Utterly Charming (24 page)

“I doubt mortals fare much better,” Nora said as a warning.

“You are perceptive,” said Clotho, smiling at Nora. “Didn’t we tell you she’d be perceptive?”

She directed the question at Blackstone. He frowned. “You didn’t say anything about her at all.”

Lachesis sighed. “Aethelstan, you are the slowest—”

“Shush,” Atropos said. “He told us he wanted to discover on his own how the world worked, remember?”

“How can I forget?” Clotho said. “The arrogance of the newly magicked male.”

“That was a thousand years ago,” Blackstone said. “I’ve learned a bit since then.”

“Obviously not,” Lachesis said, nodding toward Nora.

“I came here about Emma,” Blackstone said. “Leave Nora out of this.”

“She’s very involved,” Atropos said.

“In fact, she’s been left out too long,” said Clotho.

“She’s been involved for the last ten years,” Blackstone said, “which is probably ten years too many.”

“Why do I feel like I fell asleep in that Chinese restaurant?” Jeffrey muttered.

“Tell the mortals to be quiet,” Lachesis said.

“No,” Blackstone said. “I need their testimony.”

“Testimony?” Atropos said. “This is an official proceeding?”

“We thought this was about them,” Clotho said.

“No,” Blackstone said. “I told you. It’s about Ealhswith.”

“Don’t get testy with us, boy,” Lachesis said.

“Stop playing word games,” Blackstone said. “Emma’s in danger. She needs your help.”

“If she needs our help,” Atropos said, “and she’s out of that little coma you so needlessly placed her in, she can come to us and ask for help.”

“No, she can’t,” Blackstone said. “She hasn’t come into her magic yet.”

“Hmm,” Clotho said. “We should look into that. She is one thousand thirty. She should have come into her magic nine hundred and eighty years ago.”

“One thousand and thirty?” Jeffrey whispered a bit too loudly to Amanda.

“That’s what she said,” Amanda whispered back.

“The mortals are blathering,” Lachesis said.

“Aethelstan, shut them up, or we will,” Atropos said.

“No,” he said. “You will listen to me. With Nora’s help”—and he came to her side, put his arm around her, and held her close as he spoke—“Emma was finally able to break out of my spell. But she was in a suspended animation. She hasn’t learned or grown for the past thousand years—”

“You, of course, spelled her,” Clotho said.

“No,” Blackstone said.

“I didn’t think you were still incompetent, Aethelstan,” Lachesis said.

A tremble ran through him. Nora squeezed his side for reassurance.

“I am not incompetent,” he said. “I—”

“Emma didn’t want his help,” Nora said. She bowed a little, as much as she could with Blackstone’s arm around her waist. “Forgive me for speaking to such an august body. I presume you’re the Fates that Black—Aethelstan’s always talking about. You need to know that Emma grew upset about her lost thousand years, and I interfered, giving her my protection.”

“Your protection?” Atropos said. “Forgive me, my dear, but that’s like a fly protecting a gazelle.”

“Nonetheless,” Nora said. Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. If she had thought Blackstone and Ealhswith powerful, she was risking everything talking to the women who ruled them. “Emma didn’t want Blackstone’s—I mean, Aethelstan’s—help, so I forbade him from assisting her.”

“Blackstone?” Jeffrey asked, turning toward him. “
The
Blackstone.”

“Actually, yes,” he said. “But not the one you think. It was a messy—”

“Enough!” the three women cried together. The four intruders stood at attention. Blackstone’s hand tightened around Nora’s waist, and he pulled her so close that she almost lost her balance.

Clotho let go of her spinning wheel and leaned toward Nora. “You say you forbid Aethelstan from assisting Emma, and he listened to you?”

“He wasn’t happy about it,” Nora said. “So I uninvited him. In my world, he has no rights to Emma.”

“In ours,” Lachesis said, “he has an obligation to help her.”

“He did,” Nora said. “He gave her immunity from diseases, and a spell that enabled her to speak English, and another one that protected her muscles so that they wouldn’t atrophy, and a few others that I’ve forgotten, but she drew the line at the memory spell, the one that would give her a cursory knowledge of the last thousand years.”

“That makes no sense,” Lachesis said. “If she took all his other help, why stop there?”

“Because she didn’t know the whole story when she took the initial help. In fact, I was the one reading the spells off a piece of paper. Blackstone—um, Aethelstan—hadn’t even shown up yet because he didn’t know where I had hidden her. Then we met with him, and Emma learned what had happened and, well, she got mad.”

“Of course she got mad.” Atropos waggled a finger at Blackstone. “We warned you about that.”

“Too late,” he said. “You wouldn’t tell me how to undo the spell I’d cast.”

“We did tell you,” Clotho said. “We told you to leave the girl untouched for ten years. Seems like you finally had a chance to do that.”

“By hiding her from Ealhswith,” he said. “But Ealhswith has her now.”

“So find her,” Lachesis said. “Leave us out of it.”

“I can’t,” he said. “This is very serious.”

“Yes, it is,” Atropos said. “You’ve let an unequipped girl with no knowledge of her world run around loose in a modern mortal city. That threatens all of us.”

“No,” Nora said. “I did.”

Blackstone frowned at her, as if to keep her quiet, but she ignored him.

“I was the one who was supposed to be helping her. My mother”—Nora nodded toward her mother, who surprisingly took a small bow—“baby-sat her and did a good job, I think, even this morning, despite what happened. And Mr. Chawsir—”

“Oh, no,” Clotho moaned. “Another one of those English writers.”

“We’ll have to call the meeting short,” Lachesis said.

“I hate to be portrayed as a crone,” Atropos said.

“I’m not that Chaucer!” Jeffrey said, then shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the insanity he had walked into.

“I can vouch for that,” Blackstone said. “The writer has been dead for centuries. This man is a mere professor.”

“No one is a mere professor,” Amanda said, rising to her full height. “Mr. Blackstone, or whoever you are, you owe a great debt to Jeffrey. He’s the one who taught Emma things that no one else could, and she was happy to learn them. It gave her a sense of confidence to learn on her own.”

“That’s not what we’re discussing,” Blackstone said. His back was rigid with stress.

“Yes,” Clotho said. “What are we discussing?”

“Emma!” Blackstone snapped. “We need to get her away from Ealhswith.”

“So say you,” Lachesis said, “and frankly, Aethelstan, you haven’t been very trustworthy on this subject.”

He let go of Nora and took a step forward. She moved with him. He glared at her, but she didn’t care. She was going to stay beside him. He needed a lot of help. These women were impossible.

“You’ve taken years from Ealhswith,” he said. One of the women opened her mouth, but Blackstone held up his hand. “And rightly so. But she isn’t willing to go gently into that good night.”

“What?” Atropos whispered.

“He’s quoting another English writer,” Clotho whispered back.

“Actually,” Jeffrey said, “he’s quoting a Welsh writer.”

“As if there’s a difference,” Atropos said.

“Don’t say that to the Welsh,” Jeffrey said.

The three women glared at him. Blackstone ignored the exchange. “Ealhswith doesn’t like getting older,” Blackstone said, “and she’s not willing to die when her time comes. Her plan is to make a switch. She’ll put Emma in her own body and take Emma’s body as her own. Emma will die in her place.”

“Ealhswith cannot do that,” Lachesis said to Blackstone. “We outlawed that spell five hundred years ago.”

“Her plan predates that,” Blackstone said.

“It doesn’t matter. She still can’t conduct the spell,” Atropos said.

“Of course she can,” Blackstone said. “The question is whether or not you’ll catch her.”

“You made this claim once before,” Clotho said. “It isn’t credible. Not with the squabble the two of you have been conducting over Emma.”

“I was going to let Emma go after the first hundred years,” Blackstone said. “Then I discovered what Ealhswith was going to do—”

“It seems to me you just assumed it,” Lachesis said. “You could offer no proof.”

“—and since you wouldn’t do anything, I had to. I had to keep Emma away from her.”

“You weren’t very successful at that,” Atropos said.

“It would have been easier if I had had your help,” Blackstone said.

“You really should let this go, Aethelstan,” Clotho said.

“I can’t!” he said. “Ealhswith has Emma, and now there’s nothing to prevent her from carrying through with her plan.”

“Except that Ealhswith isn’t dying,” Lachesis said. “She still has thousands of years ahead of her.”

“She’s going to put Emma back in suspended animation. She thinks Emma is the perfect switch candidate, so she’ll make sure that she will have Emma.”

“Do you have proof of this?” Atropos asked, pocketing her shears and crossing her arms. Her long flowing sleeves caught on her fingers, and she had to shake them loose.

“Emma came out of her coma,” Blackstone said. “I’ve left her alone for the last month. Ealhswith and I were not squabbling over her.”

“I can vouch for that,” Nora said. “Emma’s been with me, my mother, or Jeffrey the entire time.”

“But Ealhswith still kidnapped Emma,” Blackstone said. “Why?”

“Perhaps,” Clotho said, “Emma went willingly.”

“I doubt that,” Nora said. “Emma is afraid of Ealhswith.”

“This is all supposition,” Lachesis said. “We do not operate on supposition. We don’t even know if Ealhswith is the one who took her.”

“Yes, we do,” Amanda said. “I saw it all. If Ealhswith’s the one with a streak of white through her hair and a fearsome demeanor, and the worst taste in clothing—”

“Blathering!” Atropos said.

“That is not blathering,” Blackstone said. “That’s testimony.”

“Oh,” Clotho said. “If you had told us that the mortals were going to testify to pertinent events, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble.”

She waved a slender hand, and suddenly a scene appeared before them, thin and indistinct, like a movie projection made on a piece of glass. Nora recognized the scene. It was the same one that had played when Blackstone had swung his hand like that.

It was from Amanda’s point of view, in the park. Up the concrete stairs was the hot dog vendor. Steam rose around his cart, and he looked too hot by half. Emma was standing before him, wearing another of Nora’s favorite sundresses. She clutched a twenty in her right hand. The hot dog vendor was talking to her, but this projection came without sound. Emma nodded, and then Ealhswith appeared beside her. Emma took a step back, but the vendor didn’t notice. He was making a dog. Emma exchanged words with Ealhswith, and then, as the vendor looked up and started to hand Emma her dog, she and Ealhswith vanished.

Then Clotho ran her hand over Jeffrey, and suddenly the projection changed. They were inside a Chinese restaurant, decorated in pink, with ironwork done in Chinese characters on the wall. A woman was taking his order—

Clotho waved her hand, and the scene disappeared.

“That wasn’t relevant,” Lachesis said.

“I don’t see why we have to go with these scruffy mortals’ versions of events anyway,” Atropos said. “Why can’t we speak to the one with the hot dogs? He would have a better perspective. He would have been able to hear—”

“Do you want me to get him?” Blackstone said.

“Of course not,” said Clotho. “There are too many mortals here as it is.”

“We cannot tell from that memory if Emma went with Ealhswith by force,” Lachesis said.

“Of course she did,” Nora said. Why couldn’t they understand? Were these women being deliberately obtuse? Was this what Blackstone had faced from the beginning? “She hated Ealhswith.”

“So you say, child,” said Atropos. “But according to your earlier testimony, she wanted nothing to do with Aethelstan either. For all we know, she could have decided that she was better off with Ealhswith.”

“Ealhswith was her mentor, after all,” said Clotho. “Perhaps she is simply going to complete Emma’s magical training. The girl will need it.”

“I doubt that,” Nora said.

“Really?” Lachesis asked, the question a sincere one. How come they were giving Nora so much respect and were so rude to Amanda and Jeffrey?

“I have proof that Ealhswith doesn’t want Emma to be her own person. Written proof,” Nora said.

“Really?” all three woman asked at once.

“The papers,” Blackstone breathed. He made it sound as if she had just saved his life.

Nora nodded. “They’re on my desk.”

“I’ll get them.” He vanished.

Jeffrey turned to Nora. He looked owlish and not a bit frightened. “You could have told me.”

“What? That I’d been hired by a wizard?” Nora said. “That you were teaching history to a witch?”

“That everything Emma was telling me was true,” he said.

“Emma spoke of our business to a mortal?” Atropos asked.

“He seems to be a savvy mortal,” Clotho said.

Then Blackstone reappeared. He looked a bit windblown, and his left cheek was bright red as if it had been bruised. He held the papers in his right hand.

“I’m not sure I like the way people pop in and out,” Jeffrey muttered.

Blackstone handed the papers to Nora. She perused them once, made sure they were the correct documents, and then reached them out to the Fates. The papers disappeared from her hands, and three copies appeared in the hands of the Fates.

“Instant photocopying,” Amanda said. “How convenient.”

“Those are,” Nora said, taking a step toward the Fates and ignoring Amanda, “committal papers. They claim that Emma is incompetent to handle her own affairs and must be placed into the custody of Ealhswith, who can then make all of Emma’s decisions for her.”

“What is this ‘schizophrenic affective disorder’?” Atropos asked.