The Celestial Globe: The Kronos Chronicles: Book II (31 page)

“Dee is cleverer than the prince. He could catch you.”

“Petra, I am no use to anyone hiding under a dusty bed. I am proposing a sensible idea, one that we should have considered a long time ago. Do you not wish to know what Dee says when he thinks a conversation is private?”

“No.”

“Petra, listen—”

“I can’t!” Her voice broke. “You have to stay safe, and with me. I can’t risk losing you, too.”

Astrophil was silent. Then he said, “Very well. We will stay together. But we must do something. We cannot simply wait for Kit to help us.”

“That’s not the plan.”

“Then what is?”

“Today we go to Whitehall Palace. Tomorrow, Robert Cotton’s home.”

O
NE THING
P
ETRA
had learned from her time at Salamander Castle was that it is easier to be sneaky when you’re a servant, because wealthy people have a lifetime’s experience of pretending that the hired help don’t exist. After stealing a plain dress from the clothesline in Dee’s garden, and a sack of turnips from his kitchen, Petra was well equipped to escape the attention of anyone who mattered at the palace.

She avoided the grand dockhouse she remembered from her previous visit. Instead, she asked the oarsman to take her to the servants’ wharf, where deliveries were made. From there, it was easy to mingle with the palace servants, who all thought that she worked in a different quarter of the palace than theirs.

It wasn’t long before Petra found the kitchens, and Jessie.

“Hello,” said Petra, “I’m—”

“Oh, I remember you. You’re Kit’s friend. What’s this?” Jessie pointed at Petra’s sack.

“Turnips. Do you want them?”

“If you’ll help me chop.” Jessie passed Petra a knife. “I’m guessing that, since you don’t look like a lady today, you don’t mind not acting like one.”

As they cut the vegetables, Petra asked, “Do you remember the morning Gabriel Thorn died?”

“Didn’t Kit tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“What I told him. The same thing I said to the queen’s councillors—Walsingham and Dee—when they questioned me. What curious eyes you have, girl! Well, I don’t mind repeating to you what I said. You can’t keep a secret here.” She waved a rough, red hand at the kitchen. “We’re a pack of gossips.”

No wonder Kit knows the kitchen staff so well,
Astrophil commented.

“The guards who walk the hallway by the library say that Thorn never met anyone that morning,” Jessie began, “and as far as I know or care, he didn’t. But I was the one who popped upstairs to see if Thorn needed anything. And from the smell of him, he’d already had plenty of wine, and it being early in the morning, too! He was muttering to himself. Total nonsense, as far as I could tell, but I would have thought that even if Thorn didn’t meet anybody that day, he
meant
to, because he was saying, ‘Cotton’s got the globe. I have to tell him. Why isn’t he here already?’ ”

“Cotton? A globe? Tell who? Tell Cotton, or tell somebody else? Who’s ‘he’?”

“How am I to know?”

Ask about Raleigh and Dee,
Astrophil suggested.

“Could Thorn have been talking about seeing Walter Raleigh?” Petra asked.

“Raleigh?” Jessie grinned. “He was in the palace, all right, but he went nowhere near the library that morning.”

“How do you know?”

“Why, because he’s a rake.”

“A rake?”

“A flirt. He was making pretty with Eleanor over there, and if you doubt that, her blush will tell you the truth.”

Petra glanced over at the young woman standing within earshot, stuffing a game hen, her cheeks on fire. “I see. Well, do you think Thorn wanted to meet with John Dee?”

“Maybe. They’re both on the queen’s council, and see each other often. I hear they don’t much care for each other, though.”

Ask about Walsingham,
said Astrophil.

Him?
Petra remembered the self-important man, with his pointed beard and hair oil that smelled like dead flowers.
Why?

On that day you went to this palace for the first time, Walsingham was very convinced that Thorn died of heart failure. A murderer would, of course, want everyone to think that the victim died of natural causes.

“What about Francis Walsingham?” Petra asked Jessie.

“Well, I suppose that whatever’s true for Dee is true for him, right? It’s just as likely that Thorn would have met with one as with the other. And Walsingham’s got more power, politically speaking, than Dee. Walsingham’s the South, and he sure lets us know it when we have to prepare a special dish for him!”

“Thanks, Jessie.” Petra handed her the knife.

“You’ll always get a straight answer from me. And I’ll tell you something else: you and Kit are two peas in a pod. Here you are, echoing the very same questions he asked.”

Astrophil said,
What I would like to know is this: why has he not shared this information with you, Petra, if he really wishes to help?

“Jessie . . . have you seen Kit lately?”

Jessie paused before replying, and Petra instantly regretted her question, because it made her sound like someone who had been kissed and forgotten—and this, it seemed, was exactly the case.

Sympathetically, the woman said, “No, dear.”

Petra left the kitchen, left the palace, left the grounds, and left the servants’ wharf, but as the hired boat rowed toward the center of London, Petra couldn’t leave behind the dull weight of rejection and disappointment. And by the time her boat docked cityside, anger had kindled within her. Kit owed her some answers.

Petra walked through west London, searching for Shoe Lane. This was where she and Kit had stopped, and he had said his home was nearby, and he had confessed that he didn’t want her to leave England.

Was this why he hadn’t told her about his conversation with
Jessie? Was Kit only pretending to help Petra? Maybe he was really just trying to keep her in London.

Petra sped up her pace. When she reached Shoe Lane, she began to stop strangers, asking after Kit. She turned from street to street, but with no success.

She kicked at a pile of trash.

Where was he?

“T
OM
.” Neel nudged him.

Tomik was staring straight ahead as they walked toward the Liberties.

“Hey,”
Neel persisted.

“I’m not talking to you. If you don’t want to try to find Petra, that’s your—”

Neel grabbed Tomik’s shoulder and dragged him to a halt. “Look!” He pointed at Tomik’s pocket.

It was glowing. Tomik snatched the crystal from his pocket.

Neel and Tomik had almost reached the Liberties when they veered west with eager feet. They began to run, the Glowstone shining a deeper and brighter blue in Tomik’s palm.

Neel gasped, and Tomik wrenched his gaze away from the crystal.

There, standing not ten feet from them, was a tall girl. Her dark, glossy hair was loose, her chin a little square. She was scowling in a way they knew very well.

Tomik’s shout was triumphant. “Petra!”

S
HE TURNED
at the sound of her name. Her silver eyes lit up like stars. Then she hurtled across the distance between them and leaped into Tomik’s arms. He caught her and spun in a circle.

“Put me down!” She laughed, not meaning what she said.

And that was a good thing, because Tomik didn’t let go of her until Neel cleared his throat.

A tin leg poked out of Petra’s hair and swept it aside. “Tomik! Neel!” Astrophil, perched as usual on her ear, waved another leg. “How extraordinary to find you here! Is it really you?”

Petra went to Neel. He stood, uncertain and still. She slipped her hand into his. It had changed since the time they had sworn a blood oath to each other. It had grown hard, like an animal’s paw. Neel shifted his fingers to turn her palm up toward the sky and pressed his thumb against her fencing calluses.

Slyly, he said, “All right, Petali. What have you been up to?”

Petra smiled, and her face held a joy that bursts to life only when an impossible dream has come true.

She bubbled with questions as her friends led her through the Liberties. This part of town, which had once intrigued Petra, suddenly became uninteresting in the face of the miracle that had made Tomik and Neel appear before her.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

“By ship,” said Tomik.

“But how do you and Neel even know each other?”

Neel warily glanced at Tomik.

“Um,” Tomik began, “when you disappeared from Okno, I tried to find you and . . . got lost. I ran into Neel, and . . . we didn’t know who the other was at first. But then we figured it out, and . . . became friends.”

“Exactly,” said Neel.

“How did you find us?” Petra asked.

“And how did you know that we were in London?” Astrophil added.

Tomik jammed a closed fist deep into his pocket.

Neel answered, “Just luck, I guess.”

“Luck?” said Astrophil.

“I don’t believe you,” Petra stated.

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than luck,” Neel admitted. “We went to a scryer, and—”

“You
scryed
?”

“No need to count the ways in which I’m not the wisest fellow ever born. I’ve heard it all before. But the scrying
did
give us a clue to where you were. During the scrying, Tomik asked about you.”

“Neel said, ‘London,’ ” Tomik added. “And then he mentioned something else that we don’t understand. He said an English word:
cotton
.”

“Wait,” said Petra. “You don’t mean
Robert
Cotton, do you?”

T
HEY SAT IN
Neel and Tomik’s room at the Sign of the Spoked Wheel. Crowded around a small table by a smaller window, the friends talked for hours. They didn’t discuss everything that had happened to them since they last saw each other, but they came close.

Then Petra said, “Tell me more about the Celestial Globe.”

“The globe doesn’t matter,” Tomik curtly replied. “We found you. We’ll sail away as soon as we tell Treb and Andras.”

“Right.” Neel rolled his eyes. “Treb’s going to be oh so pleased with that idea.”

“Petra cannot leave London,” said Astrophil, and then explained.

“You can’t be serious,” said Tomik, when the spider had finished telling them about Dee’s hold on Petra.

Neel groaned. “Pet, you’ve got to break that mental link with Dee.”

“I’d love to. Just tell me
how
.”

Neel spread his hands helplessly. “I’m not a mind-magician. But we’re talking about something that’s a lot like scrying. So my guess is that you should get him to look at something shiny long enough, then control his attention, and . . . well, I don’t know what you do next.”

“You and John Dee handle metal on a regular basis,” Astrophil reminded Petra. “It would not be hard to make him focus on a shiny object.”

Though Petra didn’t think Dee would be easily deceived, she nodded. “I can try.”

“Now,” said Astrophil, “let us discuss the globe.”

“Why?” Tomik tilted his chair back, folding his arms across his chest. “What’s the point? Before, we didn’t know whether Neel was talking about the Celestial Globe or Petra when he scryed. Now we do. The globe’s not here. Petra is.”

Astrophil jumped to the window and began to pace along the sill. “At the scrying, you asked Neel about Petra. Treb asked him about the globe. Neel gave the same response to you both. Perhaps the globe
and
Petra are in London.”

They all turned to Neel.

“What’re you looking at me for?” he asked. “
I
don’t know.”

“Say the Celestial Globe is here,” Tomik said. “So what? It’s got nothing to do with Petra.”

“No?” said Astrophil. “Then why did Ariel mention ‘the heavens pressed into a ball’? That description sounds a great deal like the Celestial Globe. If the word
terrestrial
refers to the earth, then
celestial
refers to the sky—the heavens.”