Jarek pulled on the reins. His hands settled in his lap, but they still gripped the leather straps. “He may have sons. Angry ones.”
Martin thumped Jarek on the shoulder. “No fear, my friend,” he said, and pointed toward the door, which had opened. In the doorway stood a girl, tall for her age, which was twelve. Underneath a long tangle of brown hair her face was wary. She was dressed in a nightgown, but stood defiantly, as if to say that she knew that wasn’t normal but didn’t care. She stared straight at them. Her eyes were narrowed—but perhaps, Jarek thought, this was because of the sun and not because she already hated them.
Martin leaned to whisper in Jarek’s ear. “As I said, don’t worry. He’s only got her.”
It seemed to Jarek that his backache had gotten worse.
The mare sighed. Then she spoke silently in his mind the way she did with no other human, for she knew none who had Jarek’s gift to understand her. If you were a horse, she told him, you would be used to bearing such unpleasant burdens.
1
The Sign of the Compass
EARLIER THAT MORNING, Petra Kronos had woken up to the tick tick tick of metal. It was not, as you might imagine, a clock. It did not have chiming bells, and it did not have two hands. Yet it did have eight legs and something like a face, a very tiny one punctuated by two eyes, specks of twinkling green. Astrophil, Petra’s tin spider, scampered around the nightstand next to her bed, calling, “Wake up! Wake up, you sloth! Cave bat! Ground squirrel!” His shiny body vibrated as he shouted.
Petra rubbed at the grit in the corner of her eye. “Just because you must have stayed up last night reading a book on all the animals that hibernate doesn’t mean you have to show it off.”
Astrophil folded his front two legs in a good impersonation of a human schoolteacher. “In fact, sloths do not hibernate. They are simply very, very lazy.”
“Hmm.” Though the morning sun was already making the room warm, Petra snuggled under the thin linen sheet. “I bet they’re stupid, too.”
“Oh, yes.”
“The sort of animals who just can’t take a hint,” Petra said. She yawned and closed her eyes.
“Well …” Astrophil relaxed his legs out of their stiff pose. “There is one rare sloth, the Spotted Angola Sloth, which is known to be quick-witted.”
Petra lay still.
“And generous of spirit.”
No response came from the bed.
“And easily moved by the persistent pleas of friends,” Astrophil added.
Petra rolled over, her back to Astrophil.
“The Spotted Angola Sloth is also prudent, especially when threatened by the prospect of waking up one morning to find sticky, metallic spiderwebs crisscrossing her entire face.”
“A dreadful fate,” Petra declared. She flung back the sheet and slipped out of bed. The sound of clucking hens floated in through the one tall window. A rooster must have crowed sometime earlier that morning, but it had not broken Petra’s steady sleep. She pushed back the tousled hair that she stubbornly refused, against the repeated wishes of her grownup cousin Dita, to braid into something resembling neatness. Petra’s eyes were gray—or, to be more precise, they were silvery, like they each had been made with liquid metal anchored in a bright circle by a black center. They looked just like her father’s eyes. In general, she resembled him greatly. This usually pleased her.
She turned to a shelf that ran along the white wall between one corner of the room and a rectangular bulge, which was the chimney that began in the kitchen fireplace just below. The rough wooden shelf was littered with bottles, sheets of heavy paper, a few broken goose quills, and a small box the shape and glossy brown color of a horse chestnut. It was wooden and had a hinged lid. Petra took the box and plucked down a bottle.
Astrophil shot a sparkling thread across the room so that it hit the wall next to the shelf. With one swing, he launched himself several feet to perch on the shelf’s edge.
Petra uncorked the bottle and opened the chestnut-shaped box to reveal a miniature spoon, into which she poured thick green brassica oil. Astrophil sucked from the spoon with a delighted noise. After he had drained the oil, his eyes deepened in color and glowed.
“Well,” Petra said, corking the bottle. “If you’re hungry, the others must be, too.”
Astrophil quickly crept up her arm and dug his legs into her shoulder, piercing through her thin summer nightgown.
“Ow!”
If she expected Astrophil to apologize, he didn’t.
“By the way,” he said, “I was not reading a book last night.”
“Oh?” Petra shut the bedroom door behind her. She jogged down the stairs with unnecessary force. The spider bounced up and down. They reached the second floor. A whirring, clanking sound began to come from downstairs. “Then why do you suddenly know so much about zoology?”
“I was reading ephemera,” he said, referring to the thin booklets stacked in her father’s library. “You know I can only turn pages, not those heavy leather book bindings. If books are not already open, I cannot open them myself.”
Petra raced across the landing and began to hop down the next flight of steps. Astrophil gripped her more tightly. The whirring sound was getting louder.
Astrophil said, “If someone does not remember to leave out the beautiful, big books for a poor insomniac spider, what is a poor insomniac spider to do but consult the badly written ephemera?”
“Why were you reading about sloths and squirrels anyway?”
Astrophil paused. “I wanted to learn about creatures like me. But there was nothing in the ephemera about spiders.”
Petra stopped. She began to walk down the steps at a normal pace. “I’m sorry, Astro,” she said. And she really was, for there was no book that could tell him about creatures like himself, even if she took down the zoological guide to arachnids her father had consulted when he made Astrophil. “I’ll remember to leave a book out before I go to bed.”
She reached the ground floor and opened the door to her father’s workshop, which was also the family store. It was here that one could buy metallic objects and machines crafted by Mikal Kronos.
“It is just that I am a very fast reader,” Astrophil said.
“Yes, you are,” Petra responded with pride.
The workshop looked like you would never find what you were looking for, and sounded like you would never be able to match up a noise with the thing that made it. But it was—or so her father always claimed—arranged in a very logical order. Then again, it was a logic that only he could understand. But in his absence Petra learned to find what she needed (usually), even if it took her twice or three times as long as it would have taken him.