Unexpected Magic

by Diana Wynne Jones

  My heart banged under my fur with guilt and terror.

  Henry didn’t even look at me. When the farmers said they were going to patrol this area with guns in future, he said, “Yes, that seems the only thing to do. And I’ll strengthen the outer ring of generators to stop it escaping back into the hills. I’m truly sorry about this. I’ll go and see to it now.”

  He drove off in his car and he was out all that day. He came home exhausted, but instead of settling down to another opera, he went into the dining room and worked on the map all evening. I felt so guilty that I kept well out of his way. I had messed up his magics and, on top of that, I had driven his lady away. I punished myself by not sleeping on Henry’s head that night. I crouched by the kitchen fire instead and was miserable.

  “There’s no need to take on,” Millamant said from the coal scuttle. “It’s horrible Fara’s fault just as much. She made him forget his magics.”

  “And we’re all safe from the Beast as long as we stay indoors,” Madam Dalrymple said placidly from the footstool.

  “That’s not the point!” I said.

  Orange and Claws sat up uneasily in the best chair. They had all chosen to keep me company in my sorrow. “Speaking of the Beast,” Orange said, “did you know that Big Dot has moved her kittens out into the Coop? Are they safe there?”

  “Oh Lord!” I said, springing up. “They are not! And Mr. Williams will stay out all night!”

  I was on my way to the catflap to go and reason with Big Dot when we heard Mr. Williams shriek with terror, or with pain, or both, out in the farmyard. Next second, the catflap clapped open. Mr. Williams shot in through it, streaked across the kitchen, and went to ground under the Welsh dresser, which was almost too low even for me to get under these days.

  “Hide, hide, hide!” he yowled. “It’s coming!”

  I stared stupidly at the path of blood Mr. Williams had made from the door to the Welsh dresser.

  “What’s coming?” said Claws.

  “The Beast, the Beast!” Mr. Williams gibbered. “You can’t smell it till it’s there!”

  Everyone was suddenly elsewhere, Madam Dalrymple with a most unladylike howl. I did a vanishment such as I had never managed in my life before and found myself at the very top of the Welsh dresser, almost up by the ceiling. And only just in time. Something was coming through the catflap.

  My outstretched hair caught on the ceiling. A big dark face was forcing its way indoors, a face twice the size of Henry’s and growing bigger as it came. For a moment, I thought the thing would get stuck, but that was a vain hope. I watched the wood of the catflap and then of the door spread and enlarge, as if the wood were so much rubber, to let the Beast’s shoulders follow its head, and I realized hopelessly that this Beast was a magical creature. It was almost inside now. Catfight song burst from my throat as I watched it come. This was not the growling I had done at Fara, but the full-voiced, throbbing, yowling, wailing song of defiance you make when you encounter an alien cat. Amidst my terror, I was quite surprised at the noise I could make.

  The others joined in, Madam Dalrymple shrilly and Millamant with deep echoes booming from the coal scuttle. Claws and Orange screamed and throbbed from two sides of the room, and Mr. Williams produced unearthly yodellings from under the Welsh dresser.

  But the Beast kept coming. It dragged its massive hind quarters through the door and then pulled in its long tail. The room was filling with its smell, something like tomcat and something like rotten rat, and it was beginning to rise to its hind feet, when the passage door slammed open and Henry snapped on the lights. “What … ?” he began.

  We all blinked and stared in the dazzle for a moment. I think that was the worst moment of all. There was a human sort of face on the front of the Beast’s head, blinking enormous cat’s eyes, and the face was surrounded in filthy, tangled hair. It had mangy little wings dangling from its huge shoulders. Its body had patches of elderly fur on it, clinging to bare, dirty, wrinkled skin. Everything about it was old, old and decaying. The claws on the ends of its great feet were stuck with rotting meat and shreds of grass, and they were splitting with age underneath.

  But the worst of it was that we all recognized the face.

  “Fara?” Henry said. “My God, you’re the Sphinx!”

  The Beast opened its mouth, full of blue-rotting fangs, and chuckled. Oh, Henry! I thought. I’m sorry. I got it here. I’ll never bully you again if you can only just get rid of it!

  “You’re going to ask a riddle,” Henry said shakily. “Don’t bother. You’re going to ask what goes on four legs at dawn, on two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening. And I know the answer. It’s a man.”

  The Beast chuckled again. “Wrong,” it said. It had a flat, cold voice. “I used to ask one riddle. Now I ask three. And I’m not going to ask you. I’m going to ask that conniving little spotted pet of yours, up there on top of the shelves. And when she can’t answer, I shall be free to tear the lot of you to pieces. I shall gut the cats in front of you and then make you swallow those kittens before I tear your head off. Are you ready to answer, plague-spot?”

  I quivered all over at this. I thought I knew now why Bastet had made me remember those three nonsense sayings. “Ask away,” I said, and licked at my shoulder to make my nervous fur lie flatter.

  The Beast said, “Why is a mouse when it spins?”

  “Oh, I know that one!” Henry said, and he and I answered together, “The higher the fewer.” I couldn’t think how he came to know it. It made much more sense to a cat than a human. “And?” I said.

  The Beast grinned, filling the air with bad-meat smell. “When is ceramic begonias?” it said.

  “That makes no sense to me,” Henry said. It didn’t to me, either. Nor did the answer.

  “Chocolate herrings are impure,” I said. And I guessed that the riddles—and their answers—were the result of an ancient, tired, rotting brain. In the electric light, the Beast looked older than any creature I had ever seen. Its Fara-face was all sags and wrinkles. “And your third?” I asked. This is all back to front, I thought. I am Turandot the princess and I should be asking the riddles. Has Henry told me the opera wrong?

  “The third,” said the Beast, “is, Who kills as lion and as human wins?”

  “The Beast of Ettmoor!” I cried out. “Now I can tear you to pieces!” And I was so exultant that I sprang straight down from my perch near the ceiling to the top of the Beast’s head, where I began scratching and tearing at its dirty mane with all four feet. Looking back, I can’t think how I came to do anything so silly. I became totally entangled in long, filthy hair. I couldn’t get loose. All I could think of to do then was to sink my teeth into its nearest smelly ear. The Beast screeched and swiped at me with its claws.

  The outside door crashed open, shoved by Great-aunt Harriet’s stick. I think she had been getting into her clothes ever since she heard Mr. Williams shrieking. She stormed in now, shouting, “What have you done to my poor little Willy-diddums?” and whacked at the Beast with her stick. Bang, bang. Clout. Feathers, dust, and hairs whirled.

  Henry, who was in a toweling dressing gown and his bare feet, danced about uncertainly for a moment and then seized the nearest chair—revealing Madam Dalrymple, who ran for her life—and began bashing at the Beast with it from the other side. I could feel the Beast try to protect itself with magic. Henry replied with more magic, such a furious gust of it that the chair he was wielding sizzled and the long hair wrapped around me stood out like rods. That was too much for the Beast. It turned and dived for the door.

  I was thrown aside as it crashed outside. I was flung across something hard. I was so winded and frightened that it took me a second to realize that I was spread-eagled across the Coop, which Big Dot must have brought near the kitchen when she moved her kittens into it. In that second, the Beast ran, bounding into the darkness on four legs, and Claws and Orange went pelting after it as hard as they could go. Maybe they were inspired by my example. O
n the other hand, they never could resist chasing anything that ran. And almost in the same moment, Great-aunt Harriet galloped outside and flung herself sidesaddle across the Coop.

  “After it, after it! Make this thing move, Little Dot!” she shouted, bashing the wooden side with her stick.

  While I was pulling myself to my feet, Mr. Williams landed on the Coop, too, and clung to Great-aunt Harriet’s lap. He explained afterward that although the magic made him feel as if his teeth were coming loose, he had to come because Great-aunt Harriet was not behaving normally. “And one has to look after one’s humans,” he said.

  I started the Coop and we trundled toward the gate. By then, Henry was mincing after us, gasping when he trod on a nettle, shouting, “No! Stop! That Beast is a killer!” but we were getting up speed by then and, what with one thing and another, I was too dazed to stop.

  Catsong came throbbing out of the night. When we swept out into the road, I saw Claws and Orange crouching in the way that led uphill, while the Beast hovered, wondering whether to kill them and go past, or turn the other way. That was clever of Claws and Orange, and brave, too. If the Beast had fled up into the hills, it might have been loose forever. But it saw us coming and turned downhill. It galloped away at astonishing speed. But, as I have explained, before long the Coop got up to astonishing speed too. We fair zoomed along, and began catching up steadily to the great dark shape galloping ahead.

  “We’re gaining!” Great-aunt Harriet shrieked, beating on the Coop. “Go faster! Faster!”

  We were still a good fifty yards away when strong lights shone out from either side of the road, pinning the Beast in their glare. It faltered. There was a BOOM like the end of the world and several crack-crack-cracks, followed by echoes that bounced around the hills until I could hardly hear straight. The Beast jumped up in a great arch and flopped back on the road, where I thought it came into several pieces. I was so shocked that I stopped the Coop dead. We came down with a crunch.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Oh good!” said Great-aunt Harriet. “I mean, oh dear. I think the farmers shot it.”

  One of the hatches in the Coop slid aside and Big Dot stepped out. “I’ll go and make sure,” she said, and went trotting along toward the lights and the shapes of men and guns.

  “Does that mean her kittens are in this Coop?” Great-aunt Harriet said. “How inconsiderate of me! I hope the poor little things are all right.”

  “They will be, or she wouldn’t have left them,” Mr. Williams said soothingly.

  Here Henry came limping up. But, to my huge indignation, he limped straight on past us, saying, “I’d better go and make sure they think they’ve just shot a lion. Take the Coop back to the yard, Little Dot.”

  He passed Big Dot coming back. She said, “They used such a big gun that they blew her into several bits,” and climbed back in with her kittens again.

  I took the Coop back to the kitchen door, where Great-aunt Harriet scrambled down, saying things about bottles and glasses and seeing to Mr. Williams’s wounds. “Nothing! Just a scratch! I don’t need seeing to!” I heard him saying as she banged the kitchen door shut. It took her three attempts. It was half off its hinges.

  I waited, sitting on the Coop listening to Big Dot purring inside. I waited while Claws and Orange returned, very pleased with themselves. Henry was so long coming back that I got anxious. Suppose the Beast had just been faking dead and went for his throat when he got near. Then it would all be my fault. I set off out of the yard and down the road to look for him.

  I’d only gone twenty yards or so, when there was Henry, limping along with a crowd of farmers, bringing them back to the farm for a drink. Exasperating. I sat down in the road and curled my tail primly around my legs.

  Henry saw me and dashed forward, quite forgetting his sore bare feet. “Little Dot!” he cried out. And I forgot to be exasperated and leaped up his front into his arms and draped over his shoulder, purring. “There’s my brave Turandot!” Henry said.

  “You keep getting things the wrong way around,” I said. “I am not your Turandot. You are my Henry. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” he said.

  Everard’s Ride

  Part I

  RIDERS THROUGH THE BAY

  Chapter 1

  Outlaw

  The events in this story took place rather more than a hundred years ago, when Queen Victoria was on the throne and the division between rich and poor was much more important than it now is. Your grandfather’s grandfather would then have been a boy of twelve, like the boy to whom these things happened.

  His name was Alex Hornby; and it was his misfortune to occupy the uncomfortable upper end of that gap between rich and poor, where you were not quite gentry, but too well off to be anything else. His father, Josiah Hornby, was a farmer. The family lived in a low stone farmhouse halfway up a hill, looking out across a great river estuary. From the foot of the hill a long causeway ran out into the bay, to a small rocky island on which stood the ruins of a castle. So, though all their fires smoked in the sea-wind, they had the grandest view in the neighborhood. Above the farmhouse, the top of the hill had been cleared of trees, ready for the great new house Josiah Hornby intended to build the following summer.

  Josiah, who was, like many Victorians, a grim and striving person, was changing into a gentleman-farmer as fast as he could afford to do it. He was a fairly wealthy man already. Twenty years or so before, he had bought shares in the railway which ran all around the bay beside the sea, and his shares had prospered. He had bought shares in other things. At the same time, out of what he had been paid for letting the railway run through his land, he bought the island in the bay. He had it for a song, because its owner was hard up, and because it was said to be haunted. But Josiah cared not a rap for ghosts, or gossip. He bought the island because it was cheap and because of its ruined castle. It was grand and gentlemanly, he thought, to own a castle.

  Alex and his sister, Cecilia, were pleased with the castle, too, although they were not pleased with much else about starting to be rich. It meant that Alex had to go as a weekly boarder to a grammar school in the nearest big town. It meant that Cecilia had a governess. It meant—which was worst of all—that they dropped homely friends in the village and tried to be on visiting-terms with the Courcys of Arnforth Hall. The Courcys noticed them—just. Josiah went to the Hall once a week on business. The children were called in from time to time if more guests were needed at the Courcy children’s parties. Cecilia had once refused to go to a Courcy party. Her father had been so angry that Alex hid in the loft and Cecilia set out across the bay to run away and make her fortune. She did not get very far that time. Josiah came after her on horseback and spanked her, right in the middle of the bay, beside the river channel.

  The strange things began to happen just before Christmas, when Cecilia had turned sixteen. The governess had gone the week before. Cecilia was still in trouble about it.

  “Mr. Hornby,” said the governess, standing up like a frozen steel ramrod and clasping her mittens in front of her, “I will not stay a day longer in the same house with that girl of yours. She is wild, impertinent, and disorderly. She is quite unteachable and utterly unladylike. I leave this evening.”

  “Dash and bother it, madam!” cried Josiah Hornby. “Remember the child has no mother. What has she done?”

  “I refuse to bear tales,” the governess said. “Kindly order the pony-trap around in time for the London train.”

  “But I only hid in the loft and ate apples,” said Cecilia. “And I said I had no wish to be a lady if it meant wearing mouse-colored mittens.”

  Josiah was so angry that he threw things. No one dared to go near him for two days except old Miss Gatly the housekeeper. When Alex came home for the last weekend before the holidays, his father was still angry.

  “Your sister’s in disgrace,” he told Alex. “Dash me, if I could see my way to finding the money, I’d pack the little vixen off to one
of them Swiss seminaries, be sure I would.”

  “If he does,” said Cecilia to Alex in the kitchen, “I’ll run away again. And this time I shall do it so that he will never find me. So there.”

  “Let me come with you,” Alex begged. “I shan’t want to be left behind if you’re gone. Think of nothing but school and Father!”

  “Hush!” said Cecilia.

  Old Miss Gatly came into the kitchen carrying Josiah’s teapot to be filled with more hot water. Alex bit a great mouthful of muffin and thought that at least at home the food was good. Cecilia drank tea, with her little finger crooked the way the governess did it, and smiled at Miss Gatly. Miss Gatly shook her head at her—she wore a crisp starched cap which rattled when she moved her head.

  “Cecilia,” she said. “For shame. Why make fun of the poor lady now she’s left?” She creaked and rattled and breathed heavily as she heaved the kettle up from the hob. “My rheumatics is bad tonight,” she said. “It’s the fog. Down like a blanket now, all over the bay. Just the weather for queer things on the island. They say there’s been lights seen there again—we’ll be lucky if that’s all there is to it.”

  “Tell us—tell us the stories,” Alex said, delighted and greasy, with his mouth full of muffin. They loved Miss Gatly in this mood.

  Miss Gatly came back after taking the teapot to the parlor and told them some of the stories. She sat by the range, knitting socks, needles clicking, cap rattling, and talked in the strange, formal way old country-people still use when they tell stories which may not quite be true. She told them how the ghost-lights flitted through the island on foggy nights and were seen to go winding through the bay where no one else dared to go for fear of quicksands. She told of the dangerous kingdom of Falleyfell out in the bay and how those who saw it were as good as dead.