Illuminations, page 6
“But what is a Scarling?” asked Rosa.
“A rogue illumination,” said Payne. “You take a mandrake root and paint the strokes of life on it and if it works, you’ve got a Scarling. It takes sustenance from other illuminations, and drains their magic dry.”
Rosa wasn’t quite sure what a mandrake root was. There was a Mandrake Day on the calendar, but it was in spring and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen a drawing of one. “That sounds bad?” she said.
“It’s very bad! It could bring the city to its knees! Imagine if it drained the magic from the illuminations that protect the studio against fire and flood and plague and…and…”
“Mice in the pantry?”
“Ye-e-e-s,” said Payne slowly. “Yes. Them too. Not quite the same level of threat as fire and flood, you understand.”
He shook his feathers out, which reminded Rosa irresistibly of the way that Aunt Nadia would shake out her coat before she put it on. “I have to think,” he said. He began to pace back and forth, bobbing as he walked. “Tybalt gone. Two hundred years! But the Scarling’s out—Oh, what do I do?”
Rosa heard the kitchen door open, and her grandmother come in.“Take me back to your room,” the crow said. “I have to make sure the box is empty. If it is, then it’s got the charcoal and we’re in real trouble.”
So Rosa bundled Payne up again in her coat and snuck back across the studio, her mind a whirl of charcoal and mandrake roots and ancient revolutions.
She got most of the way to her room when the door opened and her grandmother called “Rosa! Come help me with these onions!”
“Just a moment, Grandmama!” Rosa called back. “I have to go,” she said to Payne. “I’ll be right back, I promise.”
“But—”
“Rosa!”
“But I haven’t told you—”
She ran to go help her grandmother. Her last sight was of the crow perched on the box, his wings half-spread and his beak open in distress.
* * *
Helping her grandmother chop onions led to helping prepare dinner which led to doing the dishes which meant that Rosa did not get back to her bay until late evening.
She did learn one thing, though. As her grandmother was dishing out eggplant baked in sauce, Rosa said, “What’s mandrake?”
“Ah!” said Uncle Alfonso, smiling. “A wicked plant, Rosalita. Old and fell.”
“Rank superstition, darling,” said Aunt Nadia.
“Type of root!” barked Sergio. “Not nice!”
“Very interesting plant,” said Uncle Marco. He began to sketch on the tablecloth. (Grandmama sighed and rolled her eyes, but didn’t stop him.) “People used to think it looked like a little human, because of the way the roots grew.”
His sketch did indeed look like a strange little person with long, tapering roots and no head or neck.
“The old story was that if you pulled it, it would scream,” said Uncle Alfonso. “And anyone who heard the scream died.”
“They’d tie it to a dog’s tail,” said Uncle Marco, shading in his drawing, “so that the dog would pull it, not a person.”
“But what about the poor dog?” asked Rosa. “That doesn’t sound very nice for it!”
“Perhaps dogs were immune,” said Grandmama.
“Or perhaps in old times, they didn’t care as much as they should about dogs,” said Uncle Alfonso.
Rosa had to remind herself that the mistreatment of historical dogs was not the important thing at the moment. “What would happen if you put an illumination on one?”
Suddenly the entire family was looking at her. It was a little unsettling. “I wasn’t going to,” said Rosa hurriedly. “I mean, it’s not like I have a mandrake root. I just read about one and I was wondering…”
“Probably nothing,” said Aunt Nadia. “It was just an old superstition.”
“Maybe…” said Uncle Marco. “Or it might be very interesting indeed…”
“Interesting how?” asked Rosa. You could never be sure with Uncle Marco if the things he found interesting would interest a normal person or not.
Her uncle lifted his hands. “Some illuminations change depending on what you paint them on, you know. Canvas and wood and stone are safe enough. Silk is…”
“Pointy!” interrupted Cousin Sergio. “Makes it sharp!” He must have seen that Rosa was puzzled, because he tried to explain. “The magic! On the silk! Feels sharper!”
“Something like that,” said Marco. “If you painted the same illumination on silk and on canvas, the silk one wouldn’t last as long, but it would be stronger.” He smiled. “And the great illumination in the sewer pipe—those were on ceramic so that they would last a very long time and could not be worn away.”
“It’s not just that,” said Aunt Nadia, tapping a nail on the rim of her coffee cup. (Aunt Nadia drank coffee at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and occasionally in the middle of the night when she had trouble sleeping.) “If you painted an illumination so you wouldn’t lose your keys, the one on canvas would help you remember. But the one on silk might make you check on your keys every five minutes to make sure you hadn’t lost them. Silk is very aggressive like that. Pointy, as Sergio says.”
“So,” said Uncle Marco, “there are many things you could paint an illumination on. People even get them tattooed on themselves. But I’ve never heard of anyone putting one on a mandrake root. It might simply not work, or it might twist the illumination around in ways we’ve never seen.”
“Best not to try it,” said Grandmama firmly, and then she brought out cake and Rosa decided to let the matter drop.
* * *
After the dishes were done, Rosa dried her hands on a dishtowel and ran for her bedroom.
It was silent. The box still lay open on the floor, but she couldn’t see Payne.
“Payne?” she whispered. “Payne, are you here?”
For a moment she heard nothing, and then from the corner, where the bed cast the deepest and darkest shadows, she saw feathers move.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said mournfully. “We’re doomed. Even more doomed than we were before.”
“Are we?” asked Rosa.
She was somewhat skeptical of this. Serena had a tendency, when they were playing Great Beauties, to contract a hideous wasting disease or be kidnapped by bandits (sometimes both) and to swoon back across her bed, crying, “We are doomed! Doomed!”
The problem then was that Rosa would say, “I’ll save us! I kick the bandits in the face!” and then Serena would get upset because once you were doomed, you weren’t supposed to get un-doomed so easily.
“The charcoal is gone too,” said Payne. “The Scarling took it. I should have checked right away. I was so upset about it being two hundred years, and I didn’t think…I’m only a painted crow. I’m not quite as clever as the real thing.”
Rosa sat down on the bed and stroked his feathers. He felt like a real crow, or at least like the taxidermy one that Uncle Marco used as a model sometimes. (It occurred to her that she should probably not tell Payne about this.) “Start at the beginning,” she said, which is what Uncle Alfonso always said when she was upset.
Payne sighed, but turned to face her. “The Scarling has a stick of charcoal,” he said. “Like vine charcoal, you know?”
Rosa nodded. Vine charcoal came in thin, wavy little sticks. A burner outside of town burnt vines in his kiln and made them. You could draw with them and they made beautiful smudgy black and gray marks, but they got all over your fingers. Cousin Sergio sketched everything out in vine charcoal instead of pencil and left black smudges on his clothes and the walls and occasionally the toilet paper. Grandmama was forever grumbling about it.
“Right,” said Payne. “The Scarling’s charcoal is made out of one of its own roots. It’s tougher than vine charcoal. It can draw things with it and…well, it’s bad.”
He hopped over the box. “When Tybalt and I caught it the first time, we had to slam it into the box and we didn’t have a chance to get the charcoal away from it so it must still have it and there’s no limit to what mischief it can do with it!”
Rosa’s eyes were starting to glaze over from all the its. “If it’s had the charcoal all along, then we’re not any more doomed,” she pointed out. “We’re exactly the same amount of doomed as before.”
“I suppose,” said Payne grudgingly. “But we could have been less doomed.”
Rosa sighed. “So how do we catch this Scarling, anyway?”
Payne stood on one foot and scraped his claws along his beak, thinking. “It’s weak right now. It hasn’t had time to regain its strength. If we can catch it and imprison it again before it has time to work mischief, we’ll all be far better off.”
“All right,” said Rosa. “How do we imprison it?”
“We find it,” said Payne. “And then we grab it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then…” He leaned in close. “…we stuff it back in the box and close the lid!”
Rosa felt a pang of disappointment. The way Payne had been talking, she had expected something a bit more complicated, possibly involving magic.
“That doesn’t sound too tough,” she said.
“Don’t underestimate the Scarling. It’s made of cunning. And wickedness. And…um…wood. Mostly wood. But also wickedness.” He snapped his beak. “We should start looking right now. I’ll scout overhead. Quietly. And you go around and look for signs of it.”
“What does it look like?” asked Rosa, thinking of the mandrake that Uncle Marco had drawn on the tablecloth.
“Like the essence of wickedness!”
“Right, okay, but what does the essence of wickedness look like?”
“Like a little brown carrot with legs,” said Payne. “And a disagreeable expression.”
Rosa sighed again. She’d wanted to do something to help the studio, and instead she was hunting for an evil walking carrot. Maybe Serena had been right, and the Mandolinis were weird.
She left the bay and heard a soft wash of feathers behind her as Payne took to the air.
TWELVE
Morning
Velvetleaf Day
Thermidor, the Month of Heat
* * *
“Rosa, dear,” said Grandmama the next morning over breakfast, “please don’t draw on the walls.”
Rosa blinked at her over her eggs.
She had been up very late, going from bay to bay, but she hadn’t found any sign of the Scarling. She still wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for, but whatever it was, she hadn’t seen it.
Payne hadn’t come back, either. Eventually she’d gone to bed.
“Do what?” she said.
“Draw on the walls,” said Grandmama. “The little doodle you left in the hallway. I know everybody draws on everything around here, but we have to draw the line somewhere.”
“Or not draw the lines, as the case may be,” said Aunt Nadia. She never ate any breakfast, just drank cup after cup of black coffee.
“But I didn’t,” said Rosa. “I don’t draw on the walls, you know that.”
“Somebody did,” said Grandmama. “And I won’t have it! The tablecloth, fine. Napkins, fine. I am used to living with artists. But not the walls! Otherwise the studio will look like a public restroom!”
It was true. Grandmama had always been very strict about this. A mural was one thing, that was art, but she said that once you started jotting your shopping list down on the wall, they were on the road to Degeneracy. (When she was younger, Rosa had believed that Degeneracy must be a place, apparently with a great deal of graffiti and unmade beds.)
Rosa finished her breakfast, dumped the dishes in the sink, and went into the hallway. She had to look around for the drawing, but she found it at last.
It was about two inches off the floor, just above the baseboard. It was a crude little doodle, two eyes and a scowl with pointy teeth and scribbly lines that might have been hair or spikes or bristles.
“I didn’t draw that,” said Rosa.
Grandmama sighed. It was the sigh that said she didn’t believe you, but didn’t want to waste time arguing about it. “Just clean it up, Rosa.”
Rosa went back to her room first. “Payne?” she whispered. “Payne, are you here?”
The walls of the bays were only about nine feet high, with the enormous open ceiling of the studio above them. A dark lump was perched in the shadow where the walls met the brick of the building.
“Payne, is that you?”
Payne ignored her. He seemed to be fixated on something held in his talons.
“Payne?”
“Look at it…” breathed the crow.
Rosa dragged her chair over to the wall and climbed up on the seat so that she could get a better look.
“It’s a spoon,” she said doubtfully.
“It’s so shiny!” said Payne. He turned the spoon, gazing rapturously at his upside-down reflection in the bowl. “Look how shiny it is!”
Rosa rubbed her forehead. “Did the Scarling drop it or something?”
“What? No! The Scarling doesn’t like shiny things. It draws all over them.” He clutched the spoon close to his feathers. “We have to protect this one! What if it takes it?”
“Then we’ll have to get another spoon,” said Rosa. “And anyway—”
“There are more?!”
“Sure. A whole drawer full. Where did you get that one?”
“Your aunt had it in her coffee mug. I took it. It’s so beautiful.”
Rosa thought she might be getting a headache. Maybe it was because she was rolling her eyes so hard. “Look, Payne, this is important! Something’s happened.”
Payne coughed and tucked the spoon into a nook in the wall. “Right. Important. Tell me.”
“There’s a drawing in the hall! Grandmama thinks I did it, but I didn’t!”
Payne hopped down onto her bed. “Show me.”
“Can’t you talk to her? If you tell her I didn’t do it—”
The crow shook his head violently. “No! The fewer people who know about me, the better!”
“But—”
“No! I’m not talking to anyone! What if they want to put me in a zoo?”
“A zoo? What?”
“I’m a talking crow,” said Payne, as if she were being dense. “I am undoubtedly very valuable. If word gets out, I’ll end up in a zoo with people staring at me and making me recite epic poetry for their entertainment. And I don’t even like poetry.”
“But—”
“And if they found out I was a living illumination, it would be much worse.” Payne fluffed up all his feathers and shook like a dog. “They’d want to take me apart and find out how I worked. I’d get scraped and erased down to my bones.”
Rosa gritted her teeth. Payne had a point, but she hated having her grandmother thinking that she’d drawn on the walls. It wasn’t fair.
“You’ll have to hide me,” said Payne. “Up here with the high ceiling is one thing, but the kitchen is another. I’ll never understand why humans like such low ceilings where they eat…”
She smuggled the crow into the hallway. He stuck his head out of a sleeve and studied the drawing. “Scarling,” he whispered. “That’s its work, all right. I knew it wouldn’t leave.”
“Why not?”
“Because it hates the Mandolinis,” said Payne matter-of-factly. “And it hates me most of all.”
Rosa stared down at the crow, her eyes wide.
“It’s a long story,” he said. (When Aunt Nadia said that, it meant that she had no desire to tell the story, long or not. Rosa wondered if Payne meant it the same way.) “But that’s not important now. We can still catch it!”
Rosa had a hard time sharing his enthusiasm, since she was the one who was going to have to clean the wall.
“But—”
“Not in the middle of the hall,” said Payne, retreating into her jacket. “Later.”
Rosa returned the crow to her bedroom, where he returned to contemplating the shiny spoon, rolled up her sleeves, and filled a bucket with soapy water.
“Something spill?” asked Uncle Alfonso, coming into the kitchen.
“There’s a drawing in the hall by the kitchen,” said Rosa bitterly, “and Grandmama thinks I did it, but I didn’t!”
Uncle Alfonso peered at her over his coffee cup. “I believe you, Rosalita,” he said, after a long moment. “Do you know who did?”
Rosa stared into the soapy water. Payne was convinced that nobody needed to know about the Scarling…and to be honest, Rosa would have liked to catch it herself, so she didn’t have to explain that she’d let a weird little monster loose. She was trying to help the studio, after all, and releasing the Scarling certainly didn’t count as helping at all.
But what am I going to say? That an evil carrot did it? No one’s going to believe that. I hardly believe it myself. She shook her head.
Uncle Alfonso didn’t ask her any more questions. He was a good uncle that way. Instead he squeezed her shoulder with his big, paint-stained hand, and left the kitchen.
There might have been a tear or two in the soapy water after that.
Rosa sniffled and wiped her nose. There was no point in crying. She still had to catch the Scarling. More importantly, she had to clean up the mess it had left in the hall.
Why does it hate the Mandolinis? What did we ever do to it?
Did some enemy of Tybalt’s make it, two hundred years ago?
That made some sense. It did not, however, get the drawing cleared away.
She picked up the bucket of hot water with both hands and trudged into the hall.
The drawing was gone.
THIRTEEN
Rosa stared at the blank space for a long time. It had been right there…hadn’t it?
