“I won’t,” said Annabel. She tried to say it in a cold, mature way, but it came out sounding sulky instead.
Politely, Blackfoot said, I do beg your pardon, and sat down to watch her climb. The nearby wall was much higher than it used to be, but despite her chubbiness, Annabel was a goatishly nimble climber and could scale the uneven slabs almost as swiftly as Blackfoot himself.
She hefted herself to the first flat place, tearing her flannels as she went, then scrambled up the steep slope more easily, her palms and the soles of her feet rapidly growing chalky with dust and mortar. She saw Peter as she climbed, still marching around the outer edge of the ruins, and it occurred to her at the same time that the ruins were larger—much larger!—than she remembered them being. Peter must have realised the same thing at the same time, because his far-away figure stopped walking with an attitude of annoyance that clearly telegraphed across the distance.
Annabel snorted to herself and kept climbing. Peter had obviously decided that the ruins were now too large to walk around, even if he was in a snit. Now that she had started climbing, she would like to be able to tell him when he returned that she knew exactly where Mordion was.
Unfortunately for that particular aim, Mordion was nowhere in sight when Annabel reached the highest point of the growing wall. She couldn’t see the entire circumference, of course: far too much of the castle had grown back since yesterday. From this height, there was more than she’d thought at first. Here and there, she even saw the wink of glass catching sunlight, which was off-putting, since Annabel knew that there were no unbroken windows around the ruins. She’d broken the very last one herself, by accident.
Now, looking out at the brand new windows and the very-definitely-bigger ruins, Annabel felt a distinct chill of fear. It was one thing to hear from Blackfoot that the ruins could grow back: it was quite another to see it actually happening before her eyes. Annabel’s gaze went back to where the distant figure of Peter turned in a circle with an air of helplessness. As she watched, he turned on his heel and began to come back. Annabel scrambled back down as well, and by the time Peter made it to the outside of the stables, she was just dropping down to meet him.
“Well, the good news is that the ruins have got bigger,” said Peter. He sounded almost as breathless as Annabel felt.
“I know,” Annabel said. “I saw. Why is that good news?”
“Because the bad news is that the safe zone has definitely shrunk.”
5
Peter, having delivered his pronouncement with the most portentous of accents, added: “Well, actually, it’s only sort of shrunk.”
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“It’s shrunk in relation to the ruins, but not in relation to itself, because the ruins have got bigger.”
Well, well, said Blackfoot. A little breathing room. Perhaps we should see what else has grown back in the ruins, now that we’re above ground again. What did you see when you were on the wall, Nan? Which sections have grown back the most?
“It’s mostly staircases and lower levels,” said Annabel, without enthusiasm. She’d already scaled a wall, and she felt that she’d made enough effort for one day. Despite the nagging feeling Peter’s worry gave her, it was difficult to feel as frightened as she’d felt when she could physically see Mordion. “What if the castle ruins keep getting bigger? Won’t we stay safe?”
Impatiently, Peter said: “That’s just like you, Ann! I don’t want to stay in here indefinitely! Mother’s bound to be worried already, and even if the safe bit is bigger than it was yesterday, the castle’s bound to stop growing before long. Then the shrinkage will catch up with us.”
The castle will only keep growing until it reaches its original size, said Blackfoot, and added: Well, at least, so I suppose. What will happen after that is hard to guess.
“Well, then, you find a way out,” grumbled Annabel.
Was that directed at me, or the boy?
“Both of you!”
Don’t be cross just because I shamed you into bestirring yourself, Blackfoot said mildly. Of course we’re working on getting out of the castle–
“I don’t think you are working at it,” Annabel said. “You’re just following us around and making sarcastic remarks. Maybe you should work on that instead. People don’t like sarcastic pe– cats.”
I wouldn’t like to arrive at perfection so quickly. A cat must have some failings, after all.
“Ann, do you think you could not quarrel with your cat?” complained Peter. “It’s off-putting. And if you were talking about me, I am working on getting us out of the castle: it’s not easy, you know!”
You can rest assured, Nan, that I won’t allow you to be killed. It may simply take some time to find our way out of this mess.
“You’re the one who got us into this mess in the first place!”
I’m so sorry to have saved your life. It must be very difficult for you to bear.
“Ann!”
Annabel, glaring at Blackfoot, said: “Blackfoot is being sarcastic again.”
“Oh well, at least he’s not being sarcastic about me this time. Wait, is he being sarcastic about me?”
“Why do you care?” Annabel said sourly. “You can’t hear him.”
“No, but– Ann! Now you’ve pulled me into your figment again! Stop it! I’m trying to find a way out of here, you know.”
Mildly diverted, Annabel asked: “How?”
“The sealing is pushing against Mordion’s magic,” said Peter, his face lighting up. He had probably, thought Annabel rather crossly, been waiting for just this chance to let her know how clever he’d been. “There’s a lot of power going to waste around there, just crashing up against the other side, so to speak. If we can harness some of that–”
–then we can hope to create the single biggest magical fallout that the Two Monarchies have ever seen, sighed Blackfoot.
“Blackfoot doesn’t advise it,” said Annabel.
Advise it? I forbid it!
“He feels very strongly about it.”
Did I not already tell you both that the only way out of this castle is to go further in?
“Didn’t you decide that the best way to get out was to go further in?” Annabel asked. “You said it made sense.”
“That was just one idea,” said Peter. “I have heaps of ideas: I just don’t have enough information yet. For instance, I still haven’t determined if the sealing goes all the way up–”
It does.
“–and all the way down–”
It does.
“–so I have to find out about that first. Why don’t you sit here with your cat and draw things? I’m going back to the edge of the seal and Mordion’s magic.”
“Blackfoot says the sealing is all the way over and under the castle.”
“Of course he does. Sometimes I think he just says what you want to hear, Ann, so you don’t have to put yourself to the trouble of doing anything. Ow! Ann! Tell your cat not to bite me!”
Annabel, who was still feeling slightly raw from hearing Blackfoot say much the same thing earlier, patted his head and said: “Bad cat.”
Peter huffed and went away again, presumably to study the sealing once more. Blackfoot watched him go and only flicked an ear in Annabel’s direction when she sat beside him and said: “You said the same thing yourself. Why are you biting Peter?”
I’m your cat. You’re my human. It’s my job to tell you the unpleasant things. It’s none of his business.
“That’s probably because we’re going to be married when we grow up.”
As delightful a prospect as that must be, Nan, why would you ever consider marrying that top-lofty young jackanapes?
“Well, who else is going to marry me?” Annabel said reasonably. “Plump girls aren’t fashionable, and I like food too much to be a slender girl. Peter doesn’t care about that.”
Who knows? Plump girls could come back into fashion, Blackfoot said. Stranger things have happened, a
fter all. It only takes one well-known woman to be comfortably plump, and fashion changes again.
“Anyway, we know each other, and it would be such a bother to get to know someone else that well. Peter’s all right.”
I suppose I’ve heard stupider reasons for marrying someone, said Blackfoot, giving the feline equivalent of a shrug. What will you do now, Nan? Your betrothed is bound to be quite some time, if I’m any judge.
Annabel hesitated. She had been planning, insofar as succumbing to long years of habit could be called planning, to sit exactly where she was and draw in her book for as long as it took Peter to collect whatever data he was trying to collect. Now that Blackfoot had asked the question, however, it seemed impossible to do just that.
She said cautiously: “What do you think?”
It was Blackfoot’s turn to hesitate. At last, as if not quite sure he was allowed to answer, he said: I suppose asking for advice is a forward step, after all.
“Pardon?”
I said that we could try looking inside some of the new rooms that have spawned through the castle. I really applaud your proactive attitude.
“Oh, shut up,” said Annabel, grinning. “How do we get in?”
The servants’ entrance, I imagine, said Blackfoot. Nan, Your faith in me is touching, but I’m not sure why I should be expected to know more about castle entrances than you do.
In the end, it wasn’t so much a matter of finding the servants’ entrance as it was finding any door. There was still a great deal of rubble around the base of the castle itself, though there was more around the stables and the courtyard in general, and the doors were now largely inaccessible. Annabel and Blackfoot, skirting around the worst of the rubble, eventually came back to the laundry where Peter had fixed the pump, and from there found a small, narrow stairway that went up and into the castle itself.
“At least we don’t have to wriggle through,” Annabel said in relief. The day wasn’t as hot as yesterday had been, but the triad was still distinctly summery, and she didn’t feel like struggling her way into the bowels of the castle as they had done to get to the throne room.
She was shortly to know her mistake: she and Blackfoot may not have had to struggle through briars and tangled rubble to forge further into the castle, but they did have to climb a great many stairs. And most of those stairs, to Annabel’s rue, climbed up into the castle. There was the occasional landing, and even a hall or two, but most of the halls ended abruptly, dangling their half-finished selves out into cold, empty space while Annabel gazed into the darkened centre of the castle.
“It’s like it’s building itself a skeleton,” she said to Blackfoot. If she was careful about how she craned her neck, her feet a safe distance from that treacherously ragged edge of stone-work, she could even see up into the sky, where the triad’s last two suns were searingly visible. “And– and– wait. Blackfoot, if I can see the suns up there, why can’t I see what’s down here?”
She hadn’t realised it until that moment, but Annabel couldn’t even see the rough ends of any of the other corridors they’d come across, and if there were unfinished halls on this side of the ruins, there should certainly be other, unfinished halls across from them. Instead, there was only dense, impenetrable darkness, soft and inclined to swallow sound. This black stuff, then, wasn’t merely the shadow she had at first assumed it to be.
Don’t get too close to the edge, Nan, was all Blackfoot said.
Annabel gazed into that darkness for a little while longer, then, with a brief shiver, went back to climbing stairs again. A little further up into the skeleton of the castle, they came across a landing that was almost complete, with just a small patch of darkness at the far end. Annabel, who was already panting and wishing that she’d never begun to climb the stairs, puffed out a sigh of relief and leaned into the wall.
Now that’s interesting, Blackfoot said. Doors. I didn’t think we’d see doors until there was a bit more wall and floor.
“Oh!” said Annabel. She hadn’t noticed. “So there are! What do you think is inside?”
I understand that the easiest way to discover what’s in a room is to open the door, said Blackfoot.
Annabel ignored that, because a bright hope had blossomed within her. “I wonder if one of them has clothes?” With a new kindling of purpose, she scrambled to her feet and approached the door closest to them, Blackfoot padding along curiously behind her.
Be careful, he warned. The castle is fragile. It might not mean to kill you, but there’s so little of it here that mistakes could happen.
“Mistakes,” muttered Annabel, but she was careful about how she opened the door. It swung inward, and despite all her care, if she hadn’t had a very good grasp on the door handle, she would have pitched forward into empty space for the second time that day. She squeaked and pulled the door shut as she jerked herself backward.
That was particularly graceful, said Blackfoot, when Annabel was in a clumsy heap on the hallway floor. She puffed a dismissive breath at him and propped herself up against the opposite wall until her heart stopped beating quite so quickly.
When she wasn’t so breathless, she said indignantly: “How silly! What use are rooms without floors?”
Blackfoot gave his cat-shrug and licked one paw.
“But the rooms that were still here from before had floors!”
Just barely, if you recall.
“Yes, but there was a floor to fall through,” argued Annabel, climbing carefully to her feet. She looked cursorily through each of the other doors, but there were no floors or walls there, either: just the same, bouncy, impenetrable blackness. “There’s not even a floorboard to be seen in that lot.”
Perhaps the floors will follow tomorrow.
“And perhaps I’ll fall through those as well,” said Annabel, disgruntled. She had, she thought, made a great deal of effort today, for no reason whatsoever. “I’m going back down.”
I suppose you want a pat on the head, said Blackfoot; but he followed her back down the myriad winding stairs without making any other sarcastic remarks. Perhaps he also felt that she’d made a great deal of effort today.
There was no sign of Peter when they made it back to the overgrown court. Annabel, reverting to old habits, promptly sat down and fished out her pencil nub, and spent a happy hour drawing. From inside, the skeletal stairways and abruptly ending corridors were confusing and perilous: from outside, they were beautiful and mysterious. They also gave the impression that they were growing every time she looked away from them.
She was cross-hatching the rubble at the base of the main castle when a shadow fell over her, and Peter’s voice said irritably: “You’ve drawn it wrong, Ann!”
“What do you know about drawing, anyway?” Annabel said placidly. She knew she hadn’t drawn it exactly as it was: there were bits of rubble at the base of the castle that had once obviously been parts of the towers above. She’d drawn them back where they should have been. “It’s better than the blank spaces, anyway. They’re frightening.”
“What blank spaces?”
“The ones inside the castle. What about the warding? What did you do?”
“There’s nothing to be done,” said Peter, in a rather disgruntled way.
As if the castle is doing it to spite him, murmured Blackfoot, making Annabel giggle.
Peter ignored her loftily. “It’s too strong to touch, that’s all. I could do it, but I couldn’t predict the outcome.”
“Isn’t that what Blackfoot said before?”
“I suppose you’ve been drawing all afternoon,” added Peter, more loftily still.
“Then you suppose wrong,” Annabel said smartly. “Blackfoot and I have been exploring the new rooms.”
Peter’s lofty tones immediately descended to eager interest. “Anything interesting?”
“I told you,” said Annabel. “There are blank spots everywhere in there. None of the rooms have floors, or proper walls, or ceilings. And also the corridors are o
nly partly there.”
“How can they be partly there, Ann? And how–”
“Don’t argue with me about it!” snapped Annabel. “Go and look for yourself. I’m going back to the throne room.”
Peter caught at her arm. “Don’t be like that, Ann. We still have to try a few more things today.”
He means that he wants an audience while he shows off how clever he is, Blackfoot muttered. Nan, your face is very colourful. You should probably splash it with some cold water.
Annabel cautiously wrinkled her nose and found that her whole face was stiff and disinclined to move. She prodded it just as cautiously, but it was only slightly painful.
“It’s all right,” Peter said. “I put a lot of magic into it. It’s accelerated right past the sore bit.”
He said it expectantly, and Annabel, feeling that something was expected of her, said: “Thanks.”
“Oh, well, it wasn’t anything much.”
Not as much as all that, agreed Blackfoot. He’s waiting to be thanked again, Nan. He’ll accept it bashfully.
Annabel giggled, earning a slightly indignant look from Peter, and said meekly: “Blackfoot was being sarcastic. Never mind: what are we supposed to be trying?”
“The thing is,” said Peter, in his lecturing tone, “the thing is, we really need to know what Mordion’s up to. The thing that’s pushing the safe space in– it’s got him all over it. I recognise it, even if it’s with different magic this time.”
With the air of one making a concession, Blackfoot said: Well, he’s had stupider ideas.
“I can probably piggyback off the castle’s workings,” added Peter. He was straightening his collar with one berry-stained hand, which was his particular quirk when he was doing something that was very clever– something Annabel should recognise as very clever.
She tried to make her face suitably congratulatory, but it was stiffer than it had been before, and she couldn’t quite manage it. At the back of her mind, Blackfoot’s voice sighed: Oh, and we were doing so well just a minute ago! Tell the child not to piggyback off the castle’s magical workings, Nan.
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