A rush of clatter and rich air rushed out. I stepped back a bit more, holding my breath for fear the magic-laden air would overwhelm me with sneezes. It didn’t, but that mystery was overridden by the fact that the person exiting was none other than the Honourable Rag. He closed the door behind himself very quietly, and crept off down the hallway without even noticing me standing there behind him.
After a moment I decided to follow him. He went unhesitatingly through several more panels, up and down two staircases, and through an empty room full of cushions, until I was completely lost and more than a bit surprised to find myself in a privy, fully visible in the large mirror facing the door. At that point he turned around and said, “Why the hell are you following me?”
He clearly didn’t recognize me, by the supercilious tone and annoyed glare. He was every inch an aggravated lord. “Uh,” I began, tugging at my gloves with no thought other than embarrassment. “Master Roald, I had wondered if—”
“Yes?”
I glanced helplessly from resplendent baron’s son in scarlet to the pink and gold froufrou footman in the mirror. The soiled glove was stuck on my finger and I tugged it viciously. “I need your help,” I blurted, as the glove popped free and the gold ring I’d been given at the Green Dragon came with it. The ring sailed across the room and hit the mirror beside the Honourable Rag’s head with a crunch of breaking glass, which I, however, barely noticed because that’s when I finally began to sneeze.
Ribs aching, I sank against the wall, using the soiled glove as a handkerchief for lack of anything better. After a moment I heard the Honourable Rag laughing, and that set me off, so that between the sneezes and the laughter I couldn’t breathe, and started to choke.
Finally he tugged me across to the sink, where I gulped water and scrabbled around for the ring until I could jam it back on my finger. I heaved an immediate clear breath, and in the space of three heartbeats realized that I’d been quietly succumbing to the magic.
“Greenwing, you dog, you never told me you’d joined Crimson Lake. What’s been up with all the suspicious looks and elaborate obsequiousness?”
I wanted to protest this description but he pummelled me roughly on the shoulder. “No, wait, I do actually need to piss.”
While he attended to that I did my best to straighten up my disguise. I’d wiped away a fair amount of rouge and powder, but with a bit of water on the glove I repaired the damage as best I could. I still looked like the man playing Barleycorn in a troupe of players, but at least I didn’t look too much like myself.
I twisted the ring on my finger. Crimson Lake, eh? A secret society that a random stranger—or surely not that random, since he’d clearly picked me out on purpose—in the Green Dragon dropped me into, of which the Honourable Rag also happened to be a member. A ring that, while not in itself apparently magic, blocked my sneezes. I twisted it again so the garnets were in the right position. That was worth quite a bit, in my estimation. I hadn’t been able to breathe so clearly in ages.
But it didn’t do everything, I reminded myself, trying to hold onto the thought that the wizard had sent me to let the Black Priest in, that I had done so, and that whatever ‘gift’ the Black Priest had given me had also blanked my memory of the encounter. I swallowed against nausea.
“Now then, Greenwing,” the Honourable Rag said, washing his hands with the care that his hygiene-mad father had instilled, before perching himself on the edge of the marble washstand. “What did you actually follow me here for? Actually, why are you here?” He gave me another once-over. “That’s a brilliant disguise, by the bye. Where did you learn to serve so faultlessly? Everyone noticed that the service had improved since the last dinner-party, which I assume you weren’t also secretly serving at?”
I collected my thoughts. He was smiling, the corners of his eyes crinkled. Secrets and shenanigans, and I still hadn’t an idea of who to trust in this mess of secret societies and cults. Except that I was fairly certain the Honourable Rag had had nothing to do with the cult. Though I still wasn’t sure about the pie—or his secret society—or why he mocked me to my face and defended me behind my back—
“No, just tonight,” I replied. “The egalitarianism at Morrowlea extended to teaching everyone how to behave in any position at a formal dinner, from lower footman—my esteemed position tonight—to royal host. The faculty took the view that any of their students might well end up in either role.”
“And having taken the role of Barleycorn tonight, will you be playing the King of Autumn at the Dartington Harvest-Home in a fortnight?”
“Given that Mr. Dart keeps running away from their Corn-maiden, I imagine not.”
He laughed. “Well then?”
“I’ve been given to understand that there may be a young woman of Ghilousette being kept here under some duress.”
He quirked his eyebrows. “By whom?”
“Violet.”
“Oh yes, your inestimable Miss Redshank.”
“Why did you ask if she was one of the Indrillines?”
“I used to see them in Orio. One of the cousins was in my year at Tara.”
Pause, while I wondered if there were other reasons he’d seen them. The Indrillines were the criminal kings of the Western Sea: they ran the undercity of Orio, and if he’d not heeded my warnings about gambling (and given the fight we’d had on the subject, he likely had not), he could easily have fallen afoul of them.
Then Violet’s words floated back to me: Lark’s family took me in. I am indebted to them. And instead of worrying about the Honourable Rag’s possible connections I thought about her. Lark, who had access to wireweed, who flouted the rules, who thought nothing of using me, of stealing my magic and my heart and my mind—O Lady, I thought, but surely Violet wasn’t—
“I thought I’d seen your Miss Redshank in the company.”
I shook my head, rejecting the idea that Violet could deliberately belong to the gang (though a small, distant, unhappy part of me had no trouble at all believing Lark was one of them), scrabbling at some excuse. There were such things as blackmail—I swallowed, thinking of Violet in the dark outside the Little Church. “She’s been at Morrowlea with me.”
He shrugged. “If you say so. You’re looking for a young woman of Ghilousette—name and occupation?”
“Name of Miss Daphne Carlin, occupation …” I paused, wondering how far I could go. Wondering now if Mr. Dart was right, and there was no Miss Carlin at all. (Then who was the one in the kitchen? Were Corwil and I even talking about the same thing? He was on drugs; I was drunk …) “She’s a baker of uncommon talent, I gather.”
“So uncommon that in Ghilousette she might attract the wrong sort of attentions?”
“Something like that.”
“Hmm.” He frowned at himself in the mirror, pulling out an ivory comb from his coat pocket and using it to restyle his curls. “It’s the wine break—oh, of course you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Dame Talgarth’s sister is doing the entertainment.”
“What do you mean, doing?”
“She’s an illusionist, I gather.”
“An academic illusionist entertaining people at her sister’s dinner party? In Ragnor Bella?”
He grinned at me through his reflection, patting his head with satisfaction before stowing the comb away again. “Don’t you sound all scandalized and proper, now, Mr. Greenwing. No one else seems to care at all, and my father’s not here.”
No one else, I reflected, was wearing the magic-suppressing rings; or at least not as far as I knew. “Hmm,” I said. “What do you think we should do?”
“Go back in; what else is there to do?” he said, sounding surprised. “We’ll have to see what’s toward with this Miss Carlin, and I’m quite intrigued with what Domina Ringley might come up with. I’d thought the Kilromby illusionists had stopped practicing after the Interim.”
I made a noise of mild agreement, an emotion I didn’t really feel, and followed him out of the washroom, wondering
whether it was just wealth, and handsomeness, and carriage, and rank, that made me follow him so easily against my own inclination. But I didn’t have anything else to do—or I didn’t, until I heard the knocking.
The Honourable Rag tilted his head. “D’ye reckon the entertainment’s begun already?”
I swallowed dryly. “The Knockermen.”
“The what? Folk tales scaring you now?”
I glared a little peevishly at him. “It’s the name of another secret society.” Well, criminal gangs presumably were fairly secretive.
“No need to sound so haughty, dear Mr.—”
“Potts.”
“Potts? Really? Where did that come from?”
“It’s a long story.” I pressed my hand against a likely looking panel on the appropriate side of the hall, and a door swung open. The knocking came through loud and clear, echoing through the half-finished passage thus revealed. “Will you come?”
“Has this to do with the damsel in distress?”
“It might.”
He stared at me consideringly for a moment, weighing I don’t know what, eyes crinkled with a lazy amusement. I tried to match him for insouciance, not that he could probably tell under my disguise. “Welladay,” he said finally, “what are you waiting for?” and plunged into the passage with a sotto voce whoop.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
As I cobbled together later from the disjointed account of Mr. Dart, while the Honourable Rag and I were creeping through the increasingly strange corridors of the Talgarths’ house trying to find the source of the knocking, the diners were under siege.
It started, I gather, innocently enough. While Mr. Benson was carving up the sturgeon, it began to snow.
They took this, as one might, to be part of the evening’s entertainment, which to be honest had been rather tame. Despite what I’d been led to believe ought to be appropriate entertainment for a Late Bastard Decadent dinner party, there had been no acrobats, no dancing girls (or boys), and (despite the wizard attendant’s wandering hands) no orgies. There was music from a gallery to one side of the room, where a quartet of musicians were playing chamber music of the sort that was far more traditional Fiellanese than anything you would have heard in the central provinces.
The musicians switched to another song, this one an instrumental version of a folk melody, according to Miss Woodhill from West Daverary, and Dame Talgarth said to her sister: “Now we shall see what you have done.”
Now, I’d noticed that Domina Ringley appeared far less drug-addled than she had before, and was sticking rather grimly to drinking the fizzy water that was one of the many little luxuries on offer. Dame Talgarth, on the other hand, had been drinking heavily; Mr. Benson, who was acting as Wine Steward, had been refilling her glass with rare frequency. It was her house, Mr. Dart and I both supposed, and no one could naysay her with the Justice still out of town.
And then, between the lemon sorbets and the sturgeon, between one note and another, the snow.
The musicians kept playing, Mrs. Figheldean, Dominus Alvestone, and Domina Ringley kept talking about me, and Miss Woodhill, Miss Figheldean, and Mr. Dart sat politely wondering what would happen next, and watching the wizard attendant fiddling with her necklace and fondling the staff. Mr. Dart ate a bit of the snow along with his last spoonful of sorbet; he said it tasted like peppermint oil.
Mr. Dart (channelling Mrs. Etaris rather than the Honourable Rag this time) turned to Mr. Benson, who was passing behind him with the wine, and said: “Is it not yet time for the Lady?”
And Mr. Benson, with what Mr. Dart described as a glint in his eye and a rumbling kind of tone to his voice, said, “After the fish course, sir.”
“My mistake,” said Mr. Dart, and the musicians played on.
***
The Honourable Rag and I were lost.
Of course, I’d been lost since I left the dining room area. The Honourable Rag had clearly known how to find the washroom, but equally clearly was now opening doors at random. I twisted the ring on my finger, the soiled glove flapping loose in my other hand, and trailed behind him like an assiduous servant. I kept trying to tell myself that that was a perfectly respectable thing to be. I have to say it’s much easier to argue for the essential equality of all men and their trades when it’s entirely theoretical.
The Honourable Rag stopped eventually in an octagonal room with four doors in it. The one we’d entered by swung shut behind us. He turned to look around at me. The four walls lacking doors were adorned with tall mirrors in elaborate gilt-plaster frames. It was abundantly clear in our reflections that the Honourable Rag had not only about a foot of height on me but also considerable breadth of muscle. I sighed.
“Any ideas, Greenwing?”
I brushed at a loose curl falling down from my periwig. “There’s always the old stone-skipping rhyme.”
He grinned and started to twirl around while he chanted. “Bother, pother, tother, and truth: here’s a stone for the duchess and one for the duke, one for the king and one for the fluke, silver gold copper and tin, turn-round-quickly-and-let-the-next-one-in—I think that’s the door we came in by.”
“I’m not one to dismiss tradition just because it’s traditional,” I said stoutly, and opened the door behind me. And perhaps it was the same one we’d just gone through, but that didn’t matter much, because it was snowing here, too, and, moreover we could see who was doing the knocking: one of the cultists—or at least (the voice of my Morrowlea tutor suddenly thundering critically into my mind) someone dressed as one.
The Honourable Rag cried, “Oy!” and set off down the hall at a brisk pace. He was wearing fancy shoes, however, and almost immediately slipped on the snowy marble, did a spectacular somersault, and cracked his head on the floor hard enough to stun himself. The figure hammering at the wall looked back—it was wearing a dark mask—and lit off to the right.
The footman’s dressy ankle shoes had poor grips, but though I skidded a bit I got safely to Roald’s side. He was out cold. I bit my lip, trying to think what was best to do. Eventually I took off my periwig and laid it under his head, and then decided that since there’s not a lot else one can do immediately for a concussion besides rest, I’d do better finding someone else.
Still being entirely lost, however, I thought I might as well find out what was going on with Grey Cloak. The thought of the hammer that Grey Cloak had been holding made me take the Honourable Rag’s carbuncle-hilted dagger. It was just as nice as I’d suspected when I first saw it.
It was still snowing and I kept thinking how absurdly cold my head felt without the periwig, worrying about what other effects the various drugs, drinks, ensorcellments, and near-ensorcellments might be having on me, and suddenly stopping dead as I recalled, and then lost, some no-doubt-vital piece of information.
Violet is here! I let the Black Priest in! The wizard attendant is in league with the Black Priest!
(Seemingly, my tutor’s voice said again: do not be so hasty about jumping to conclusions!)
Grey Cloak disappeared around two corners, but one benefit of indoor snow was that its footsteps were utterly clear. The trail led me securely along several hallways of increasing impressiveness until they set off up a grand staircase that I realized must be in the centre of the house. The snow was falling more thickly in the lower reaches, obscuring the ground floor. Going up I kept one hand on the railing to avoid the Honourable Rag’s fate, the dagger clutched in the other.
About halfway up the stair, the footsteps turned sideways into a large painting. I hesitated a moment, wondering if this was a very good idea (magic! Violet! the Knockermen! the cult!), and in that moment a voice cried out in pain and alarm and Grey Cloak came tumbling out backwards on top of me.
I picked myself up, pushed Grey Cloak down again as he tried to get up, and then jerked off the mask.
It was Mr. Dart.
“Mr. Dart!” I cried, astonished.
“You can’t hide in there,” he said e
arnestly, getting up and tugging at my hand. “There’s already someone in there.” He tugged me insistently towards the stairs. I followed, trying to hide the dagger.
“Why would we be hiding?”
“We’re playing Capture the Castle,” he said very seriously. “I’ve captured you, you’re my prisoner until the game is over.”
We started down into the snow. “Come,” he said, “she said we had to hide until the horn blows.”
I realized, somewhat belatedly, that he must have been enchanted, and instead of protesting merely said: “Perhaps we should go outside?”
He looked scandalized. “They’re outside!”
“Who are they?” I asked cautiously, and in the pause heard the knocking begin again.
“Them. The ones who are coming to capture us. The game’s afoot, we must hide.”
I gave up trying to make sense of what was going on in his head, and guided him instead back along our footprints, thinking that perhaps we could rescue the Honourable Rag and hide him from danger. The knocking continued, echoes falling into echoes and making it impossible to discern where anything was coming from.
But as we came to one of the cross hallways, I realized that there were, indeed, other people loose in the house, for not only were there multiple sets of footprints, but there were people down the ends of the halls.
All of them were wearing dark grey cloaks. They seemed busy knocking on walls, and I thought perhaps we could get out of sight without being noticed, but Mr. Dart called out gaily: “I’ve got a prisoner! Carry on, men! I’ve got a prisoner!”
They looked over. I decided not to wait.
I picked a door at random and ran through it, Mr. Dart giggling and protesting along behind me, but though his left hand was surprisingly strong he was no match for me. The knocking continued, no longer completely erratic but increasingly synchronous, an effect that grew more and more alarming the more pronounced it became. I bounced off walls, the noise a muffled protest to the rhythm, bashing through doors as I came to them without any idea at all of where we were going. Down stairs when we fell on them, through doors when they lurched up before us, the dagger in front of me and Mr. Dart bobbing along behind. The ring on my hand seemed warm, and my blood was thudding in my ears.
Stargazy Pie: Greenwing & Dart Book One Page 25
