Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) Read online

  Poly didn’t offer Mordion her hand, but somehow he managed to kiss it anyway. He did the kissing with great skill, holding her eyes as he did so in a smouldering sort of way, thought the older Poly grimly, that was meant to make her heart flutter. She was pleased to note that her heart did no such thing. Younger Poly was staring him down, nostrils flaring; daring him, if the militant thoughts were anything to judge by, to just try and wink at her.

  One of Mordion’s brows went flying up, and his blue eyes narrowed with amusement. By way of retaliation, he said: “Charming! I really must compliment your coiffure!”

  “I’m starting a fashion,” Poly heard her voice say dryly. “What do you want, Mordion?”

  “Your company, amongst other things,” said Mordion easily, tucking her hand into his arm.

  Poly took it away again and slipped her hands into her pockets. “I’m busy.”

  “How fortunate that I’m not!” he remarked affably, with a glinting smile. “I’m free to attend the most beautiful lady in court about her business.”

  Poly saw the flash of her younger self’s thoughts suggesting the remark that in that case, he should go and find the most beautiful lady in court and leave her in peace; but a sideways glance at Mordion stopped the remark on young Poly’s tongue.

  Mordion, a predatory smile lingering on his lips, said: “Very sensible of you, darling. Although, I admit that I would have liked the opportunity to describe your attractions to you one by one.”

  Poly began to feel very afraid. Her younger self had not blushed, which pleased her, since it meant that she hadn’t fallen prey to Mordion’s skilled assault in spite of herself; but Mordion was showing no sign of being rebuffed despite her marked rudeness. It took her a little while to realise that she was feeling so frightened because younger Poly was frightened as well.

  A flash of memory showed Poly the man-shaped void in the amber, and she seemed to hear Luck’s voice saying again that Mordion had promised him books to rescue her.

  He did it, thought Poly, light-headed with shock. It was ridiculously clear: she should have known it the moment Luck mentioned Mordion’s name. The surprise made a buzzing in her ears that separated her from her younger self, and Poly tried to cling to the memory, but it was too late.

  She floated up, up, up; and her past self was left to the mercies of Mordion.

  Chapter Eight

  Poly woke with a gasp and a shiver, feeling as though she’d been doused with cold water. She was lying on the dusty floorboards, and Onepiece was howling. One of her amber beads, she noticed mechanically, had come free and was caught between floorboards, cracked and a little blackened. It was empty of magic. Poly’s gaze travelled away from it and focused on her finger through dusty glasses, aware that it was throbbing uncomfortably. There was a smeared patch of scarlet on the tip of it.

  “It was the dog that bit you,” said Luck. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Poly automatically reached for Onepiece, sitting up dizzily to gather him into her lap, and said: “It’s alright, darling. I’m back.”

  ¬-poly poly POLY!- wept the puppy, burrowing into the crook of her arm.

  “You would have kicked me for that,” Luck remarked gloomily. “The dog bites you, and you cuddle it.”

  Poly gave a sudden chuckle.

  “I’m glad you didn’t bite me,” she said. “Onepiece, you were very helpful. Thank you.”

  “Targeted sensory programming,” said Luck. He hauled her up by one arm, more enthusiastically than gently, his eyes bright.

  Onepiece chose that moment to turn human, and she was left to juggle his half-human, half-canine body with one arm while Luck propelled her forcefully at one of the plastered walls in the room.

  “Yow!” said Poly, as plaster loomed and then vanished. “Luck–!”

  “The wall is slightly out of synch with our timeline,” Luck explained, without stopping.

  There was a kind of grating gurgle from Onepiece, and Poly realised in some surprise that he was laughing.

  -sneezy- said his thoughts.

  “Use your outside voice,” Poly told him automatically, gazing around at the room she had been propelled into. It was a library, messy and disorganized, with haphazard piles of books stacked crazily against every wall but the one they had entered by. That wall was almost translucently see-through, and gave a brick-and-plaster patterned view of the other room.

  Onepiece said: “Zee!” forcefully in his deep little voice, clicking his teeth, and looked pleased with himself.

  Poly said: “Clever boy!” and found herself being vigorously licked. She couldn’t help the involuntary grimace or the quick shoulder swipe she gave to dry her cheek, and Onepiece muttered aloud incoherently for a moment before she heard his voice in her head.

  -kisses- he said reproachfully.

  “That’s a puppy kiss. Little boys kiss like this: mwah!”

  Onepiece gave the throaty chuckle that passed for his giggle, shoulders hunching automatically as his eyes crinkled.

  “Mwah!” he said, planting a sloppy kiss on her cheek in return. “Mwah! Mwah!”

  Poly successfully resisted the urge to wipe off her cheek this time, but swung him by the wrists to avoid another assault. He hung from her hands happily, gazing about the library with his mouth gaping and padding lightly at the floorboards with his bare feet. At least this time the trousers and shirt that Luck had originally magicked for him had appeared along with his human body. There was time to work on the shoes later.

  Poly hefted Onepiece until his feet were over hers, and walked him around the room while he rattled his chuckle to the surrounding books and wobbled unsteadily on weak legs. They passed Luck as he was crouched by one of the book-piles, and Onepiece, with gleeful abandon, tossed a mwah! in his direction.

  Luck recoiled, his face surprised and offended in equal proportions, and Poly giggled helplessly.

  “Why’s it doing that?” he demanded. “Poly, you’re encouraging the dog to mock me.”

  “Puh!” said Onepiece, taking a false step and dragging Poly one unsteady step sideways.

  “He was blowing you a kiss,” Poly said breathlessly, recovering her balance with difficulty. “I was showing him how to kiss.”

  “Puh!”

  “Yes, darling, very clever.”

  “Well, tell it not to,” Luck told her, eyeing Onepiece warily. “If it wants to learn how to kiss, we can give it a demonstration when we’re not busy.”

  “He knows how to puppy kiss,” explained Poly, gently swinging Onepiece’s feet back onto her own. “I was showing him how to kiss like a little boy.”

  “Hm,” said Luck. “Maybe not, then. Poly, stop playing with the dog: the gremlins have moved the books I want. I need you to find them.”

  “Eee!” insisted Onepiece. “Puh. Eee.”

  “Lee, darling,” said Poly. “Put your tongue behind your teeth. Po-lee. Luck, why am I finding the books that you lost?”

  “Puh. Lee!”

  “I didn’t lose them,” Luck said irritably, dashing one hand through his hair. “I told you: the gremlins moved them. Maybe they ate them. Poly, I need my books. There were passages in them about Targeted Sensory Programming and Sensory Recall that I need to have another look at. You’ve done something very beautiful and I don’t know how you’ve done it. Ah. That’s what I was going to ask you: where did you go?”

  “Back,” Poly said. “The morning before I was cursed, actually. It was a memory, but I don’t remember it.”

  “Huh,” said Luck, tilting his head back to gaze at her. His hand dropped from the bookshelf, and he took a narrow-eyed step forward. “Interesting.”

  Poly was ready to back away, but fortunately this time Luck was content to poke experimentally at the amber beads in her hair with one finger. In fact, the most offensive thing he did was to tug sharply at the hank of hair that was threaded through the amber, and then stare at her punctured finger.

  Once he said: “Bloo
d,” in a disapproving tone of voice; and then he said: “Huh,” and let her go again.

  “Puh-lee,” muttered Onepiece, smacking his lips and giggling gutturally at the sound. “Puhpuhpuh. Pollee. Yuck.”

  Luck shot the puppy a narrow golden look and said: “I don’t think your magic is trying to break the curse.”

  “The magic I don’t have?” asked Poly sweetly, twitching the lock of hair away from Luck’s fingers.

  “Yes, that magic,” said Luck, sublimely inattentive. “I think it’s trying to get you to break the curse. You’ve hidden memories and programmed yourself to remember them by visual or sensory stimulus using whatever magic you have to hand. I can’t tell what you’ve linked it to, though. That’s the tricky bit. You made us skip to the Frozen Battlefield overnight, and pushed my Shifter wrong to make us visit the hermit. I think you programmed yourself to get us to certain places.”

  “I didn’t program anything,” Poly told him mildly. “I don’t have magic, Luck.”

  “You’ve got memories you can’t remember,” Luck said. “You wouldn’t know.”

  Poly opened her mouth and closed it again. At length, she said: “Well, yes. But why would I try to get us to the Frozen Battlefield? How was that supposed help break the curse? And how on earth could the hermit help?”

  Luck was silent for so long that she knew he couldn’t think of a reason. At last, he said: “I need my books, Poly. One’s called Self-Programming: Establishing Markers, and the other is a little red book with a flowery title like Psychoanalogy and Neuro-Linguistic something or other. And look for that spellpaper.”

  Poly considered asking whether either of the ridiculously complicated titles involved magic of any kind, but reflected that Luck would most likely be throwing magic at her whether or not she found the books, and that it was undoubtedly easier to find them than have Luck complaining every few minutes that the gremlins had eaten them.

  Poly found a big book with brightly coloured pictures and set Onepiece down in a corner with it, ignoring Luck’s glare. The puppy accepted it shakily and pawed at it with his fingers, but watched her owlishly as she searched the shelves, mumbling under his breath. When she next looked over he was fully immersed in the pictures, and she was able to turn her attention to the task of finding Luck’s missing books. Since she didn’t place any faith in the existence of Luck’s ‘gremlins’, it seemed sensible to start in one corner of the room and search the piles of books from top to bottom. Halfway through the third pile of books Poly began to be aware that there was a faint halo to them, and a cautious rather than thorough examination leading her to believe that there was another, slightly odd layer to the books, she sat back with a sigh, and said in resignation: “Luck, are there two layers of books?”

  Luck said: “Hm?”

  He was leaning into the wall with one shoulder, absorbed in a tiny blue book and swatting absently at specks of dust that drifted frequently by his nose. Poly assumed, more for the sake of giving him the benefit of the doubt than because she really believed it, that he had been looking for the books also, and had been distracted by an old favourite.

  “The books. Are there two layers?”

  “Two layers. Out of synch,” he murmured.

  “Well, it’s untidy,” Poly said. She unlaced the glove from her antimagic hand and tugged it away briskly, tucking it into her apron pocket. No doubt it would be covered in Onepiece’s camel-brown hairs before long: her apron was already littered with them. The silver spiral around her arm glittered and sparked with silver all the way to the centre of her palm, free and eager to be used; and Poly reached through the halo, through the gap in synchronicity, and grasped something that wriggled. The books pulsed, wavered, and doubled in amount, tumbling in a cascade to the dusty floorboards.

  Onepiece gave his rough chuckle and made an explosive sound with his lips, flinging his thin hands into the air. The action overbalanced him and sent him sliding into a pile of books, much to his amused surprise, and Poly had to stop herself from involuntarily stepping over to pick him up. It was useless expecting him to learn to be a boy again if she was constantly holding him up. He made an inarticulate noise, then a raspberry as he tried to blow away the dust that clung to his face, and said silently to her: -shelves all tucked up. daft wizard. empty dusty-

  Poly opened her sight a little wider, gazing at the walls until she could see what the puppy meant. The faint shadow of what could have been three or four bookcases was etched into the ivory render of the walls, vague scrolling that could have been swirls of render, but wasn’t quite.

  “Clever boy!” she told Onepiece approvingly, and the puppy grinned a wide, slack grin at her. She ran the palm of her antimagic hand over the rendered wall, and the rough, sandpapery feel of render gradually gave way to the smoothness of painted wood. There! There was one of the shelves, solid and firm beneath her fingers. Poly gave a tiny chuckle of satisfaction, and curled her fingers around the shelf, tugging briskly. The bookcase moved, groaning and unwilling, and segued from the wall into solid self-existence, scrolled and white-painted with a top shelf that was just out of Poly’s reach. She heard Luck muttering crossly about walls that wouldn’t stay still, but since his only other reaction to the disturbance was to wriggle his shoulders against a tottering tower of books that had nudged subtly into him, she merely pulled out the other three bookcases one by one, ruthlessly tumbling books out of the way.

  “Yik!” said a shrill voice as the last bookcase ground out of the wall. Something soft and small pelted into Poly’s hair, and she looked up to see myriad tiny, sharp teeth grimacing at her out of a dirty ivory face. The creature was only five inches tall and naked. It was vaguely humanoid but sexless, with a bush of what might have been hair but was more likely to be dust bunnies glued haphazardly to its head. It had a second woodchip grasped in its tiny paw, and the vaguely threatening chittering it made with its toothy mouth seemed to suggest that it was on the point of hurling that at her, too.

  Poly narrowed her eyes at it, and slowly raised her index finger.

  “No,” she said sternly. “No throwing.”

  The creature gibbered, dancing on its flat, toeless feet, and made small, darting motions at her forefinger. It looked very much as if it was trying to nerve itself up to throw the woodchip.

  “No,” Poly said again, more slowly.

  “Yikyikyik!”

  “Bookshelf is for books,” Poly said calmly, looking into the jewel-green orbs that were watching her beadily. “Not for Yiketyyiks.”

  “Yiketyyik,” it said sadly, dropping the woodchip. Poly wasn’t sure if it was conceding defeat, or making a bid for sympathy.

  Following her instinct that anyone in Luck’s house was bound to be undernourished, she suggested: “Food?”

  “Yik!”

  “All right,” conceded Poly. Onepiece said -food!- distantly in her head, and she saw a scrabble of book-cover and pages as he shrank back to his puppy form. “Wait here.”

  -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 fin
d, 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.”