Castle Hangnail

by Ursula Vernon

  “Well,” said Eudaimonia. “I suppose that changes things.” She smiled, and it was almost kind. “I see now that it isn’t your fault that things are such a ruin. There are so few of you, and so . . . ill-suited. You must think you are doing the very best you can.”

  The minions said nothing.

  “But the old way of doing things will have to change. You will have to actually work for a living. We will have no parasites in this castle, do you understand?”

  The minions continued to say nothing.

  “Very well, then.” Eudaimonia gave a bright, brittle smile. “I’m sure we’ll get along splendidly . . .”

  She tapped her wand against Miss Handlebram’s block of ice.

  “. . . or else measures will have to be taken. Now, then. Are there any questions?”

  “Excuse me,” said Angus. His voice was calm and he didn’t paw the floor. Only someone who knew him well would know that he was angry. “I do have one question, Sorceress.”

  Sorceress, Majordomo noticed with despair, not Mistress.

  “What would you like us to feed your cockatrice? We’re running out of chicken feed.”

  “Minotaurs are so stupid,” said Eudaimonia. She smiled as she said it, and her voice was caressing, as if she were saying something else entirely. “I suppose you can’t help it. Must I make all the decisions?”

  She tapped her wand on her palm. Her smile grew wider.

  “Why don’t you feed it the donkey?”

  Chapter 38

  She’s got to go,” said Pins.

  Everyone nodded.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Majordomo. “She’s got to stay! If she leaves, we’ve got no Master! The Board will have us decommissioned! We’re out of options! She’s our last chance.”

  “Did you give her the Tasks?” asked Pins.

  “Um.” Majordomo paused. “Well, no. Molly must have taken her list with her. One ought to be mailed here automatically—there are spells at the Board of Magic that handle that—but I haven’t had a chance to get to the post office, since she’d had me running around—”

  He stopped, since that might sound like a criticism of the new Master, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Angus folded his arms. “I’m only a stupid Minotaur,” he said heavily, “but I’d rather go live somewhere else than stay here with her.”

  “You’d leave?” Majordomo felt his mouth sag open. “But—but this is your home!”

  “Not while she is being here,” said Cook.

  “You’re minions! Minions don’t betray their Master!”

  Pins spoke for all of them when he said “I’m not her minion.”

  “We took the Minion’s Oath, same as you,” said Angus. “We all pay our dues to the Minion’s Guild. And we have a Master, and just because she’s gone missing doesn’t mean we’re not still loyal.”

  “If anything,” said Pins softly, “we’re more loyal than you are. You never liked Molly. As soon as a new Master showed up, you threw her over, without even bothering to ask her side of the story. You’d never have done that to Ungo.”

  Majordomo’s breath hissed between his teeth. He could not think of a single thing to say.

  “Anyway,” said Angus, “I’m not feeding that poor donkey to that ill-tempered cockatrice. I’ll take the donkey to Berkeley tonight and see if he can’t spare me some of last season’s mutton.”

  Cook left the kitchen. Majordomo could hear her hooves clomping down the stairs toward the basement.

  He pushed his chair back. “I will go and attend the Mistress,” he said. His voice sounded hollow in his own ears.

  It was a long walk up the steps to Eudaimonia’s suite, and for once, Majordomo was glad of it. There are two Masters of Castle Hangnail now. There cannot be two Masters. One is gone—but a Master is never gone when the minions loyal to her remain.

  What do I do?

  He tapped on the Sorceress’s door. One of the bodyguards—Gordon, was it?—opened the door.

  Majordomo was vaguely aware that the man was sneering, but his gaze was caught by a thong around the man’s throat, and dangling from it—

  The Imperial Squid.

  A flash of rage went through the old minion’s heart, and his hand shot up. He grabbed the coin and yanked hard.

  The bodyguard wasn’t expecting any kind of assault. Majordomo might look like a tired old man, but Ungo the Mad had rebuilt him well. Gordon went to his knees, choking, as the thong was yanked tight around his neck.

  “That wasn’t yours!” hissed Majordomo. “That belongs to Sir Edward!”

  “Ghhrgghkk!”

  “What is going on here?!”

  Cold so intense that it burned struck Majordomo’s face and froze his right arm. He could not have let go if he wanted to. The leather throng, made brittle by cold, snapped as Gordon crawled backward.

  “I will not have my servants fighting!” shouted Eudaimonia. A second blast of ice knocked Majordomo sideways onto the carpet.

  With her wand in her hand, her eyes glowing with rage and magic, her blue robes whipping around her, Eudaimonia looked every inch an Evil Sorceress. The old minion’s heart seized with pride.

  A Master. A Master like the old days. This is what they are supposed to be like.

  He dragged himself to his feet. Gordon rubbed his throat and eyed him vengefully.

  “He took something that didn’t belong to him,” said Majordomo.

  She shook her head in disgust and turned away. “When you are done rolling around on the carpet, I have compiled a list of repairs that will need to be made immediately.”

  “Yes?” said Majordomo. His right arm still wasn’t working, but it would thaw out quickly enough. “I would be glad to, Mistress, but we are—err—temporarily embarrassed in the funding department . . .”

  “Yes, I know,” said the Sorceress. “We will fix that.”

  Did she have money? “We will?”

  Eudaimonia leaned back. “We will begin by selling the foolish metal Bees in the basement.”

  “You . . . you want to sell the Clockwork Bees . . . ? But those were inventions of Ungo the Mad . . . they’ve been here forever . . .”

  “Indeed. They look it too. I shall prepare a list of potential buyers.” She waved a hand. “Should they prove insufficient, we shall have to find a buyer for the male Minotaur.”

  Majordomo thought perhaps he’d misheard. Then he thought perhaps he’d gone mad.

  “Mistress?”

  “I would prefer not to. I know the creatures don’t like to be separated.” And she gave him what she probably thought was a kind smile. “But we cannot live in a castle that is falling down around our ears, can we?”

  She’s talking about Angus as if he was something you could sell. He’s a minion, not a piece of furniture!

  “Mistress,” said Majordomo. It wasn’t agreement or disagreement, but at least he was saying something.

  “As I said, we’ll leave that on the table. How many Bees are there to sell?”

  There were one hundred and sixteen, each of which Majordomo knew individually, but he said only “I will go and count them at once, Mistress.”

  He bowed. His last view as he turned from the room was of Eudaimonia in front of the window, the sunlight turning her hair into a pale white flame.

  She looks like a Master like the old days.

  But . . . it isn’t the old days anymore. And even then, a castle couldn’t have two Masters.

  And you weren’t allowed to sell your minions. It was a sacred trust.

  His right arm was still frozen, but that didn’t bother him. Clenched between his frozen fingers, an icy weight against his palm, lay the Imperial Squid.

  Chapter 39

  Majordomo paused on the landing above the staircase. The Great
Hall lay before him, and drifting up from it, he could hear voices.

  “Shhhh!”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Keep your voice down! She’ll hear you!”

  “Of course I can do it! It’s only ice! But how are we going to move her?”

  “Quiet!”

  Majordomo cleared his throat loudly and began walking down the staircase, setting each foot down with a thump. There was a flurry of activity, followed by the sound of people being very quiet down below, which is not quite the same as silence.

  When Majordomo plodded out into the Great Hall, Edward was standing at attention beside the block of ice, Pins was sewing quietly on the couch, and Serenissima was cleaning the floor.

  It was a scene so innocent that Majordomo would have been wildly suspicious, even if he hadn’t just overheard them talking.

  He trudged past them, toward the staircase that led down to the boiler room and the Clockwork Bees.

  They’re plotting . . . and they didn’t tell me about it.

  It would have been obvious even to the donkey that the other minions were plotting to melt Miss Handlebram out of the block of ice. Majordomo stomped down the stairs to the boiler room.

  Why hadn’t they told him?

  Did they really think I’d try to stop them? Miss Handlebram is my friend too! I don’t want her to be encased in ice!

  They don’t trust me.

  They’re afraid I’ll tell the Sorceress.

  He almost missed the next step, and had to catch himself on the handrail.

  And get everyone else in trouble? Let her punish Pins and Serenissima and sell Angus, like he was a cow?

  Majordomo pushed open the door to the boiler room. Clockwork Bees droned happily around him. Dark, metallic honey dripped between the gears and made sticky rivers down the far wall.

  He could not imagine the castle without them.

  Eudaimonia is a terrible Master.

  We have to get rid of her.

  If we get rid of her, Castle Hangnail is doomed. We’ll never get the Board of Magic to give us another extension. It’s the end.

  In the heat of the boiler room, his frozen arm began to thaw. He slowly pried his fingers open and stared at the coin in his palm.

  We’ll have to leave. It’s over. It’s finally over.

  He put his back against the stone wall and slid down it. The Bees thrummed around him.

  Majordomo put his face in his hands and began to sob.

  He had always known his place in the world. Now he had never felt more alone.

  The touch on his cheek was as light as the feet of a Clockwork Bee. Molly put her arm around his shoulders and said, “Don’t cry.”

  “You’re here,” said Majordomo, sniffling. Molly fished out a tissue and handed it to him. “You came back.”

  “I didn’t ever leave,” Molly confessed. “I’ve been down here in the boiler room and going out into the garden at night. Bugbane tells me when someone’s coming, but he’s out in the garden trying to catch some lunch. Cook’s been bringing me sandwiches.”

  Majordomo wiped his eyes. “I suppose everyone else knows you’re here and didn’t tell me. Not that I blame them.”

  She shook her head. “Just Cook. She said nobody else was mad at me—except you—but I didn’t see how they couldn’t be, so I asked her not to tell.”

  She sat down next to him. Majordomo pressed the tissue to his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Why did you stay?” he asked.

  Molly leaned her head back against the stone wall. “I didn’t want to leave you guys alone with her.”

  There was no need to ask who Molly was talking about. Majordomo nodded.

  “She doesn’t care about us,” he said hopelessly. “I’m used to bad Masters—we’ve had all sorts of Evil and Wickedness, it’s what we do—but at least they loved the castle. They’d have died to defend it. Some of them did. The old Vampire Lord died defending the castle eleven and a half times.”

  “What was the half?” asked Molly.

  “Someone put a stake through his spleen. They weren’t very clear on anatomy. He was grumpy for weeks.”

  Molly nodded. After a minute she said, “I used to look up to her a bunch. She was so pretty and she knew magic, and nobody else did. She was mean to me, but then sometimes she’d be sort of nice too.”

  Majordomo sighed. “And then you think that if you could just do what she wanted, she’d be nice again.”

  Molly nodded vigorously. “Yes! You understand!”

  “Yes.”

  The Clockwork Bees droned overhead. Molly sighed. “But I don’t think it matters what we do. I think she’s just mean when she wants to be mean. I used to try really, really hard at the spells to get them just right, so she’d be impressed, but it didn’t matter. It was like she just got more and more sarcastic. Sometimes she was nicer when I messed up . . .”

  She trailed off, with an odd expression on her face, as if someone had just handed her a great truth.

  “What?” said Majordomo.

  “She was nicer when I messed up. I think she wanted me to fail. When I did the shadow spell right, that first time, she was really mean, but in that way that sounds like she’s being nice, but really she isn’t.”

  Majordomo raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s not surprising, is it? Magical folk, particularly the Evil ones, don’t like other people to be as powerful as they are.”

  “I don’t care if other people are more powerful than me, as long as they leave me and Castle Hangnail alone.”

  “Yes,” said Majordomo, “but you’re Wicked. Wicked is different from Evil.” He waved a hand. “You know.”

  Molly nodded. Wicked was turning somebody into an earwig and letting them run around for a week to give them a good scare. Evil was turning someone into an earwig and then stepping on them.

  When Eudaimonia talked to you, you felt like an earwig looking up at the underside of a shoe.

  “There was another thing she used to do,” said Molly. “When I’d get a spell wrong, she’d take my magic to do it right.”

  Majordomo sat up. “What?”

  “She’d take it. You know, the way the mole shaman did for Wormrise, only not like that, because he asked first and he only borrowed it. And Eudaimonia didn’t really ask. I mean, she kind of told me that I had to let her.”

  Molly scowled. It sounded weak when she said it like that. Her twin sister would have said “Well, stand up to her and say no!” but her sister also said things like “Ignore them and they’ll go away,” and Molly knew perfectly well that if you ignored people, they generally figured they were getting away with something and got ten times worse.

  Whereas if you turned them into an earwig, their manners improved amazingly. She really had to figure out that earwig spell.

  “Did you ever tell her not to?” asked Majordomo.

  “I tried to once,” said Molly. “She sort of talked me into it. I mean . . . well, you know. She said she wouldn’t like me anymore and I couldn’t come over and learn magic. So then I had to apologize and beg her to take my magic before she’d forgive me.” She scowled again. “That’s just the sort of person she is.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Majordomo, thinking of the curtains. “She asked me to do something impossible, and I knew it was impossible and instead I wound up apologizing because it hadn’t gotten done.”

  “It’s like a weird kind of magic,” Molly agreed. “Like a spell that makes you feel like it’s all your fault.”

  They both sighed at the same time.

  “Anyway, I thought she was just taking my magic to do the spells right, because I couldn’t do them myself. But now . . . I don’t know. Maybe she was keeping the magic for herself.”

  “Maybe,” said Majordomo. “Maybe they were
the wrong spells for you. Witches and Sorceresses aren’t the same. Just because she could do a spell doesn’t mean you could. Or vice versa.”

  “Wish I’d known that two years ago,” said Molly glumly.

  Majordomo remembered suddenly why he was mad at Molly. “Did you just steal an invitation at random?”

  “Um,” said Molly, staring at the floor.

  He waited.

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I . . . well . . .”

  “Just tell me,” said Majordomo tiredly. “I can’t feel any worse.”

  “She told me to throw yours away,” mumbled Molly. “Said Castle Hangnail was too . . . um . . . small.”

  (Actually the phrase she’d used was “pathetic run-down little backwater,” but Molly wasn’t about to say that to Majordomo.)

  “So I fished it out of the wastebasket,” Molly said, “and came here because I thought—well—I thought you needed somebody, and I’m small too, and maybe a small castle needed a small Witch.” She hunched her shoulders. “I really didn’t mean to lie. I thought I’d figure out a way to stay.”

  There was a long silence in the boiler room, broken only by the buzz of clockwork. Then Majordomo reached out and closed his fingers over hers, with the Imperial Squid clasped between them.

  “It did need a small Witch,” he said. “And it still does. We’ll figure out a way.”

  Chapter 40

  You’ll never get Miss Handlebram melted,” said Molly. “It’s magic ice. It stays cold unless you’ve got magic fire to melt the outside bit. Once you’re through that layer, it’s ordinary ice and you could steam it away, I guess, but you have to get through the shell.”

  The eight of them—six minions, one goldfish, and Molly—sat around the kitchen table. Bugbane was posted as a lookout over the door, in case Eudaimonia or the bodyguards came downstairs.

  When Majordomo had emerged from the boiler room, Molly beside him, everyone had been stunned—then delighted—then afraid. They cast nervous glances upward, in the direction of the Sorceress’s bedroom.