Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) (27 page)

“How did we end up in–”

“The Forest,” said Michael hoarsely. “Poly, please tell your hair to stop sucking up forest magic. The Forest is very protective.”

“I don’t– oh, that’s
strong
!” panted Poly. “I can’t stop it, Michael! I can’t– it’s too strong and there’s too much of it. Oh! Michael, please Shift us! It keeps pushing more in and
I can’t fit any more!
”

Under the oppressive weight of too much, too strong magic, Poly only vaguely felt Michael prise something out of her hand. The light flicker of silver magic that Michael attached to the spindle helped her to remember that it was the spindle, but by then she was drowning in a surfeit of forest magic. She vaguely felt Michael slip his arms around her and was as vaguely grateful to be able to let her head drop onto his chest.

The Forest must have let them go. Poly wasn’t sure if it was because the spindle was no longer so obviously magic-less, or if it was because Michael’s Shifting spell blazed stronger than before in his urgency to get away; but after another, too-full moment there was blissful weightlessness.

Poly found herself able to appreciate the pleasure of being embraced by Michael for one delightful second.

Then Margaret’s voice, quiet and a little bit scratchy, said: “Oh, Poly, not Michael too!”

Poly’s dazed look around comprehended a dizzying catalogue: walls, house–
Luck’s
house; Margaret, pale and big-eyed; Josie, thoughtful and sharp-eyed; Annie, cheerful but watchful; and Luck looking white about the mouth with Onepiece’s skinny wrist grasped in one hand. She looked up and met Michael’s blue eyes, which were startled and somehow undecided. His mouth opened as a flurry of skirts attended Margaret’s dash from the house. Then Poly was let go abruptly, cold and shaken, and Michael dashed for the door.

“Margaret! Wait, it wasn’t– Meg! Please!”

“Well done, Poly!” said Josie’s fat voice, complacently. “I’ve been wondering exactly what it would take to shake a bit of sense into those two.”

“I always like an autumn wedding,” Annie said.

Poly blinked and smiled painfully, hoping that she didn’t look as shocked and miserable as she felt. She found herself gazing stupidly at Luck, whose eyes had gone very green and narrow, and heard him say: “What do you mean by going into the Forest when I tell you not to?”

“Accident,” whispered Poly, tears threatening to spill over. Josie saw the exhaustion, if not the tears, and became bustlingly supportive, calling on Luck not to be ‘too hard on the poor mite’; and even Annie was bold enough to say: “Look at her! Pebbles and Primroses, she’s all done in!”

“Out, biddies!” demanded Luck outrageously. “I won’t have ‘poor Poly’ here and ‘poor Poly’ there! She sneaks out behind my back, steals magic from the forest, and won’t share! Out!”

“Well, I never!” said Josie; but she said it on her way out the door, and Annie was even quicker to go, with a commiserating smile at Poly.

When the door shut behind them Luck dropped Onepiece’s wrist and said: “Well, that got rid of them. Are you going to cry now?”

“Um,” said Poly in a watery voice. She sat down by a pile of scalloped metal and Onepiece pattered over to cling to her knees, looking anxiously down at the tears that were trying to escape. His painfully worried look was at first touching and then amusing, and in playing games with his fingers to cheer him up, Poly found herself gradually regaining her composure.

Luck sat down next to them at some stage and said: “He was too young for you anyway, Poly.”

Poly gave a slightly wet giggle. “Of course! I couldn’t think of anyone under the age of four hundred!”

“That’s right,” said Luck. “And he’d never be able to keep up with you. Your hair is growing again, by the way.”

“I know,” said Poly, fighting back another wave of misery. “I really liked him, Luck. I thought– well, for a minute I thought he was–”

Luck was observing a violet stain on one cuff. “I thought so too. Thought his taste was beginning to improve.”

“You yelled at me.”

“Oh. Yes. Sorry about that. You needed a moment to–”

Poly stretched up to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you. Onepiece, don’t do that to my hair. I’m trying to tie it up.”

Luck silently watched her tie her braid with the blue scarf and then asked: “Where did you find your magic?”

“Angwynelle had it. Did you know I wove–”

“–an entire trilogy of books into time and space? Yes. Well, I guessed. Nifty work, that.”

“We were testing a theory with the spindle when the forest pulled us in.”

“Told you not to go into the forest,” said Luck mildly.

“Michael thought we’d end up at the clock tower.”

“Huh. I knew he was an idiot. The spindle doesn’t pull magic, magic pulls
it
. The stronger the pull, the likelier you’ll end up with it.”

“I know that
now
,” said Poly. “I keep going wrong. I’m missing some memories I need to have.”

“I’ll get the dog to bite you again. So long as there’s blood it should trigger your sensory programming.”

“Not those ones. That’s from the day before it happened.” Poly paused, struggling with the concept, and at last said: “I don’t think it’s memories, exactly. I think it’s knowledge. A big piece of knowing that I used to know, and don’t know any more. Magic theory and court politics were the two things that Lady Cimone taught, but I only remember the politics and some basics of magic theory.”

“Someone took them out of your head,” nodded Luck. “They must have been very much afraid of you, Poly. There are three kinds of preventatives in the three-verse curse itself, two more in the spellpaper, and you’re spelled to fall asleep again every time you think about the castle or your old life. They made certain you wouldn’t wake up, and that if you
did
, you’d never be a threat to them.”

“He always did like chess,” Poly said. “It’s all a game to him, but he’ll always make sure he’s at least six moves ahead of you.”

“You’re talking about Mordion again. I told you, it can’t be him.”

“It can’t be, but it is. He was there, in the memories I don’t remember.”

“Then it must be a
different
one,” said Luck stubbornly.

Onepiece, looking from Poly to Luck, said hopefully: “Bite?”

Luck said: “Yes,” his eyes brightening.

Poly said: “No, darling. Maybe later. Luck, we have to leave the village: someone trying to kill me nearly killed Margaret.”

“More importantly, someone knows you’re the princess and has been sending messages to the Capital,” said Luck, leading Poly to wonder who was the less important factor; herself, or Margaret.

She found herself faintly smiling. “Why does it matter what information gets back to the Capital? We’ll be there soon, anyway.”

“Yes, but there are over a hundred miles of bumpy road between us and the Capital, and highwaymen are a bore. They yell and wave pistols about, and sometimes a bullet is faster than magic and then your horse ends up dead. Besides, I prefer to know exactly how much the bunch of them know before I wander into the Council Hall. The communications magic I found wasn’t linked to the message tubes: someone was talking face to face through magic, and I can’t spy on that.”

“You’re not supposed to look at anyone else’s messages, anyway,” Poly said. She knew this because she had been the uncomfortable spectator in a scene between Josie and Margaret, who was furious to learn that her mother had been briefly riffling through her messages when they arrived daily through the tubes. The tubes, Poly had discovered quite quickly, were not really tubes but a stream of disseminated information. They disintegrated paper messages at the sender’s end and reconstituted them in somewhat flimsier paper form at the other end. She had been fascinated by the idea, used as she was to colourful pages and liveried messengers, and had been startled to discover that there were laws, actual
laws,
made solely for the governance of the tubes.

Luck looked startled at the reminder, and said hastily: “Yes, well, never mind that, Poly. We’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Without travelling spells,” agreed Poly. She’d had quite enough of travel spells for the time being.

“Oh, we don’t need spells,” said Luck blithely. “Didn’t I tell you? I have a coach.”

Chapter Fourteen

Poly dreamed the night pleasantly through, and woke up in a room as unfamiliar as it was familiar. Instead of Margaret’s bed there was a shelf of books, covers sharp and new; and instead of the window was something that shifted and glittered and tried to bulge forward.

Poly flopped back onto her pillow and groaned. Onepiece wasn’t on the bed with her, but that didn’t surprise her: the bed, after all, was only a metaphysical projection. Somehow or other, Poly had woken up in her own mind.

It hadn’t changed much since the last time she visited, thought Poly, sliding from the bed and wandering cautiously about the room. Still, there was enough of a difference for her to notice it.

That difference was mainly in the bookshelf, packed tight with a great many more books than she remembered; but the curse seemed to have altered a little, too. It was turbulent and somehow desperate, which should have worried her. Instead, it made her feel that in some inexplicable way, the curse wasn’t so very far from being broken.

The books wouldn’t open when she pulled them from the shelves, trying one bright, stubborn tome after the other.

Poly said: “Bother,” glumly. It was obvious what the books were. They were the metaphysical representation of her knowledge in magical theory. She looked for any trace of magic or unmagic on the books, cautiously optimistic that she could break the spell if only she could see it, and fancied that she could see a tracery of criss-crossed, clear thread sewing up the edges of the book she held.

Unmagic, then. Poly had peeled off her glove and attempted to shake out her antimagic hand before she remembered that it wasn’t her real arm, and that the antimagic wasn’t really there.

She felt her not-real face go pink just as it would have if it was real, and frowned, tapping the spine of one book with her forefinger. Luck’s presence was pushing hard at her from somewhere outside, which was making it difficult to concentrate, and Poly rather thought she’d prefer to remain asleep until she’d sorted a few things out.

Then Luck’s voice said, very clearly: “Poly, if you don’t wake up I’m going to have to kiss you again.”

“Go away,” Poly said back, though she wasn’t sure he could hear. She was pulling at something ephemeral and whispy that she thought was the antimagic in her arm, and it was actually obeying her.

“Well, I tried,” said Luck’s voice. This time it was closer: it sounded as though he was looking over her shoulder. “You’re not going to like this, Poly.”

This kiss was nothing like Luck’s first kiss. It was just as insistent as the first had been, but this time it was also soft and pliable, and the feeling of being surrounded by it resolved into the comprehension that Luck’s arms were wrapped around her.

It woke her at once, with a shock and a clarity that Poly didn’t remember feeling when she’d woken the first time, but when she sat up with life blazing through her limbs, Luck moved with her. He didn’t stop kissing her until Margaret, who was kneeling beside the bed and looking prim, cleared her throat with a ladylike “
ahem
!”

“Yow!” said Poly, when she’d got her breath back. “That
fizzed!
”

Luck, looking pleased with himself, disentangled himself from her hair and sat back at the foot of the bed.

Margaret gave a scandalized giggle. “Poly!”

“Well, it did,” Poly said defiantly. “My head is much clearer now.”

“I should think
so
!” Margaret said; but her voice had lost the scandalized note. “Oh Poly, I’m sorry about yesterday! Michael explained it all, and it was all a big misunderstanding, and we’re as happy as a pair of hand-fed skerry! Oh! And I got your frocks!”

Poly found herself bemusedly clutching a tight-packed bundle, much to the vociferous disapproval of Onepiece, who was also clutched in her arms, his skinny arms wrapped around her torso.

“Luck
squish!
” he said indignantly. “Now splat on head! Poor Onepiece!”

Poly put the package aside but laughed at Onepiece, which seemed to please him. He grinned his slack-jawed grin up at her and loosened his skinny arms from her torso long enough to wrap them around her neck instead.

“That’s not a dog, that’s a limpet,” said Luck. He was watching them narrowly. “Poly, you’ve done something else impossible, and I don’t know what it is.”

“If you don’t know, I’m sure
I
don’t. And Onepiece is not a dog, he’s a boy.”

“Boy!” agreed Onepiece, making a rude face at Luck. Luck made one back, surprising a giggle from both Poly and Margaret, and stood up.

“You’ve got a quarter hour, Poly,” he said.

“A quarter hour for what?” said Poly to the closing door.

“That’s how long it takes for him to assemble the coach and input the directions,” explained Margaret. “I packed the frocks to travel, so mind you hang them as soon as you unpack them. The spell will stop when you untie the string.”

Poly took a bewildered moment to realise that Leaving was not just Today, but Now, and mechanically disengaged Onepiece’s arms from around her neck. As she did, something that had been pressed between them dropped to the floor with a loud thump.

“You shouldn’t read in bed,” said Margaret, stooping to pick up a familiar book. “No wonder you can’t wake up in the morning.”

Poly took it from her dumbly: it was the shiny-new unopenable book she’d been holding before Luck woke her up. It was still unopeneable when she mechanically tried it, but Margaret’s curious look and Onepiece’s avid interest caused her to tuck it away beneath the parcel of clothes with a loop of Don’t See Me magic; and then, when she was dressed, into her pocket.

They left the village in style. True to his word, Luck had managed to produce some species of coach–fat, bulbous thing that it was–and although it was ridiculous, it also proved ridiculously comfortable. Besides, anything was better than another of Luck’s Journey spells gone awry.

Once it appeared outside Margaret’s window, the morning began to blend together in a blur of action. Poly wasn’t sorry for it. Michael had come to wave goodbye along with Margaret, and when his blue eyes failed to meet hers for the third time in a row it occurred to Poly that for Michael at least, it had been a close thing. She tried to feel glad for the obviously happy Margaret, but she couldn’t help wishing that she had a little more of the bounce and vivacity that had won Michael’s heart.

Luck was busy muttering magical instructions to the thin air between the coach shafts, so Poly hugged Margaret, who hugged her fiercely back, and then smiled a friendly smile at Michael, who gave her one of his old grins and at last met her eyes.

“Look after the wizard,” he said. She thought he might have hugged her but Luck breezed around the corner, his muttering finished, and swept her along with him instead.

“Up you go, Poly; we can’t wait around all day. The highwaymen will be getting restless.”

Poly allowed herself to be shooed along, hampered slightly by Onepiece: who, it turned out, did not care to ride in the carriage, and made realistic sick-noises to illustrate his displeasure when Poly ordered him to climb in anyway. She pushed him up the three perilously steep steps into the carriage anyway, but the calculating look she caught from beneath his lashes prompted her to wonder if Onepiece was at last beginning to test his boundaries. She wasn’t sure if the thought terrified or pleased her.

A huge basket of provisions was given pride of place on the backward-facing seat, as was Poly’s parcel of new clothes. Much to Poly’s surprise, Luck seated himself beside both basket and parcel, one leg stretched across the gap between seats, his booted foot braced against the seat cushion and his arms flung comfortably over the basket and the back of the seat respectively.

Poly felt the coach lurch into motion and saw a row of smiling, waving townspeople.

“Who’s directing the coach?”

“You go pink when you’re agitated, Poly.”

“I’m not agitated,” Poly said. “I’m terrified! Doesn’t even a magically propelled coach need a driver?”

“I am driving it,” said Luck, closing his eyes. “You’d know that if you knew what you were seeing.”

“I see a swirl of magic that doesn’t mean anything to me,” Poly said. Her fingers automatically tapped the book in her pocket. If Luck was going to sit there with his eyes closed, there was no reason for her not to play with it.

“Oh yes,” she added, seizing Onepiece’s waistband to prevent him from tumbling out the window. “And I want my spellpaper.”

“Want to
ride
,” said Onepiece crossly, clinging to the window despite Poly’s admonitory tug.

Luck opened his eyes and said: “All right,” with one of his sweet smiles, and after a brief search of his pockets, passed the gleaming paper to Poly, who had been expecting a fight and accepted it in astonished silence. She tucked it into her own pocket, half expecting it to disappear.

Luck was, in fact, in an entirely good mood. He stretched out on his side of the coach, closed his eyes again; and, Poly presumed, drove the coach. It was hard for her to tell. She could see all the connecting threads of the spell– the ones that looped around the shafts of the coach, the ones that looped around Luck’s wrists. She even thought she could see Luck doing something with the changing patterns. In spite of that, Poly couldn’t make head or tail of it. The spell was utterly alien.

Still, she watched the swirls and concentric cogs of it until magic danced in her mind when she blinked. She tore her eyes away from it eventually, beaten, and her tightly shut book seemed to mock her with hidden knowledge from its pocket.

Luck’s eyes were still closed, so Poly tightened her hold on Onepiece’s trousers as they bounced over a particularly rough patch of road, and slid the book from her pocket. The loop of Don’t See magic was still around it loosely, and she left it there, mistrustful of Luck’s closed eyes. Even with it in place she could still pick at the seams of unmagic that bound the book closed, and though she didn’t want to spare a hand to wrestle the glove off her antimagic hand, Poly felt the antimagic at the back of her mind where it had been earlier in the day, and drew on it. It came to her willingly, and Poly, following Luck’s lead, braced herself with one foot against the opposite seat and tilted the book against her knee. She didn’t really need to use her fingers but she did anyway, delicately hooking an invisible thread sickle of antimagic through the strands of unmagic that were holding the book closed. To her pleasure, the antimagic cut through the threads with ease. Poly pinched them away from the book as she cut them, dropping each one carefully onto the floor of the coach until she realised that they were wafting into her hair anyway, where they made brief spangles of colour before fading to black.

Onepiece wriggled back down into his seat partway through the operation, his interest piqued, and watched her intently with wide brown eyes as she worked. Poly, finding it easier to unpick with two hands, gave him a piece of the unmagic to play with and was very soon plucking the last few threads from the boards of her book.

Onepiece stopped playing with his loose end of unmagic for long enough to bounce eagerly on the seat. “Open, open!”

Poly sneaked another look at Luck, who was still leaning against the wall of the coach, eyes closed. Well, what could it hurt? She slid one finger under the cover-board, and was faintly surprised when it lifted from the pages without effort. She exchanged a delighted smile with Onepiece and flicked the cover open completely.

“Pah,” said Onepiece, his smile fading into a scowl. “Still tricksy.”

The book was empty. Blank pages whirred beneath Poly’s fingers as she flipped through it, each page as smooth and clear as the day the paper was made.

-This can’t be right!-
said Poly silently, stung by the unfairness of it all.
-Not when I’ve just got it open!-

-one missing-
said Onepiece, who seemed to be struggling to find the right words. He made silent shapes with his mouth before scowling and giving up.
-one half gone walking away. not far away now-

Poly said crossly:
-Of course it is! And where is it, I would like to know!-

“Not got it,” said Onepiece immediately. “Maybe
per
haps string is in the way?”

“Perhaps,” allowed Poly, charmed to hear a very nearly correct sentence from him.

To her dismay, Onepiece took her approval as encouragement, and darted one hand toward the book. Before she could stop him, the Don’t See loop was around Onepiece’s skinny wrist, and the book had gone back to being very noticeable indeed.

Across the coach, Luck’s eyes opened, gold and green in swirls.

“Poly, I’m going to invade your personal space,” he said.

Used as she was to Luck invading her personal space, Poly still wasn’t prepared for him to lunge across the coach and kiss her thoroughly.

When she got her breath back, she said: “You’re going to have to stop doing that, you know.”

“No, I won’t,” said Luck. “Why should I? Poly, you are a beautiful, impossible woman. I knew you were hiding something.”

“It’s
mine
.”