Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1)

by W. R. Gingell

  “No, you said that Civet took to the battlefield and that something went wrong. You said no one knew what happened.”

  “Someone does. There are little clues all through the Capital Library.”

  “What sort of clues?” asked Poly curiously, allowing the conversation to be waylaid briefly. “And why?”

  “Notes in margins, redacted Governmental Spellpapers that get un-redacted if you know how. Passages in ancient books. Some of the notes and passages are older than the original spellpaper attached to your curse.”

  “Older? How?”

  There was a very wide-awake glitter in Luck’s green eyes. “Some of ‘em are older than you, too, Poly.”

  “How can some of the clues be older than me if it all happened after I went to sleep?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Mordion handed me a nice little piece of the puzzle when he gave me your Spellpaper.”

  Poly stared at him. “What has it got to do with me? I wasn’t even there!”

  “Exactly!” said Luck, as if it made perfect sense. “You weren’t there. That’s what made it all clear.”

  “Made what clear?” demanded Poly, bewildered; but Luck was already tossing the bowls into non-existence as he stood.

  “I want to see the man-shaped hole. Come along, Poly.”

  Poly did so, sighing, with Onepiece trotting at her heels, and pointed out the area to Luck. “There. Between those two.”

  “Huh,” said Luck. “There is a hole. Crafty.”

  He ran a finger over the indent, startling Poly because she hadn’t expected him to touch the stuff. Then he licked the amber.

  Poly dropped her head into one hand, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Luck–”

  “Oh,” said Luck. “Ah. That tastes familiar. Give me your hand, Poly.”

  He grabbed her hand without waiting for her to comply, and slapped it onto the surface of the amber, palm open. She let out another sigh, this one exasperated.

  “Luck, what did I just say about personal space?”

  Luck returned one of his best glassy looks just as Poly, her fingers pressed firmly against the amber by his, felt a tremor go through the stuff.

  “What–”

  The tremble became a roar, buzzing through Poly’s fingers all the way to her teeth, and when she tried to pull her hand away, Luck let her. The roar didn’t stop, to her dismay: if anything, it doubled. She clutched her one stinging hand in the other and watched, frozen, while the hundreds of suspended Civitans shivered as one and then disintegrated into fine dust.

  There was a sudden emptiness. Poly, her eyes as wide and glassy as Luck’s, saw the particles snatched away on a light breeze. The grass where the amber had been was shrivelled and black, and that blackness went on as far as she could see.

  “I told you it tasted familiar,” said Luck. He sounded pleased with himself.

  Poly looked at him sickly. “Did I kill them all?”

  “What? No, of course not. They’ve been dead for hundreds of years. They only looked alive because of the amber.”

  “Oh,” said Poly, and found that she was whispering. She added vaguely: “My hand is cold.”

  “That’s because the non-magic catalyst had magic locked inside it,” Luck told her, gazing at the black expanse in front of them with distant eyes. “It was tuned to you. As a matter of fact, I expected it to– oh, there it is.”

  It? thought Poly with a sinking heart. She followed Luck’s eyes and saw a haze sweeping across the new barrenness, a long gentle wave of what could have been blackened stubble, following the swells in the ground as it rode the breeze. It was only when it rose, wave-like, that Poly realized it wasn’t riding the breeze: it was carried along of its own volition, gathering from the most distant edges of the Frozen Battlefield to approach them. Poly shook out her antimagic arm, willing it into warm, reassuring life, and had a moment of nasty surprise when it didn’t respond.

  “Won’t work,” said Luck, his eyes still on the gathering blackness.

  A stab of anger pierced through the fear in Poly. “What did you do?”

  “I made an anti-antimagic glove.” Luck sounded pleased with himself. “Now you can’t accidently kill any of my spells, and no one can tell you’ve got it.”

  Poly fumbled with the strings of the glove, horribly aware that she wouldn’t be able to get it off in time, and said in calm desperation: “How do we stop that, then?”

  “Stop it?” Luck looked surprised. “We don’t want to stop it. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s all exactly magic, as such.”

  It was too late now, anyway, thought Poly. The wave of blackness had reached them. It rose to surround them, high and black and shifting...and stopped.

  “Oh, I like this!” said Luck, prodding at the stuff with his magic. His eyes were golden and fascinated. Poly wanted to hit him.

  The dark, shifting pieces of stubble were beginning to take on the same amber glow that the Frozen Battlefield had had before they dismantled it, and she wondered briefly if it had let go of the others in order to trap herself and Luck. Then it flickered once, twice (was that Luck or the stubble? Poly wondered dazedly) and they were suddenly surrounded by forest.

  “Huh,” said Luck. “Interesting. I’m sure this is impossible.”

  “Did we shift again?” asked Poly, looking around with wide eyes. The ground beneath them was still blackened battlefield in a small circle extending outward from their feet until it became, without warning, mossy forest floor. It gave Poly the impression that they were surrounded by a cylindrical window.

  To her left were two children, a boy and a girl, both just a few years younger than herself. The boy was dark-haired and bespectacled, fiddling with a ticking black box, and as she watched he slapped at the hand of the red-haired girl, who was enthusiastically trying to turn a knob on the box. She scowled at him darkly, reminding Poly vaguely of someone she knew, and then caught sight of Poly and Luck.

  She squealed, the scowl vanishing as swiftly as it had come. “It worked! Peter, it worked!”

  “I told you it would,” said Peter, with a slight air of superiority. He looked up, his grey gaze meeting hers, and Poly felt a shock that sang right to her toes.

  The first coherent thought that sprang to her mind was: Ma was right. He was cocksure when he was a boy. The second was to wonder what exactly her parents were doing here, mingled with the question of why they were so young. The overarching thought, however, was that this was why Dad had made sure that she could pick he and Ma out of an imprint no matter what year the imprint was from.

  “Do you know who we are?” asked Peter cautiously. Poly nodded, short and sharp, with the idea that if she were careful enough, Luck might never need know they were her parents.

  Peter nodded back, squeezing the red-headed girl’s hand to keep her quiet, and it occurred to Poly that he was being as careful as she was.

  “The tickerbox will shift us on again in a bit, but Glenna was certain that we could meet up before it did.”

  Glenna, her eyes roaming up and down Poly, looked fiercely pleased. “I would have been nicer to you if I’d known,” she said.

  Poly’s gaze shifted enquiringly to Peter, who looked annoyed with himself. “Sorry, we keep forgetting what part of your time-line we’ve met with. Are you two already– I mean, is he your husband?”

  “Good grief, no!” said Poly, horrified. “He’s a wizard who um, rescued me.”

  Peter grinned. “Hallo, Luck. You look even less civilized than usual.”

  Luck, whose eyes had narrowed, grinned back, startling Poly. “Past or future?”

  “Um.” Peter thought about it, polishing his glasses, and said at last: “Well, both, I think: we haven’t gone far enough to tell, yet. You should see us again soon, actually, only we’ll probably be younger by then. We’ll need somewhere to stay for a while, and we probably won’t know who you are.”

  Luck’s eyes went golden again, and something shifted in the forest, sending
ripples over the amber window.

  Peter said apologetically: “It won’t work, you know. The tickerbox isn’t magic, it’s clockwork.”

  “You’ve made a hole in time,” observed Luck, looking sharply from Peter to Glenna. “Who are you?”

  Poly shot her youthful father a warning look, but he was already shrugging. “That’s not allowed. Actually, it’s a big kind of Not Allowed. Poly, we’ve only got a few more minutes before we shift again and I don’t know when we’ll end up. Once the window dissipates, all the magic trapped inside is going to hit you: I’m afraid there’s rather a lot. I had to push a big bunch of it into the tickerbox to solidify the resin in time, and it seems to have leaked through. It might be a bit strong.”

  Poly’s eyes snapped to his face. “You put those people in amber?”

  “We did,” said Glenna, in a gruff little voice. “They would have killed everyone. Or enslaved them. It was all very nasty and we don’t want to talk about it.”

  A flicker disrupted their faces briefly, and Poly felt the tug of dismay at her heart.

  “What happened to you both?” she asked hastily, before they could disappear.

  “Peter pushed too much magic into the tickerbox trying to time-travel us,” Glenna said matter-of-factly. “He does that a lot, as a matter of fact. It burned out one of the baby engines that was regulating–”

  “It’s a secondary engine!” interrupted Peter, looking annoyed. “And it happened to be the one that was controlling time and interval, so we’ve been ducking in and around all over the place. Mostly we’ve been going backwards but I’m pretty sure we’ll come forward again before too many years. Either that or I’ve managed to fix it by the time we’re older. Anyway, we’ll be seeing you.”

  There was a surge through the surface of the window, and Poly’s parents became harder to see.

  “No, no, don’t go yet,” said Luck, very awake and excited. “There were notes, clues, little bits and pieces in books and such: old ones.”

  Peter, pushing his glasses up in sudden interest, moved closer and must have made some reply to Luck, but Poly found herself being addressed by her mother, who said quietly: “I’m sorry we leave–left, that is–you there. I think anything that wasn’t originally tuned to the tickerbox gets left behind. We haven’t been able to carry anything with us out of the different times yet. Peter says he’ll figure it out, but I suppose we won’t, if we left you behind.”

  “Lady Cimone looked after me,” said Poly, smiling through the pain in her heart.

  The window twisted and rippled more furiously than before, distorting Glenna’s tight-clasped hands and suspiciously wet eyes. Luck and Peter murmured back and forth rapidly, then Peter stepped back and grabbed Glenna’s hand.

  “See you soon,” he said to Poly, and grinned. “Or later. I’ve lost track.”

  The inrush of eager magic following the disintegration of Peter’s time-spell left Poly shaken and distinctly euphoric. Into the silence Onepiece wailed; terrified, confused and alone. He threw himself at her, and it was only when he had been attended to with all the proper cuddles and reassurances that Poly heard the irregular taptaptap of something nestled in her hair. Startled, her hand flew to her hair, and felt something round and hard and cool threaded onto a lock of her hair.

  Poly twitched it into sight and frowned down at the five or six amber beads that had somehow joined the blackbird feather a little below her right ear.

  “Now where did you come from?” she muttered to herself.

  She didn’t really need the sudden, interested, and entirely too close inspection that Luck gave the beads to be certain that they were a small reminder of the amber magic she’d received from her father, however. She gave Luck a narrowed look that was meant to remind him about poking his nose where it wasn’t wanted, but Luck only stared back at her with liquid gold eyes that failed to comprehend anything but the magical puzzle she had presented him with.

  “They tuned it to you,” he said, eyeing the beads with fascination. “Nothing has changed that amber slab for three hundred years, and you disintegrated it with a touch! They tuned it with magic and something else. Something crafty. Poly! Who were they?”

  “Peter said I’m not allowed to tell you,” Poly reminded him, scruffing Onepiece’s ears with affectionate fingers. She was disinclined to disobey her father: she still relished the relative safety of being known as the princess.

  Luck’s eyes narrowed. “Do you always do what Peter tells you to do?”

  Poly bit back an unwise laugh and said: “Well, yes, actually.”

  “Huh.” Luck sounded disgruntled. “You don’t do anything I tell you to do.”

  “Perhaps you should ask me instead of telling me,” suggested Poly sweetly.

  Luck gave her another of those clear green looks that meant he’d heard but refused to acknowledge as much, and said: “You can’t be the princess when we get to the village.”

  Poly, caught between two disparate ideas, said dazedly: “Can’t be the– what village? What do you mean, I can’t be the princess?”

  “My village. I’m sure I told you about it.” He ignored her mutter that No, he hadn’t, and added: “They won’t know what to do with a princess. Also, someone is trying to kill you.”

  A small, drawn-out growl from Onepiece surprised them both. -no one is allowed to hurt poly. i will bite and bite and bite-

  Poly pulled gently on the puppy’s ears to quiet the growl, remembering the Journey spell that had been a bomb, and found her voice to say: “Perhaps they’re trying to kill you.”

  She could fully sympathise with the urge to kill Luck.

  “They’ve had years to kill me off if they wanted to,” said Luck. “It only started after I kissed you.”

  “I suppose that makes it my fault,” said Poly, with a faint smile. Luck shot her a startlingly shrewd look but didn’t reply. “All right. Who am I supposed to be?”

  “You can be one of my housekeeper’s nieces,” said Luck carelessly. “She’s got a gaggle of them that live in the Capital and send her dozens of letters every week. If people think you come from the Capital it’ll explain why you talk so oddly.”

  Startled, Poly said: “But won’t she mind?” and added, belatedly: “I do not talk oddly!”

  “Knowing Josie, she’s probably already prepared a room for you,” Luck said. “She’s the most frighteningly prescient woman it’s ever been my misfortune to meet. I think she scrys the coal-scuttle.”

  Poly, torn between a desire to know if it really was possible to scry with a coal-scuttle and another to know what Luck meant when he said she spoke oddly, found herself left behind once again while Luck strode across the blackened expanse of newly liberated field. Onepiece scrabbled to be let down and hared after him, short legs pumping enthusiastically, and when Poly hastened after them both it was agreeably easy to catch up with Luck, suggesting that he had turned off his Keep Away spell.

  While Luck strode along without talking, a vague crease between his brows, Poly asked Onepiece: -Do I speak oddly?-

  Onepiece gave the mental equivalent of a shrug, his thoughts cartwheeling gleefully after a lone butterfly, the first to brave the blackened ground in search of flowers.

  “You flatten your vowels,” said Luck, surprising Poly by attending. “You sound like you just stepped out of Ye Olde Civet.”

  “I did just step out of Ye Olde Civet,” Poly told him.

  “Well, you need to sound like you just stepped out of Mrs. Terry’s Finishing School for Elegant Young Ladies. Or better still, Trenthams.” Luck pursed his lips and added unexpectedly: “Rounded tones, young gels! Rounded tones!”

  Poly stifled a giggle not entirely successfully, and protested: “That’s just silly! I’d sound like a courtier putting on airs!”

  “That’s another thing,” nodded Luck. He sounded like he was warming to his subject. “Finished ladies are meant to sound flowery. You’re all blunt edges and vinegar.”

  “The
n I’ll have to be an unfinished young lady,” said Poly, refusing to be ashamed. “Onepiece, do not eat that!”

  Onepiece froze, a piece of matted and unidentifiable miscellany between his canines. -poly want some?-

  “No, Poly does not want some!” she said tartly. “Put it down, darling: you can have something nice later when we stop for the night. Look at it, it’s got amber all over it.”

  Onepiece dithered for a moment before reluctantly dropping the clod of matted amber. As it blended into the blackened grass Poly heard him sigh mentally, but he trotted back to them cheerily enough, and she knew he was thinking about his promised treat.

  “And keep the glove on,” said Luck, prompting Poly to realise that she’d been unconsciously tugging at the crossed laces of the glove, which had become uncomfortably tight. “People aren’t supposed to be able to absorb antimagic. I’d rather not have a little bird mentioning around the Capital that the foreign princess can absorb antimagic.”

  “I’ve never heard of antimagic before,” Poly said, in accusatory tones.

  Luck, unoffended, said: “They called it static magic, or something. It was new in your time, anyway: well, newly discovered.”

  Poly frowned, her fingers unconsciously fiddling with something smooth and wooden in her pocket, and thought that static magic sounded vaguely familiar.

  “I want to know why it curled around my arm,” she said broodingly.

  “I want to know what you’re fiddling with,” said Luck, with one of his sharper, leaner looks. He grabbed her gloved wrist, half-tugging it from her pocket, and Poly applied the heel of her foot to his toes with some energy. It didn’t have as much effect barefoot, but Luck still yelled and let go: more, Poly thought after a startled moment, because Onepiece had attached himself to Luck’s heel with his tiny needled teeth than because of her attack.

  “Yow! Ouch!” said Luck, attempting to fend off Onepiece with the foot that Poly had battered. “Get off, you miscreant mongrel! Poly! Yow. I forgot you have a habit of attacking me.”

  Poly made a bubble with her outstretched arms. “Personal space! Do you assault every woman you meet?”