“Dita,” Petra whispered. She had lost her voice.
But David easily found his. “Mother!” He spun around and ran into the dark depths of the house. “Mother!”
2
The Making of the Clock
THE TWO MEN carried Mikal Kronos into his shop.
Petra shut the door behind them. She felt mechanical, like one of her father’s inventions. She couldn’t look away from the cloth covering his face. It was stiff with old blood. Petra knew the bandage needed to be changed, but didn’t know if she could do it.
A thousand questions tried to claw their way out of Petra’s mouth, but only one escaped: “What happened?” Petra was astonished to hear her own voice. It was small and frightened.
“Your da had an accident,” the heavyset man replied.
Dita briskly entered from the hallway. Her back was straight, her hair wrapped in a dark blue scarf, and she was wiping her hands on her starched apron. David followed her, carrying Stella on his shoulder. Dita caught the tall man staring with curiosity at the bird. He glanced away, embarrassed.
“’Lo, missus,” his companion said. “My name’s Martin. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. Your husband’s had a hard journey. Would you show us where we could set him down for a bit of rest?”
“He is my uncle.” Dita frowned. “Come this way. His bedroom is here,” she said, and showed them to a small room on the ground floor with a square window and a narrow bed.
After the two men had laid their burden onto the bed, Dita took her uncle’s hand and bit her lip as she looked at his bandages. “David, get some water.”
David ran out of the room. But Stella launched herself from the departing boy’s shoulder and flew back, settling on a bedpost. The raven craned her neck to watch as Dita gently peeled away the gauze covering her uncle’s face. “How did this happen?” Dita demanded.
The two strangers exchanged a look.
Petra hung back. Her hand was braced on the door frame. Dita’s back blocked Petra’s view of her father. Petra waited for someone to speak. When no one did, she answered her cousin’s question. “They said it was an accident.”
“Really.” Dita’s voice was flat. She pinned the men with a fierce glare. “An accident? You will have an accident, too, if you don’t get out of this house right now.”
Martin smiled and spread his hands. “Now, you can’t blame us for—”
The bird shrieked and sprang from the bedpost, diving at the men with sharp claws and a sharper beak. Startled, they ran from the house, tripping, cursing, and covering their faces with their hands as Stella darted at them like a flying dagger.
When Dita spoke to Petra her voice was both rough and kind. “I want you to leave the room as well.”
Petra hesitated. Then she slipped into the hallway. She ran upstairs to her room. Through the window, she could still hear the bird’s furious screaming.
After that, no one questioned that Stella belonged to the family.
DITA HAD MOVED into the house with her husband and son years ago, after a long drought that had made the brassica fields dry, crisp, and useless. There was no harvest that year, and the one the year before that had been poor. Farmers across Bohemia grew desperate. The prince’s court in Prague felt the pinch of higher prices for reserves of oil used for cooking, lighting lamps in fashionable homes, and making weapons, which relied on the intense heat of fires made with brassica oil. The young prince’s response was to raise taxes.
Outraged, the countryside began to plot against the prince. But then key members of the rebellion mysteriously disappeared from their homes. The plot came to nothing. Some men lost their lives that year. Others, like Josef, lost their livelihood.
Josef and Dita came to the house at the Sign of the Compass with not much more than their son, David. Their farm, their home, and almost everything in it had been sold. Though Petra knew why they had come to live with them, she also knew that her father hoped Dita would become a second mother to Petra. Petra resented this. First of all, she had never even known what it was like to have a mother, since hers had died while giving birth to her. Petra felt that there was no need to replace what she didn’t feel was missing.
And she loved living alone with her father. He taught her lots more than she had ever learned from the wig-wearing village schoolmaster. He sometimes followed her advice, like when he began working on metal tools that were invisible. Petra always enjoyed watching him work. He didn’t use his hands to build anything, but stared at objects with concentration, making gears and drills and nails dance across the room in a shining pattern. He explained to Petra that using his hands was slow and cumbersome. His fingers would block his view of the very thing he was working on. When he said this, Petra suggested that other people would like to see the holes they were drilling. Might not invisible tools be useful? Petra’s idea was good in theory but not in practice. Try hitting a nail with an invisible hammer and you will understand why. But at least her father took the idea seriously and produced a few tools that he stored somewhere in the shop. Petra could never find them, though. This wasn’t very surprising, since the tools were (after all) invisible.
The very best part of living alone with her father was that Petra was free. She was free to wear what she wanted, sleep when she wanted, eat what she wanted, and say what she wanted. It might have crossed her father’s mind that he had no idea how to raise a young girl, but if it did he was quickly distracted by a few days locked in his workshop with a loaf of stale bread and the beginnings of a fresh idea. He was happy and Petra was happy. But when Dita’s family lost their farm and he invited his niece to come live with them, he began looking at his daughter in a thoughtful way. He had had the same expression on his face when the tin rabbit was lost, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was responsible for something he couldn’t take care of all the time.
And so began a struggle between Petra and her cousin. Petra waged a war of resistance. Dita fought back with persistence. Still, over the years, Petra had come to value many things about her cousin. One of them was the woman’s honesty. Dita did what she said she would. And she always said what she thought. Dita was not one to mince words or use them lightly.
So when Dita knocked on Petra’s door an hour after the strangers had left, and entered without waiting to be invited, Petra held her tongue, though at any other time she would have shouted about her right to privacy. Nervous dread sang in her stomach.