Thank you so much, said Blackfoot. He sounded amused and perhaps a bit rueful.
“You’re afraid he’s going to use me to keep stealing magic from people, aren’t you? Like he used the Sleeping Princess to keep himself in magic for hundreds of years.”
I’m certain of it. And with both his natural and stolen powers amplified by you, there’s no reason he shouldn’t try for the throne again.
Annabel shivered. “I’m sorry, Blackfoot.”
Then don’t do it.
“It’s Peter.”
I know. I will point out once again that Peter is quite capable of taking care of himself, and that you will not necessarily save Peter by giving yourself up.
“Yes, but it’s Peter.”
Very well, said Blackfoot. Then where shall we start, Nan? The tunnels that turn back on themselves, or the doors that open into closets? You could get yourself a new dress.
“Doors,” Annabel said, rather more flintily that was her norm. “We’ll just keep opening them. This one–” she scrambled to her feet and tugged at the closest door, disclosing a small cleaning cupboard that was smaller than the door itself, “and this one–”
Every door in reach, in fact, sighed Blackfoot. Hoping to achieve something by sheer obstinacy. It’s a plan, I suppose. You missed one, Nan.
Annabel made a rude noise at him, but opened the door anyway. This one opened into an actual room, even if it was only someone’s washing chamber, but there were no other doors leading from it, so Annabel closed it again. She made her way doggedly down the hall, opening and closing doors while Blackfoot followed along behind with a running commentary of: A boot-black cupboard! and what’s this? A laundry-room? Delightful! Perhaps when we’re finished putting a shine on our rather useless plan, we can freshly launder it. It won’t change the fact that it’s threadbare, but at least it might smell a bit better. Dear me! Now a library! What giddy heights of excitement!
“Oh, shut up,” said Annabel mildly. The library seemed promising: there was even, she was sure, another door at the far end of it. “And stop dragging your feet. Oh! There is another door in here!”
Her fingers found the doorhandle and turned it, and Blackfoot said sharply: Not that one, Nan!
Annabel wrenched her foot back as a draft swept across the back of her neck, raising gooseflesh, and caught herself against the door-frame. Two hands mirrored hers on the other side of the doorway, and then Mordion was there, his blue eyes glowing.
“Careful,” he said, and there was a delighted smile on his lips. “No, don’t step back, darling, or you’ll fall over your cat. He does seem to get in the way rather often, doesn’t he?”
Annabel, catching her breath, threw a quick look behind her and saw that another tunnel had opened, this one in the floor. It was vast, yawning, and far too close for comfort. “Don’t stand behind me like that, Blackfoot,” she said. “I could have fallen in.”
Nan, Blackfoot said, Nan, I really protest–
“I know. But I can’t help it.”
Mordion said: “Do you know, I always find it rather difficult to know when you’re speaking to me and when you’re speaking to the cat. It could be construed as rude.”
“What a shame.”
One of Mordion’s brows went up, but he only said: “You’re a little earlier than I expected. No trouble with doorways like your little friend?”
“Not with doorways,” Annabel said, and felt a curious prickling sensation all the way up her neck to her ears. The heavy weight that had been resting on her since she woke that morning vanished away entirely, and left in its place a sensation of dizzying lightness. “Tunnels, mostly.”
“I thought you might have.” Mordion’s smile had grown. “Now, who can have been putting out tunnels in the castle, I wonder? Who can that have reminded me of?”
“Do you know what’s interesting?” Annabel said slowly. “I don’t know if I noticed it days ago without really seeing it, or if I only realised it now. Your feet don’t touch the ground. Did you know?”
Mordion’s face very carefully didn’t change. When it had done with not changing, he looked at her with a slightly pitying amusement. “You have a fertile imagination, little cow,” he said. “Or have you been drawing in low light for so long that you strained your eyes?”
Nan? What–
“Be quiet,” Annabel said.
How rude, said Blackfoot, but he sounded more cheerful than otherwise, so Annabel didn’t bother to tell him that she’d been addressing Mordion, who was looking very surprised. The sensation of lightness within her grew until it was almost intoxicating.
“You should very carefully consider the next thing that comes out of your mouth,” Mordion said, and his mouth was slightly thinner. That pleased Annabel. Mordion was always so smiling and debonair that she enjoyed seeing him jolted out of his easy superiority. “If you want your friend back–”
“I do,” Annabel said. “But you don’t have him, do you?”
“Now this is curious. You came to me, if I recall correctly. You were certain that I had your friend: I told you I didn’t.”
“You said that at first,” said Annabel. She wanted to giggle, but just as there wasn’t time for crying today, nor was there time for laughter. “I thought you were being difficult, but you really don’t have him.”
“Of course I have him,” Mordion said. “Who else would have him?”
Annabel settled herself into the blank, stubborn façade that irritated Peter so much when she did it to him. “Don’t know. But I know it’s not you. Your feet don’t touch the ground and you can’t even get through doorways. You’re not exactly here, are you?”
“I’m enough here to influence the growth of the castle,” retorted Mordion. “Enough to move about and meet with you– enough to tempt your young friend through a doorway and into my kind of here. And every day my here becomes bigger, while your here grows a little smaller.”
“Yes. That’s the thing I remembered,” Annabel said, in quiet triumph. “Peter disappeared with an entire section of hallway. How could you trick Peter through a doorway when there wasn’t a doorway in that hall?”
“Ah.” Mordion sighed. “It was a sound guess, after all. I don’t suppose I can persuade you that it will easier upon all parties if you simply step through the doorway right now?”
“No,” said Annabel. “That’ll only be easier for you.”
“You remind me of someone I knew once,” said Mordion, in a reflective kind of way. “She caused me a lot of trouble: I certainly hope you don’t do the same.”
Annabel heard Blackfoot chuckle. There is a resemblance, now that I think about it. That’s right, Nan, keep looking at him like that. Let him know you can’t be charmed.
“Ew!” Annabel said indignantly. “Blackfoot!”
I’m so sorry to have turned your stomach, said Blackfoot, and there was a burgeoning amusement hiding just behind the words. If it helps, I don’t think he can help it: his default method of interaction with any female is charm.
Annabel threw another disgusted look at Mordion that made his brows rise again. “Then he should do a better job of it.”
Mordion, looking very surprised, only managed to say: “What–” before Annabel shut the door in his face.
Blackfoot, who was doing the odd little hui hui hui! at the back of Annabel’s mind again, said: Oh, that was immensely satisfying! What now, Nan?
“Now,” said Annabel, leaning against the wall because her legs didn’t seem to want to hold her up, “now we go back to trying to find Peter by ourselves. But first I want to eat something. And I need to think.”
Back to the kitchen?
Annabel nodded. “Yes.” She wasn’t hungry, exactly, but she felt the need to eat something slowly and methodically while her mind plodded along just as slowly and methodically. “I think I almost understand something, but I don’t know what it is. I need to eat grape-nuts.”
Thinking was somewhat addictive, she had di
scovered. From her earliest memories with Grenna, Annabel had been too busy trying to find enough food to live on and trying to avoid the more unpleasant magic, to have time for more than survival. Later, she had found her first papers and the pencil stub, and that had kept her busy enough not to think about the unpleasantness of her surroundings. The not-thinking had become something of a habit, a defence against life with Grenna, and it hadn’t occurred to Annabel that there was any need to change this state of affairs until she was running for her life with Peter and Blackfoot.
Now that she had begun to think, however, it was difficult to turn those thoughts off. At first, sketching a quick likenesses of Blackfoot as she systematically ate grape-nut after grape-nut, Annabel followed her thoughts in a confused pattern of wondering where Peter could possibly be if Mordion didn’t have him. She was half-way through that sketch when it occurred to her that she had stopped thinking about Peter, and that her pencil had begun to circle very slowly on the page.
Annabel looked down, frowning, and found that she had sketched the rose that was part of the stonework mantelpiece behind Blackfoot. It was curiously familiar, and stuck in her mind tenaciously enough to make her page through her other drawings until she found the reason why: she had already drawn it.
“That’s odd,” Annabel said, tapping her pencil nub against the kitchen table. “This is the one I drew on our first night in the castle.”
What of it? asked Blackfoot, padding across the tabletop to nose at the grape-nuts. It’s a good one: very detailed.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “This rose wasn’t in the kitchen when we got here. The kitchen was old and dusty and broken down when we arrived: the mantelpiece was mostly sheared away. I drew this picture the way I wanted it to look, not the way it was.”
I see, said Blackfoot. Then, Nan? What of it?
“I don’t know. It’s– oh! I do know!” Annabel paged feverishly through her sketchbook, and there was the first drawing she had done of the throne-room. It had been dusty, the doors along the length of it cluttered with so much rubble that they couldn’t be uncovered, and the grand entrance at the bottom knit around with raspberries. Annabel had drawn it as she wished it was: clear of rubbish and cobwebs, free from spiders and debris.
“And that’s what it was like the next day,” she said slowly. “That one door that took us to the burn room especially, but we probably could have opened some of the others, too.
Blackfoot, peering at the drawing from the other side, said, Well now. That’s something.
“Ye-es,” Annabel agreed doubtfully. There was a slightly panicked feeling spreading through her. The next few drawings after the one of the cleared throne room were the Caliphan and the other stranger that she had never quite been able to draw properly, and she could see the improvement in each drawing. The Caliphan became steadily more like the real one she saw in the reflections—who, by some law of equal reactions, daily seemed closer and clearer in the reflections—and even her attempts of the unknown stranger were more cohesive.
That, as far as Annabel was concerned, was fully as terrifying as having Mordion running about the castle freely. Because what if…what if, by drawing them—what if, by drawing him—Annabel was bringing him back into the castle? She thought about the Caliphan with his sharp eyes and lanky limbs: he looked friendly enough, but Mordion was quite beautiful, and in light of her meetings with Mordion, she was as little inclined to trust a face that seemed friendly as she was to trust a beautiful one.
She tore out all the sketches of the Caliphan and the other stranger with shaking hands, and stuffed them at the back of the sketchbook. It wouldn’t do to be mindlessly working on details of those particular drawings.
And it was impossible, of course. She couldn’t do magic. It was one very certain constant of life, such as constancies went; just as sure as Peter’s insufferable self-certainty and the feel of Blackfoot’s voice in her mind. But as she thought about it, Annabel seemed to remember drawing in the diamond-shape of the castle wizard’s quarters before ever it appeared; even those walls around the black squishy centre of the castle– she had drawn those, for sure.
Annabel found that she’d dropped her pencil nub and was eating grape-nut after grape-nut, the sweet, dry, grapey taste and flesh of the nuts filling her mouth until it was almost too full to chew. Carefully, she pushed the nearly-empty bowl away, and wiped her hands on her red satin skirt, staining it with fat.
Then, picking up her pencil nub again with hands that still seemed to shake, Annabel drew.
10
Annabel woke with one thought in her mind. She’d gone to sleep with it there, too. More importantly, she’d gone to sleep with a drawing clutched in her hand, and that drawing depicted the castle wizard’s quarters with rather more in them than they had had yesterday. It was a quick sketch that didn’t go quite all the way to the edges of the paper, but Annabel had been very careful about what she added to the sketch itself. She had included three very specific items: a bowl of grape-nuts, a satchel that was small enough to be comfortably worn yet big enough to hold her pencil and notebook, and a pair of fluffy, knitted socks.
I see you’ve been busy. Blackfoot sat up, yawning, and stretched. He threw a cursory glance at her sketch and said: We’ll be off to the wizard quarters, I take it?
Annabel nodded. “Is the black squishy stuff still pushed toward the centre of the castle, do you think?”
I would imagine so, said Blackfoot. I won’t be sure until we’re a bit closer. We’ll need to be more careful about going through doorways, Nan. The castle is feeling particularly…Mordion-ish…this morning.
Annabel sighed gustily. “You’ll have to tell me which ones are safe.”
Yes, it’s a dreadful burden to bear, but one must do what one must do.
“Pft,” said Annabel. “That wasn’t what I meant, actually. I meant that it’s a shame I can’t tell these things for myself.”
So long as you have me, you don’t need to do it for yourself.
“I thought that was the kind of thinking you wanted me to get out of?”
You’re a snide little thing this morning, aren’t you?
“Pft,” Annabel said again. “You’re just being aloof because you like to be the one being snide.”
I do such a wonderful job of it, you see. Shall we go, Nan?
“All right,” said Annabel. “But if we run into trouble this time, it’s your fault. And we’re stopping at the kitchen for breakfast.”
Annabel wasn’t sure if it was the way the castle was shifting about even more that morning, or if it was the stiff way Blackfoot was stalking around her, but everything felt slightly out of order, like a shoe that was just a little bit too small. Even if she couldn’t sense or see the magic involved, she could feel the difference. Or perhaps it was simply because she was afraid that she had, in a small but irrevocable way, become a part of something to which she had only ever been an onlooker.
Adding to the sense of oddness was the fact that the castle wizard’s quarters seemed a little more complete from the outside when they finally found their way there. The door was just a bit more solid: the walls just a bit more well-defined. Or, thought Annabel dubiously, she could simply be imagining things.
Well, Nan? Are you going in, or will you continue to stare at the door?
Annabel took in a deep breath, let it out, and opened the door. She saw the new furniture before the door was quite open, and that made her heart jump, but she muttered: “Could’ve just come back overnight. It’s not proof.”
With the door fully open, it was obvious that there was a great deal of change. The room was still far from complete, but there was an easy chair, a desk and attendant chair, and one cupboard whose contents overflowed onto the floorboards. Annabel was very familiar with each piece of furniture: she had drawn them in last night, exactly as she now saw them.
“It’s still not proof,” she said to Blackfoot. “The castle was bound to fill in this room some
time or other.”
Mmm, Blackfoot said, and began to prowl around the room. There’s something odd here. Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. I wonder, Nan, exactly what it was you did last night with your drawing.
Annabel, who had just spied a small bowl of grape-nuts on the desk, amidst the clutter, shivered. “It’s all odd. But it’s not all exactly the same, either. There’s more stuff than I drew. Oh!”
The satchel she’d drawn last night was hanging by its strap over the chair back: she hadn’t seen it at first because of the throw rug that was also draped there.
“Socks,” said Annabel faintly, as Blackfoot stopped stalking around the room and began to wash himself. She had drawn them on the easy chair by the window, and at first she’d thought they were missing altogether, but once she moved past the desk and chair, there they were on the floor, as if they’d rolled off the plump seat cushion. She crossed the room and picked them up, a fluffy ball of wool that felt oddly heavy in her hand, and turned to look perplexedly at Blackfoot.
He was still washing himself, but there was such a feeling of tightly wound expectancy to him that she expected him to leap sideways when she said: “Blackfoot.”
Instead, as if he’d been waiting for her to speak, he said: Well, Nan?
“I don’t have any magic.”
So we’ve established.
“I can’t do magic.”
Even so.
“But somehow I am doing it.”
Quite the puzzle, isn’t it?
“Are you teasing me?”
With Mordion skulking around the castle and your young friend mysteriously vanished? Of course I’m teasing you. You should know me better by now, Nan.
Annabel was betrayed into a giggle. “It’s obviously not me doing it,” she said. “But it’s being done. So is it the pencil or the notebook that’s doing it?”
I really wonder why you’re asking me.
“I’m not asking you, I’m thinking aloud. I’m an independent person who can think for herself.”
Blackfoot Page 15
