A Well-Timed Enchantment

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "He's got it," she said, grabbing his arm and shaking him. "Algernon's got the watch."

  "Well," Oliver said, relaxing visibly, "you said all along that he would, so it shouldn't come as a surprise."

  She came close to strangling him. If she'd thought there was time for it, she might have. "Are you well enough—"

  He interrupted: "Why is one of your shoes purple?"

  Of all the ridiculous things ... Still she knew if she didn't explain, she'd never have his full attention. "I accidentally stepped into a bowl of blueberries and couldn't get the stain out But that—"

  "But it's purple, not blue."

  "That's the color of blueberry juice. Listen—"

  "Then why aren't they called purpleberries?"

  "Oliver!" she screamed at him.

  He waited patiently.

  "The fair folk left us a message to talk to the pigman."

  "All right," he said in a calm, infuriating, let's-not-get-hysterical tone. "Then let's talk to the pigman."

  Gingerly she opened the door and peeked up and down the hall. No sign of Algernon. That was little relief. If he wasn't here, where was he? And wherever he was, what was he up to? She motioned for Oliver to follow quietly. Silly. Oliver was always quiet. Her slipper, however, squished noisily with every step.

  No one seemed to hear, or at least no one stopped them as they passed through the castle halls and left the main building. They found the pigman, appropriately enough, by the pigpen. He was sitting on the railing, his feet up as though he were on a chaise lounge. The pigs were settling down for the night while he blew onto a blade of grass in his cupped hands. The resulting sound was music, soft and fluttery. The resulting sound was, in fact, a lullaby.

  One of the pigs grunted, and—as though it had announced their approach—the dusty little man looked over his shoulder and saw them. Immediately he was down from the railing, and the shapeless cap was off his head. "Miss," he mumbled.

  Deanna curtsied, because she had curtsied every other time and it seemed rude to stop now. "Sir," she said, "the wizard Algernon has something—"

  The pigman hit himself on the side of the head with his cap, causing enough dust to make Deanna cough. "I knew it," he cried. "I knew it wor yours."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "That thing. That silver and leather thing what Octavia found."

  Deanna glanced at Oliver and couldn't tell what he was thinking. "Octavia?" she repeated. "Who's Octavia?"

  "Octavia. The porker what you ate tonight."

  Deanna gulped, never having been on a first-name basis with her supper before.

  "Where did Octavia find it?" Oliver asked, less sentimental about such things and therefore more practical.

  "Well, I like to take the pigs out to the forest sometimes. Give 'em a chance to forage. Something different Anyway, there's this pool there. Said to be enchanted, but I never seen anything enchanted there. This morning I brung the pigs there and Octavia, she just stuck her snout into the edge of the water and pulled that thing up outta the mud and shook it like this." He made a motion like a dog worrying a slipper. "That wor right before you come, miss. I kept trying to ask, but never seemed to get the chance."

  Guiltily, Deanna remembered holding her breath and ignoring him. "So how did Algernon get it from you?"

  "I give it to him, miss. Just now."

  "You gave it to him?" But then she thought back to the courtyard, how the wizard's eyes had gotten all whirly and her free will had seemed to melt away. She would have given the watch to Algernon too, under those circumstances, and never have thought to miss it.

  "Did I do something wrong, miss?" the pigman asked. "I'm terrible sorry if I did. Terrible sorry."

  "That's all right," she said, more to make him feel better than because she really believed it. "I'll get it back."

  "Yes, miss. He'll give it to you, miss, if you explain it be yorn."

  She sighed but didn't argue. "Thank you. Come on, Oliver."

  "Miss," the pigman called after them. "I hope you get your magic back."

  She was about to call back that she didn't have any magic and never had, but decided that was something she probably shouldn't yell across the courtyard.

  No telling who might hear.

  ELEVEN

  Plans

  "Oliver, what are we going to do?" Deanna asked as they walked back toward the castle.

  Oliver shook his head, with his best don't-ask-me-you're-in-charge look. "I'll do whatever you want me to do," he said.

  She had no answer for him either.

  They rounded a corner and saw Leonard standing on the lawn, facing the castle. And singing. He had accompaniment: bored-looking servants playing lute, harp, cymbals, and something that looked like a clarinet but sounded like the moan of a humpback whale. He sang, loudly and off-key: "My love is like a cold, cold frost ... But when I die, she will feel lost..."

  A dog started to bark, then another, then several. A rooster crowed. Those servants who had to be up earliest and so went to bed earliest banged on the shutters and yelled for quiet. Leonard got louder, to be heard over the racket, and gazed up at what had to be Deanna's bedroom window with a sick-puppy expression.

  Her legs got quivery and she sat down heavily on the ground.

  "Deanna?" Oliver sounded worried. He crouched down beside her, but she didn't want to look at him. She crossed her legs Indian style and hunched over in the evening gloom, her arms hugged around herself. Without touching her, without knowing anything of human comforting, he said, "Maybe something you ate?"

  Her life was going to end here, she thought, in a place even less familiar than the Guyon farmhouse, surrounded by strangers who were getting stranger all the time. She had been gone all day, which would have her mother in a panic; her only confidant was a cat; and her only plan for dealing with the impossible task she had been set had been to cross her fingers and hope that things would work out. Well, things hadn't worked out, and by noon tomorrow there wouldn't even be anybody left to miss her.

  "What should I do?" she whispered into the lengthening shadows, as though the fair folk could hear her. It wasn't a matter of being unwilling; she couldn't begin to guess where to begin.

  Leonard's voice warbled, "My love has eyes of wondrous brown ... Pray, don't look upon my song and frown..."

  Deanna rocked back and forth, wondering if it would hurt to die or if she would just suddenly cease to exist, gone like the flame on a birthday candle.

  Oliver watched her silently, still close enough to touch. Still not touching.

  A voice behind her announced, "Somebody should do something."

  Deanna jumped.

  It was Baylen standing there in the almost-dark; and when she continued to sit there, looking at him with her jaw hanging loose, he nodded toward his brother and said, "Leonard. Somebody should do something to get him to stop."

  "Oh," Deanna said, for it had seemed for a moment as though he'd been reading her thoughts. "Leonard."

  Baylen looked at her as though she were a mildly distasteful idiot. He raised his eyebrows at Oliver, gave her a hint of a bow, and started to leave.

  "Baylen," she called after him. "Help me."

  Baylen paused, his expression quizzical. "With Leonard?"

  "With my quest."

  The flicker of interest dissolved into disappointment.

  But she remembered how Baylen had rescued her, all unwittingly, by interrupting Algernon when he'd tried his mind-control spells in the courtyard. She scrambled to her feet. "Please, Baylen. I don't have anybody else to turn to."

  Silently, with a graceful uncurling motion, Oliver stood.

  Lamely, she added, "Oliver and I don't have anybody else to turn to."

  "Why don't I get my Uncle Algernon?" Baylen suggested. "He's good at that sort of—"

  "No!" she cried. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure she hadn't attracted Leonard's attention. "No," she repeated more calmly. "Not Algernon."

&nbs
p; Baylen was interested again. He came closer. "Don't tell me Uncle Algernon is competing with Leonard for your attention."

  "No," she said. Then, deciding she would get nowhere if she didn't trust someone, she told him: "Your uncle has the thing I need—the object of my quest."

  "Ah!" Baylen stroked his chin. "Then why don't you ask him for it?"

  "He wouldn't give it to me. I know he wouldn't. Baylen, we need some sort of plan, and Oliver and I can't come up with one."

  "Well..Baylen said. She had agonized over telling him, and here he was looking bored and obviously trying to think of a way to get out of becoming involved.

  Beyond them, Leonard started a new song, one that proclaimed his love was fairer than any other's.

  Instantly Baylen shifted from bemused to annoyed. Deanna had taken the song as a tribute to her rather than a comment on Baylen's betrothed, but apparently the older brother saw Leonard's wording as a personal affront. His gaze slipped from her to Leonard then back to her.

  Sorry, I can't help you; I'll be beating up my brother, she thought he was about to say. Or some such thing. Instead, he said, "Let's talk someplace else. Away from..." He glanced away in Leonard's direction once more.

  It was too good to be true, and who cared what his reasoning was? "Oh, Baylen," she said. "Thank you." She glanced at Oliver, to share her relief with him.

  If he was relieved, he did a fine job of hiding it.

  What was the matter now? Was Oliver's sulky expression because she had said she had no one to turn to? There was no time to ask, for Baylen was pulling on her arm, leading her away from his brother and his songs.

  At least Oliver followed without objection. Baylen led them to the mews, where the hunting birds were kept. The place stank of the sputtering torch Baylen lit, and of leather and bird droppings, but at least they were alone. In the silence, Deanna could hear the hawks—or eagles or falcons or whatever they were—shift nervously from one foot to the other, jingling the tiny bells attached to the little hoods that covered their eyes. Oliver looked inordinately interested in the birds, so Deanna plunged into her story as soon as Baylen faced her. "This object of mine," she said, "it's called a watch."

  "Watch?" Baylen repeated. "Like a guard goes on watch?"

  Good grief. If people started thinking it had some military significance, she'd never get it back. "No, nothing like that. It's the little thing your uncle got from the pigman this evening. He's wearing it around his neck. It doesn't do anything. It's just called a watch because it ... it's pretty to watch."

  That was stupid, and she knew it was stupid even as she said it.

  Baylen looked at her levelly and said, "That doesn't sound like something Uncle Algernon would be interested in at all."

  "Well, the thing is, he doesn't know that it doesn't do anything."

  "Ah. What does he think it does?"

  "I ... don't know," Deanna admitted.

  Baylen chewed on his lip, apparently thinking a lot faster than he was talking. "Hmm. All right I know how to get it. I'll tell him I've found out what it can do, that I overheard you and Oliver talking and that it ... Let's see..." Even in the failing light she could see the sparkle in his eyes when the idea came to him. "I'll tell him it's something for use in alchemy: for changing lead to gold."

  Deanna glanced at Oliver to see if this made any more sense to him than it did to her, but she couldn't tell what he was thinking. She said, "Yes, but Baylen, that'll only make him want the watch even more. We have to make him think it's something he doesn't want, maybe that it's dangerous to him."

  "No!" Baylen said. "No, no, no, no. You don't understand this type of subterfuge at all. If Uncle Algernon thought it was dangerous, he'd never let it out of his sight. I'll tell him it's something nice and safe, and then he won't be so careful with it."

  Baylen was right about one thing: she certainly didn't know anything about subterfuge. But she supposed it made a sort of sense as he explained it. "But if he thinks it'll make gold, won't he want to make gold with it?"

  "Yes," Baylen said. "How not? But we'll tell him—I'll tell him—that the magic of the watch only works ... if no one is watching it."

  Deanna concentrated, trying to imagine Algernon believing this. She couldn't.

  "No. It's coming to me. It's called a watch because it alone must watch over the alchemic process. The watch ... Let's see ... The watch must be placed at a crossroads where a man has been hanged from a gallows." Baylen ignored the face Deanna made and continued: "This must be done at midnight, by the light—oh, this is good!—by the light of the first full moon after the winter solstice."

  Winter solstice? That didn't sound promising, considering it was August. "When's the winter solstice?" she asked.

  Baylen gave her a look which indicated anyone with any sense at all knew when the winter solstice was.

  "December twenty-second," Oliver answered. Then, just as smoothly. "Is that soon?"

  Baylen tapped his head in the same nothing upstairs gesture that Deanna knew from nine hundred years later in Greeley, Colorado.

  "Baylen," she said. "Baylen, listen to me. This is important."

  "What?"

  "This has to be done tonight."

  "Tonight?" Baylen frowned. He looked bitterly disappointed. "How about by the light of any full moon?"

  "Is there one tonight?"

  "No."

  "Baylen, forget the moon. I'm perfectly serious about this: I must have that watch and I must be back in the forest by midday tomorrow. At. The. Latest."

  Baylen tugged on his mustache. "Can we keep the crossroads with the gallows?"

  She considered. He seemed to be making all of this more complicated than it needed to be. "Only if there's one nearby," she told him.

  He sighed. "Eight or nine furlongs."

  "What's a furlong?"

  "Two-oh-one point one-six-eight meters" Oliver explained.

  It was Deanna's turn to sigh. "I was never good at metric."

  "About an eighth of a mile."

  Times eight or nine ... So, a bit over a mile all told; about a twenty-minute walk. "That's not bad."

  Baylen was looking from Oliver to Deanna. "What's a mile?" he asked.

  "Eight furlongs," Oliver said. He tapped his head.

  Baylen showed his teeth in a grin that was unsettlingly similar to Algernon's.

  Was all this really going to get her watch back? "So, at the crossroads..." Deanna prompted.

  "At the crossroads," Baylen continued, "at midnight. It must be placed in a box of oak, and the box must be placed in an iron cauldron. One gold coin goes at the bottom of the cauldron, then the whole thing is filled with base metals of any sort—broken blades, rusted armor, scrap tin. The box, with the watch inside it, rests on top." He paused, thinking.

  "Go on," Deanna urged.

  "Once the box has been set in place, no one must look at it. Which is why the watch is called a watch: because it alone will watch over the alchemic process." Baylen was obviously pleased with that touch. He intoned: "Let no human eye behold the cauldron between the rising of the moon and the coming of the sun, or the spell will be reversed and the gold..." He paused for dramatic effect. "...lost."

  Deanna considered. It was reasonable. Sort of. She guessed. Perhaps Algernon would be greedy enough to risk having the watch out of sight for a few short hours. She glanced at Oliver, who looked skeptical.

  "Trust me," Baylen said. And, after all, what other choice had she?

  "Tonight," she reminded him.

  "Tonight," he assured her.

  TWELVE

  Night

  "You go back to your room," Baylen told her, "while I set things up with Uncle Algernon."

  Deanna hesitated. Oliver just stood there with his arms folded and she couldn't even tell for sure if he was looking at Baylen or beyond him at the roosting birds.

  Baylen said, "If he sees us together, that would spoil everything; then he'd never believe our story."

 
Deanna could see the logic of it, and yet she had the sense that something was wrong, if she could just figure out what. Things were moving too fast. Our story was it now?

  Baylen sighed impatiently. "And you can't wait here: somebody is sure to notice the torchlight and come investigating to see who's here at this hour."

  "All right," said Deanna. The alternative was to remain in the mews in the dark, inhaling the bird stink and hoping that Oliver wasn't thinking about the falcons as an after-dinner snack. "Come on, Oliver."

  She and Oliver crossed the darkened courtyard, and thank goodness Leonard had apparently given up on her. There was no sign of him or his musical entourage on the lawn. The huge doors to the castle were open, spilling golden torchlight out onto the entryway.

  "Now," Deanna said as they slipped inside, "if we can just avoid Leonard and Algernon..."

  She knew she shouldn't have said it. A statement like that was just inviting bad luck. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted it, even before she heard a footstep on the stone floor behind them. She whirled around, crying, "What do you want from me?" which was an appropriate question for either Leonard or Algernon.

  But not for Sir Henri, who took two steps back and stammered, "Ah, well, ahm, ah, nothing."

  "I'm sorry," Deanna said. "I thought you were..." Your son? Your brother? She couldn't very well say either. "You startled me," she finished lamely. Obviously he could have said the same to her. "Forgive me."

  Sir Henri bowed, ever gracious. "Nothing to forgive, my dear. But there's nothing here at Belesse that should give you such a start. Nothing and nobody dangerous about the place at all."

  She could have said, Yeah? Have you been in your brother's room lately? But she didn't.

  In the second she lost thinking it, Sir Henri's attention went to Oliver. "Feeling better, my boy?"

  "Than what?" Oliver asked.

  Deanna dug her elbow into his side. "Yes, he is." She smiled and nodded.

  Oliver imitated the gesture, watching her while he did.

  "Much better," Deanna said.

  "Much," Oliver agreed.

  "Good," Sir Henri said. "Excellent. Poor Marguerite didn't feel well at dinner either."