Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) (20 page)

Perhaps it was due to the lingering effects of the freckle girl’s purple eyes that Poly was able to slip away shortly after, towing Onepiece and his resident gremlin. If so, she was very grateful.

When she passed Michael’s storefront, hoping to catch a glimpse of him again, she was further pleased to find that she would have his escort instead: it was Michael’s half-day.

“So we’ve managed to abscond with you at last!” said his voice. There was a flurry of movement as Michael leapt the front railing, apron over shoulder, and landed with a flourish and a bow. He was trailing threads and tiny triangular off-cuts of blue cotton.

“Did I impress you, Miss Poly?”

“Oh yes, I’m terribly impressed. I don’t think the man behind the counter thought much of it, though.”

Michael grimaced comically, ducking out of sight of the store-owner’s glare. “He’s merely jealous of my physical prowess.”

“Oh, is that what it is?”

“It must be: who could be angry at this face? Hurry along, Miss Poly, or he’ll be after me to clean the dust from his front window.”

So Poly hurried along, giggling at Michael’s nonsense while Onepiece perched on her hip and made popping noises in her ear. Before long they had arrived at a small, clean-scrubbed cottage that Poly recognised without Michael’s unnecessarily flamboyant gestures, by the simple fact that Annie was in the front garden planting seeds.

Annie looked up at their approach and said with a smile: “I thought I heard trouble. Welcome, Poly: I hope Michael hasn’t been wearing your ears to nubs?”

“Only one of them!” protested Michael as Poly laughingly denied it. She
liked
Michael’s chatter: it made a vast change from Luck’s mostly silent, magically charged presence.

“Did you manage to sneak away or did Luck give you a half-holiday?”

“Luck’s out repairing a few spells. He says there’s something nattering at the steady magic around the village, and that it’s giving him a headache. Besides,” added Poly, unable to repress her amusement, “It was mostly young girls and their eyelashes today.”

Annie climbed to her feet, dusting at the rich, black soil that was crumbling on her palms, and said curiously: “Don’t you mind?”

“Good grief, no! Why should I? It’s far too entertaining to be annoying, and if I wanted to learn how to flirt, I think it would be very instructive.”

“Yes, but does
Luck
mind?” asked Michael, a mischievous gleam in his eye.

“Oh, Luck doesn’t notice a thing! I suppose,” added Poly with guiltily appreciative amusement; “That’s what makes it so funny. The poor girls have no idea what they’re up against.”

“They do, you know,” said Michael, opening the front door for Poly and his mother. Of course, being Michael, he did it with the lowest of court bows, wriggling his eyebrows at Poly. “They’re just beastly determined. I think they might have bets on it.”

“You hush your nonsense,” said Annie, while Poly was still trying to decide whether he was joking or not. “You’ll have Poly thinking we’re all escapees from the Frozen Battlefield.”

“Well, some of them might as well be; they’re as mad as a pair of wet gnau in a hole.”

“Madgnau,” said Onepiece, giggling. He wriggled vigorously to be let down and promptly grabbed Annie’s hand, much to that lady’s delight.

“Tea, I think. Michael, fetch the biscuits, will you?”

“I hear and obey, Mother Mine,” said Michael cheerfully. “Nuts or raisins, Poly?”

“Nuts, please.” Poly paused, considering a question to which she thought she might already know the answer. While Michael fetched biscuits, she said daringly: “Are they flowers? That you’re planting out front, I mean?”

Annie didn’t choose to misunderstand. “No, I’m planting as many strawberries as I can before the season passes. Slightly Sideways Strawberries are very picky about their planting time, and we’re coming into the last week just now.”

“I’ll have a word with Luck,” Poly said, sighing. She expected Annie to make a polite demurral and was preparing to press her point when the other lady nodded once, relief clearly etched across her face. Poly was surprised, and then annoyed at her surprise.

“I’d take that very kindly in you,” Annie said. “The wizard is a very great and kind man, but I’ll be the first to admit that he’s inclined to be forgetful.”

“Oh, is that what it is? I thought it was plain boredom and a habit of forgetting everybody else but himself.”

Annie smiled guiltily, but said: “Well, I suppose the centuries will do that to a person.”

“Good grief, don’t excuse him! You can feel free with me: I have no illusions about him, you see.”

“So I see,” observed Annie; but there was still a smile at the edges of her eyes, and Poly wondered why. “Oh well, never mind the wizard: today is tea and biscuits, and never mind our problems. We want to know all about you.”

“Indeed we do,” said Michael, leaning across the counter and the biscuit tin both. He looked as if he was prepared to hold the biscuits ransom unless he was satisfied that all his questions had been answered. “Don’t listen to Mother Mine: she only wants to know such tawdry things as where you attended school, where you’re really from, and what you’re really doing here.
I
want much more pertinent information. For instance: I can’t help but feel that such an entrancing young lady must have suitors under every rock: but are you spoken for? And that’s a rather delectable spellpaper gleaming at me from one of your pockets– I would love to poke my nose in and see it. Thirdly and finally, how did you get the curse that’s clinging to you like a shadow? Now, now, Mother Mine, don’t hit me! You must admit they’re more interesting than your questions!”

Since Annie really did look as though she was about to box the ears of her erstwhile offspring, and Michael was darting back behind the kitchen bench with the biscuit tin clasped to his chest in order to escape the wrath he had invoked, Poly said, proud to find herself not blushing: “No, perhaps, and it’s a long story, in that order. And not under
every
rock, but one of them certainly crawled out from under one.”

“Slimy?” asked Michael, pausing in his mad dash for long enough to offer Poly and Onepiece a biscuit.

“No: beautiful! And about as dangerous as a cockatrice.”

“Now, cockatrices are much maligned creatures–”

“This particular one wasn’t,” observed Poly, dispassionately interrupting the flow of nonsense before it was fully begun. “In fact, if it was anywhere around, you could be sure that someone else around it was being maligned.”

“Shame on you, Poly,” said Michael, piously. “Just because a creature is poisonous at one end and sharp at the other, is no reason to cast aspersions upon its character.”

“Oh, will you hush your nonsense! Michael, love, if you’re going to hand out biscuits like fair-favours, you should perhaps hang the kettle.”

Michael gave one of his elaborate bows, suggesting another ‘I hear and obey’, and vanished briefly into the depths of the kitchen with numerous clatterings and clangings that were evidently designed to remind them of his presence.

“No village is without its own particular cockatrice,” said Annie, dryly enough to make Poly think that she was referring to a particular person. “But you’re not village, I think?”

“No. Is it obvious?”

“The court curtsey was a hint. Most mothers and finishing schools in the Capital still teach a version of it, but none quite so elaborate. You’re from court, I suppose: but not Glausian or Broman, I’ll be bound.”

“No: Civet.”

“Special,” explained Onepiece, tugging at Annie’s jerkin to indicate his need of another biscuit. “Old,
old
Poly.”

Poly, a rueful smile twitching her mouth up at the corners, saw the brief, frozen moment when Annie understood.

“You poor child! You’re the Sleeping Princess.”

“Well, in a manner of speaking,” said Poly cautiously.

“I knew it!” Michael said triumphantly, appearing in the doorway again with a dangerously tilting canister of tea in one careless hand. “An Elder Curse: The Mysterious Stranger: A Hidden Menace!”

“Stop talking in play bills, you horrible child! The Sleeping Princess, now: that had something to do with the Frozen Battlefield, did it not?”

“Luck thinks so.”

“You don’t?”

“Well, yes,” said Poly doubtfully, unsure of how to explain that it was more of a personal connection than a magical one. Her parents had been responsible for that: it certainly hadn’t had anything to do with her curse. Or, she wondered suddenly, remembering Mordion: had it? If Mordion was behind her own curse, it was more than passingly likely that he’d also been responsible for the fierce, terrifyingly joyful faces she’d seen captured in amber. What had Mum said?
They would have killed everyone. We had no choice.

“I didn’t mean to bring up unpleasant memories,” said Annie’s voice. Poly blinked, becoming aware that Annie was leaning across the table, her face concerned, and drew her thoughts away from Mordion with a conscious effort.

“Not unpleasant,” she said, smiling faintly. “But I don’t seem to remember much.”

“You looked like you were about to fall asleep,” said Michael, startling Poly by being much closer than she’d realised. He proffered a messy cup of tea that had sloshed into its saucer, and placed a sugar bowl on the table with triumphant precision, indicating with a flourish that she could help herself.

“I probably was.”

“Ah, the curse clinging! How exciting. Do you know that your hair is growing again?”

“Of course she knows her hair is growing! Very trying for you, my dear.”

“Pretty,” said Onepiece with a frown that only went away when Michael winked at him in agreement.

“Can a well-placed kiss break it?”

Poly tried not to blush, failed, and said: “I think so. I haven’t had a chance to look at the spellpaper yet, but that’s how Luck woke me up at first.”

“Fortunate Luck,” remarked Michael, with a sparkle in his blue eyes as he dodged his mother’s hand. “Desist, Mother! After all, everyone loves a good love curse!”

“I don’t,” said Poly frankly. “It’s a great nuisance, in fact. Luck’s working on it, but every time we think we’ve managed to corner it, it sneaks away.”

“Just like Luck, in other words.”

Poly gave a surprised gurgle of laughter. “Well, yes!”

“You’re a pair of disreputable children!” chided Annie. “The wizard doesn’t have to answer to any of us: anything we get from him is a windfall.”

“Oh well, you’ll let me know if you need any help, won’t you, Poly? Spellpaper or kisses.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” said Poly. Her voice surprised her with its dryness, but Michael’s innocent façade didn’t even register a crack.

“Have a biscuit, Poly. Have a biscuit, Mother Mine. Now, out with the spellpaper!”

Poly took it out of her pocket with slight reluctance: she’d wanted to look it over by herself in private first. But Michael’s blue eyes were very hard to resist, and even Annie’s eyes, though not as compelling, were glittering with interest. Annie, like Josie, was unrepentantly one of those who ‘wouldn’t mind if I
do
’.

When she smoothed the spellpaper out on the table, it crackled and became smooth and matte, the folds disappearing as if they’d never been. The snap of impersonal, clerical magic made Poly jump. She hadn’t looked at a spellpaper in– well, more than three hundred years, and not so very often back then, either. Lady Cimone had made sure she knew all the treaties, of course: the Forest Treaty, which was the oldest of them all, and made of leafy parchment that somehow still glowed with the same pearlescence of the newer papers; the slightly scorched Treaty of A Hundred Days, which hadn’t fared nearly as well due to a few treacherous Parasians or Civetans (depending on which country you happened to be in); and the Three Monarchies Treaty, which Poly shrewdly suspected was no more than a pile of ash after the Enchanted Battlefield.

But studying the Treaties from behind glass and magic ward was very different from the crackling, powerful presence of an uncaged spellpaper, and Poly cleaned her glasses once, very slowly, before she began to read.

Across the table, Onepiece’s little human nose wrinkled and was firmly grasped in one small hand before it could sneeze into his tea.

Poly had only read four lines before she looked up, bewildered. “But this is nonsense!”

“Aloud, aloud, Poly,” pleaded Michael, bouncing on his seat. “What’s nonsense?”

“It’s in rhyme!” She ran her eyes over the lines again, unreasonably irritated. “A trite little three-verse curse, actually.”

Annie’s blue eyes had become very sharp. “Now what is a three-verse curse doing written in spellpaper?”

“That’s exactly what I would like to know,” said Poly, a little fiercely.

Across the table, Onepiece looked at her with watchful eyes and said guiltily: “Wasn’t feeding gremlin.”

“I’m not cross with you, darling,” Poly assured him, watching the gremlin as it shoved the rest of a biscuit into its mouth. “It says: