The Plentiful Darkness Read online

  Small as she was, Rooney must have looked a fright. Dirt-spattered clothes, hair wet and flattened on her scalp, a grimace twisting her lips. She edged away from the house, tramping mud as she went. Rooney didn’t want to be scolded for snooping, or worse, handed over to Warybone’s warden.

  “Who’s there?” the man called. He came no closer to the shutters, kept in place by his wife’s clawed grip.

  The girl, however, hurried forward. No longer carrying the violin, her fingers curled around the frame. She squinted into the dark-pinched night, but Rooney had reached the edge of the yard and stood beyond the blue light glowing from the window, holding her mirror tight.

  “Come away from there, Devin.”

  “In a minute,” the girl said.

  Her eyes crawled across the night and settled on the spot right where Rooney stood. Rooney would have darted away, but any sudden movement might have drawn the girl’s attention. Instead, she hunched her shoulders, tucking her hands to her chest. Without meaning to, she squeezed, thumb pressing down. The mirror’s case clicked open.

  At the same time, the thinnest crack parted the clouds. Moonbeams fell gently. A frail spark of light glanced off the mirror’s surface like a startled moth. Scowling, Rooney snapped the case closed, and the pale shimmering winked out. She held very still, hoping the girl’s eyes would travel past her.

  The girl leaned farther out the window, as if she might swing her legs over the frame and climb through it. Her lips parted.

  Rooney squirmed. She held her breath.

  “No one’s there, Mother,” the girl shouted back, although she must have spotted Rooney. A fat drop of rain plunked down from the eaves onto her head, and she ducked back inside, passing a hand over her hair.

  Rooney’s legs wobbled in relief.

  Only for a moment, though.

  The girl no longer watched her from the window, but the shiver tunneling down Rooney’s spine told her that someone still did.

  3

  THE ROUGHHOUSE BOYS

  Rooney spun around. A splotch of darkness, deeper than the rest of the night, shadowed the air beside her. It drifted closer. A strange presence hidden in a cloak of fog. She flinched away from the unseen eyes that most surely watched her. A cold prickle touched her skin, and she ran, as if something chased her.

  Up the hill she dashed, then Rooney skidded to a stop on the rain-slicked cobblestones. She’d reached the spot she’d meant to find, a small slope high above Warybone, so thick with thorns and greenery, and so near the tower, she’d thought it too creepy for the roughhouse boys to gather.

  But there they were, the four of them clogging the hillside.

  She sucked in a breath. The air was thinner here, the lights from the houses down below faded in the fog. Not a single candle shone from the tower’s shuttered windows, not even from the one flung open, staring down at Rooney like a dark, unblinking eye.

  Three of the boys stood up to their waists in a patch of long grass and overgrown blackberry bushes. They looked at the sky and the clouds drifting past, elbowing one another out of the spot where they thought the moonlight would tumble.

  But one boy stood apart from the rest, balanced up in the branches of an oak, where he was closer to the sky. Even with so many hours left in the night, he’d probably already collected all the moonlight he needed, his mirror full to the brim.

  This thought, more than the hard look on his white, dirt-streaked face, bristled against Rooney the most.

  Trick Aidan was always besting her.

  He scrambled to the ground, quick as a squirrel, then cocked his head to the side, staring straight at Rooney. A smug smile turned up the corner of his mouth, as if he knew just what she was thinking. She glared at him—at his black hair brushing his chin (all messy and wet), at his eyes (as dark and sour as blackberries), at his sharp-knuckled fists already raised. He might have been as wiry as Rooney herself, but the very bones inside him formed harder lines.

  Rooney pushed back her shoulders and pressed her lips together. Dripping wet, she couldn’t have been any more intimidating than the smallest of the Montys, but it was the toughest face she had and she wore it like stone—unflinching and cold.

  Trick sliced his way through the brambles and stepped into the street, blocking Rooney from racing up the hill. She was quick. She might have outrun him, but the winding road led only to the stardusted tower.

  A dead end.

  Trick rolled his shoulders, shaking water from the worn collar of his coat. “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think?” Rooney flashed the mirror in her hand. No sense in hiding what was so obvious.

  “Here?” he said snidely, a reminder that she trespassed.

  Her heel lifted. His clipped voice almost drove her back, but it would have been far worse to retreat, so she stepped forward instead. “Yes, here, if I want to.”

  His eyes narrowed. As if he might push her down the hill himself, he too took one step closer.

  And so did the rest of the roughhouse boys. Their heads swung all at once, long necks stretching to see her better. The bushes rustled and twigs broke as they crushed through them. Grim smiles stretched across their faces, for Rooney knew the only thing they might have liked better than catching moonlight was keeping her from taking it.

  As for Rooney, no one was there to sneak out of the shadows and stand shoulder to shoulder beside her. She had no friends (rotten or otherwise).

  “Who’s that sogging all over our streets?” The question came from the smallest, and the toughest, of the rain-soaked pack.

  Bridget Mullen.

  The girl was a roughhouse boy through and through. Mean and brave and quick wristed with her mirror when catching moonlight. She had a slash of dark hair snipped straight across her eyebrows and her collarbone, and skin so pale she must have avoided spending any time in the sun. Across the corner of her mouth, a thin scar puckered like a too-small fish that had been caught on a line and thrown back into the river.

  “Looks like she’s half-drowned,” the girl said.

  “Am not,” Rooney grumbled under her breath. Oh, how she hated the way they made her squirm.

  Bridget shoved one of the boys out of her way and stalked to Trick’s side. Half a foot shorter than him, she stood almost exactly eye to eye with Rooney. But Rooney felt so much smaller, just one girl alone.

  “Ah, Bridge,” a blond-haired, pale-skinned boy called Sim said with a snicker. “It’s Ratty de Barra.”

  Rooney stole a quick look at the ground, fearing the smudge-nosed rat had returned and wound around her ankles. (It hadn’t; it wasn’t.) “Rooney,” she said, though of course they already knew and didn’t care.

  Bridget let out a low-pitched laugh, and the rest of them joined in.

  A boy named Colin came even with Bridget. He had a boyish face with wide eyes and soft brown cheeks, but that didn’t fool Rooney. She knew he was as terrible as the rest of them, even if he had a quieter way about him. “We don’t like your sneaking.”

  “Don’t care.” Besides, Rooney was hardly sneaking. She’d walked straight up the old road.

  “We don’t like your face,” Sim said.

  “Don’t. Care.” Rooney hadn’t seen her face in a good while since the only mirror she owned wouldn’t reflect it. She had no doubt it was as long and thin as the rest of theirs and wasn’t so pretty to look at with all the grime, so it was hardly an insult.

  “We don’t like you,” Bridget snapped.

  This wouldn’t have wounded Rooney (after all, she didn’t much like them either), but Trick looked away then, his face upturned to the sky, as if he couldn’t be bothered with needling and torturing her. As if she were such a small thing, pesky as a rat, and beneath needling and torturing.

  Rooney huffed. She glared. Her mouth opened, but she had no comeback.

  Bridget’s green eyes flashed, and she had no problem finding the words she wanted. “Payment is due.” Her hand shot out.

  Roon
ey thought Bridget meant to smack her and took a step back before she could stop herself. As soon as she did, she knew it was a mistake.

  “These are our streets. This is our moonlight.” Bridget’s little scar stretched as she smiled—her kill look. “Give it.” Her open palm waited.

  She could only mean one thing: what Rooney held most dear. What she’d never give anyone. The only thing that brought her any joy.

  Her mirror.

  “You’re making her cry, Bridge,” Trick said.

  Only Trick would sink so low. “The rain is in my eyes,” Rooney sputtered.

  Unmoved, Bridget wiggled her fingers. “I said, give it!”

  “No.”

  Bridget smiled wider, a signal that this small defiant response pleased her. “Then we’ll just have to take it. Get it, boys.”

  4

  THE ALLEY OF RATS

  Rooney fled down the hill toward Warybone.

  Behind her, the roughhouse boys’ boots smacked on stone. They didn’t holler or shout or call after her, and it seemed less a game, then, without their jeering voices echoing in the night. They chased her with eagle-eyed focus.

  In her rib cage, Rooney’s heart knocked all around. She couldn’t let them catch her. She couldn’t let them take her mirror.

  Hair streaking behind her, she charged down Cider Street. She slipped her way through the crowd stumbling in and out of the tavern, hoping the boys would lose sight of her or be collared and scolded for running the streets too boldly.

  At the corner, she chanced a backward glance and caught sight of Colin, Sim, and Bridget. She looked all around for the fourth roughhouse boy, but Trick, who she’d thought would be at the front of the pack, most eager to catch her, was nowhere to be seen. Rooney grinned.

  One down.

  A glimmer of hope flickered inside her, as if a blue moonlit flame burned in her chest. She cut left, then left again and again and again, making a full turn around the block because they wouldn’t expect her to take such a simple route rounding back on itself. She whipped her head to the side, grinning wider when she saw that Trick was well and truly gone, and Sim too. Only Colin and Bridget remained.

  Two down.

  Rooney ran faster, winding deeper through the city until her lungs ached and her feet too, loose pebbles pressing into the worn soles of her boots. Eventually, she began to slow, to tire, but not to give in. Just before rounding the next corner, she took a quick look back, and what she saw—Colin stopped and panting in the middle of the street far, far behind—sent a burst of energy through her limbs. She pumped her legs harder.

  Three down.

  Only Bridget remained, and Rooney had a plan.

  She swung that-a-way back toward her alley, racing there directly instead of trying to lose Bridget with twisty turns. Laughter rumbled in Rooney’s throat as she returned to the place she knew best.

  “Hello, Monty,” she gasped, greeting the wet, beady-eyed rat that sat at the mouth of the alley. It swiped tiny paws over its whiskers, and another rat came to join it, this one even larger and more snaggletoothed.

  All the better, Rooney thought, for everyone feared something, and what Bridget Mullen feared was rats. Bridget’s too-big mouth had once let out this secret. Rooney would never be so careless with her own.

  Rooney darted into the darkness, then watched the entrance to the alley, tensed in case Bridget charged through it after her. The slap of footsteps came closer and closer. The shadowed outline of a figure blocked the way out.

  A shriek rang loud in Rooney’s ears.

  The rats must have greeted Bridget too.

  Bridget Mullen had lost a finger to one—or so she said—and oh, how she’d moaned over its loss. All for something so insignificant. Only the very tip of Bridget’s pinkie went missing, after all. A layer or two of pink skin scraped off somehow (chomped off, according to Bridget).

  True or not, Rooney had never been more thankful for the rats.

  “Come out of there!” Bridget shouted into the dim, but she did not cross from the street into the alleyway. Her silhouette slipped back and forth as she paced.

  “I won’t,” Rooney called back. “And you’d better get out of here, unless you want to lose another finger!”

  The rats squeaked and skittered about, disrupted by the loud voices. Bridget kicked at their sleek bodies, hopping from foot to foot to get out of their path. She slunk away from the opening, breathing hard, hands balled into tight fists.

  Her voice lowered. “That mirror is ours now. We’ll have it, this day or another.”

  Rooney clutched the silver case. “It isn’t; you won’t. Neither this day nor another.”

  She waited and listened, braced and ready to pounce should Bridget brave the alley of rats. Bridget said not another word. She only stood there glaring, until at last, with a great huff, she stormed away.

  Rooney let out a sigh of her own. Her muscles, all bunched up in her neck and legs, relaxed, and she thought she might collapse.

  Leaning against the old brick wall, Rooney looked down at the mirror still in her hand. It was right where it belonged and right where she’d first found it. One lonesome night she’d fallen asleep and in the morning, there it was, the mirror lying in her palm. Something so rare and beautiful and promising when everything around her had gone wrong and rotten.

  That’s how she knew the mirror was magic. Like an impossible wish made upon a star, it had come out of nowhere when she needed it most.

  Tonight, she might have been without supper, but she would not be without her mirror. It was the only thing that mattered.

  Something shuffled at the end of the alley.

  “Settle down, Montys. That awful girl is gone.”

  The rustling came again. Whispered steps edged forward. Footsteps, not the pitter-patter of little rat paws.

  And then a figure was atop her. A quick hand lashed out and snitched the mirror from her fingertips.

  “My mirror!” Rooney cried.

  The figure danced away from her. Moonlight slivered between the clouds, catching on a pale face.

  Trick Aidan.

  Burrs clung to the hem of his long black coat. Scratches scuffed his boots. But the most tattered thing about him was the expression he wore, a ragged grin. “What took you so long?”

  Rooney thought she’d lost him in the chase, but she should have known better. He’d guessed where she would come. All he had to do was head here directly and wait for her arrival.

  Catching her off guard when she thought she was finally alone.

  She took a swipe at him. “Give it back!” Rooney’s voice rose in panic. She snatched at his arms with fists and nails. She wanted to tear right through him and take back her mirror. “It’s mine!”

  Trick dodged her blows, shielding the mirror in his hands. “You know where to find it,” he said, and bolted.

  On legs wobbling from running, Rooney stumbled after him. She reached for his coattails, but before she could grab them, she tripped—on a meddlesome rat, no doubt—falling to the ground.

  In defeat, she lifted her head, only to see Trick streaking into the night, too fast, too far ahead for her to catch him.

  5

  THE WORST OF THE WORST

  When morning dawned, Rooney wanted to pull the night sky back over her head as she would a blanket. For all she’d wished, wished, wished upon the evening stars, her lunar mirror had not miraculously returned to her.

  It stabbed at her heart. That she’d lost—that she could not protect—her lunar mirror. It was irreplaceable. No shop in town sold its likeness, and no ordinary mirror held its magic. Trick Aidan had bested her again.

  Although this theft did not hurt as much as it had when she’d lost—when she could not protect—her parents, it brought their absence more sharply to her mind. Trick had swept into the alleyway, quick and merciless, snatching away her mirror, just as the feather flu had flown into Warybone last year, taken root in those townsfolk with vulnerable lungs
, and stolen her parents’ final breaths.

  Like she had that first night without her mother and father, Rooney felt empty inside.

  She curled her fingers into fists and kicked her wooden crate where she slept, knocking a slat loose. And then she turned down the alley and walked out into the dawn-blushed street.

  Sunlight rippled in the puddles, all golden and lovely. Rooney stomped through them, eyes focused straight ahead. That smudgy Monty followed, clicking along beside her. She eyed it suspiciously. “Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

  But it mustn’t have; it didn’t.

  At the edge of Warybone, right before the wilder lands took over, ran a little stream bordered with thorny blackberry bushes. Rooney ate fistfuls of the overripe fruitlets, drank her fill of the cool water, and scrubbed some (but not nearly enough) of the grime from her skin and her clothes.

  And all the while, she plotted her revenge on Trick Aidan. The Monty, its pointy teeth nibbling on a blackberry, was surprisingly good at listening.

  “I’ll take back my mirror, and I’ll take his too. It would serve him right, wouldn’t it?” Rooney plucked a long piece of dried grass from the earth and wove the wheat-white blade through one of the many holes in her stockings. “Oh, he’s the worst of the worst!”

  The Monty chittered, a scratchy sound that would have sent Bridget Mullen running.

  “Good point. Bridget shouldn’t go unpunished. But first things first. My mirror above all else.” Rooney cinched the blade of grass, shrinking the hole in her tights, and knotted the sharp ends.

  The Monty blinked in what must have been agreement, and Rooney stood, testing out her make-the-most-of-it stitching. “Now, where might they be?” She regarded the Monty. “Can you sniff them out for me?”

  The Monty’s tail whipped to the side. Rooney turned, gazing ahead, as if the rat had pointed purposefully. “Come on, then.” She clomped forward, her nose following the scent of sausages and coffee and fresh-baked bread.

  All the roughhouse boys would be slopping up breakfast, most likely, especially if they had a little extra moonlight to sell and moonstones to spend now that they had Rooney’s mirror too.