Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) (14 page)

-me too, me too! haha, food!-

He followed her through the vague wall manifestation and then danced ahead into the kitchen, precipitating a small shriek and hasty footsteps.

Margaret appeared in the doorway, brandishing a kitchen knife, and said, trying to be cross: “The next time he scrabbles around my feet like that, he’ll be chopped up and put in the pot with the rest of the meat!”

-chopchop!-
said Onepiece gleefully, still dancing around her feet.
–inna pot!-

“Exactly! Poly, can you tell Luck that dinner will be ready in a quarter hour?”

“I can
try
,” Poly said doubtfully. “I don’t know that he’ll listen, though: he’s reading a little blue book and all I can get from him are two-word answers and a grunt every now and then.”

“He’s in the library? Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him today,” Margaret said pessimistically. “Are you having your dinner there?”

Poly made a rueful grimace. “Probably. Luck’s lost two books he wants me to find, and the library is a mess. I’ll probably have to clean it before I can find anything.”

“Rather you than me!” said Margaret with an unsympathetic laugh. “What did you come out for? Does Luck need something?”

“Do you have anything in the kitchen that a–” Poly paused, sighed, and gave in to the inevitable: “–that a gremlin would find tasty?” “Pulled out the bookshelves, did you? Well, that’ll cause a bit of a mess around the house. Give ‘em cheese; they like that. But you won’t get any peace until you put the bookcases back into the walls: they live in them, you see.”

“Well, they’ll have to live somewhere else,” said Poly, with a determination she didn’t quite feel. She accepted the lump of cheese that Margaret gave her, ignoring the knowing smile and shrug that went along with it, and returned to the library.

When she got back she was greeted by a row of silent, beady eyes that watched her intently from the top three shelves of the fourth bookcase. The original gremlin had been joined by roughly twenty more of the creatures, and they sat with their bare bottoms on the painted wood, dangling their flat feet into the dusty air.

“Yik,” said the first gremlin, precipitating a chorus of
yikyikyik!
s that threatened to pierce Poly’s eardrums.

She held up her index finger again sternly, and, much to her satisfaction, an awed silence fell as twenty-odd gremlins stared at her finger as if bewitched.

“Huh,” said Luck, flicking over a page. “They don’t do that for me.”

His voice was absorbed and uninterested, but it produced a violent response from the gremlins, who chittered and shrieked at him until Luck looked up from his book with a decided snap of gold to his eyes. This quietened all but the boldest of them, and even they berated at a mutter instead of a shriek. Poly, deciding that this was possibly the best behaviour she could expect of them, hastily broke the cheese into smaller portions and gave it out with congratulatory murmurs. The first gremlin to receive his cheese clasped it beatifically in webbed, fingerless hands and crooned: “Ah she!”

“Shee!” crooned the others, bobbing their heads. It was a relief to think that they knew more words than the continual
yikyik
, but Poly found their wide, adoring gaze slightly nerve-wracking, and said, touching a hand to the middle of her chest: “Poly. Not she. Poly.”

The mutter of ‘Poly’ was passed between the gremlins with much teeth-snapping satisfaction until one of them held up his lump of cheese with a victorious cry of: “Polyolyoly! Ollyollyolly!” The others took up the cry, brandishing their cheese, and charged back into the walls, shrieking and
yik
-ing. Poly was left feeling rather uncertain, but since she saw neither a trace of webbed hand nor dust-bunny hair despite all her knocking and tidying and dusting, she let herself assume, a little uneasily, that she had pleased them.

-inna walls-
said Onepiece in her head, sniffing cautiously at the render of the walls.
-all yikyik and cheese and She Poly-

“Oh dear,” Poly said, with a tingle of foreboding. “I hope I haven’t sent them on a rampage.”

-yes, but not in bookcase anymore-
pointed out Onepiece prosaically.

Later, Poly retired to the kitchen to fetch dinner, grinning to find that she had caught Margaret with her head out the kitchen window, berating a would-be caller in a loud whisper.

“But Meg, you promised!” protested the lad. He was a boy with big round glasses and a natural expression of hopefulness that was at present somewhat strained, and Poly thought he looked rather nice.

Margaret tossed her head at him and said: “Yes, but Luck’s home, Puss: you’ll have to go with someone else. Oh, Poly, there you are. I’ve put it all on a tray for you.”

Poly said thank you cheerfully, and nodded at the boy in a friendly way that made him blush darkly, much to her amusement. She wandered back to the library with leisurely slowness, wondering how many boys Margaret was dangling on a string while she tried to attract Luck’s notice. The thought was a rather stringent one, and she wondered for a moment if she was jealous of Margaret; because unless she counted Mordion, Poly hadn’t even had
one
boy to dangle on a string.

But then
, thought Poly hopefully,
I never wanted one. Not a courtier, anyway.

The thought cheered her up. It would have been a rather dismal thing to find herself jealous of a petty sort of girl like Margaret.

Well,
she thought fairmindedly;
Not petty. Just proprietary.

Besides, Luck didn’t seem to notice her any more than he noticed the other village girls, unless Poly construed his not running away from Margaret as notice. In which case, Margaret was to be pitied rather than envied.

She picked her way through stacks of books, placing Luck’s dinner beside him the floorboards, and received a sweet, absent smile from Luck that meant he hadn’t really noticed her. If
that
was what Margaret had to contend with, Poly did pity her.

Poly went back to her own piles of books, nibbling at her cheesy potatoes whenever the hunger pangs struck her, and before long found that her dinner had turned leathery with cold. She eyed her plate ruefully, comparing it with Luck’s, which was still full and now congealed in solidified fat, and realised that Onepiece had gone to sleep curled up in his corner. Mentally apostrophizing herself for a thoughtlessness as bad as Luck’s, she picked him up and bore him off to bed, forestalling his sleepy mutters with a gentle caress of his ears.

It was cold and dark outside the library, surprising Poly with the lateness of the hour, and when she tiptoed into Margaret’s room the girl was already in bed and heavily enough asleep not to wake at the opening of the bedroom door. Poly deposited Onepiece on the bed, covering him with the sheets just in case he turned human in his sleep, and stretched limbs that had, she now realised, become stiff and sore. How long had she and Luck been immured in the library? She’d lost track of the time, sorting madly to make order from chaos, and somehow it hadn’t seemed important to keep track of the rapidly advancing hour. Perhaps–heaven forbid!–Luck’s absent-mindedness was catching. Poly grimaced at her smudged reflection in Margaret’s bureau mirror, and decided that it was necessary to escape the dusty air of the house. She’d taken many moonlight walks back at the castle, letting the silence and coolness of the night slide over her refreshingly. It had helped to wash away Persephone’s petty snipes and the continual, battering assault of tiny, unkind magics from Mellisande and Giselle. Here in Luck’s village she was less likely to be remarked upon if she slipped out, and Poly was quite certain that Luck wouldn’t notice her absence.

Poly made her way quietly back through Luck’s living room and out the front door. She was uncertain of what lay beyond Margaret’s real bedroom door and was unwilling to risk bumbling around someone else’s home late at night.

It didn’t occur to her until she shut the front door that Luck might have some kind of magic lock on it, but when her convulsive grab at the doorknob turned it easily, she was able to huff out a breath of relief and feel thankful that at least Luck had thought to include her in the house spells, even if he couldn’t remember to make sure that she had dinner.

It was pleasantly cold outside, but the touch of a cool breeze on her unfamiliarly bare arms reminded Poly fleetingly that the butterflower yellow dress Luck had made her was the only one she presently owned, and that her complete lack of both coin and apparel would have to be brought up with Luck tomorrow. But in the meantime, the moonlit village was quietly welcome, and Poly strolled through the tightly knit houses until she found herself at the outskirts of the village. The houses here were bigger, single-level dwellings that spread sideways in contrast to the neat, two-level condominiums at the centre of the village. Behind them the forest stretched out, silent and massive. Poly wandered closer to the shadowed trees, but when her hair uncoiled itself from the plait she’d confined it in and reached out waveringly to the forest she backed away rather quickly.

There had been quite enough magic for one day, Poly thought decidedly.

To her surprise, this time she didn’t encounter the village wall as she walked. The village had seemed somehow smaller yesterday, and Poly, wondering just what Luck had meant when he described the village as spiral, made an addendum to the list of things she needed to mention to him tomorrow. She had a shrewd idea that Luck worked on a different set of vocabulary to the rest of the world.

There were even
fields
in the village, for heaven’s sake! Margaret had only shown the portion of the village that she considered pertinent–which tended to be shops and the houses of her cronies–and it was rather a surprise to find herself following deep ruts in the grass that served for tracks between the crops. They were smallish fields, perhaps only a quarter-mile square each, but they were full and whispering in the moonlight, just like fields should be. Poly amused herself by trying sleepily to guess what was in each field, but with indifferent success: after the familiarity of paddock after paddock of sheep, one green, rustling crop looked much like another. Besides, the villagers seemed to have a ridiculously eclectic mix of crops, some of which, Poly thought doubtfully, she was
almost
sure were not in season. A closer look at the fields showed a webbing of unfamiliar magic surrounding the crops that intrigued her enough to bring a halt to her stroll while she tried to puzzle out the thread of one of the closer spells.

One of the threads was Luck’s, Poly was certain. She stretched out a finger to trace the single thread, and it gave a little beneath the pressure, taut but elastic. The other strands were myriad and completely unfamiliar, and they all had that slight skew to them that she’d noticed before. Despite Poly’s best efforts, she couldn’t tell what the spell was for. She was still gazing at the webbing and yawning behind her hand when it occurred to her that she was very nearly asleep where she crouched. The thought spurred her to rise rather hastily and turn homeward with a quicker step than before, an unwelcome vision of herself laying asleep and forgotten between rows of corn (or was it cotton?) slowly creeping into her mind.

Poly hurried back through the rustling green stalks, mentally scolding herself for the stupidity of taking to the open air at night when she was plagued by a sleep curse.

She wasn’t the only one taking the air, however: as she hurried homeward, Poly saw a broad-shouldered shadow struggling through the only empty, unploughed field in sight. The thread of stray, wrong magic that had drawn Poly’s attention to the fact was quivering with barely suppressed hunger. Poly shivered, and disintegrated it with her antimagic hand as she passed. Poacher or mischief-maker aside, she didn’t care for the type of magic that had made the nasty little trap. She heard running footsteps and saw the vault of a shadow over the fence, and walked a little faster with the uneasy suspicion that she might have freed a poacher from the rightful grasp of his victim.

The way back home was twice as fast as the way there, and Poly, who thought she’d managed to become thoroughly lost, was grateful to find herself trailing up the main road to Luck’s cottage in very short order. Luck was outside waiting for her, which explained the quicker journey back: he gave her a quick, critical look over and nodded decisively as if he were satisfied. Poly was too sleepy to really care what it was he was satisfied about, and when he opened the door for her in a rare moment of thoughtfulness, she merely murmured goodnight and took herself off to bed.

The acrid burn of smelling salts woke Poly to a world that was far too warm. She sneezed three times, constricting a thin, bony little body that protested its displeasure in semi-articulated grunts, and battled her way out of tangled bedsheets, almost falling out of the regrettably narrow bed.

“You’re lively this morning,” remarked Luck. He was looking bright and cheerful, thought Poly sourly, and his hair was standing up almost straight. She had an idea that he hadn’t been to bed at all.

“I’m in my
chemise
!” said Margaret’s voice indignantly. She looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or offended to find Luck in her bedroom. Luck gave her one of his wide, glassy looks until she scowled and dragged the sheets up to her chin, then turned back to Poly.