Petra turned her back on him, unnerved. She walked toward Sir Humfrey, trying to keep her pace steady. When she approached Sir Humfrey’s desk, the blank wall appeared behind her, and her shoulders sank with relief.

The librarian noted down the books she was taking. “There you go.” He handed the small pile to her.

“There was a man in there …” Petra described the reader who had stared at her. “Who is he?”

“Ah, that would be Master John Dee. He’s the ambassador from England. A very learned man. He speaks many languages, even dead ones.”

Despite her plan, Petra did not feel eager to return to the third floor, if the third floor held Master Dee.

BUT RETURN SHE DID. Luckily, she did not see John Dee again during her third-floor excursions. Unluckily, it did not seem that what she really wanted was on the third floor: bedrooms.

“Well, I could have told you that,” Sadie said. “The private chambers of anyone of rank are on the fourth floor. That’s where I work.”

They were at dinner, talking quietly amid the uproar of hundreds of men, women, boys, and girls. Dana, one of Sadie’s friends, had finally turned away from them to tell anyone else who would listen about her latest crush. Petra seized the opportunity to ask Sadie for a favor.

“Can you find out something for me?” Petra asked casually, reaching for the large bowl of stewed cabbage.

Sadie’s face grew wary. She lowered her fork. “What?”

“Have you ever heard of something called a Worry Vial?”

When Sadie shook her head, Petra began to explain what the vial was, and what it looked like. “The darker it is, the better. Would you tell me if you see one that looks really purple, and whose room it’s in?”

“Petra, you’re going to get into so much trouble. Don’t you understand that you could get really hurt? You should go back to your village.”

“I’m not going to take anyone’s Worry Vial. I swear.” Petra crossed her heart in mock solemnity. “Anyway,” she continued lightly, “the worst thing that could possibly happen is that someone will catch me cleaning a room where I don’t really belong. Then I’d just say that I’m sick of working for Iris. That’s believable. I could claim that I’m hoping to prove myself in a new position as a chambermaid. Maybe I’d get fired, but I won’t get sent to prison. Hey, will you pass me the salt?”

Sadie shook her head. “Don’t try to pretend that we’re not talking about something truly dangerous, Petra. If the Worry Vial works the way you say it does, don’t you think that if they catch you playing with some powerful lord’s vial, they’ll be a tiny bit suspicious?”

Petra shrugged. “As far as anyone knows, Worry Vials are foolproof. And the gentry don’t expect people like me to even know that the vial is anything other than a decorative vase. If someone sees me handling a vial, I’ll just say I’m dusting it.”

“You’re going to do it whether I help you or not, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But it’d take me a lot longer. I’d have to search dozens of rooms. Of course, I’m more likely to get caught that way. But what else can I do?”

That worked.

A few days later, when they were tucked under their wool blankets in the darkness, Sadie whispered, “Try the captain of the guard’s private chambers. Fourth floor, northwest corner. The doorknob is shaped like a boar’s head. But it’s usually locked. I don’t know how you’ll get in. And I won’t help you do that.”

“Is the vial dark purple?”

Sadie paused before replying. “It’s black.”

“THE POWDERED BERYL does absolutely nothing!” Iris pressed her forehead against her fist. “The dye is still yellow.”

The gap of time between now and the birthday celebration was narrowing, and as they worked harder on the production of a new primary color, Iris grew ever more distressed.

“It’s not that yellow,” Petra tried to comfort her.

“I could fill my chamber pot with that dye!”

I think you are going about this in the wrong way, Astrophil commented. You keep mixing things together in the hope that you are going to produce a color that cannot be made by blending other colors. Do you not think that you should look for one thing that can produce one color?

Petra repeated Astrophil’s suggestion to Iris as if it were her own.

Iris considered this, and murmured, “Rainbows.”

“What?”

“A rainbow is one thing that shows us many colors.”

“Yes, but we already know what those colors are. There’s nothing new about them.”

“But sometimes stones seem to have rainbows inside. Like diamonds. A diamond is clear, but if you look closely you can see flashes of rainbow light—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. But what if there’s a color that we haven’t noticed, hidden among the rest?”

“You want to turn diamonds into dye?” Petra was skeptical. “Don’t be daft! Diamonds are too hard. You can’t grind them or melt them down easily. Perhaps a moonstone.”

Petra fetched a handful of the clear, translucent jewels and began to melt them down in a bowl held over a green flame fed by brassica oil. The moonstones puddled into a bluish gel.

Try an opal, Astrophil suggested. These milky white stones with sparkles of different colors had a reputation for bad luck. But Petra was not a superstitious sort of girl, so she put an opal to the test.

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 na**d 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.

When they reached the chambers at the northwest corner, they spotted a room whose doorknob was a snarling boar’s head. Neel put one eye to the keyhole, screwing the other one shut. Then he took a small glass out of his pocket and pressed one end against the door, holding the other end to his ear. Nodding briskly, he moved his fingers over the door and they heard a click.

Checking the hallway to make sure no one was there, Petra slipped in after Neel. She held her breath, hoping that the captain of the guard was happily stuffing food in his mouth someplace far from here.

They shut the door softly. The captain’s bedchamber was a suite. They had entered into an empty drawing room. A door to the bedroom was at the opposite end.

“Did Sadie say where he keeps it?” Neel whispered.

“It’ll be right by his bed.”

“That ain’t a very safe spot to keep all your secrets.”

“Nobody knows that you can suck the secrets out of Worry Vials. Everyone thinks they’re reliable. And you’d better not tell anyone otherwise.”

Neel unlocked the bedroom door. “Think of all the krona you could get from blackmailing …” His eyes were wide.

“Not now!” She pushed open the door. And there, right on the nightstand, was a fat, black bottle. Petra reached in her pocket for a flask of water. She uncorked the Worry Vial and poured the water in.

“How long do we have to wait?” Neel scooped up a pile of coins on the dressing table.

“Neel,” she hissed. “Put that back.”

“What for? I want to get something out of this, too.”