Luck said: “That’s what you get for being rude. What do you want?”
“We want the Princess,” said the nearest masked man.
“You can’t have her. What else?”
The kidnapper who was still struggling to escape his own spell, yelled angrily: “You! Dead!”
“You can’t have that either,” snapped Poly, sticking her head out the coach window. She was feeling very pink and annoyed, and it made her angry that Onepiece had been frightened back into his puppy form.
At the sight of her, a handful of the kidnappers dropped to their knees, and the leader bowed deeply.
“I know not by which manner of lies this knave hath imposed upon thee, fair princess,” he said; “But in our hands lies your succour. Plead not for the life of this varlet!”
The speech, cumbersome and archaic, took far too long to make sense in Poly’s mind. It was something of a shock to realise that he was addressing her in Old Civetan.
“I’m very familiar with the current dialect, thank you very much!” she told him sharply. “Call your men off!”
He bowed again. “I regret that I can’t, your highness. I’m sorry.”
“He thinks I’ve bespelled you,” said Luck. “Suspicious lot, Royalists. Think anyone who doesn’t agree with them must have been subverted by the Council.”
“Well, they’re upsetting Onepiece. Can you get rid of them?”
“Probably. Maybe. Someone has given them a few nasty toys to play with.”
“All right, then,” said Poly, and sat down again. She tucked Onepiece under one arm and fumbled with her book until it was open on her lap. Outside, something vastly magic sucked at the air, popping her ears, and Onepiece whined.
“Oh, won’t I teach you to frighten Onepiece!” said Poly wrathfully. The book tried to slither away from her, obstinately unreadable, and she stripped the glove from her antimagic hand with her teeth, pinning the book ruthlessly between leg and palm. The book wriggled without much hope and eventually gave up, but not a word appeared on its snowy pages. Poly set her teeth and reached further in, pushing at the boundaries of Real and Not Real.
Magic was already flying outside the carriage, fast and thick, when she looked out briefly. After that one anxious look Poly concentrated on the book, sickened by the sight of Luck at the centre of a deadly, multi-coloured whorl. The reality of the book had parted beneath her hand, and that was all that could matter, because it was slippery, illusive, and somehow incomplete.
Poly crooned: “You clever boy!” at Onepiece. The puppy had told her what the problem was, in his roundabout way: the book itself was only half of the spell. The other half, the half that would complete and break the spell, was missing.
The carriage rocked. Poly and Onepiece were hurled across the seat once again, and when Poly looked dazedly out the window, clasping Onepiece in one arm and her book in the other, Luck had disappeared. She was up and out of the carriage before she realised what she was doing, leaving Onepiece to scrabble on the cushions, and found herself plunging headfirst into a miasma of deadly magic that was only loosely being controlled by someone in the group.
Luck was in the dirt, looking rather surprised and damp. “Better get back in the carriage,” he said to her, his voice strained. “They can’t get at you in there.”
“What about you?”
“Some fool gave these madmen specialty target-oriented magic,” he said. “The carriage has a failsafe clause that’ll trip when– well, it’ll send you back to the village.”
“What failsafe?” demanded Poly. She was trembling in a very unpleasant way, and she was quite sure she knew what kind of failsafe Luck had on the coach.
“Poly, get back in the coach!”
“Books,” said Poly aloud, her eyes distant and shiny. “Books are for reading. But I can’t read it. There are no words. Blank books are no use. Blank books are– oh!”
She looked up at the leader and said icily: “Let Luck go.”
“Can’t!” panted the leader. He was struggling to control the magic that spiralled from himself to Luck. Poly was coldly certain that before long he would be in the same situation as Luck.
She said: “Well, I warned you,” and tugged the hermit’s feather from her hair.
This time the feather came out easily. Her mind, Poly was beginning to find, worked in a deceptively simple way. For example: the book was half a spell. The book was blank. Blank books were for writing in. Therefore the other half of the spell must be a pen; and in Poly’s time, pens were not the elegant, hollow tubes that Luck used. They were still proper quills. The hermit had told her what she needed to do when he gave her the feather.
She didn’t even try to write a word in the book, she simply stabbed at it with the feather. Something gave a great, messy blurt! like the splattering of ink, and Poly found that she could understand. She looked briefly down at her antimagic hand, revelling in the impossible wonder of it, then found the disintegration trigger in her book spell and wafted both book and feather into dust.
It felt as though she’d never forgotten. And when the joy of newly remembered knowledge began to seep away into contentment, there was the joy of truly understanding what it was that Mordion had woken in her.
Poly gave a low little chuckle and said to the masked men: “I think you will all be very sorry.”
The spell they were using on Luck was a wind-funnel, magic and oxygen twisting at such speed that it ruthlessly sucked the breath out of him. It was a shame to disintegrate it instead of studying it as she would have liked to do, but Luck was rather blue in the face. She corroded the piece that controlled the oscillation of the spell and then took out the safety clause and blasted all the collected wind at the masked men, bowling them into the trees. When they began to gather themselves together again, groggy but determined, Poly flung one of the amber beads from her hair at them and said: “Oh, no you don’t!”
The bead expanded and liquefied in the air, slapping against the men with a heavy, wet sound, and trickled around them until they were covered. In the heavy silence that followed, Onepiece said curiously rather than sorrowfully: “Wizard dead?”
“Of course not!” said Poly, rather more fiercely than she meant to. She dropped to her knees by Luck’s limp form and shook him. “Wake up, Luck!”
Luck’s eyes opened at once. “No need to be rough,” he said. “Knowledge all in order? Very good. We can go now.”
He lunged up and shooed Poly back to the coach, where Onepiece’s trembling snout was poking out of the window.
“You should be resting!” she protested.
Luck said: “Hah!” and lifted her bodily into the coach. “If you’d been any longer breaking that spell, maybe.”
“Speaking of spells,” said Poly, confused and a little suspicious; “How did they manage to trap you with something that simple?”
“It was very strong,” Luck said evasively. “Besides, you have your knowledge back now.”
Poly, mechanically receiving Onepiece into her lap, stared at him. “You let them catch you!”
“Well, you don’t like it when I experiment on you,” protested Luck.
“You let them catch you!”
“Of course I did. You needed something to push you, and now you have your knowledge back. Don’t complain.”
“I thought you were dead!”
Luck eyed her warily. “I’ve warned you about hitting me, Poly.”
Poly struggled for words briefly. It occurred to her that she wanted, more than she had ever wanted, to hit Luck. And then perhaps to hug him, and kiss him, and–
Oh, dear. Poly sat very, very still, panic tickling at her stomach.
I can’t have fallen in love with him! she thought wildly. I can’t have! Oh, it’s not fair!
At last, she sagged against the plump seat-cushions and said: “Just drive the coach!” glaring balefully at him over Onepiece’s head. For some reason, her glare only made Luck smile. To her irritation, when he close
d his eyes to marshal the spell, the smile remained.
Chapter Fifteen
Poly was asleep when they entered the Capital. It was closer to dawn than night, with a bold pink line from the first sun edging the monstrous walls that enclosed them; and the rattling of wooden wheels on cobblestone woke her at once. Onepiece had at last reverted to his boy form, his skinny legs curled up on the cushions and his head in Poly’s lap.
“Go back to sleep, Poly,” said Luck. His eyes were still closed, and both his feet were resting on the cushion opposite him, pinning Poly’s skirts. “We still have a long way to go.”
Poly, sleepily stroking Onepiece’s hair, went back to sleep with the hazy impression of having entered a vast, sprawling metropolis.
When she opened her eyes again, the impression was strengthened and expanded to include the idea of buildings formed from ice. Huge marble slabs of icy white seemed to make up nearly every building in the vicinity of the coach, carefully sculpted corners sweeping down to meet meticulously swept footpaths, and from thence to regular, well-kept circles of delicate foliage. The streets had been paved to look just like the marble around them, but Poly picked up the spell that turned ordinary brick to white marble, and smiled a little derisively.
Luck pointed to the grandest of these: the only one with golden steps.
“Council Hall,” he said. His eyes were open, green, and very, very bright. “They like people to know. We’ll be home shortly.”
Caught up in a sudden, blind panic, Poly asked: “Are you leaving me here?”
“What? No, of course not. You don’t want to face that lot until you’ve had a long rest and a full breakfast. We’re going home. All of us.”
Poly hunched away from the icy buildings and the frigid cold they exuded, shivering in mingled relief and coldness. Before long the ice-white buildings gave way to a more sensible yet still elegant brownstone, and not long after that, to plain brick and cobbles again. The cold didn’t diminish, however, and the breeze picked up sharply when the coach took a turn to the east, sweeping down the walled streets and into the coach with piercing accuracy. In his sleep, Onepiece shivered. Poly, belatedly casting about for blankets or furs, found that the coach was stopping.
“Wake the dog,” said Luck, springing from the coach without use of the stairs. His eyes were still bright. “We’re here!”
Poly followed rather more cautiously with a half-sleeping Onepiece draped in her arms, and found that they had pulled up directly between two brick houses. Both of them were tall, narrow, and rather pokey: neither of them were particularly inviting. There was a gate arch between them, though it held no gate, and it was through this archway, to Poly’s bemusement, that Luck now walked. Through it she could see the narrow channel formed by the opposing walls of each domicile, rising high in chipped, dusty red brick.
“Here?”
“Don’t dawdle, Poly. In you come.”
The red brick alleyway was fresh and cold, dappled with leaf-shaped shadows in the early morning light of the triad. Poly, looking up curiously as a whisper of breeze brought the scent of pepper-tree to her nose, saw clear sky between the two red brick walls, and wondered. She wasn’t really surprised when the alley ended abruptly at a wooden gate, beneath which grass seemed to peep.
Luck opened the gate without use of a key and marched on, red-brick path turning to grass between one step and the next, and red-brick walls disappearing in a riot of foliage. Poly walked into a pleasant glade, and the early, sharp yells and clatterings of the stone road outside immediately ceased.
She squinted up at the triad, but it wasn’t in a different position than it had been before they entered the gate. Very well. She knew what Luck hadn’t done.
Luck was watching her expectantly, so she said: “Well it’s not a piece of land from somewhere else, anyway.”
“No. That would be too clumsy. Besides, a portal to Somewhere Else leaves you open to nasty things creeping in from the middle.”
“It feels like Forest,” Poly said, scrunching her toes in her shoes. She could almost feel the grass through her leather soles. “But not quite. It’s sort of growing up the walls and spreading out.”
“Yes,” said Luck. He sounded quite pleased with himself. “I found a lonely little bit of land and seeded it here between the bricks. It’s been growing ever since. I think it wanted to be Forest but couldn’t quite manage.”
“Did it build the house, too?”
“What? No, of course not. I did that.”
“Oh.”
“Well, what’s the matter with it?”
“You built it?”
“Poly, you’re being insulting again.”
Poly said: “Oh,” again, and gazed thoughtfully at the house. It had appeared after they reached the top of a sudden swell in the grass; greenish, just marginally square, and somehow not very interested in being a house. It had the requisite two windows at the front, and a dutifully knockered front door, but Poly was shrewdly certain that at the sides and back, where it couldn’t be seen, the house would be leaf and hill.
She was half convinced that the windows and door were painted on, and it was a mild shock when Luck opened the front door quite easily.
“They all open,” Luck told her, with a narrow look that suggested he’d noticed her surprise. “And so do the windows.”
Poly followed him across the threshold and looked around curiously. There was enough magic in the place to make Onepiece mutter in his sleep, and from the inside the walls were suspiciously leafy. The floorboards didn’t even attempt to wood-like solidarity: they were green, and gave slightly beneath her feet.
Grass, Poly decided, watching her own footprints vanish as the grassy floorboards sprang back. Typical of Luck’s preferences for open living space, the room had no appreciable furniture.
“You used the land to make the house, too,” she said.
“Of course I did. Otherwise I would have had to ferry bricks in here. I don’t like bricks. They’re stubborn and they don’t like being shrunk and expanded.”
“Would they have been shrunk and expanded?” asked Poly.
“Probably,” said Luck carelessly, tossing his dirt-stained longcoat onto a dusty hatstand. The hatstand staggered a little but held, the coat caught drunkenly by one sleeve. “The land isn’t quite settled yet. Put the dog down somewhere, Poly. We have work to do if you want to survive the Council.”
Poly looked around at the square room with its three doors and said: “Where are the bedrooms?”
“They’re here somewhere,” said Luck vaguely. “Open a door. Explore.”
The first door Poly tried led to the bath house. It was huge and leafy and cool, and the bath itself was more akin to a pool than it was to a bath, its sides built with mortared rock. Poly even thought she saw a stream glittering away somewhere underneath the green floorboards, feeding happily into the bath and out again.
The second door led to a hall that was more promising, with two doors to each side and one at the very end. These, in succession, led to the water closet (which was none the less terrifyingly modern for Poly’s introduction to those in the village); a curiously springy room that gave under her touch in all directions, walls and floor alike; two rooms stuffed full with books and other dangerously magical artifacts; and, at last, the kitchen.
Since it was unlikely that the third door in Luck’s main room led to anything but the back garden, Poly settled for what she had and decided to help herself to breakfast.
She was looking for a suitable place to lay the slumbering Onepiece when she noticed the small fire that was growing swiftly bigger in the depths of a square, tidy stove. That was curious, since Poly was certain there had not been a fire there when she entered the kitchen. She laid Onepiece on the lid of the wood-box where he was close enough to the stove to keep warm but far enough away not to burn himself on it if he tossed in his sleep, and set about exploring the cupboards.
The cupboards were as helpful as the stove
had been. The first provided her with a small but surprisingly matching set of cups, bowls and plates, and a variety of wooden cutlery. The second showcased three adorably tiny saucepans and two bigger pots; and the third held stoppered pots of oats, millet, barley, sugar and thick molasses.
“Porridge, then,” said Poly to herself.
A spelled cold-box held a bottle of milk, though how it got there, Poly wasn’t sure: Luck didn’t seem the kind of person to remember about keeping milk. Still, it was fresh when she dubiously sniffed it, so Poly used it.
She would have taken a bowl of porridge to Luck except that when she opened the door she’d entered by, it opened into a room instead of a hall. It seemed to be the cloakroom, hung about with various coats and hats, all of them in a state of disarray. Amidst the coats and hats were myriad parcels of all sizes and shapes, some of them leaking magic into the surrounding wall and any hats that were too close for comfort. Finding the space above her head rather empty, Poly looked up to see that the roof was far above her head, and that the pegs on the walls extended all the way to the ceiling, nearly every one of them filled. She stepped carefully back into the kitchen, unwilling to be separated from Onepiece as well as Luck, and ate her porridge alone.
Onepiece stirred a little when she washed her bowl out but was still sleeping heavily enough not to wake when she opened the kitchen door again. This time, instead of cloakroom or hallway, Poly found a small bedroom with a narrow white-toned bed and an empty fireplace.
“Mine,” said Onepiece in his sleep.
Poly laughed softly and laid him on the bed. Like the milk in the cold-box, the sheets were improbably fresh when she gave them a short, sharp sniff, and she had no qualms about tucking the boy in. On her way to the door the fireplace burst into tiny warm flames. Poly eyed it thoughtfully and twitched a thread in the house as she left so that Onepiece would be able to find her when he woke, and set out to find Luck again.
Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) Page 25
