He knew the process for making lye, simple as it was, but he allowed her to explain it all the same. If she felt the need to talk, he certainly wasn’t going to discourage her. Not until they reached the abbey’s shadowed entrance did she become quiet.
They dismounted, and Alberta removed the hood from her lantern. Pale light streamed around them to cast strange shadows in the crumbling building. Together they picked their way through the nave to the cloister and from there back to the abbot’s quarters where her supplies lay.
“You keep a box of concoctions in the chapter house, though, don’t you?” asked Duncan.
She frowned at him but realized that he had once caught her coming from that very place. “That’s my storage box. I got it early on as a place to keep things so that the chambermaids wouldn’t report anything strange to my father. I’ve never bothered to move it. A couple wooden barrels would be too easily discovered if I kept them in the chapter house, though. That’s the most obvious place to hide things—some fool recently went and put a spear amid the rubble under one window, for example.”
Duncan choked and coughed self-consciously.
“Oh, was that you, Goldilocks?” asked Alberta, all innocence. “I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t clear it away, then. What else have you hidden around here?”
“Just my armor,” he said sheepishly. “It’s not in the abbey proper, though. The halberd wouldn’t fit anywhere else, and I was told that no one ever came here.”
“Few people do, thanks to the rumors of ghosts. There used to be a handful of hooligans that would come up from Midd—mischievous boys with nothing better to do with their time—but they generally stuck to the nave and the cloister, if the graffiti was any indication. They don’t come up anymore, though. I used to take whatever items they would leave behind, douse them in the pond so they got nice and scummy, and then place them right in front of the abbey entrance like a ghost might if someone littered its domain. After about a year, I guess the hooligans got unnerved enough to stop coming. Or they found something better to do. Go ahead and pack the straw down in that barrel there, now, at least half a foot thick.”
They stood within a crumbled room with half a roof and patches of sky above them. Alberta pointed him to a barrel that sat in one corner. It was perched atop several bricks, with a stopper near the bottom and a wooden pan beneath. Duncan uncovered the top and squinted into the shadows, but he could see nothing within.
“Is it already empty?”
“I always empty it when I’m done making a batch,” she replied from another corner of the room. “I bury the ashes out behind the old infirmary and throw away the old straw. When you’re done packing that in, help me move this rain barrel.”
That object, he noticed, was positioned beneath an open patch of sky, where it could easily collect rain from the afternoon storms that came through at this season. He stuffed a bed of straw into the first barrel and hurried over to comply.
The process of lye-making did not take long. The hardest part was pouring the water from the rain barrel into the lye barrel. “You should get a bucket,” Duncan told Alberta as they set the heavy cask back down on the ground.
“I’ll put it on my list,” she replied sarcastically. “Bella and I usually just dump out half the water on the ground before we try to move it.”
“Why couldn’t we have done that as well?”
“Because I usually don’t have enough water for a full batch when we do. You’re a man. You should have muscle enough to lift it, so stop complaining.”
He swallowed any further argument.
Once they had secured the lid over the lye barrel and moved the rain barrel back beneath its patch of sky, it was time to leave again. “I talked all the way here,” said Alberta. “You have to talk all the way back.”
“What am I supposed to talk about?” asked Duncan.
“I don’t care. Tell me some silly half-true story about Sir Goldmayne. Just keep talking. Make up some more nonsense about his horse, if you like.”
He obliged her by weaving a most ridiculous story of Goldmayne and his horse as they haplessly bumbled through the countryside. She stopped herself from laughing several times over the course of the tale, but that only spurred him to make it more ridiculous in the hopes of catching her off-guard.
“Enough, enough!” cried Alberta when they reached the castle gates. “There’s only so much idiocy I can take!”
“You told me you didn’t care what sort of story I told,” said Duncan reproachfully. The most he’d gotten out of her was a quickly suppressed snicker, but he knew that her control was tenuous at best. A few minutes more and he could have had her in stitches.
Alberta must have known that as well, for she did her utmost to resume her typically caustic persona. She dismounted her horse and tossed the reins at Duncan, who caught them deftly. “Take that creature back to the stable and then go directly to bed,” she commanded imperiously. Then, she turned on her heel and marched straight to the little side door of the castle.
Her hooded lantern swung haphazardly from one hand; its one beam of light danced like a fairy in the dark. Duncan watched her go with a strangely thudding heart. “Wildfire,” he murmured quietly, “there’s something wrong with me.”
The white horse snorted. “You can say that again.”
No doubt Wildfire was referring to the ludicrously unflattering story Duncan had been telling only moments before. Duncan’s worries had more to do with the sudden melancholy that had descended upon him, though. He felt like she had left too soon. He had actually been enjoying her company, and it wasn’t the first time, he realized.
“That’s not good,” he muttered, and he smothered those unbidden feelings mercilessly.
Chapter 22
Princess Alberta summoned him from the garden the following morning. At the time, he happened to be working alongside Gardener. “Again?” cried the man in frustration.
“Should I not go?” Duncan asked him.
The pageboy who had brought the summons started nervously. No one in his right mind disobeyed an order from Princess Alberta.
Gardener knew this much as well. “Go, go, Scurvyhead!” he sneered. “And I’ll go speak to King Edwin about his daughter interfering with my staff!”
Then, he stormed away toward the front of the castle. Duncan exchanged an uncertain glance with the pageboy. “That’s only going to bring trouble,” he said as he stripped the work gloves from his hands.
Within her room, Princess Alberta sat amid a pile of books as usual. She looked up when he entered. “What took you so long?”
“Gardener,” he replied plainly. “He’s off complaining to your father about how you keep summoning me away from my duties.”
She made an irritated noise and snapped her book shut. “Can’t that man mind his own business?”
“Tending to the gardens is his business,” said Duncan.
“Botheration,” she muttered. She picked herself up from the floor and extracted three books from her piles. “Come along,” she told him as she passed him into the corridor.
He hurried behind her. “Where are we going?”
“To the library. My room is the first place Father will look if he decides to scold me.”
Duncan had never been to the castle library before. He wondered if it would be as large as Dame Groach’s library. The castle was larger than her manor house, of course, but its rooms seemed more crammed together, so that he didn’t always have the same sense of space here as he had had there.
They met Princess Bellinda and Prince Perceval in the hallway.
“What are you doing with Scurvyhead?” Bellinda asked her sister with a pout.
“Mind your own business,” said Alberta harshly.
The youngest princess was not so easily rebuffed. “Is he telling you more stories of Sir Goldmayne?”
Alberta scoffed. “What would I want with stories of Goldilocks? What a perfect waste of time that would be! Where ar
e you two off to, anyway?”
“Mind your own business,” said Bellinda impertinently.
“Ah,” said Prince Perceval with a nervous glance between the bickering pair, “we’re just off to meet with Briarly and a few of the court nobles.”
“Oh, has Briarly left his rooms?” Alberta asked. Duncan guessed from the shrewd glint in her eyes that she knew as much already.
“Yes, and since he and Percy are leaving tomorrow, we thought we’d scheme up something fun for their last day here,” said Bellinda.
“We have tutoring this afternoon,” her sister reminded her, an unspoken warning in her voice.
Bellinda waved one hand carelessly. “Father’s already given me leave to skip.”
“And Mae?”
“I don’t know what she’s going to do,” said Bellinda honestly. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we have people waiting. If Lord Briarly wants to hear stories about Sir Goldmayne, can we send for Scurvyhead?”
Duncan looked to Alberta with alarm.
She shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Of course she didn’t, he thought bitterly.
“We’ll be in the library,” she added. “Come along, dog.”
With nothing further, she continued up the corridor. Duncan hesitated momentarily before he followed. A glance back over his shoulder showed him Bellinda and Perceval watching their retreat. “I don’t want to go tell them stories,” he hissed under his breath to Alberta.
“Why do you think I told her I didn’t care?” she whispered back. “If I had told her no, she would’ve summoned you for sure.”
She wrenched open a door and motioned him inside.
Duncan stopped short on the threshold. The castle library was three stories high, with balconies and staircases and more books than he’d ever known existed.
Alberta poked him in the back. “You’re blocking the way.”
He stumbled forward enough for her to pass by him.
“Honestly,” she muttered, “you act like you’ve never seen a library before.” Suddenly, she stopped and scrutinized him. “Have you ever seen a library before?”
The question jarred him back to his senses. “Dame Groach’s,” he said. “It was… maybe… a quarter the size of this one?” he guessed.
“Ah,” said Alberta knowingly. “Come on, then. If we’re going to be interrupted, we’d better discuss as much as we possibly can before then.”
“Discuss?” he echoed. “Don’t you have some task to send me off on?”
“No. Sit down.” She gestured to a comfortable chair for him, then settled on a couch across from it. She curled her feet beneath her and immediately began looking through the three books she had brought along. Duncan hesitantly sat where he was told and stayed silent.
“I think I’ve exhausted my resources,” Alberta said. “You might’ve narrowed down the search a bit more for me, you know.”
He realized that she was talking about Wildfire’s curse, and he immediately perked up. “Were you able to find anything?”
“I’ve found a great many things,” she said archly. “Whether they’re of any use to you is another matter entirely. Insofar as I can discover, bodily curses can be broken in a variety of ways, depending on the type of curse and who cast it. Most of them involve a true love performing some sort of inane act—crying, kissing, speaking vows of adoration. Does your friend have a true love?”
Duncan hesitated.
“Well?” she prompted impatiently.
“He does, but I don’t think she’ll be of any help. That is, I don’t think he would agree to let her be of any help. It’s a pretty awful curse.”
“What if she’s his only option?”
“I think he’d rather die,” said Duncan. Wildfire had been fairly adamant about Princess Margaret not getting involved.
Alberta frowned and flipped a page in one of her books. “What about magic words?” she inquired. “There are stories of curses being broken by magic phrases spoken aloud.”
“Like what?” Duncan asked. He was fairly certain that Wildfire would have remembered such a phrase by now if he knew it.
“Some corrupted form of Latin, usually,” she said. “Mutare is the word for ‘transform,’ and it’s usually some variation of that. Oh, but the original curse had to be administered in Latin as well. You can’t change languages mid-stream when it comes to magic.”
“I don’t know the original language,” said Duncan. “I can ask.”
“If it’s Dame Groach who cast the curse,” Alberta told him with a knowing glance, “it’s probably Saxon, not Latin. I don’t know the Saxon word for ‘transform,’ and I certainly can’t guess at any variations for it.”
“What other remedies are there?” asked Duncan with a sinking heart.
“You can use some physical item of protection,” said Alberta. “In all the stories that had that remedy, though, the item was provided prior to the curse. Your friend probably doesn’t have anything like that.”
“Probably not,” Duncan agreed.
“The only other remedy I could discover is death,” she said then.
He recoiled. “I’m not going to kill him!” he cried in outrage.
“I meant the death of the original curse-bringer,” said Alberta with a scowl. “What good would killing the victim do, except to put him out of his misery?”
Duncan frowned but said nothing. It wasn’t his fault he had misunderstood her. The fairy at Otis’s smithy had suggested killing Wildfire as a remedy, after all. If Dame Groach’s death could bring about Wildfire’s cure, though, Duncan might actually have to consider confronting the old witch.
“How can we know for sure if any one remedy will work?” he asked. “I mean, what if it doesn’t? Are we just supposed to try one after another?”
“The only creature that can tell you for certain what can break a curse is a fairy,” said Alberta, much to his disappointment. “They can see through enchantments, probably because they cast so many of them. It wouldn’t be such a half-bad idea to consult them, actually—so long as you keep your head covered, that is.”
“I always keep my head covered,” said Duncan. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Fairies are obsessed with gold,” Alberta answered. She flipped the pages in one of her books and extended it to him. “This is a map of Meridiana as of two hundred years ago. The little triangles represent known fairy-glens. They should still be there, but according to that book, they’re easiest to find at night. Do you want to go look for one?”
He had taken the book from her to study its contents. The map spanned both pages, and he easily picked out Midd in the very center. Several triangles patterned the vicinity directly around it.
“I’ve already spoken with a fairy,” he said reluctantly. “She told me just to kill my friend and have it done with. Fairies don’t understand death because they’re immortal.”
Alberta considered this. “Well,” she replied, “perhaps a different fairy would give you a different answer. Do you want to try?”
He shrugged and handed the book back to her. “I suppose there’s nothing to lose.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but the library door suddenly swung open.
“Alberta, are you in here?” called an imperious voice. Duncan shrank back into his chair as King Edwin entered the room.
“I’m right here, Father,” said Alberta. “Is there something you need from me?”
The king looked first at his daughter and then at the servant who sat across from her. “What’s this about you commandeering under-gardeners?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Alberta retorted.
He gestured to Duncan. “This Scurvyhead person is supposed to be trimming hedges right now, not tending to your whims, Alberta. You know how difficult the upkeep in the garden is, especially in the summertime, and when you confiscate one of the workers—”
“Pooh,” Alberta interrupted scornfully. “It’s only because I’ve conf
iscated Scurvyhead instead of one of the other under-gardeners—he does twice as much work as any of them, you know. Gardener keeps piling more and more on him while the rest of them loll about. You can’t blame me for taking pity on the poor simpleton, Father. If you want your gardens tended to properly, tell Gardener to stop taking two hours for lunch and another for afternoon tea.”
King Edwin looked like he’d had the wind stripped from his sails. “I’m sure he does no such thing,” he protested.
“Half the under-gardeners do it too,” said Alberta. “Scurvyhead’s the only one who actually works—straight through lunch and afternoon tea, and when he finishes the tasks he’s assigned, he’s rewarded with more work.”
Her father eyed Duncan with uncertainty. For his part, Duncan wished that the chair he sat in would wrap around him and vanish out of sight.
“Is this true?” King Edwin demanded of him.
“I like to work,” said Duncan helplessly.
“Even on the days I’ve confiscated him, he goes back and finishes all his chores in the garden,” Alberta added. She spoke carelessly, her eyes fixed on the contents of one of her books. “If you think Gardener should be able to work him to the bone, though, Father, by all means send him back. I only thought to do a bit of kindness for a poor, overworked servant.”
That caught her father’s attention. “You?” he asked suspiciously.
She looked up with a harassed expression. “You keep telling me to be nice! If I’m going to get lectured whenever I take pity on some lesser creature, I’ll go back to scowling at everyone!”
King Edwin was obviously in a tough spot. On the one hand, he wanted to keep his servants happy, and Gardener was most unhappy at the moment; on the other, he did want Alberta not to always be so difficult with everyone. His gaze slid back to Duncan.
“Has she been unkind to you, Scurvyhead?” he asked.
“No, sire,” said Duncan, and he hoped that this was the correct response. Alberta had returned her attention to her book and seemed not to care what he said at all.
King Edwin grunted. “Well,” he told his daughter after a moment’s consideration, “don’t keep him too long. He might want to finish his chores early, and you’re keeping him from that.”
Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale Page 27
