“I’m not hurt. Your spell stopped me from falling too quickly.”
“All right. I’m not cross, then.”
“Where’s Blackfoot?”
I’m here, Nan.
“He looks pretty fierce.”
If you expect me, Nan, to let you off as easily as your gullible little friend did–
“I don’t,” Annabel said. “But do you think you could let me out?”
Blackfoot didn’t say anything, but the ground seemed to rise beneath her. The twin faces of Blackfoot and Peter drew rapidly closer, and as the tunnel spat her back onto the remaining kitchen floor, Annabel stumbled in her now rather ragged skirts.
“Is it all gone?” she asked urgently. “The wall around the castle?”
“That? No, it’s still there.”
“But I erased it all!” wailed Annabel. “It should be gone!”
It won’t be gone until you draw the castle back, said Blackfoot, and there was the unconscious certainty that she had become used to in his voice when he talked about the castle. Nan, I have a few very important things I want to say to you!
“You might as well,” Annabel said. “You can start by telling me how you know so much about the castle, and why you tried to run a tunnel out of here without Peter that day.”
Ah, said Blackfoot. Then perhaps we might defer our discussion until the castle is drawn back?
Annabel stuffed her notebook and pencil into her satchel rather grimly. “I thought you might say that.”
15
Annabel went to sleep with the unsettled feeling that all things had become new, and woke bitterly clinging to the hope that nothing essential had really changed. There was the furry warmth of Blackfoot around her neck—if she pushed away the thought that it was extremely likely Blackfoot was more than a cat—and there was the regular, almost-snore of Peter’s breathing—if she refused to acknowledge the fact that he was now subject as well as friend—so what was really new apart from the castle she had drawn back yesterday?
The castle that, even now, had as its core a formless, black squishiness that had once been a person called Mordion.
Annabel gave up trying not to think, and unobtrusively got up.
Despite her care, Blackfoot stirred. Nan?
“Go back to sleep,” Annabel said quietly. Much as she had expected, they had not discussed anything yesterday. She didn’t really mind: an anger that she didn’t really want to think about had been steadily growing at the back of her mind, and if she brought it out she would have to think about it. “I’ll bring breakfast with me when I come back.”
There was a contemplative silence from Blackfoot as he evidently considered any dangers and remembered that Mordion was no more. He curled his tail around himself again, and his voice muttered: Sausages, in a sleepy kind of way.
Annabel didn’t go to the kitchen. Instead, she climbed up through the castle, following the familiar way that no longer shifted at either Mordion’s or its own will, and knocked at the door of Rorkin’s quarters.
“Don’t have to knock, you know,” came Rorkin’s voice through the door. Annabel felt her stomach unclench, though she hadn’t been aware that it was knotted. She had drawn him back with the castle, so why was she so relieved that he was indeed back? “You’re the Queen Heir. You can go wherever you like without knocking.”
“I know,” said Annabel, opening the door. “But I don’t think I was quite sure you were here.”
Rorkin was sitting as he had been when she first met him, his feet on the desk and his chair tipped on its back legs. This morning, however, his eyes were open, and they were watching her unblinkingly. “That’s because you still think you’re the one doing everything. You’re not. You just hold the Thing that does everything.”
“I know,” said Annabel. “Maybe my mind doesn’t know it yet.”
“Your mind knows it,” Rorkin said. “It’s your heart that doesn’t know it yet. You’re still trying to do it all by yourself and being worried that you won’t be able to do it properly because you’re not strong enough. You’re going to have to start remembering it’s the Staff that does everything, and that its magic is more than enough to look after things. It chose you, and it’ll make sure you stay safe.”
“Now that it thinks I’m worthy,” said Annabel, and there was something of a sour taste in her mouth.
Rorkin grinned at her suddenly, surprising her. “I think you’re worthy, too, if it helps.”
Annabel made a pft sound. “Not really.”
“You’re blushing.”
“Oh, shut up.” There was a momentary silence before Annabel added: “I drew you some more socks.”
Rorkin lifted one huge foot and waggled the woolly member at her. “Found ’em.”
“I need to know something.”
“Bribe, was it?”
“Yes,” said Annabel. “Rorkin, it’s important. Peter’s mother–”
“Told you that. I don’t know what you saw, but she’s not dead. I told you the castle would get more savage.”
“How do you know she’s not dead?”
Rorkin looked at her for a very long time, his eyes sharp and mirrored. At last he said, “You’ll find that out later. Or maybe you won’t: I’m not very sure about that bit. But I know she’s not dead.”
“I want to be sure,” said Annabel. “Because if I tell Peter that she’s alive, and she’s not–”
“If you don’t believe me, ask that cat of yours,” Rorkin said mildly. “He’ll– why are you glaring at me?”
“I’m not glaring at you.”
“Who are you glaring at, then?”
“Never mind.”
Silence fell again. Rorkin picked at his woolly socks, and Annabel hugged her satchel to her chest, trying to think of a way to say what she wanted to say.
“Yesterday,” she said at last. “When I erased things, and you disappeared, and I– and Mordion– and Mordion was erased– was that part of the tests?”
“Yes,” Rorkin said. If his eyebrow twitched and he hesitated just a little bit too long before he said it, at least he tried. He looked up, then away, then back down at his socks. “All part of the tests. You passed with flying colours: well done, well done!”
Annabel looked at Rorkin, and he looked at her. Then she threw her arms around him and hugged him; and although Rorkin made muttering, dissenting noises, he still hugged her back.
At last, he pushed her away in series of gentle shoving motions with his big hands, and said: “That’s enough of that. You can’t go hugging people you meet around the castle. Your subjects will think you’re odd.”
“I am odd,” said Annabel. “If I’m the Queen, I’m allowed to be odd. I’ll make it a decree or something.”
“Can’t do that,” Rorkin said. “It’d never pass parliament. What are you sniffling for? That’s not hygienic.”
“You have cobwebs again.”
“Make a nice ambience, don’t they?”
“They’re not hygienic.”
“Clean little things, spiders. Don’t leave carcasses around the place when they kill.”
Annabel ran her finger over the woodgrain on the desk. “Rorkin.”
“No.”
“No, what?” Annabel said, very much surprised. “You don’t even know what I want to ask!”
“Ask him yourself. And turn him back into a person while you’re at it.”
“How did you know–?”
“I’m not going to get between you and your cat,” continued Rorkin. “If you want to know how much he knew in advance you’ll have to ask him yourself.”
“It was a lot,” muttered Annabel. “I know that much. I just don’t know where to start asking.”
“I’m not going to get between you and your cat–”
“Yes, you said that–”
“–but you might want to think about asking him for the full story of the Sleeping Princess. He may have mentioned a spy that went along with Mordion and the
others at the time of the Great Cat Incident. Start there: ask him about that spy.”
“You mean that Blackfoot was the spy?”
“I’m not–”
“I know, I know. You’re not going to get between me and my cat,” huffed Annabel. She turned to leave, but there was a lingering sense of transience to Rorkin that made her ask uneasily: “You won’t go, will you?”
“Not just yet, I should think,” Rorkin said.
“Good,” said Annabel, and closed the door behind her. At the moment things were still too confused in her mind, but she was really quite certain there were other questions she would want to ask Rorkin later.
She meant to go back to the throne room—ridiculous to think that they were still sleeping there, with a whole castle of beds to choose from—but somehow she found herself climbing up through the castle instead. Annabel climbed through floors and stairwells, up towers and across connecting walkways, until she ran out of stairs to climb. Then she stood at one of the ramparts and looked out over the countryside below, her pencil stub still clutched in her hand. That was ridiculous, too. Ridiculous to think that she hadn’t known there was something odd about it from the start. She’d had it since she could remember—or at least, since she could remember drawing—and it had never grown any shorter despite constant use. Nor had it ever required sharpening.
“You probably enchanted me so I wouldn’t notice,” she said to it. She didn’t think she was quite as unnoticing as that. Peter certainly wasn’t. “That’s not fair. So I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t want to be Queen, and I’d rather not keep you. It’s no good thinking of this like another test, either. It’s not that I don’t want the power, or that I think I’m unworthy, or any of that stuff that’s supposed to make a good Queen. I just don’t want to do it. I want to live with Blackfoot and eat nice things and not have to bother with the whole kingdom. Pick someone else.”
That seemed too little to say. Annabel sighed, and added: “Please understand.” Then she pinched her fingers around the pencil nub, brought her hand back, and threw it as far as she could. It vanished in a moment, too small to follow as it flew through the morning air, but Annabel stood where she was for quite some time despite that. It wasn’t until much later that she muttered: “It’s just me and Blackfoot now,” and stumped away downstairs, feeling at the same time a little freer and a little more guilty.
By way of a detour on her way back to the kitchen, Annabel turned down the particular combination of stairs and corridors that led to the room where she’d first found her red dress. She hadn’t expected it to change very much, so it was a surprise to find that it was even more full of clothes than it had been the first time she visited. She wandered through the racks of clothing in her torn red satin, wistfully touching similarly rich frocks but now well aware now of how useless they would be.
“Pockets,” she said, and passed by the richer frocks completely. After all, there were some quite lovely ones that were in sensible materials like cotton, and a few were even colourful. Annabel picked the most colourful of them, a bright yellow dress with a waist that looked just a little too narrow. To her delight, it had two big, decorative pockets at the sides.
Annabel slipped her sketchbook into one of them and patted it contentedly. It made a tiny clicking noise so familiar to her that she didn’t really understand until it occurred to her that she had thrown away the staff pencil. Then why was something in her pocket clicking against the front board of her sketchbook?
Fatalistically, Annabel slipped her hand back into the pocket and felt around the sketchbook. Her fingers met with a small, familiar shape, and when she brought her hand out, she was looking at her old pencil nub…
Peter found her in the kitchen later. He was pale and tight about the mouth, but he was still making an effort to pretend nothing was wrong. He whistled at her new dress. “Ann! You look half decent! Maybe you won’t be so ugly when you grow up, after all.”
Annabel, hunched over a new sketch that was complete but for the mouth, only made a half-hearted face at him and kept drawing.
“Thought you’d be getting breakfast by now,” he said, leaning over her shoulder with his hands in his pockets. He nodded at the sketch. “That’s better than usual. Thought you could never finish that one?”
“I know how to finish it now, that’s all,” said Annabel listlessly. And she did know how to finish it: she’d left Rorkin’s room with a very clear idea of what that face looked like. It was a big part of the reason she’d tried to get rid of the pencil.
“Why aren’t you finishing it, then?”
“Don’t know,” Annabel said, and threw her book down on the table. “Let’s have breakfast.”
“Aren’t you going to get your cat?”
“No. Let him sleep. I’ll get him later.”
I’m here, Nan, said Blackfoot, nosing his way through the open kitchen door. I thought you were bringing breakfast?
“Why does everybody want breakfast so much this morning?” Annabel said irritably.
“More importantly, why don’t you?” Peter demanded. “Are you sick? Here, let me check–”
Annabel batted his hand away. “I’m not sick.”
I see you’ve been busy, remarked Blackfoot. He leaped to the table top while Annabel was fending off Peter, and crouched over her drawing with his tail softly lashing from side to side.
Annabel snatched it away from him and stuffed it back into her pocket with the pencil nub. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Don’t eat all of the pies, Peter! I want some!”
Finish the drawing first, Nan, said Blackfoot. You can’t tell me you haven’t already eaten.
“Well, I haven’t,” Annabel said defiantly. “And I’m hungry. I’ll finish it after.”
Very well, Blackfoot said, though there was a tightly-wound feel to him that suggested it cost him a little to say so. I expect sausages, in that case.
“I got some for you already.” Annabel pushed the dish across the table and whisked the cover off. “Peter, if you eat all the pies– oh.”
Peter had already put down one of the pies in front of her. “All right, Ann,” he said. “I was just getting one for you. You’re in a mood this morning, aren’t you? Are you still cross about your red dress?”
Annabel blinked. She hadn’t thought about her red dress since she put on the yellow one. As unwilling to admit it as she had been at the time, the long satin skirt had been dreadfully inconvenient. The yellow one, on the other hand, fell just short of her ankles and was held out a little by a fluffy petticoat that meant it didn’t tangle in her legs. “No,” she said. “I like this one now.”
Since I daren’t hope that your taste has improved, I’ll assume you picked it based on its vibrant colour, Blackfoot remarked.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Annabel told him sourly. Across the table, Blackfoot shot her a bright look that held a great deal of amused understanding in it, and she went back to her pie with cheeks that were awkwardly tight and hot. Almost without realising it, she found her pencil nub back in her hand and the sketchbook out in front of her, the remains of her pie uneaten and unappetising beside it.
Across the table, Blackfoot had finished with his sausages. He leapt from the table and padded over to sit very precisely at her feet.
Finish the drawing, he said. His voice was quite pleasant, but Annabel caught the hint of steel to it.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, retreating to the safety of stubborn stupidity. “The mouth isn’t coming out right. What if I draw it wrong?”
Annabel knew perfectly well what mouth was meant to go there: it was a thin, sarcastic and not entirely kind mouth. She didn’t like it much. It made her think of the Blackfoot who was sharp and impatient, not the one who curled up warmly on her pillow and talked her through the worst times.
“Ann? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing, there’s something really big stirring
up– are you drawing someone else back? Should you be doing that?”
Nan, said Blackfoot, and this time his voice was soft and cajoling.
“Shut up,” said Annabel, hunching her shoulders against his plea.
Peter, very much annoyed, went back to his breakfast. “I was just asking.”
Nan, please. I’ve been this way for so long. I’m more than this.
“You’re big enough already,” Annabel said. There was a vast hotness to the edges of her eyes that seemed to fill her head. The little nub of pencil was in her fingers and she was drawing human Blackfoot’s mouth even as she said: “I don’t want you to go away.”
I won’t go away, Nan. I promise.
“You’re already going away,” she said sadly. There was a kind of blurring to Blackfoot’s form that she recognised. She wanted to dash at the drawing but that would have spoiled it, so she kept drawing surely, rhythmically, stopping every now and then to smudge a shadow with her finger. Beside her, Blackfoot continued to blur and then seemed to expand.
When the drawing was complete, with human Blackfoot’s sarcastic mouth slightly curved and mocking, Annabel tossed her sketchbook to the floor. The movement turned her away from Blackfoot and sent her pencil tinkling across stone. Annabel ignored both, and stared with her hot, tight eyes at one of the new, old mantelpiece roses that she’d also drawn into existence.
There was a flutter of movement in her peripheral– Peter cleaning his glasses in awestruck silence, Annabel thought. When there were two, solid male figures in the corner of her eye instead of just one Peter-sized one, she heard Peter say: “What did that? You can’t tell me it was Ann! You weren’t part of the castle to draw back!”
The other figure, long and lean, stretched and became longer and leaner. “I wouldn’t dream of telling you anything,” said Blackfoot, his voice smooth and familiar, and utterly alien. “You already know everything, after all.”
Blackfoot Page 24
