It flowed into a brown, glistening liquid.
Iris took one look at it and burst into tears. “Nothing ever works for me!” The old woman began to sink into the floor and holes appeared in her clothes, growing wider and wider.
Run, Petra! Astrophil ordered in a panicked voice.
But Petra had noticed that one of Iris’s tears had fallen into the bowl. As the acid tear plopped into the melted opal, the color of the liquid in the bowl transformed. Petra had never seen anything like it. “Iris!” she shouted, her eyes flicking from the bowl to the floor, which was dipping into a cavity, causing Petra to slide toward the white and nearly naked woman. “Iris! Look in the bowl!”
To Petra’s relief, the woman did. Her tears stopped. Her clothes hung in shreds. The floor beneath her feet was a shallow basin, but it had ceased sinking and spreading.
“There it is!” Iris breathed. “Rodolfinium.”
You can imagine that Petra wasn’t pleased by Iris’s name for the new primary color. She tried to hide her disgust, but she needn’t have worried. Iris wouldn’t have noticed Petra’s expression anyway. She was too enthralled by the new color in the bowl.
Colors tend to stir emotions in the heart. Blue seems peaceful but unreliable. Red makes you feel passionate. Yellow produces a feeling of energy and restlessness. The best way to describe rodolfinium is that when Petra gazed into the bowl, she felt lightheaded.
Iris was joyous, and told Petra to take the rest of the day off. “Go on, then! Scamper!”
Thinking to take advantage of Iris’s good mood, Petra asked if she could take a bottle of India ink with her. “I want to write down everything that happened today in my journal.”
“Of course you do! A fine idea! Yes, yes, take some ink. Just don’t walk off with any opals!” Iris beamed.
But Petra took more than a bottle of ink. You might say that Iris had trained her too thoroughly. Petra’s notion of what she needed was all too well informed. As Iris gazed into the bowl of rodolfinium, Petra took the following items in addition to India ink: powdered blue algae, sorrel vinegar, an empty bottle, iron tongs, and her third-floor pass.
19
The Captain’s Secrets
THE PAIR OF FOURTH-FLOOR GUARDS stared at the paper. They stared at the tongs holding the paper. Finally, they stared at the girl holding the tongs.
“Huh?” One of them scratched his nose.
“It’s my pass.”
“Well, give it over, then.”
“All right. But you probably should take the tongs, too.”
The two men eyed each other. Who was this jumped-up cellar brat? Why was she gripping her pass with a pair of tongs as if it were poisonous? Was she a lunatic, a Thinkers’ Wing experiment gone bad?
“What the blazes do we need tongs for?”
“My mistress is Countess Irenka December. She wrote the pass.”
The first man scrunched up his face in confusion, but the second muttered something in his ear. The first man winced.
“Fine. Hand over them tongs.”
But as the girl tried to pass the tongs, the folded note slipped to the ground.
“Blast!” growled one of the men. “Give em here.” He snatched the tongs and bent over, trying (and failing miserably) to pick up the pass. His fellow guard smirked.
“There!” On his fourth or fifth try, the guard triumphantly held up the crumpled piece of paper, secure in the tongs’ grip. The other guard clapped slowly, sarcastically.
The guard with the letter stopped smiling. “Uh, how do we open it?”
One guard held the letter with the tongs and the other tried to unfold it with his penknife, knocking it to the ground. Swearing loudly and long, neither of them noticed a dark shape slip by and dash down the hall to hide behind an enormous window curtain. The two guards continued to fumble with the pass, growing increasingly irritated.
“Give me them tongs!”
“Why? So you can drop the pass again? Give me my penknife back!”
“The girl gave them tongs to me, didn’t she?”
“Right. And she’s such an expert judge of character. Let’s nominate her for the Lion’s Paw.”
In the end, one of them managed to unfold the note by placing an edge of it under his boot and slipping the tongs into the crease, flipping over the first fold. He gripped the pass and held it high, keeping it a good distance from his face. “Fourth Floor Clearance,” it read, followed by a postscript saying that the assistant could check out library books. It was signed by Irenka December, Sixth Countess of Krumlov, and it bore a seal showing a white ermine. The guard heaved a long-suffering sigh and the paper wafted in the air. “Go on, then.” He handed the tongs and the letter back to the girl, who solemnly accepted them. She walked down the hallway.
Petra was very pleased with herself. She had grown up in a village with busy adults and a long-winded schoolmaster, so she had had many opportunities to practice faking other people’s handwriting. But working for Iris gave Petra a new edge in the art of forgery. Petra had learned that sorrel vinegar mixed with salt can make the strongest ink vanish. To produce the right kind of pass, all Petra had to do was apply the vinegary juice to the word “Third” and write the word “Fourth” in its place. The only problem was that sorrel vinegar lightens the color of paper as well as making the ink on it disappear, so a close look can easily reveal that a letter has been tampered with. Remembering Sir Humfrey Vitek’s reluctance to touch paper handled by Iris, Petra cooked up a plan that would get her past the fourth-floor guards and provide enough distraction so that Neel could slip past them as well.
Petra walked down the corridor that would take her north. Her feet echoed on the gray, veined marble floor. She tried to stay focused, even though the splendor around her—ancient suits of armor, and round-bellied Chinese vases balanced on pretty tables—begged for her attention. It was also hard to ignore Neel as he followed her up the hallway, dashing from one set of window curtains to the next. They had decided to break into the captain’s bedchamber during dinnertime, when he was likely to be away and there would be few people in the halls.
“What about your job?” Petra had asked Neel.
“Pfft,” had been Neel’s dismissive response. “I give em the slip all the time. Easy as breathing.”
A valet passed Petra in the hallway, giving her a doubtful look. Neel stayed behind his curtain. The valet shrugged and walked on. Otherwise, the halls stretched emptily before them as they then headed west.