Rowen gave an impatient sigh and dashed up the stairs. Edweth began to gather up the linen, then she studied Will again, and her gaze softened.
“So you come from far away, do you?” she said with a knowing look. “That’s a big place, I’ve been told. As easy to get lost there as it is in these parts.”
“I’m not lost,” Will said. “I just don’t know where I…”
He trailed off sheepishly. The housekeeper nodded.
“You’re in Pendrake’s Toyshop in Pluvius Lane. That’s a good place to be, whether you’re lost or not.”
“I won’t be staying long,” Will said. “But thank you.”
“You can save your thanks for the master,” Edweth said. “But in the meantime, while you are here you will not be treated poorly.”
Rowen came bounding back down the stairs, tying the cord of a new cloak round her neck. At the bottom she paused and sniffed.
“Do I smell oranges?”
“The road to the Sunlands is open again,” Edweth said. “There was even chocolate at the market yesterday.”
“I hope you bought some,” Rowen said. At the door she turned to Will. “Please stay here. You’re safe in this house. Edweth used to slay ogres for a living.”
“Off with you now,” the housekeeper snapped.
Rowen laughed and hurried out the door.
“Come with me, Master Lightfoot,” Edweth said. “We shall get you settled in.”
She went up the stairs and Will followed, noting that here, too, the walls were inset with niches crammed with more toys, and also with books. And so it continued as they climbed, more toys and books, up several floors, until they reached a landing with four doors. Edweth took a key from a pocket in her apron, opened one of the doors, and gestured for Will to precede her inside.
He found himself in a small room, with stone walls hung with colourful tapestries depicting odd, intertwining figures of plants, birds and beasts. There was a four-poster bed against the far wall, a writing desk and chair next to it, a mirror in one corner and a tall wardrobe in another. Will was reminded a little of the snug in the woods, but this room seemed more polished, less secretive and ancient.
“Here we are,” said Edweth, “I hope this will serve. Perhaps you should get some sleep.”
“No, I’m fine,” Will said. “I’ll stay awake. Until Rowen gets back.”
“Well, then, I’ll make you something to eat. And I will heat some water, too, so you can bathe, if you please.”
She spoke these last words with a meaningful arch of her eyebrows, and Will wondered just how bad he looked, and smelled, after his long journey. Edweth pointed to a door that Will had not noticed.
“You’ll find the bath in there,” she said. “Give me a few minutes, and then pull the cord above the tub, and it will fill with hot water. Pull it again when the bath is full.”
She must have noticed the look of surprise on his face, for she added, “This isn’t a snug in the Wood, young sir. We do things for ourselves here.”
“No, that’s not it,” Will said. “I just didn’t think you’d have running water.”
As soon as the words were out, he blushed again. Edweth’s smile was more like a wince.
“If you know what a bath is,” she said, heading for the door, “then you’ll know how to use it. I will bring you some fresh clothes. When you’re ready to eat, just follow your nose.”
After the housekeeper had gone, Will explored the room. On the desk was a thick book with a clock face set into its front cover, an ink bottle and a quill pen. He opened the drawers of the table and found a stack of blank writing paper. In the wardrobe were several woven blankets, thick folded cloths that Will supposed were towels, and feather pillows, all neatly arranged on shelves.
Will took a towel, went into the inner room and undressed. After waiting what he hoped was a long enough time, he pulled the tasselled cord above the bath. A stream of hot water gushed out of a stone pipe overhead and splashed into the tub. When it was half full he shut off the water and took a very brief bath, feeling uncomfortable at being naked in a strange house.
In the water he examined his various bruises and scratches. The only proof of what he had been through since leaving Dad and Jess.
“Where am I?” he wondered out loud.
When he was done he went back into the other room and found clean clothes laid out on the bed. He dressed slowly, uncertain about these unfamiliar garments and exactly how they were supposed to be worn. Then he stood before the mirror and inspected himself. He was wearing a white cotton shirt and a green waistcoat, knee-length grey woollen breeches, white stockings, and black buckled half-boots. The clothes were strange, and didn’t quite fit him, but the face that stared back at him was definitely the face of the Will Lightfoot he knew very well. He turned away, afraid he would see those terrible eyes again. When he dared another glance, it was still his own reflection looking back at him.
Will Lightfoot, thief and runaway. Lost in some world that couldn’t be real. Rowen had said his own world was called Elsewhere. To him it felt as if that’s where he was now. They had walked a long way from the clearing where he was sure – pretty sure – the motorcycle was still lying somewhere. He remembered the lost look on Jess’s face as he rode away on the bike. What was she doing now? She couldn’t go to sleep at night unless Will read to her. Before he left they were only halfway through that book about horses she loved so much. With a sick feeling he thought about Dad, maybe still out there somewhere looking for him. He had lost his wife, and now his son.
Even if he was in trouble back home, Will knew one thing for sure: this place was far worse. He would just have to hope this loremaster could help him get back to where he belonged.
As Edweth had suggested, Will followed his nose and the enticing aromas led him downstairs to the kitchen. From hooks in the walls hung shining pots and kitchen tools, and a tall wooden table with chairs stood in one corner. Edweth brusquely invited Will to sit there. She had cooked sausages and eggs and toast, and set a heaped plate before him, which he proceeded to wolf down hungrily.
While he ate, Edweth sat beside him and asked him questions. To his relief, she asked only about his family.
“Jess,” she repeated when he had told her about his sister. “A pretty name.”
“She’s a good kid,” Will said with a pang, remembering her silent wave as he left the campsite. “I shouldn’t have left her like that.”
He continued eating, but without the same eagerness. When he had finished, Edweth told him he could explore the house.
“Anything that you shouldn’t touch will be behind a locked door,” she said. “But there’s lots to look at, and plenty of books to read. Just put them back where you found them. This is the master’s house, and he does not take kindly to having things rearranged.”
“I won’t touch anything,” Will said firmly.
He left the kitchen then and wandered along the curving passageway to a spacious, high-ceilinged chamber, with hanging tapestries like those in his room. There was a large stone fireplace here, although no fire was burning in it. High-backed chairs were ranged about a large round table of dark polished wood. On the table was a marble chessboard, the pieces scattered across it as though someone was in the middle of a game. Will looked more closely at the large, painted chess pieces. Some were familiar, like the knights on horseback, but others were strange to him. One was a tall, hooded figure in white that troubled him for some reason he did not understand.
In one corner stood a suit of armour, its metal plates tarnished to a yellowish-grey and much marred with cracks and dents. As Will inspected it, he remembered what Rowen had told him about the knights-errant. Dingy and battered, the armour didn’t seem to fit well with anything else in the room. He wondered why Rowen’s grandfather, this man that Edweth called the master, bothered to keep it, or didn’t have it polished up at the least.
Confronted once again with questions rather than answers, Will w
andered out in the corridor, found the staircase and began to climb. He passed the shelves without paying them much attention, but he noticed that many of the books had no title on the spine. Those that did consisted of strange words he didn’t know.
He lost track of how far he had climbed and found himself on a floor where all the doors were shut except one, which was wide open and showed him a room exactly like the one he had been given. Then he noticed what was different: the light blue tunic lying across the bed as though it had been casually tossed there. The open books on the writing table and others piled haphazardly beside it on the floor. One of the wardrobe doors was open, and hanging from a hook was Rowen’s travel-stained red cloak.
Realizing where he was, and alarmed at the thought that he might be found where he didn’t belong, Will turned to leave, then caught a glimpse of something that stopped him: on the wall above the writing table was a small woven tapestry depicting a man and a woman. The woman was dressed much like Rowen, but the man wore clothing that Will recognized as that of his own time and place.
Will backed slowly out of the room and his foot slid beneath him. He regained his balance and looked down. There was a puddle of water on the floor. He thought at first that Rowen must have tracked the water in with her, and then he heard the sound of steady dripping near by. He turned, searching, and soon located the source: water was trickling down from the floor above.
Will wasn’t sure any more where his own room was, but his first thought was that he had left the water running in the bath. He remembered pulling the cord to shut off the tap, but perhaps something had gone wrong and it had started flowing again. His impulse was to run downstairs and tell Edweth, but he thought of the poor impression he was likely to make on Rowen’s grandfather, coming into his house uninvited and then promptly flooding it.
He would have to deal with this himself, and hope that nobody else found out about it.
He hurried up the stairs to the next landing. Here the walls were bare stone, without shelves, toys or books. The corridor was in near darkness, as there were no lamps and no windows. Warily, Will followed a slender rivulet of water on the floor and at the far end of the corridor found it seeping from under a door. A narrow and rough-hewn door, not smoothly polished like those on the floors below. There was no sound from inside.
Will stepped back into the middle of the corridor and looked around.
“Hello,” he said as loudly as he dared, which wasn’t very loud. “Is anybody there?”
No one answered. Will pushed the door, expecting it to be locked.
The door opened easily. The room within was dark.
And it was raining.
There was no roof that Will could see, and no back wall. Just two side walls and a stone floor that receded into darkness. A chill wind flicked icy droplets of rain into his face.
From somewhere far inside the room, if it was a room, lightning flashed.
Will stumbled back and whirled in panic. He bolted down the corridor and collided with someone who gave a loud grunt. Will fell over. When he sat up with his ears ringing, he was facing an old man in a long, dark green coat who was also sitting on the floor, his spectacles tilted sideways and a stunned look on his bearded face. Between the two of them stood Rowen, her eyes wide with shock.
“Grandfather, are you…”
“Nothing damaged, Rowen,” the old man muttered, righting his spectacles, “except perhaps my dignity.”
He picked himself up and patted the front of his coat.
“I’m sorry, I was—” Will said, scrambling to his feet.
“Never mind,” the old man said gruffly. “I expect we’ll both recover.”
“This is Will Lightfoot, Grandfather,” Rowen quickly said. “Will, this is my grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake.”
The old man’s bushy eyebrows rose slightly. He looked towards the open door of the room.
“I told Grandfather everything,” Rowen said to Will. “He’s going to help you.”
“If I can, Rowen.”
Will looked up into the old man’s sharp, steady gaze.
“I don’t know what this place is,” he said as firmly as he could. “I just want to go back to where I belong.”
Pendrake frowned, and pulled shut the door of the strange room.
“Now that you are here,” he said with quiet certainty, “you cannot go back. At least not the way you came. You can only go on.”
Their once-upon-a-time is our now…
— The Quips and Quiddities of Sir Dagonet
WILL FOLLOWED NUMBLY as the toymaker led them to his workshop. The old man’s words had stunned him. He had no idea what to think now, and anger smouldered in him, though he didn’t know who he was angry at.
To his surprise the toymaker’s workshop was, compared to the other rooms he had seen in the house, a mess. Even worse, if possible, than his own room back home. Its walls were lined in an alternating pattern of windows and glass-fronted cabinets crammed with bottles, jars, shards of bone, pieces of coral and crystal, and other odd, unidentifiable artefacts. In addition to the numerous finished and unfinished toys Will saw about the room, there were fat, leather-bound books piled everywhere. One thick volume on top of a tall stack had a sword lying between its pages, apparently as a bookmark. A writing desk on one side of the room was almost completely hidden under great untidy drifts of paper and parchment. A huge workbench on the other side was likewise buried, but in wood shavings and tools. On the floor sat various objects that seemed to have been placed there for lack of anywhere else to put them, including a slab of marbled reddish stone, a shapeless old hat, and a large glass ball.
“Everything is in its proper place,” Pendrake said when he noticed Will’s look of surprise. “A fact that my housekeeper cannot seem to grasp, since she is always trying to get in here to tidy up. One day she will succeed, and I will be utterly lost.”
The toymaker took off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he shut the nearest window and drew down the blind. Rowen did the same with the other windows. The room was lit only by the dim flames from the fireplace. Pendrake invited Will and Rowen to be seated by the fire.
“The raincabinet was already here when I moved into this house,” the old man said as he settled into his own deep armchair. “I called it the water closet at first, but nobody else found that amusing. Especially not my housekeeper. Ah, well. Now, you should know there is a toll that every visitor to Fable must pay.”
“I don’t have any money,” said Will anxiously.
“It’s not that kind of toll. In Fable, sooner or later, someone is sure to ask you to tell your story.”
Will nodded, but didn’t speak right away. He had a lot to tell, but he wasn’t thinking so much of the impossible things that had happened to him since coming here. Instead he remembered what had brought him here in the first place. He had stolen his father’s motorcycle, and he wasn’t looking forward to admitting that. But that wasn’t really the beginning, either. There was the move from their old house, and all the days before it, when it had seemed he hardly said a word to Jess or his father. When he stayed out late with his friends or shut himself in his room all evening. And before that, the day that what he had most feared had come true. When he returned home and his mother was gone, and he knew, he really understood for the first time that he would never see her again. It had seemed to him that day that his story had ended and that from then on there was nothing left to tell or say.
He could not tell them all that. Not yet. And so he began with the theft of the motorcycle and how it led to his encounter with the fetches, and all that had happened afterwards.
Pendrake sat frowning in his armchair by the fire as Will told his tale. He did not ask questions, nor did he offer any explanations for the strange and terrifying things that had occurred. He simply listened while Will, stumbling over his words and often backtracking to add details that he had forgotten, slowly got the story out. Once or twice Rowen jumped in to
give her version of the events she had witnessed. Pendrake neither asked her to keep quiet, nor commented on what she had to say.
When Will was finished, the old man continued to sit for a time, his gaze distant and his hands pressed together in front of his lips, as if he were deep in thought over what he had heard. The silence was broken only by the snap of the fire, and the ticking of a clock, carved to resemble an owl, that hung on the wall above the desk.
Finally Pendrake stirred. He rose from his chair, took a poker and stood near the fire.
“As I’m sure you’ve guessed,” he said, “you have strayed very far from home. Luckily you have come to a part of the realms that is not utterly different from the world you know. It could have been far worse.”
“How could it?” Will said, close to tears. “You told me I can never go back.”
“I said you cannot go back the way you came. You will have to find another way, as everyone does who comes here and wishes to leave. The border between this realm and yours is always shifting. What is a door one moment may be a wall the next.”
“But nobody knows where I am. It’s been hours since I left. My father, Jess, the police – they’ll all be looking for me. I have to get back now.”
“You cannot,” Pendrake said simply. “But I can tell you this. The border between realms shifts in time as well as space. You could spend days here, and return home to find that only moments had passed. Or the other way round. Much depends on the way you return.”
“Do you know the way?” Will whispered, though he already suspected what the answer would be.
“I know of only one way. To find the path that is yours, not anyone else’s.”
“But what about the fetches, Grandfather?” Rowen interrupted. “They’re probably still out there. It was a lucky thing that Moth found us.”
Pendrake turned to her with a smile.
“Yes, thank goodness for the Nightwanderer. Since he and Morrigan make their home in the Wood, I asked them a long time ago to keep an eye on my granddaughter. I have had at least that comfort when she goes off in search of adventure without telling anyone.”
The Shadow of Malabron Page 5
