His Royal Whiskers

by Sam Gayton

  “What about a potion that turns you back into a baby? Or a tonic that can shrink whoever drinks it? Could we mix up an elixir with the power to turn things into cats?”

  Pieter paced back and forth, working out each potion’s chances mathemagically, until finally he would declare it:

  “Dangerous.”

  Or, “Extremely dangerous.”

  Until finally, at last, he said: “Wait a second. That last one could work.”

  Teresa stared at him. “An elixir with the power to turn things into cats? Really?”

  Pieter double-checked the figures in his head. “Really,” he said. “It’s risky, it’s half crazy, there are several million uncertainties . . . But yes. It could work. It might even be useful. There are a lot of rats on these shelves. And if we do something helpful, it might help us if the Czar finds out.”

  Teresa’s mouth hung open. Her half-chewed pepperleaf fell out.

  “Finally,” she said. “We have a recipe.”

  “A good recipe,” said Pieter.

  “A great recipe.”

  “Now all we need is a name.”

  Three khaves and a pepperleaf later, they had it.

  Teresa chalked it up on the wall:

  CATASTROPHICA

  Dusk until dawn in the cramped little laboratory. Tired days and frantic nights, giddy with secret alchemy. Crowding around the cauldron fire, dizzy with the heat. Boil it up and simmer it down. Pieter’s pacing, Teresa’s frown. Mix it all together and whirl it all apart. Something isn’t working. Go back to the start.

  How do we get whiskers to grow? Try whisking the potion, then add the whisk? Give it a try—what’s the risk . . .

  Fizzle, sizzle, hiss, spit—Look out!—BOOM! Wave away the fumes. When will it work? Soon . . .

  Stir in clover, fold in cream. Pause and stir, pause and stir. Pause four times, to make four paws. The tips of kitchen knives for claws. A hundred other things and more.

  Boil it down to syrupy gloop. Thicker than soup, thicker than stew, thicker than porridge, thick as glue. Make it glop and gunk and guck. Just one drop will be enough. This stuff is seriously strong! It’ll change things for a long, long, long time.

  Do you think maybe we should make it weaker . . . ? Don’t be silly—make it stronger, Pieter!

  All spring and summer, that’s how it went.

  The Great, Furry Experiment.

  Of course, an experiment was all it was for Pieter. The time when the Catastrophica might actually work was a far-off moment he had barely thought about yet. Sometimes, he would dream of the day they rid the kitchens of rats. Teresa would be promoted to Alchemaster, and sit on the War Council beside him . . .

  But mostly, Pieter was too distracted by the second, secret alchemy that was changing his heart whenever Teresa smiled at him. For uncountable in number are the many alchemicals in this world, but most common and powerful of them all is love.

  * * *

  4. The Western Woodn’t lies at the edge of Petrossia’s border. It is a bit like a wood, only bigger, darker, wilder . . . and hungrier.

  5. It might surprise you that Teresa could locate such a plethora of unusual substances from what was essentially a large kitchen larder. But there is almost nothing in this world that someone, somewhere does not class as a delicacy.

  4

  Alexander Turns Six

  On the day of the catastrophe, Prince Alexander was woken in his bed by the dawn peeking through the drawn curtains. It was five of the morn. The last week of Dismember. Today he was six years old.

  He sat up, rubbing his eyes. Through the crack in the curtains, the sun had sent him a present. A thin stem of light lay across his quilt like a golden rose. The prince reached out to touch it. The light was warm and luminous on his fingers. Mama had loved flowers—mintflower most of all. Teresa had told him that.

  He slid out of his bed and into his slippers. Hugging his nightgown around him, he tiptoed to his door. Father’s present was in the enormous birthday stocking that hung from the handle. It was wrapped in red polka-dot paper the color of blood splatter. Alexander could already tell what it was from the shape. He tried not to feel disappointed.

  Another crossbow.

  He unwrapped it half-heartedly (but carefully—in case it was loaded). Then he lugged the crossbow over to his weapons rack and left it with the others. It looked identical to last year’s crossbow, and the one from the year before that. A little bigger, maybe. Like him. Today he was six years old, not five. He had one more crossbow. Nothing else had changed. Mama would always be gone.

  Alexander always thought of her on this day. The Czarina had died just after he’d been born. His life began just as hers began to end. Now she was buried outside the Winter Palace, in the Chapel of the Frozen Tear. The Czar had ordered her coffin made from ice and æther, so that he could always peer in at her frozen beauty.

  Alexander often went to see her, but only in the evenings. In the rosy sunset light, he could sometimes fool himself. She is only sleeping. She is only sleeping. He’d whisper it to himself, over and over, then go back to his room and look at the pictures of Spring Beauty in his fairy tale books.

  “You know what always makes me feel better when I’m sad? Cake. Always works. Without fail.”

  The voice was just a whisper. It echoed, as if it was inside Alexander’s head, but it came from the empty fireplace behind him. He turned to face the chimney flue. His joint-best friend’s face had appeared in its usual place.

  Alexander couldn’t remember a time when Teresa hadn’t popped up from the fireplace. She had just always been there. He supposed that’s why she was his joint-best friend. Because he couldn’t imagine life without her.

  “Did you say cake?” he asked Teresa.

  “That’s right.” Teresa’s head poked out from behind the hearth. She nodded. “Cake.”

  “With cocoa sprinkles?” Alexander asked. “And jam in the middle? And cream?”

  Teresa looked offended that he would even feel the need to ask such obvious questions. “All that and more, Your Majesty,” she said, scrambling out into the fireplace and giving him an exaggerated bow. “You forgot the six tindersticks on top. It is your birthday, after all.”

  Alexander smiled for the first time that day.

  “Come on down to the kitchens, then,” she said, holding out a grapple and harness. “We’ve got baking to do.”

  Alexander started forward—but his worries stopped him. “What if Papa wakes?” he whispered.

  Teresa pulled a face. “Don’t worry about the Czar.”

  But Alexander did worry. He wasn’t brave like Teresa—especially in matters concerning his father. “He’ll want me to practice my war skills with Lord Xin.” 6

  “The Czar won’t even know you’ve left your bed,” Teresa interrupted. “My friend Amna is the maid who sweeps His Majesty’s room. I got her to sneak an extra sprig of snoozeweed in his samovar last night before bed. Pieter says there’s a ninety-seven percent chance he’ll sleep past noon.”

  Alexander’s worries went at once. Pieter’s percentages could always be trusted. He could work out the solution to any sum quicker than Alexander could copy it out of the answers book. He was the joint-cleverest joint-best friend Alexander had ever had.

  Not that he had ever had any other friends apart from Pieter and Teresa. The Czar did not approve of them—in Papa’s opinion, Alexander needed only soldiers and serfs.7

  “Life isn’t about making friends,” Papa liked to say often. “Life is about making enemies! And then defeating them, and enslaving them, and making them sweep your halls and cook your meals! If I ever find you’ve made any friends, I shall spike their heads on the gatehouse wall!”

  That was why Alexander doubled back to the door and pressed his ear to the keyhole. Just to be totally sure his father was asleep.

  What he heard made him smile. The Czar lay in his bedchambers across the hall, conquering the silence with his snores. Alexander left him th
ere. He stepped into the fireplace, then slipped and clipped the harness into place. Teresa took hold of him—they both swayed above the pitch-black tunnel of the flue. Then she released the grapple and together they went whooshing down the chimney.

  * * *

  6. Lord Xin, the Heirmaster, was the member of the Czar’s War Council responsible for tutoring Alexander. He did not teach his pupil any stories, or languages, or history—conquerors did not need such things. Instead Alexander learned how to lay siege to a fort, and when to order a cavalry charge, and the advantages and disadvantages of napalm.

  7. And crossbows. You really never could have too many crossbows.

  5

  The Baking of the Birthday Cake

  The kitchen was a jungle, as usual. The air was a thick soup of steam, sweat, and suds. Pans hissed and spat, and tall stacks of messy dishes grew up from the sinks, fast as bamboo. The Royal Chef yelled across the worktops as she checked each dish, her cries strange and harsh as a tropical bird’s:

  “More quill wheat!”

  “Less dill!”

  “Don’t overcook the marrowfoot!”

  All around, the fat cooks blundered around the stoves like oliphants, readying breakfast. In the muggy air, their top halves were hidden. Only their huge legs and white flapping aprons and gigantic bottoms could be seen.

  None of them noticed Alexander and Teresa land in the unlit hearth—poof! The basement fireplace coughed them out in a cloud of soot.

  Quickly, before they were spotted, Teresa unlatched her grapple and hurried Alexander over to the shelves. In the herb garden, Pieter stood waiting to pull them up. They rose with a whoosh, jerked to a stop, and stepped off the winch.

  Pieter looked from Teresa to Alexander, counting up each of their soot smudges, and sighed.

  “You both go down the same chimney,” he said. “So why does Teresa come out ten times more covered in soot? One day I’ll figure it out.”

  Teresa shrugged, and shook the soot off her, the way a dog shakes off fleas. “Some questions you’ll never solve, Tallymaster.”

  “Like the question of where you’re from, you mean?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m a gingerbread girl who got bored of sitting up on the shelf with the other cakes.”

  Alexander stood still while Pieter got out a little mouse-whisker brush and cleaned all evidence of soot from the prince’s dressing gown with a brisk brush-brush. It was very important that no one found out about the chimney. It was their secret corridor to one another. It was how they had become friends in the first place. Without it, Teresa would never have been able to kidnap Pieter, or visit Alexander in his room. Their friendship had all come from that chimney. Which just goes to show that you can find hope anywhere. Even in a hearth full of ashes, long after you thought the fire had gone out.

  “Now remember,” said Pieter, once Alexander was neat again. “If we’re spotted down here, there’ll be trouble.”

  Alexander gave a solemn nod. “That’s why we’ve got a plan in case we get spotted.”

  “Which is?” said Pieter, who was fond of springing tests on the prince.

  Alexander scrunched up his face with concentration. “I say I was playing sieges, and I charged down the stairs and got lost.”

  “And?”

  “And I ordered you to lead me back upstairs.”

  “One hundred percent correct.” Satisfied, Pieter turned to Teresa and nodded.

  “What do you want to bake, Alexander?” she asked. “Trifle? A St. Katerina Sponge?”

  Alexander licked his lips. “I don’t mind,” he said. “As long as we make it together.”

  So that is what they did. First, Alexander made the suggestions:

  “Vanilla!”

  “Meringue!”

  “Jelly beans!”

  Then, Pieter decided the amounts:

  “Three pods.”

  “Egg whites—use ostrich.”

  “Half raspberry, half strawberry.”

  Finally, Teresa scrabbled up the shelves to gather all the ingredients together. Her long braided hair swung like a pendulum as she worked. From a tall pot, she plucked long black vanilla beans like burned matches. An egg the size of a football was lowered down in an elastic net. Little leather bags of spice were tossed out from the billows of steam, landing perfectly at their feet.

  Then, once everything was set, they started mixing.

  Cooking was like magic to Alexander. All the ingredients got swirled together in a bowl the size of a cauldron. Crack the eggs, scrape the vanilla beans, sift the flour, mush the butter. Teresa went down on the winch and took the cake to the ovens, while Alexander and Pieter watched with a pair of scopical glasses. The cake went in as a tray of gloop, then the grandpapa clock chimed threnty past six, and it came out changed into a block of golden scrumptiousness.

  They rode the green rope up to the herb garden and feasted on it there. Teresa lay out a picnic blanket, then covered the cake with icing and sweets.

  “Happy birthday, Alexander,” Teresa said. “Now you are six!”

  “Or,” said Pieter, “if you look at it another way, you’re four hundred and thirty-eight.”

  Alexander scrunched up his face. “Am not!”

  “You are,” Pieter said. “If you count in weeks instead of years. You see? Things can seem short or long, depending on what you use to measure them.” 8

  “Some wildfolk count their age by the miles they’ve traveled,” said Teresa as she decorated the cake. “One of their queens, Babapatra, lived to over a million.”

  Alexander considered this for a while. So did Pieter. He didn’t ask, though, how Teresa knew such things. He would only receive a riddle for an answer.

  “How old am I in days?” Alexander asked him.

  “Two thousand, one hundred and ninety-one,” Pieter said instantly. “If you include the leap day.”

  “Two thousand, one hundred and ninety-one.” Alexander grinned. “How are you so good at numbers, Pieter?”

  “If you’re born in Eureka, you have to be. The city is famous for its mathemagicians.”

  Alexander watched Pieter stick six sugarsticks in the cake. A tinderfly was tied to each one. “So why did you leave?

  “I had to. To save the city from the Czar.”

  Alexander was wide-eyed. “You beat Papa in a fight?”

  “Single-handedly,” Pieter said with a grin. “Aged four and a half.”

  That was not quite the whole story. But Pieter liked keeping the details vague. It sounded like a fairy tale then. It made it seem as if he’d been some super-powered invincible toddler, who had waddled up and hit the Czar with a flying karate kick.

  In actual fact, the Eurekans had spotted the Czar’s army marching on the city. After quickly calculating their chances of survival (slim to none), they surrendered completely. In a decision that Pieter had never known the Czar to make before or since, he agreed to spare them, but only if they provided him with a mathemagician as tribute. Pieter’s parents offered up him.

  “I still can’t believe you’re not angry about that!” Teresa said with a sniff. “They gave you up to be a slave!”

  “One boy to save a whole city?” Pieter shrugged. “That’s not monstrous, it’s smart.”

  (Though in his heart, down in the part where mathemagics made no sense, Pieter was angry. It did hurt. Parents were supposed to find their children more precious than anything else, weren’t they? He bet Teresa’s parents would have died to protect her. Maybe they had. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t talk about them.)

  “They handed you over as if you were a purse of old pennies,” Teresa muttered. “And I think you’re worth more than all the treasure there is.”

  Pieter smiled at that, but shook his head all the same. Sometimes, he didn’t understand Teresa at all. She said things that just didn’t add up. But the strangest thing of all was, he couldn’t shake the feeling she was somehow right.

  Alexander made his
wish and cut the wicks on each tinderstick, freeing the six little living flickers of flame. The tinderflies flew up and away like sparks from a fire. They carried your wishes up to the stars, so it was said.

  Teresa took out the knife and cut three huge slices. The birthday cake was so hot it burned Alexander’s fingers, and so sweet it hurt his baby teeth. He sat there, belly full and heart bursting, trying to remember the last time he had felt so happy.

  “Teresa’s right,” he said, spraying crumbs everywhere. “Cake does help.”

  Pieter was halfway through his second slice when, over by the shelf edge, Teresa shrieked.

  It was the sort of shriek that, when uttered in a kitchen, could have meant several things. Maybe she had just seen a particularly huge rat scurry over the shelves, or accidentally set fire to a tea towel. Pieter couldn’t smell smoke, so a rat was most likely. He turned to see if he was correct.

  “We’ve been spotted!” Teresa hissed, leaping back from the edge. She kicked the birthday cake into the mint bushes, then grabbed up the picnic blanket and shoved it inside a crate of breadsticks. “Remember what you say, Alexander! You got lost and we found you and we’re definitely not friends.”

  Pieter scrambled up to his feet, heart pounding, belly full of cake. Down in the kitchen below was a man slender as a willow cane, with skin smooth as porcelain and eyes the color of jade. A cloak of midnight velvet hung from his shoulders, and a glittering H was stitched in gold thread upon his sleeve, and he was smiling up at them.

  Lord Xin, the Heirmaster.

  Cruelest of the Czar’s War Council.

  And Alexander’s tutor.

  * * *

  8. Some of you might be scratching your heads, saying to yourself: Pieter’s mathemagics are wrong. Alexander is only 313 weeks old! But remember that a week in Petrossia is only five days long—the Czar killed off the weekend a long time ago.