“God bless you,” yelled Strix.
“Thanks,” Lizbet yelled back.
At the head of the room, through boiling fog and vapor, Lizbet glimpsed a figure ten feet tall or more. A tattered great coat, high boots, and black wide-brimmed hat. A scarf fluttered between coat and hat, its ends so long that Lizbet could almost touch them. But within the coat, the hat, the scarf, no person could be seen, save for the swirl of cloud and steam that, if Lizbet used her imagination, might be said to momentarily look like a face, a body, an arm, or a leg before dissolving again in the blowing wind.
“Your Holiness,” Cupido proclaimed, his high chirping voice cutting through the roar of the winds, “your guests have arrived!”
“Is this . . . a witch?” Lizbet said to Strix.
Strix nodded. “The Pope of Storms is made of airs and vapors,” she said. “He’s made of mist, fog, the smoke of forest fires, steam from volcano vents, blizzards, tempests, hailstorms, and whirlwinds.”
Lizbet tried to calm herself. She leaned forward a little, as if steadying her body against a gale. She tried to curtsy, and barely escaped falling over. “Your Highness!” she yelled into the wind. “My companion and I thank you for granting us audience! Our journey here has been difficult, and fraught with danger. We have come over the Montagnes du Monde to find a book that belongs to Margrave Hengest Wolftrow. The Margrave has my father imprisoned, and I hope that—”
What mischief have you been doing to my goblins?
The Pope of Storms’ voice whistled, whispered, boomed, and howled. It was the midnight wind hissing across the grass. It was the tempest roaring through the oaks. Lizbet felt a sense of helplessness and futility when she spoke. As if she were pleading with the wind.
“I . . . we . . . ,” she stumbled.
You trespassed in the goblin city. You burgled shops and stole a keg of beer. You freed a criminal whom I had confined for his crimes. You pilfered the keys of the goblin constable.
“Uh-oh,” Strix said.
“He’ll behead them for sure,” Griffon said. “Probably after hanging them first.”
“No, I think he’s in a forgiving mood,” Cupido said. “Maybe he’ll just have them flogged.”
“It was an accident!” Lizbet yelled into the wind. “We didn’t know . . . we couldn’t find . . . I felt pity for Toadwipe . . . I’m very sorry. We’ll make amends . . .” The wind carried her words back to her. She didn’t know whether the Pope of Storms even heard her.
For your crimes, I order you confined in my dungeon for a thousand years, to be whipped daily, and take no nourishment save for your own tears.
“A thousand years . . . !” Lizbet exclaimed.
“An unusually lenient sentence,” said Griffon. He shook his head, and his feathers fluttered mournfully “I fear such soft-heartedness will only encourage future lawbreakers.”
But on account of your tender years, and because your crimes were the result of ignorance and youthful folly rather than a hardened criminal mind, I will strike five hundred years from your sentence, have you scolded instead of whipped, and allow you a diet of tea and shoes as well as tears.
“The sentence cut in half!” Cupido chirped. “Truly, the Pope of Storms is made out of mercy!”
“But—my father! Five hundred years! It’s still too long! He’ll die before I get out. I’ll die.” Lizbet shook her head, shocked by this dismal prospect.
Strix. You have no more to do here.
The tattered greatcoat spread wide. The blustering winds pushed Strix forward, toward the cloudy figure of the Pope of Storms. Strix’s layered dresses and rusty hair fluttered out before her. She bent backward, fighting the wind, almost losing her footing.
Embrace me. The whirlwind will be our steed. I will repossess you to the house of Mrs. Woodcot. And none too soon. Your actions have been suspicious. Why didn’t you leave the mortal girl to die in the Montagnes? Though it mattered not in the end. Come, Strix.
Fighting the winds which forced her toward the embrace of the Pope of Storms, Strix cast one look back at Lizbet. In Strix’s brown eyes, the turn of her head—what was that look? Fear, loss, longing, and guilt: Lizbet saw all of these, in an instant.
She leaped forward, threw her arms around Strix, and held her tightly against the winds. “She doesn’t want to go!” she cried. “She doesn’t want to!”
Strix! Come to me without delay.
Ferocious winds dashed against her. Lizbet’s clothes whipped her skin painfully. She gasped to breathe. She struggled to hold on to Strix.
“I’m not going!” Strix yelled. “If you’re going to put Lizbet in a dungeon, put me in one too!”
Cease your folly. You risk dissolution.
“I don’t care! Lizbet is my friend!”
The winds reversed. Lizbet and Strix were violently thrust in the opposite direction. They lost their balance and fell. Still clinging to each other, they were rolled across the floor by the tempest, out the door, and (both of them shrieking in shock and relief) down a staircase, to fetch up at the bottom, bruised but whole.
Lizbet released Strix. She tried to push herself up on her hands.
Strix did not let Lizbet go. Instead, she grabbed her more firmly, and hugged Lizbet to her. “I’m in trouble,” she said in a shaky voice. “I’m in really, really bad trouble. Worse than I’ve ever been in. What’s going to happen to me?”
“Right now, you’re going into the dungeon,” croaked Griffon, tottering down the staircase one step at a time.
“Don’t worry, we don’t even have a dungeon,” chirped Cupido, hopping down behind him.
“We’ll build one just for you,” said Griffon.
“But in the meantime, we’ll put you up in a guest room,” said Cupido.
“Tiny and bare, with a heavy bar across the door,” said Griffon.
“It has a beautiful view!”
“Of the hungry crocodiles in the moat.”
“They’re fed daily, Griffon. If they want second helpings, they should speak up.”
The guest-room-dungeon, several floors higher in the stronghold, proved to have a beautiful view indeed. As it seemed with every room here, there was more window than wall. Immensely long curtains blew through the open spaces and out into the sky. Below, Lizbet could see crocodiles cutting through the waters of the moat. Somewhere nearby and above, a windmill made a continuous chuff-chuff-chuff noise.
The bar clunked down outside the door, and they were locked in. The room was not quite “bare,” as Griffon had threatened. Two gray hammocks made of woven grass and vines, bits of yarn and loose threads, hung from ceiling. Lizbet thought they looked quite like oriole nests. Strix immediately flopped down in one, and by the time Lizbet had arranged in her mind all the questions she wanted to ask—why was the Pope of Storms suspicious? Why was Strix in trouble?—Strix was sound asleep.
They had both gotten no more than an hour of sleep in the last two days—that brief time in the sewers, before Maglet woke Lizbet. Exhaustion claimed her. She crawled into the remaining hammock, and despite everything she was feeling, excitement, fear, and despair, she was asleep almost before she closed her eyes.
Hours later, Lizbet awoke to the sound of the bar outside the door being slammed back, the squeak of the door opening, and Griffon’s lugubrious voice: “Tiffin is served. Prepare for your scolding.”
Lizbet rubbed her eyes. Griffon and Cupido stood in the doorway. Cupido held a steaming teapot. Griffon held a platter with a boiled boot, artfully presented in a garnish of hobnails, shoelaces, and grommets.
Chapter 17
While Lizbet and Strix ate, Griffon and Cupido scolded them.
“Don’t be so slovenly.”
“Chew each bite twenty times, else you’ll get colic.”
“You wear your dresses too short.”
“You’r
e lazy, you’ll never amount to anything.”
“That’s not fair,” Lizbet protested. “You’ve only just met me—how do you know whether I’m lazy or not?”
“This boot isn’t bad,” Strix mumbled through a mouthful of half-chewed shoe leather. “For a cooked boot, that is. Watch out for nails though.”
“You’re too kind,” Cupido said. “I’ll be sure to tell the cook you enjoyed it. Lizbet, you ought to eat more, you’re too skinny.”
“You’re a greedy little pig, Lizbet,” Griffon said. “If you eat that much you’ll get fat.”
When the scolding was done and the meal finished, and Griffon, Cupido, pot, and platter had departed, Strix said, “We have to escape.”
Lizbet nodded. But even if we succeed in escaping the Pope of Storms, she thought, what then?
The awful truth was that Lizbet had failed. She had not found the Margrave’s book. She had run out of ideas where to look for it, in all this immense world. Even if she escaped, she would return empty-handed. She had no way of releasing her father from prison. Her struggles, her pain, the loss of her legs—all had been for nothing.
Despair drained the strength from her limbs and dragged her down, as men drown in quicksand.
Strix didn’t notice. She was already making escape plans.
Strix stuck her head out a window and craned her neck around. They had slept through most of the day, and it was nearing sunset. The horizontal light through the windows was orange-red and dim. The winds had died to almost nothing, and the long draperies that had fluttered out the windows like banners now hung almost vertically. “We’re about a hundred feet up,” Strix announced. “That’s our first problem. We could try knotting the draperies together to make a rope. That might get us to the ground.”
“And the moat? And the crocodiles?” Lizbet said.
“I read a story about a man who used crocodiles as stepping stones to cross a river,” Strix said. “He had to walk very quickly across their heads. I think it helped that all the crocodiles were in exactly the right spots.”
“I think that kind of thing works better in stories than in real life,” Lizbet said.
“Let’s start on the draperies,” Strix said. “Crocodiles later.”
There were lots of draperies, and they were very long, but even after Lizbet and Strix had knotted them all together, they weren’t quite long enough to reach the ground. “Is it hopeless?” Lizbet said. At that moment, she was feeling it was quite hopeless. Everything was hopeless.
“No!” Strix said. She balled up her fists. “We have to get out. We have to. I am in such trouble, you don’t know.”
“We’re both in trouble,” Lizbet said.
“Yes, but—”
“Wait,” Lizbet said. She had an idea. “I know the ropes of draperies aren’t long enough to reach the ground, but they must be long enough for us to reach one of the windows below. And there are lots and lots of windows.” The stronghold was practically nothing but windows. “I’ll bet we could climb down outside and get back in through an open window. Maybe we could find a room that wasn’t locked.”
“Even if it weren’t locked, we’d still be trapped in the stronghold,” Strix said doubtfully.
“We could lower the drawbridge to get out.”
Lizbet knew the plan relied too much on hope and luck (how did you lower a drawbridge that flew on goose wings?), but it was the best she could think of at the moment.
Saying “I’ll bet we could climb down” was easy. Actually doing it was terrifying. Lizbet went first, gripping the taut velvet drape between white knuckles, wrapping the fabric around one ankle, squeezing it between her legs. The rope of draperies swung gently back and forth in the still air of early evening. The sun had just set, the sky was still light. The dark waters of the moat were hundreds of dizzy feet below. Lizbet could hear the distant splashings and bellows of the crocodiles. To fall spelled death. Lizbet quailed. Had they made enough knots when they tied the drapes to the window frame? She wished they had doubled up the drapes for strength, instead of just tying them one to one. What if Griffon and Cupido came back? Would they cut the drape and let her fall to her death?
“Hey.” Strix’s voice, right above her. “Are you actually going to climb down, or are you just going to hang there with your eyes closed?”
Inch by inch, hand over hand, Lizbet let herself slide down the rope of drapes. But when she came to the first window below, she found it was covered by a lattice of stone bars. She grabbed at it with her hand and yanked. It didn’t budge. She yanked at it harder, until the rough stone scored her skin and made it bleed, but the stone bars refused to yield. She looked up. Strix, leaning out the window of the guest-room dungeon, was fifteen feet above. Lizbet didn’t think she had the strength to climb up there again.
The next window down was also protected by stone fretwork. Through the bars, enticingly, Lizbet could see light falling through an open door. A door she could not get to.
She slid down fifteen feet more. Another window of crisscross stone bars confronted her. Lizbet’s fear of height and falling was overtaken by another fear: maybe there was no window below that she could enter. Had the Pope of Storms planned it this way? Had he anticipated his prisoners’ escape plans and ordered them confined in a room that he knew had only barred windows below? Maybe Lizbet would descend to the end of the drapes and be stuck there, with no way to reenter the stronghold, too tired to climb back up, and nothing to do but fall into the waiting jaws of the crocodiles below.
“Can you speed it up?” Strix called from above. “This is taking a long time.”
“Shut up!” Lizbet yelled. In anger and frustration, she hauled back her foot and kicked at the stone bars with all her might. She didn’t care if it hurt. She wanted it to hurt.
With a sharp crack, and the crunch of falling masonry, her foot smashed through into the room beyond.
“Maybe the bars aren’t stone after all,” she called out to Strix, amazement in her voice. “I think I can break through them.” She aimed another kick at the grate, and another chunk caved inward.
In a minute, she had made a hole big enough wiggle through. Behind the window, she found herself in a dim, dusty storeroom. Immense pottery jars stood along the walls, each taller than Lizbet, narrow at the bottom and bloated at the top. Names were painted on them: “Zephyr,” “Boreas,” “Sirocco,” “Harmattan,” and others. Lizbet thought she heard noise from inside the jars. She put her ear to the one marked “Boreas.” The ceramic was icy cold against her face. From within, a distant roaring, a sound like winter gales whipping through the fir trees.
“Don’t open that jar,” Strix said. She slipped through the hole Lizbet had made and dropped to the floor.
“I wasn’t going to,” Lizbet said.
“I just worry that you’re too brave for your own good,” Strix said, shaking her head. “Or mine.” She stooped and with both hands picked up a chunk broken off the window grill. She rolled it back and forth. “It’s stone,” she said. “Just as I thought. Catch!” She tossed it to Lizbet.
Lizbet caught it. It was, indeed, solid stone. How had she ever broken it? When she scraped it with a fingernail, the nail chipped. She dropped the chunk of stone to the floor and stamped on it as hard as she could. It shattered to pieces.
“Witch legs,” Strix said with satisfaction.
Of course. Lizbet’s legs of oak and iron straps. Like battering rams, they had broken through the stone grill.
It’s lucky that I have witch legs, she thought. Instantly, she hated herself for thinking that. But then she put the hatred aside as well and just let the first thought remain, unjudged. Because it was true. Like it or not, her witch legs had saved her.
An unlocked door led from the storeroom to an interior hallway of stone struts studded with baubles. Lizbet took Strix’s hand and pulled her down the hall. Th
e front of the stronghold, with the main gate and the drawbridge, faced east. Lizbet headed down the hallway in the direction she thought must be eastward and looked for stairways down. Also, she kept a lookout for doors into which they could dodge into if they heard someone—
“Hi! You must be the new prisoners. Trying to escape, I see?”
Lizbet’s heart clenched in her chest. She spun around.
In the hallway behind them stood a goblin. Shorter than the average goblin. Fatter than the average goblin. Uglier than the average goblin, if such a thing were possible. Green, gray, and pink piebald fur. A mouth full of rotten teeth.
“Bon soir, mais bon filles,” the goblin said, spreading his paws in greeting. “That’s French! What can fudge do for you?”
Fudge? But Lizbet preferred any subject of conversation besides “prisoners escaping.”
“Fudge!” she said brightly. “It’s, um, tasty. It’s nice to give to your sweetheart on St. Valentine’s Day. It can make you deathly ill if you eat too much.”
“There was once a boy,” Strix said, “whose name was Alf. Alf loved a girl, Meg. Meg was so thin you could read the newspaper through her. Meg loved everything sweet, but she didn’t love Alf. To win her heart, Alf brought her fudge every day. At the end of a year, Alf had spent his last penny on fudge, but Meg had fallen in love with him.”
“I’m going to guess the ending,” Lizbet said. “Meg was now as big as a circus tent from eating all that fudge, and Alf no longer loved her?”
“Actually, Meg was still as thin as moonlight,” Strix said. “She had a tapeworm. They married, and lived no more or less happily than other couples. Why are we talking about fudge?”
“Not fudge, but Fudge,” said the goblin. He pointed at his chest with both thumbs. “I’m Fudge! My name’s Logofudge, actually, but they all call me Fudge. One syllable being easier to remember than three, and the incongruity and humor of a goblin being named after a confection is also a mnemonic advantage. What’s your name, little lady?”
Half-Witch Page 18
