might do to the old lady next door?”
“The old lady next door is younger than I am,” said Grandmama acidly.
“This is excellent coffee,” said Nadia hurriedly. “Truly excellent. Have I told you lately how much I admire your coffee?”
“Hmph!”
Payne shook his head miserably, unmoved by their banter. “I can’t be relied upon to guard the box. If it wasn’t for Rosa’s radishes, we’d have lost everything. I’ve made a mess of this from beginning to end. I didn’t want to tell anyone, and then I couldn’t even be trusted to keep the box safe. You got hurt because of me. Tybalt should have painted a—a—cat on the box instead!”
Rosa reached out with her good hand and stroked the feathers on the back of his neck. “Payne—”
“It’s true,” said Grandmama, her voice like iron. “You’re not wrong, crow. So what do you intend to do about it?”
Under Rosa’s fingers, Payne shivered. “I can’t make up for it,” he said, turning his beak away.
“Nobody’s asking you to,” said Grandmama. Rosa hated that tone of voice. She’d used it on Rosa once or twice.
Rosa wanted to jump up, say something, change the conversation so that she wouldn’t have to hear Payne being yelled at. Her face burned in sympathetic embarrassment.
“If you were watching the box tonight,” said Grandmama, “and the Scarling dangled gold and jewels and spoons in front of you, what would you do?”
“Nothing!” said Payne fiercely. “I wouldn’t move a muscle! Not a feather! I wouldn’t leave the box for anything!”
Grandmama reached out, flipped his beak up, and looked into his eyes.
Whatever she was looking for, apparently she found it. She grunted. “Good,” she said. “Remember that. Now let’s say no more about it.”
The tension went out of the room like air let out of a balloon. Nadia set her coffee cup down with a clunk.
“So!” she said, brightly. “The chain was a good idea, but now they’ll be expecting it. What are we going to do next?”
THIRTY-TWO
Morning
Watering Day
Thermidor, the Month of Heat
* * *
Serena came back, out of breath, with a pair of cloths. The illuminations on them were golden-eyed lizards, holding red fruit in their front claws. One had a strawberry and one had an apple. Rosa knew from the Codex that it didn’t matter what the fruit was, but it had to be red, and the lizards had to have golden eyes.
Illuminated bandages never lasted very long—you couldn’t magically heal a broken arm with one, for example—but they helped. When Cousin Sergio had broken his left wrist last year, he’d drawn a new lizard on his cast every day. Eventually it had been completely covered in little green lizards holding red berries, everywhere he could reach. He’d had the cast off in two weeks and it had healed so cleanly that he barely had a scar.
“Mom says to yell if you need any more,” said Serena.
Grandmama sighed. “I hope I won’t,” she said, “but I’m grateful for these. If they ever need a stuffed armadillo…”
Rosa looked away, as Grandmama wrapped her stiff arm in the healing cloth. The Studio Magnifico were their rivals. Everybody knew they were rivals. But apparently there was a difference between hoping to get a commission and refusing to give bandages to someone who’d been hurt. The studios might be rivals, but they went back and forth trading paint and canvas and—and—stuffed armadillos!
Because they were all illuminators together. Because everybody knew that when you needed paint, you needed it right now. And someday you’d be the one who needed to borrow paint…
“You must be feeling better,” said Grandmama dryly. “You’ve been drumming your fingers on the table for five minutes.”
“Oh!” Rosa looked down at her hand. Her fingers felt fine. When she stretched her arm out, her elbow made a sort of painful stretchy twang, but it moved.
Aunt Nadia stood up, paced across the room on her ankle, and sat down again. “Good as new,” she said. “Though I probably won’t go out dancing on it.” She glanced at Payne. “Wings! In my next life, I shall have wings.”
“Sensible,” he said. “They’re much more efficient.”
“Leave the cloths on for a few more minutes, then we’ll set them aside,” ordered Grandmama. “Saint Fenester knows, we probably aren’t getting through this without somebody else getting bit by a scribbling.”
Serena looked smug. “My aunt did those,” she said. “She’s really good at it.”
“I thought I recognized her style,” said Grandmama. “Always does such lovely scales.”
Payne cleared his throat. “About the box…”
“Have you figured out how to protect it yet?” asked Serena.
Payne shook his head.
“Can’t think!” said Sergio, standing up. “Going to guard the paintings! Send Marco in!”
He left the kitchen.
“Could we stick it down to something?” asked Rosa. “Like glue the box to the table?”
“Hmmm.” Uncle Alfonso tapped the box thoughtfully. “That might be a good start. They’d have to get the box open instead of dragging it off to work on.”
“Which shouldn’t be too hard, honestly,” said Payne. “It’s just a latch, without the illumination on it…and I don’t think Rosa can paint me back onto the box, unfortunately.”
Rosa blinked. “You’d want to go back on the box?”
“I was a better guardian on it than I am off, apparently,” said the crow dryly. “But it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t explain how Tybalt did it, so I imagine you’re stuck with me to the end.”
Rosa reached out and scratched his feathers. “I’m glad,” she said. “I like having you around.”
Payne rested his beak briefly along her hand.
“How did he do it?” asked Uncle Alfonso. “Not the magic, but the painting?”
“I sat in diluted turpentine until my paint started to dissolve,” said Payne. “And I didn’t enjoy that at all. It made my tailfeathers extremely sticky. Then I hopped onto the box and he started to push my paint around and things got very hazy. The next thing I knew, Rosa had figured out how to get the box open and I woke up again.” He flicked his tail, as if to reassure himself that it was no longer sticky.
“How long do you think we have before it tries again?” asked Aunt Nadia.
“You kicked the Scarling pretty good,” said Payne, with a little dip of his wings. “But his scribblings will only get weaker. I can’t imagine he’ll wait too long.”
“There’s no way he can make more scribblings?” asked Uncle Alfonso. “You’re sure?”
“There’s only the one piece of charcoal,” said Payne doubtfully. “He shouldn’t be able to. But there’s a lot I don’t know.”
Rosa didn’t think she’d ever heard Payne admit that before. She blinked at him. Normally he’s a worse know-it-all than Serena!
“Suppose we just drop the whole box in wet cement?” said Aunt Nadia. “I’d like to see any drawing get it out of that!”
“That’s a great idea!” said Serena, but Payne shook his head.
“We have to be able to get into the box ourselves,” the crow said. “Otherwise it would be perfect. But Rosa has to be able to draw us more radishes.” He nodded to the two leafy illuminations on the table. “They’re the only thing we know will hold off the Scarling and its creatures.”
“You think we’ll need to hold more off?” asked Uncle Alfonso.
“I suspect we might,” said Payne. “And it won’t do us any good if it can’t get into the box, if it’s buried us under a pile of scribblings to get there.”
Rosa thought of her family covered in scribblings, lying on the floor by a block of cement. It was a horrible image.
She tried to think of something else. What would be like cement, but easier to get into?
“What about clay?” she asked.
They all looked at her, puzzled.
“Clay?” said Aunt Nadia.
“What about clay?” asked Uncle Marco, limping into the kitchen.
“What if we wrapped the box in wet clay?” asked Rosa. “Really thick clay. Then we can pull it apart ourselves if we need to get into the box, but the scribblings will have to dig into it.” The scribblings were pointy, but she didn’t think lines would be very good for digging.
“Do we have any clay?” asked Grandmama.
“Sergio was building maquettes out of it last month,” said Uncle Alfonso. (Maquettes were miniature sculptures, usually of humans, that a sculptor uses to work out ideas, like a rough sketch in clay. Cousin Sergio was not a very good sculptor, but he liked to do it sometimes as a change from painting. “Think differently!” he’d bark, hands in the clay. “Shake out cobwebs!”)
“That’s not a bad idea at all,” said Uncle Marco. “I imagine it would slow them down quite a bit.”
He put his hand on the back of the chair. “First, we’ll need Rosa to draw us an army of radishes.”
Cousin Sergio cleared his throat from the doorway. “Should see this!”
They all got up. Rosa carried the box in front of her and Payne rode on her shoulder.
Cousin Sergio led them into the main studio and pointed upward.
There was a collective indrawn breath. Rosa shivered.
“How long do you think it’s been there?” asked Grandmama.
“Who knows?” asked Aunt Nadia grimly. “How often do any of us ever look up?”
“It wasn’t there yesterday evening,” said Payne. “I flew around before it got too dark.”
In foot-high letters across the pale bricks, the Scarling had written:
* * *
WILL END STUPID MANDOLINIS FOR ALWAYS
* * *
“It’s not very good grammar,” said Serena.
Aunt Nadia glared into her coffee cup. “That’ll be a consolation when we’re all killed in our beds, I’m sure.”
“No one’s getting killed in their beds,” said Uncle Marco.
He looked around at the rest of the family, at Serena, and nodded once. “From now on,” he said, “nobody goes anywhere alone. We’re at war.”
THIRTY-THREE
Afternoon
Watering Day
Thermidor, the Month of Heat
* * *
They dragged a table into the very center of the main studio. Rosa sat at the table with the box next to her and a pad of paper.
Her eyes kept being drawn up the wall to the Scarling’s message. It was written in black charcoal.
Had the Scarling written the threat before it had come down and nearly been trapped? Or had it written it afterwards? And if it had been afterwards, what had it used?
It looked very much like the charcoal in her hand.
There can’t be two pieces of charcoal, she thought. If there’s two, it’d be making more scribblings. If it’s making more scribblings, then…
She bent her head over the pad of paper and hastily drew a very large radish. She wasn’t sure if bigger was better, but probably it couldn’t hurt.
Grandmama and Cousin Sergio went into the kitchen and came back out with cups of tea for everyone. Uncle Marco and Alfonso pulled chairs up around the table. Everyone was careful not to stare at Rosa, which she appreciated, but she could feel the words on the wall watching her, like evil eyes.
“I didn’t know the Scarling could write words,” she said to Payne, as her radish drawing pulled itself away from the page.
“It can,” said Payne. “It can’t talk, so it writes.”
“It’s smarter than I thought, then.”
“Well….” He tilted his wing back and forth in a maybe-yes, maybe-no gesture. “Not really. It’s cunning, I suppose you’d say, not smart like a crow, or a person.”
Rosa shaded in the leaves on another radish. She wasn’t sure that she believed Payne. She had been thinking of the Scarling as something like a big, evil rat. Being able to read and write made you smarter than a rat, though, didn’t it?
“What did it write when Tybalt had it?”
Payne shrugged. “Oh, you know. Need more paper. And paint not dry. That sort of thing.”
“And it hates all Mandolinis because of this Tybalt person of yours? How lucky for us!”
Rosa stifled a sigh. When Aunt Nadia got sarcastic, there wasn’t much that you could do.
Payne peered at her thoughtfully, turning his head. “You know…”
Nadia raised an eyebrow.
“You’d make a good crow,” he told her, with the air of one bestowing a great compliment.
Nadia blinked at him, then broke into an unwilling smile.
A second radish climbed off the page. Rosa shook the cramps out of her hand and drank her tea. Grandmama had put honey in it.
Uncle Marco and Sergio had excavated the clay from the clutter under Sergio’s desk. It was half dried out, and they had to dump water (and Sergio’s tea) into the clay to get it wet again.
The two of them knelt down and began digging their hands into the clay to try to mix it. Sergio groaned. “Too dry! Need more!”
“It’ll be fine,” said Uncle Marco. “Keep kneading.”
“It’s called wedging if it’s clay,” said Serena, in that know-it-all tone that she had.
Uncle Marco was untroubled. “Keep wedging, then,” he said. Sergio muttered something under his breath.
It was strange waiting for the Scarling to attack. Rosa had been keyed-up and scared and ready to fight, but it hadn’t shown up. It had been over an hour. She didn’t know how to feel. She had been ready to be heroic and now she just had to go to the bathroom, which didn’t feel very heroic at all.
