Are you sure you did not yell at him first?
Petra slowed her pace. But she defended herself. He was being impossible! He said he would help, and he hasn’t even bothered trying to get a message to me. And he’s been working here the whole time!
Exactly. He has been working here the whole time.
Petra stopped in her tracks.
Do you think, the spider continued, that he would be shoveling horse manure if he did not really want to be part of the plan?
Petra hated it when Astrophil was right—which was very often. But she turned around and ran to catch up with Neel. The boy glanced at her and looked away. He continued to push the wheelbarrow until they had reached a corner of the grounds reserved for drying manure in the sun to sell later as fertilizer.
“At least it’s not hot,” Petra ventured. She had been stuck inside the castle for so long that she had not realized that the weather had truly changed. The air was chilly enough to make the tip of her nose cold. A brisk wind blew across the dusty yard. “The stink would be really bad in summer. And the flies.”
Neel tipped the horse droppings into a large pile. “So I’m supposed to be grateful, then?”
Maybe you can find a cheerier subject to discuss than manure, Astrophil suggested to Petra.
Petra pulled her father’s notebook from under her shirt, where she had tucked it into the waistband of her skirt. “Neel, I want you to do something for me. This is one of the most valuable things I own. It can’t be found, but I don’t have a good place to keep it. Would you hide it for me, please? There’s no one else I can trust.” She held out the book.
He wiped his hands on his trousers and took it. He flipped through the pages. “It’s just a bunch of signs and drawings.”
“It’s my father’s. It’s about the clock. I don’t really understand what it all means, but it could be important. I don’t think the prince knows it exists, but if he did”—Petra took a deep breath —“he’d probably do just about anything to have it.”
Petra knew she was taking a risk. If what her father said was true, if the prince truly didn’t know how to use the clock, then the book could indeed be very valuable to him. She couldn’t leave it in her locked chest. She was sure that the servants’ lockers were regularly searched by the housekeeper. If Harold Listek found the notebook, he might not think it was important. But if he did …
Petra hoped Neel would hide it. The tricky thing was, now that Neel knew the book might be important to the prince, he might try to sell it for the price of several horses.
Neel looked at her. She could read the same thought in his tawny eyes. She almost snatched the book out of his hands. He glanced away, peering at the pages again. He lifted a brow. “Huh.”
“What?” she snapped. She should never have shown him the book. What was the point of trying to win the trust of someone you cannot trust?
“Your da understands the idea of zero.”
“What?” She looked over his shoulder to see which pages had caught his interest. They showed strings of equations. Oh, those pages, she thought. “What’s ‘zero’? Is that a Romany word?”
“That is zero.” He pointed to a symbol shaped like the letter O. “You know your numbers, right? One, two, three, four—”
“Yes.” She glared.
“Well, zero comes before one.”
That had to be wrong. “Nothing comes before one.”
“That’s kind of the point.”
He ruffled his hair and turned a page. Petra balled her fists in frustration.
Astrophil spoke up, addressing Neel. “Are you trying to say that zero operates as a placeholder for calculations? That it represents nothingness?”
Neel nodded. “But the gadje don’t use it. It’s stupid that you don’t. You can’t do knotty math without it.”
“Do you understand what the equations mean?” Astrophil asked.
“No, but I can guess that Petra’s da was trying to measure energy, not blocks of wood.”
Petra was speechless. It was a good thing Astrophil wanted to do all of the talking.
“How do you know this?” the spider asked Neel.
He shrugged. “Zero comes from the same place as my people. Even if it hadn’t, we would have picked it up along the way. It’s a neat idea. The best thing about wandering everywhere is that you can choose what you like of a place and take it with you, like almonds off the tree.”
“How is it possible that the Roma are interested in complex mathematics and yet your people cannot read?”
“It’s not that we can’t. Why should we read?”
“Well, to pass along information. To record your history.”
“Information should be shared by people, not things. These pages are just dead trees.” He frowned at the spider. “Any history worth having should be alive.”
Petra held up an irritable hand. “Are you two talking philosophy? Because if I wanted to listen to that I would be sitting on a splintery bench in the Okno schoolhouse. Neel, will you hide my father’s book or not?”
The boy weighed the book in his hand. Then he put it under his shirt. “Yeah, sure. I’ll hang on to it for you.” Then he seemed to guess her wish to change the subject. “You seen the menagerie?”
“No. What’s that?”
“The prince’s animal collection. Come on, Petali.” He tugged at her sleeve. They walked across the grounds until they reached a locked door. Neel held his hand a few inches from the keyhole and twisted his fingers. The door clicked, and he pushed it open.
The garden was a paradise of green geometric shapes. There was an elaborate maze and enormous flowers that Petra had never before seen in her life. Some of the blossoms were as large as her head. She was astonished that so many flowers were growing. It was, after all, already October. Butterflies fluttered like scraps of colored paper. A tiny, needle-beaked bird with wings that were a constant blur ducked in and out of the flowers.
“That’s a hummingbird,” said Neel. “Looks like a flying blue-green jewel, doesn’t it? Hummingbirds don’t live in Bohemia. And you’d never see all these flowers blooming about in one spot at the same time. Guess the prince had em magicked.”
He led her to a series of large cages. Monkeys screeched and clambered upside down at the top of one cage, swinging themselves back and forth. In another cage, they saw a bewildering creature with shiny fur, webbed feet, and a duck’s bill. “It lays eggs, just like a spider,” Astrophil informed them. This just made the animal seem even more bizarre.