Castle Hangnail

by Ursula Vernon

  4) Win the hearts and minds of the townsfolk by any means necessary.

  Failure to complete these Tasks in a timely manner will result in forfeiture of said castle.

  Sincerely,

  The Board of Magic

  Molly looked up at Majordomo. Forfeiture wasn’t too hard for someone who read at a tenth-grade level—it meant she’d have to give the castle up—but she wasn’t sure about some of the others.

  “Win the hearts and minds of the townsfolk?”

  “However you like,” said Majordomo. “The old Vampire Lord liked to keep the hearts in jars in the basement, but he was rather old-fashioned. You could just grind them all underfoot and demand tribute if you like.”

  “. . . Um,” said Molly, who had never ground anyone underfoot in her life. (Blackmailing her sister the time Sarah had gotten a C on a geometry test probably didn’t count.)

  “All very standard,” said Majordomo. “You’ll have completed the first Task once we see a really good display of magic—something to prove your bona fides, you understand.”

  “Um,” said Molly again, who had no idea what bona fides were. “A display of magic. Yes, of course.” She folded the list of Tasks. “Indeed. Is there anything else you’d like to show me, Majordomo?”

  “You’ve seen most of it,” said Majordomo. “All Castle Hangnail has to offer. It’s all yours now, I suppose.”

  He didn’t sound too sure of this last bit. Molly hurried onward. “In that case, I’ll want to spend some time here, reading about the history of the castle. If you could arrange to have my lunch brought up here, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Oh,” said Majordomo. “Yes. Certainly, Mistress. I’ll see to it.”

  He paused at the threshold and gave her a look.

  Molly gave him a look right back.

  You can say a lot with a look. In this case, Majordomo was saying “I am still not entirely convinced that you belong here, and I’m going to keep an eye on you until I figure out what you’re up to.”

  And Molly’s look, with the innocence that comes naturally to twelve-year-old girls who are often to blame for something, said “Who, me?”

  Majordomo’s eyebrows drew down, and his look said “Yes, you.”

  And Molly widened her eyes and her look said “Well, good luck catching me, then!”

  And she smiled brightly and shut the door in his face.

  She waited until the footsteps had receded—Majordomo had a distinctive shuffling gait—and then turned back to the library.

  This was more like it!

  “Spellbook,” she said under her breath. “Spellbook, spellbook . . . if I can just find a good spellbook . . .”

  Molly ran her fingers across the books until she came to a title that sound promising—The Education of a Sorcerer’s Apprentice by A. Nesbit. She pulled the book down, curled up in the armchair, and began to read.

  It is all very well and good to be able to turn invisible when you hold your breath, but there is a great deal more to magic. Molly, who had not gone to a Witch’s school—who had in fact gone to a perfectly ordinary, rather dingy school with most of the grades packed into one room—knew that if she was going to be allowed to stay in Castle Hangnail, she was going to have to be able to do more than turn invisible.

  Magic is tricky stuff. Not everybody can be a Witch or a Wizard. You have to have a certain amount of inherent magic to be able to do a spell at all, and very few people have that much. Even among twins, like Molly and her sister, only one twin may have the gift.

  But merely having magic isn’t enough. Being a good cook won’t help if you don’t have ingredients and recipes to work with. Molly had magic, but in order to use it for much of anything, she was going to need to find a spellbook.

  Her mother would certainly not have allowed her to have a real spellbook in the house—not even one with a pink cover and rhinestones and a title like Completely Unobjectionable Magic Spells to Help Very Nice Girls With Their Homework.

  She had told Majordomo the truth—she did have a book of potions. Unfortunately, it had been written by a very nice White Witch, and so it was full of potions for curing earaches and making vegetables grow. A distant relative had given it to her for Christmas one year, and Molly had hidden it immediately before her mother could get a good look at the cover.

  Molly had used that book to win second prize for her giant zucchini at the fair three years running. But there was nothing terribly Wicked about zucchini.

  The sad fact was that Molly knew almost no real magic. She knew a couple of the little spells that children teach each other on the playground—“Ladybug, Ladybug,” say, which lets you talk to a ladybug, and “Ring Around the Rosie,” which, when done properly, protects against the plague. (Ladybugs, sadly, are not very good conversationalists, so you rarely hear anything of interest, and there had been no plague in that country for a hundred years.)

  She had once found a really wonderful spell in a library book for turning someone into an earwig, but she hadn’t written it down properly and she’d never been able to find the book again. She suspected that it had been mis-shelved in the children’s section, and librarians look at you very oddly if you go up to them and say, “Excuse me, do you have any books on how to turn your enemies into earwigs?”

  She knew a handful of other spells. She could start a fire with her thumbnail. She could get tangles out of the worst tangled hair. She could tell if her twin sister stepped into her side of the room. She could make her shadow come alive and dance with her (which is an exhausting spell, and she didn’t enjoy doing it). She could turn a leaf into a teacup, and a teacup into a leaf.

  These were the only real spells that she knew.

  She had learned them from Eudaimonia.

  Chapter 7

  Molly eventually abandoned The Education of a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which was very dry and contained no actual spells, but a great many complaints about the quality of meals at the various boarding schools the author had attended.

  If I can find a spellbook, though . . . something that can teach me real spells . . . I’ll study it really hard. Even if it’s boring. I’ll learn them. I know I can learn them. Eudaimonia didn’t think I could do the shadow spell, and I proved I could. I can learn these too.

  And then I’ll prove to Majordomo that I’m a proper Wicked Witch.

  Let’s take a minute to talk about spellbooks, since, in this day and age when magic is no longer taught in schools (or is, at best, an elective like Home Economics), very few people have the experience with spellbooks that they used to.

  A spellbook is basically a cookbook for magic.

  Cooking itself is the first cousin to magic, so it’s not surprising that a spell resembles a recipe. In a good spellbook, the ingredients will be laid out, along with some indication of the time involved and how hard the spell will be. For example:

  A Spell to Become Invisible

  You will require:

  A moonless night

  A length of black silk thread

  A pinch of fern seed

  A triangle drawn in green chalk

  This spell will last for three hours or until sunrise, whichever comes first.

  And then the spell will, ideally, explain exactly what you do with the thread and the fern seed and the green chalk triangle, what magic words to say over it, and so forth.

  In a very good spellbook for beginners, there will even be footnotes telling you how to acquire fern seed in the first place (this is quite difficult, as ferns prefer to reproduce by spores most of the time, and actual fern seed is itself invisible) and how to pronounce the more difficult words in the incantation.

  This is all relatively straightforward, and if one has a bit of magical power (enough, say, to turn invisible when they hold their breath), they need only follow the spell and then enjoy their newfound th
ree hours of invisibility.

  The problem lies in finding a good spellbook to begin with.

  Just as writing an easy-to-follow recipe requires an orderly sort of mind, so too does writing a good spell. Unfortunately, many Wizards and Witches and Sorcerers and so forth do not have orderly minds. Reading their spellbooks is rather like reading the recipe cards for a gifted but erratic cook—lots of scribbled notes to themselves and not much use to other people.

  Invisbul Spell

  sprinkle fern seed—try spleenwort,

  A. platyneuron?

  Tuesday night

  use thread from black scarf Mom sent me?

  Build wall of Octroi in hexagon

  octagon

  dodecahedron

  pyramid

  recite words from William’s Spell of Unseeing. FIRST syllable, not second!!!

  send Igor to store for green chalk

  Molly began pulling volumes down from the shelves, looking for a useful spellbook. Unfortunately, she was getting a great many books written like the latter example, and very few of the first.

  Majordomo came up with her lunch. Molly shoved the spellbooks under a copy of A Compleat Historie of Castle Hangnaile and looked wide-eyed and innocent at him until he went away again.

  One book! One good book of spells that she could really use, all about Smiting and Blighting! A Wicked Witch who didn’t Smite and/or Blight might as well just be a White Witch.

  There’s not anything wrong with being a White Witch, of course. It’s just that once people figure out you’re not going to turn them into a toad, that you will cure their earache and make their cow give extra milk, you become part of the service industry, like the pharmacist or the mailman. People show up at all hours expecting you to charm warts off their feet.

  White Witches are much nicer people, but Wicked Witches have more fun. Molly pulled down another volume, saw that it was written backward and in Latin, and put it back. She knew two words of Latin—carpe diem, which means “seize the day”—and reading backward made her head hurt. She flopped down on the library stool and jammed her chin onto her hand. Surely somewhere there must be a book that could help her!

  Her eyes traveled over the row of Encyclopedia Thaumaturgica, and paused at the gap, one book wide, for volume Q.

  If Cook threw away volume Q, why is there a gap at all? Shouldn’t P and R just be jammed up against each other?

  She went over to the shelf and felt around in the gap.

  A few inches back from the encyclopedias, nearly lost in the darkness at the back of the shelf, was a little book, not much bigger than Molly’s hand.

  The leather was gray and the pages were gray and the ink was silver. There was no title and no title page. The spells began on the very first page. Molly had to turn the volume to one side to make the light reflect off the silver ink so that she could read it.

  It was written in a beautiful flowing hand, and except that every s looked like an f (which happens in very old books) it was remarkably easy to read.

  To talk to any bird or beaft, take a hair or fcale or feather from the creature you wifh to fpeak with and wrap it in a dock leaf and tie it with a hair from your own head and fay over it the following wordf . . .

  Molly read the spell three times over. There was not a list of ingredients, but it seemed very straightforward. She turned the page and there was a spell for “turning fand into flying fifh eggf,” which was perhaps not terribly useful, and on the opposite page, there was a spell to spy on your enemies.

  She turned the pages faster. Some of them were odd and useless little spells—was there any point in making acorns sing? Or being able to turn stones into cheese?—but some of them looked very useful indeed. Molly could think of four or five situations where being able to turn a cow into a dragon would be extremely handy, although the spell only lasted for one minute, which did limit its utility.

  “But will they work?” she whispered. “Or will I be able to cast them?” For there are very powerful spells that are very simple, but unless you happen to be the right sort of person, they will not work at all. (And a good thing too. You can raise the dead with five words and a hen’s egg, but natural Necromancers are very rare. Fortunately they tend to be solemn, responsible people, which is why we are not all up to our elbows in zombies.)

  There was only one way to find out. Molly slid the Little Gray Book into her sleeve and headed out to the gardens.

  Chapter 8

  The herb garden of Castle Hangnail had been untended for many years. Cook’s garden was full of enormous lettuces and cabbages and tomatoes the size of softballs, but the only herbs were for seasoning. Bees buzzed happily on the flowers of the basil, interrupted by the occasional baritone droning of a Clockwork Bee.

  If you walked through the courtyard that held Cook’s garden, though, there was a little stone archway leading to a second garden. This one was smaller and completely wild. Twisted green stems grew over the stones, and the branches of strange trees rested against the sky.

  Molly knew a fair bit about plants. Her mother had a garden at home, and Molly had to learn to identify various herbs in order to make the potions in her potion book. She knew many of the plants in this garden, but others were foreign. Many were medicinal. Some were poisonous.

  As she walked the overgrown paths, she muttered the names of plants to herself—“Rosemary . . . that’s skullcap . . . valerian . . . oh dear, the mint has really taken over in this bed, hasn’t it? I’ll have to get in with the shears . . . Is that goldenseal? I thought it only grew in the mountains . . .”

  Someone had clearly lavished care on the herb garden many years ago. Molly suspected that it had been another Wicked Witch.

  However Wicked that Witch might have been, she had clearly loved the garden. Plants can tell when you love them, and if you don’t love them, it takes a great deal of expensive fertilizer or powerful magic to make up the difference.

  Molly was not looking for anything rare and special, however, but for a dock leaf. Dock is a very common weed. No weeds dared to enter Cook’s garden, but perhaps here, wedging its root into the gap between two stones . . .

  “Aha!” She pounced on the broad green dock leaf. It had wavy edges and a thick white vein down the middle.

  “May I help you, Mistress?” asked Majordomo from the archway.

  “Nope!” said Molly. “Found what I was after.” Dirt crumbled off the dock roots and onto the path.

  “Indeed,” said Majordomo. The lines around his mouth (some of which were stitched on) deepened with disapproval. “Are you taking up gardening?”

  “I might,” said Molly. “But for now, Smiting and Blighting, you know. All in a Wicked Witch’s work.”

  She slipped past him, dock leaf in her hand, and ran into the castle.

  • • •

  Dock leaf, check . . .” she murmured, rereading the recipe in the Little Gray Book. “Candle . . . hair . . .” She yanked one out of her head, then slid the book into her sleeve. “Now, to go find one of their hairs . . .”

  Molly had a goal in mind already, at the top of the highest tower, where the bats roosted. The ravens could already talk, but bats generally don’t (or if they do, only to each other and sometimes to the moon).

  “May I be of some assistance, Mistress?” asked Majordomo, stepping out of a doorway into the hall.

  “I’m fine,” said Molly. “Are you following me around?”

  “It is the duty of the guardian to assist the Master in any way possible,” Majordomo intoned.

  “Maybe you could go oil Lord Edward’s knees,” said Molly.

  Majordomo narrowed his eyes. Molly widened hers. (Her mother would have recognized that look and sent her to her room preemptively, since, as she said, “You’ve obviously done something!” but Majordomo did not have a great deal of experience with twelve-yea
r-old girls.)

  “We’re all very eager to see some magic,” said Majordomo. “All of us minions. It’s been so long since there was a Master, you understand. And in order to complete the first of the Board’s Tasks . . .” He trailed off.

  Molly waved her hand airily. “Tonight, then. I prefer to work magic under the moon, you know.”

  Majordomo bowed. “We shall look forward to it.”

  That’s done it, thought Molly, sprinting up the steps of the tower. I’ve got to pull something off tonight. Majordomo’s getting suspicious, and going invisible isn’t going to be enough. She gulped.

  If she couldn’t prove that she was a real Witch, she was going to be sent back home in disgrace. She’d have to share a room with her twin again. With pink stuffed animals and glittery unicorn posters.

  Molly shuddered.

  If only she’d been able to arrive in a carriage pulled by cockatrices or turn into a wolf or something impressive like that! Something that would have made Majordomo accept her as the proper Mistress of the castle, no questions asked.

  Tonight, she thought. If worse comes to worse, I’ll do the spell where I spin off my shadow and dance with it. If we can get enough candles in the room, that’ll look impressive, even if it is just a silly little trick . . .

  She pushed open the door to the belfry and entered the roost of the bats.

  The top of the tower was lost into darkness. On every surface—the rafters, the walls, the rusting iron gratings—were dozens and dozens of bats.

  Bats are actually very delicate little creatures. Molly was fond of them. These were brown bats. They looked, as they clung to the ceiling, like nothing so much as dozens of dried prunes.

  Molly pulled the door shut and stepped carefully across the floor. A bat roost, no matter how diligent people are about cleaning it, smells like bat guano. It’s an unavoidable problem. Angus came up once a week with a shovel and scraped the floor, then carted the scrapings down six flights of stairs to the gardens. (Bat guano makes the very best fertilizer in the world.) Then Serenissima would come up and steam the floors clean. But in a week, it would have to be done all over again.