Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) (22 page)

“I haven’t helped much today,” she said, so that she wouldn’t have to think about it. Everything with Luck was always just a little bit uncomfortable: he took liberties, he never listened, and he very rarely deigned to notice anything that didn’t interest him. How could she help it if she’d scowled at him more than she smiled? But she still said, for that and for today: “Sorry.”

“I didn’t need you,” said Luck absently; and even if that was insulting, at least it was reassuring.

He was still observing her, his eyes for once entirely and completely green with not a golden speck of magic to be seen, and Poly, finding herself uncomfortable and slightly flushed, said: “Can you get rid of the hair again?”

“What? Oh yes, the hair. Well, I could do with a few more specimens: the last lot were no good at all. I might have to try something different this time.”

He knelt in front of her, parting the gathered hair to find a bare spot for his knees. Poly, who had intended to rise and seat herself on Luck’s chair in a civilised manner for the operation, found herself, as usual, with nowhere to retreat.

“Spell!” she said warningly to Luck, as the spelled cloak in his arms sent an arcing spit of blue-ish magic flying into her hair.

“Huh,” said Luck, looking down at the cloak in faint surprise. “Where did that come from?”

“You were already carrying it. I don’t think it likes me.”

“It doesn’t like anyone,” Luck said dismissively, laying the battered thing carefully down behind the wall of books. “It’s a Cloak of Hideous Aspect. Sooner or later all the grimaces and frightened looks sink into the lining with the spell and turn it sour. This one is very old. Lean forward, Poly: I need to be able to reach the hair at your nape.”

Poly did so reluctantly, cupping Onepiece’s suddenly restless head with her hands and feeling that the space was already entirely too crowded as it was.

“Much better,” said Luck cheerfully, slipping one arm around her neck. The other arm went around her shoulders, and Poly was able to renew her acquaintance with Luck’s ink-stained collar while Luck muttered into her hair. Terrifyingly, Poly found that she could understand almost everything he was saying.

Finally he said: “Give me your hand, Poly. Not the antimagic one.”

“But– oh, wait a moment.”

Poly reshuffled Onepiece to rest against Luck’s shoulder and wriggled her normal hand free, which Luck grabbed with more speed than gentleness and wrapped around a thick hank of hair.

“Think of it as magic,” he told her, nudging his shoulder into hers to accommodate Onepiece’s head. “Well, it is; but I mean the hair itself. Think of it as a skein of magic that you want to cut in half.”

“Shall I cauterize it?” asked Poly dubiously.

Luck said: “No!” hastily, tugging her hand away. “Poly, you don’t listen. I specifically want it
not
cauterized!”

Poly made a rude face at Luck’s collar that had to be quickly smoothed away when Luck’s collar was replaced with Luck’s face, but the rather closer look he gave her suggested that he’d caught the tail end of it anyway.

Using her arm as a demonstration, he curled his fingers around her wrist and squeezed tight.

“Cinch it, you see? Then twist and tug.” He demonstrated that, too, prompting a muttered ‘ow!’ from Poly, and added: “If we’re lucky, that’ll do it.”

Poly wanted to ask what would happen if they
weren’t
lucky, but Luck was gazing at her expectantly, his nose mere inches from her own, and even being more or less hugged by Luck was better than being stared at by him. She reached back for the bunch of hair that Luck was scraping together again, and
twisted
.

At once her head was lighter and her hand heavier, loose tendrils springing up to tickle her ears. When Poly shook her head in fascination, her freshly cut hair dusted Luck’s cheeks.

He said: “Hey!” but didn’t move away, and Poly refused to feel apologetic. She was surrounded by Luck–Luck’s arms, his magic, his sharp chemically smell–and if he was slightly inconvenienced by that, well, serve him right. He gathered the hair, which was longer again than she’d realised, and from the vague hum Poly sensed coming from it, he should be well pleased with the success of their experiment.

Poly didn’t realise Luck had finished gathering hair until he said: “You’d better hold the dog, Poly,” and it was borne in on her that they’d been sitting quietly for some minutes without moving, and that Luck needed her to hold Onepiece again in order to disengage himself.

She murmured her apologies, faintly surprised at herself for becoming comfortable enough with Luck’s somewhat pushing presence to forget it, and curled her arms beneath Onepiece.

“Got it!” said Luck cheerfully, heaving up armfuls of hair.

Poly, feeling somehow chilled now that Luck’s warm presence had moved away, climbed carefully to her feet with Onepiece’s skinny legs dangling on either side of her hips.

She was wondering if she should wake him for breakfast–or was it lunch? Time had gone a little strange today–when someone in the kitchen screamed. It was a staccato scream; short, sharp and possibly angry, and in the astonished silence that followed, Onepiece muttered sleepily: “Wasn’t me.”

Luck said thoughtfully: “Huh. Margaret doesn’t usually scream,” and took off at a dash.

Poly, following more slowly with Onepiece, her anti-magic arm swiftly ungloved, came across a scene as macabre as it was bright. Margaret, a chocolate held between two shaking fingers, was gazing wide-eyed at the kitchen table, upon which a semicircle of gremlins were sprawled around a cheerfully-coloured box. Their faces were smeared with melted chocolate and they were quite dead.

“I almost ate one!” said Margaret frantically. She managed to drop the chocolate at last, flinging it away in her haste to be rid of it, and it tumbled stickily past the gremlins. She wiped her hand furiously on her apron, scrubbing away the slightest trace of melted chocolate, and when Poly skirted the table to put a comforting arm around her waist, Margaret subsided into the hug with a shudder.

“Huh,” said Luck, observing the top of the chocolate box. “They’re for you, Poly.”

“Thank you, I’m sure!”

“No, they’re addressed to you. ‘Miss Polly, from an ardent admirer’.”

“How charming,” Poly said, with a dry mouth. She passed Onepiece to Margaret, who seemed glad to have a warm body to cuddle, and tugged her glove back over her antimagic arm. “Can you do anything for the gremlins?”

“What? Oh no, they’re dead as doornails. The others will probably come along later and collect them. I think they stuff them and hang them on their side of the walls.”

Poly sighed, tugging her laces tight. “Well, you wanted someone to try and kill me. Now they have.”

“Again,” agreed Luck. “All very helpful.”

“I’m so glad you think so,” Poly told him, unable to repress a faint smile. Neither was she able to repress the shiver that followed a moment later. “Wait, what do you mean, again?”

“Third attempt, Poly. We had an explosive in a Journey spell the first time. The second attempt was more of a gentle brush, so I could only catch a trace of it: this time should be
much
easier.”

“But when did someone try to kill me before?” protested Poly, interrupting Luck. He was muttering something distinctly magical to himself. She categorically refused to believe that the bomb in the Journey spell was anything more than mischief directed at Luck himself.

“When I put you to sleep in the kitchen two days ago,” he said, between mutters. The chocolate box lid was luminescing faintly, swirls of Luck’s golden magic putting coils of something else into sharp relief. “Someone tried to kill you then. I thought they might.”

“Do you mean to say,” demanded Margaret, in building indignation, “That you put Poly to sleep and left her
in my kitchen
to be murdered?”

Poly, somewhat amused to note that Margaret was more concerned by the idea of a body in her kitchen than the thought of Poly’s murder, was able to say calmly enough: “Well, it’s done now. Ronin must have scared away the murderer before they had a chance to finish me off.”

“Yes,” said Luck thoughtfully, tilting the lid to gaze more closely at it. Poly wasn’t sure whether his assent was to Margaret’s indignant question or her own statement. “Poly, take your glove off.”

“One day,” said Poly, tugging once again at the laces of her glove; “One day you’ll say please, and I’ll probably faint with shock.”

Over the chocolate box lid, Luck gave her a brilliant, dreamy smile that made Poly blink in surprise, and said: “Be a darling, Poly.”

There was a stifled giggle from Margaret, and while Poly was still startled into immovability, Luck peeled the glove from her hand and tugged her forward.

“You shouldn’t smile at people like that,” Poly told him, becoming more or less coherent again. “Good grief, no wonder the redhead was peppering me with questions!”

This time, Luck’s smile was more smug than breathtaking, but all he said was: “Poke about, Poly. See if there’s anything there to dismantle.”

Poly did so, her fingers running nimbly over the smooth surface of coloured cardboard in search of any traces of magic.

“Nothing,” she said, at last. “Nothing magic, anyway.”

“Huh,” said Luck, unsurprised. “Didn’t think so. Clever. He’s filled the chocolates with poison: nothing magic to trace.”

Poly pulled her glove back on, shrugging away disappointment and a slight quiver of fear. “We’ve no way to find him?”

“Oh no, I can find him,” Luck assured her. Since he followed this assurance by disappearing into the library with the chocolate box and one of the gremlins, Poly felt distinctly unconvinced. When she tried to follow him, she found to her indignation that he had somehow closed the library against her. She stomped back into the kitchen with something less than the fellow-feeling she’d had toward Luck that morning.

“He’s going to cut up that gremlin, you know,” Margaret said, grimly scrubbing the kitchen table.

Poly whisked away the remaining dead gremlins, but there seemed to be nowhere appropriate to put them, so she lined them up in the garden outside, decently out of sight behind the butterflowers. She hoped that Onepiece wouldn’t take it into his head to explore the garden as a puppy– in which form she had a feeling he would be more than capable of chewing on and then burying the gremlins.

The garden reminded her of Annie’s front garden, hollowed out to serve as a tiny field for strawberries, and another source of ire against Luck raised its head.

“Does Luck ever actually remember to help anyone?” she asked Margaret irritably, working the kitchen pump vigorously to wash her hands. She could still feel the tiny, stiffening limbs against her fingers, and the gremlins had left a sticky scum on her hands.

“Not unless you keep prodding him,” said Margaret sympathetically. “Or if it’s interesting. If it’s interesting, just you
try
keeping him away.”

“Yes. I’ve already discovered that.”

“Did he really put a spell on you and leave you out as bait?”

“Well, it wasn’t so much a spell as an experiment,” Poly admitted, fighting off the desire to thoroughly berate Luck. “But yes. I suppose I’m just lucky that Ronin came along when he did.”

Margaret snorted. “If you call
that
lucky. Don’t let Ronin hang on your apron strings, Poly: you’ll end up with the wrong kind of reputation.”

“Oh,” said Poly blankly. “Really? But he seems so nice!”

“Tell me he didn’t murmur a word or two about Miss Margaret being ‘a trifle overblown’, or warn you that I’d scratch your eyes out? Just in passing, of course, and in the nicest way.”

Poly grimaced. “Something like that.”

“Well, I hope you didn’t listen to him!” said Margaret, scooping up soap foam with a damp cloth. She shot a sideways look at Poly and burst out laughing. “You did! You thought I’d be upset that you’re here and turning the head of every boy from one end of the village to the other!”

“You
were
a bit standoffish at first!” Poly protested, but Margaret’s laughter was infectious, and she couldn’t help her lips twitching.

“Yes, but that’s because– oh, never mind! I decided you couldn’t help it, so there was no use being upset, after all.”

“Couldn’t help what?” said Poly, bewildered; because Margaret had gone off into another peal of laughter.

“That’s exactly it!” she said, and refused to explain any further. “Never you mind! As to the beaux, well, it’s nice to have a bit of space every now and then! Only don’t get attached Michael, will you? He breaks hearts every which way.”

“I’ll take care,” Poly said dryly. Now that she was thinking of it, she seemed to remember a remark or two that Ronin had made–one
to
her and another
about
her–that made her wonder why she hadn’t been more careful with him in the first place. “My skills have gotten rather rusty.”

“Skills? Oooh,
do
tell, Poly! Do you have delicious castle secrets to reveal?”

“There was a time when I could tell a scheming courtier at a glance,” said Poly, irritated with herself. “How annoying! I shall have to learn it all over again!”