“But he’s trying.”
“Petra.” Her father’s voice was stern as he gripped her shoulders. “The clock is no longer our concern. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” His white bandages confronted her. She nodded, although she knew he could not see her. “I do.”
8
Firefly
A FEW DAYS LATER, when Petra was visiting Tomik at the Sign of Fire, he hissed at her so Master Stakan wouldn’t hear: “Lucie and Pavel leave tomorrow morning. Dawn. I’ll be there.”
Petra practically ran home.
Through the twilight, she saw the sign with a compass that looked like a flower transformed into a machine, or a machine transformed into a flower. Petra veered. She sprinted around the house to the back. She took off her shoes and loped through Dita’s small garden.
Petra had avoided coming here. Not because of Dita’s rows of green plants, but because of the building not far from them. It was her father’s smithy, with its forge and a water-filled slack tub for cooling red-hot iron. A little over a month ago, the sight of the smithy would have been disheartening. But tonight her mind burned as brightly with excitement as any piece of fire-tempered metal. Ever since Astrophil had suggested that her father had lost his sight while trying to secure a noblewoman’s education for her, Petra felt a heavy guilt. She wanted to turn that feeling into the glow of pride.
For twelve years, she had not been what the villagers might call an impressive girl. Petra attended classes at the schoolhouse, but found them dreadfully boring, and received average marks. She was lean, not exactly pretty—she had high, wide cheekbones and the odd silver eyes of her father. Mikal Kronos always claimed she had a knack for metalworking, but she’d never really applied herself to learning what he could do. Now that she was old enough to become her father’s apprentice, and at least learn the more ordinary aspects of his trade, there was so much that he was unable to do, unable to show her.
But these things would change.
Petra entered through the back door. She went to the library and scooped a protesting Astrophil off the pages of a book about geometry. Then she walked into her bedroom, shut the door behind her, and raised her right palm to face the flustered spider.
“Time for bed,” she announced. “We’re leaving tomorrow. Will you wake me two hours before dawn?”
He didn’t reply at first. Then he said slowly, “Your plan to go to Prague is brave, Petra, but is it wise?”
“What could happen to us? We’ll be with Lucie and Pavel. Besides, we’re just going to explore the option of rescuing Father’s eyes. This will be a preliminary investigation. You know I wouldn’t do anything dangerous.”
If Astrophil had eyebrows, he would have raised them in disbelief. “This adventure could be like a riptide.”
“What do you mean?”
“A riptide is when you swim in the sea, close to the shore, never intending to go out very far, and then an underwater current sucks you out far into the deep water.”
“How poetically grim of you, Astrophil. First of all, Bohemia is landlocked, remember? We have no seas. So we’ve nothing to fear from riptides.”
“You are deliberately misunderstanding me.”
“And second, you’re forgetting just how much we can learn from this experience.”
The spider noticed which word she had stressed. “You are deliberately tempting me.”
“Think about everything that Prague has to offer. The most learned scholars in Bohemia live there. And what about the prince’s library? Wouldn’t you like to at least see it?”
The spider was quiet, thinking. Then he said, “I suppose that someone must look after you.”
“Four o’clock in the morning, then?” Petra said cheerfully.
“If you actually manage to get out of bed at four o’clock, I will eat my spiderweb.”
Petra pulled a thick burlap sack from a drawer and filled it with a jug of brassica oil, the little wooden box containing Astrophil’s spoon, a knife, two pairs of trousers, three drawstring shirts, and a work smock. With a grimace, she added a brown skirt that was stiff from having never been worn. She thought a moment, and then tossed in clothes for winter: a hard leather coat and a woolen scarf Dita had knitted for her. Pavel and Lucie might not stay long in Prague. But that didn’t mean she had to leave the city with them.
She blew out the candle. She would pack the rest of what she needed in the early morning, when she was less likely to draw the attention of the rest of her family. David, she was sure, was still awake in his room on the top floor, above hers.
Petra struggled to fall asleep. She thought of how happy her father would be when she returned with his stolen eyes. She would suggest new tin pets to craft, like a firefly. She imagined a green light blinking on, off, on, off, and on again, until finally everything was dark and she slept.
ASTROPHIL HAD TO PINCH her several times before she sat up. “Ow! Astro! Is that really necessary?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it is entertaining.”
Petra dragged on her clothes, still sleepy. She took a sheet of paper down from a shelf, along with a goose quill and a pot of ink. She forged the note from Dita to Lucie and Pavel. She blew the ink dry. Then Petra ripped a scrap from the empty bottom of the page, and tucked the forged letter in her bag. Inking her quill, Petra bent over her desk again. On the scrap of paper she wrote:
Dear Father, Dita, Josef, and David,
I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry about me.
Love,
Petra
Petra shouldered her packed bag. She softly stole across the hall to her father’s library, then began riffling through books and papers.
“What are you doing, precisely?” asked Astrophil.
“Looking for drawings or notes about the clock,” she replied. Her father’s loss was connected to the clock, and she needed to have as much information about it as possible.
When false dawn began to brighten the library, filling it with the gray light that comes just before the sun rises, Petra gave up. Her father must have left any papers about the clock in Prague, probably in the hands of the prince.
There was one thing left for her to do. She unlocked the safe in the floor and took some krona —not much. Then she resealed the secret compartment.
She was ready to leave the room when something about the floor caught her attention. In the smooth wooden board hiding the safe she saw the pattern of extremely tiny holes. She wondered why she had never noticed them before. Perhaps they could be seen only by dawn light. Certainly she had never been awake this early to gaze at the floor of her father’s study —or to do anything at all, for that matter.