Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) Read online

  “Why not?” she demanded, determined at least to get an answer out of him.

  “Journey spells make me ill,” Luck said, with dignity. “It’s time for breakfast. Eat your eggs before they go cold.”

  And there were eggs. They were sitting lopsidedly on a sloped boulder, dribbling golden yolk down a flimsy plate and surrounded by a decent amount of bacon and two slices of toast. Poly was too hungry to be surprised. She was even too hungry to ask where Luck had produced the eggs from, or why she hadn’t seen the change in his magic. She had a small, terrified feeling that it was such a small effort for him that it hadn’t even registered. Poly, who had a basic knowledge of the theory of producing somethings out of nothing–not to mention cooked somethings–began to feel that she might have been safer with the princess than she was with this wizard.

  She wasn’t even sure he was a wizard, if it came to that. His magic was just a little bit too golden and strong and abundant to make him a mere wizard. Poly thought she might be glad of the princess’ mantle if it came to travelling with an enchanter, since a princess must command respect, after all.

  She was still hoping rather doubtfully that this would be the case when she finished scraping the last golden drops of egg from her plate with a strip of buttered toast.

  Luck said: “You eat more than a Capital Footsoldier,” and it came to her attention that he was watching her in fascination.

  “I haven’t eaten in three hundred years,” said Poly, trying for dignity despite the flush of heat that had crawled into her cheeks. “I was hungry.”

  “Yes, you have,” Luck said. “The enchantment had a sustenance clause built into it. I don’t suppose you know exactly what sort of enchantment it was that they laid on you, by the bye?”

  “I thought you knew,” Poly said, in a rather accusatory tone. He was the wizard, after all. Or enchanter, if one subscribed to the view that the worst possible outcome was the one most likely to occur.

  “I don’t know everything,” said Luck, levelling a vaguer than usual gaze at her. “Your enchantment is three hundred years old. It’s based on an ancient sort of ritual that dates back even further, and it’s all convoluted with a curse as well. There’s only a few scraps of information on it apart from the spellpaper that bound the enchantment in place. I searched the whole Capital Library looking for clues.”

  Certain that she was about to be told again that it was her fault, Poly asked hastily: “Where did you get the spellpaper?”

  “The Head of the Wizard Council gave it to me,” Luck said, removing the golden gaze, much to her relief. She wondered if he’d been trying another sneaky spell on her, and thought that yes, he probably had. “The elections are only half a year away and everyone’s digging for filthy rumours and backstory about the opposing party. Then you turned up like a gritty little pearl just waiting to throw everyone out of balance, and suddenly the Council’s housecleaning doesn’t seem quite so perfect.”

  I’m housekeeping, Poly thought, her eyes narrow and somehow hot. Well!

  “Why did he give it to you? Why not just find me himself?”

  Luck shrugged. “Probably didn’t want to be assassinated. Or kicked, if it comes to that.”

  “Very well, then,” Poly said briskly, still annoyed and ridiculously hurt. “Thank you for rescuing me, and I’ll be quite all right by myself now. You can go on without me.”

  “No, I can’t. I have to bring you back to the Capital with me. It’s in my contract.”

  “C-contract? Oh!”

  That was even worse. As if it wasn’t enough that someone had decided to use her as a common-or-garden ingredient in an enchantment, now she was being bartered and arranged for as if she were simply a commodity.

  “Don’t be silly, Poly,” said Luck. “If I don’t take you back with me, Mordion won’t give me the books.”

  A shock of cold surprise fizzed through Poly from her head to her toes, freezing out the anger. “Who is giving you books?”

  “Mordion. You don’t know him.”

  There was an unpleasant feeling in her stomach. Poly said: “Do you know, I think I might.”

  “Rubbish. You can’t.”

  Poly bit down on a sharp retort since Luck was quite right: it was very unlikely that the Mordion she had known could still be alive after three hundred years. However, the memory of what that Mordion had been capable of inspired in her a fear powerful enough to say: “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Luck blinked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time, and said with interest: “Huh. We’ll see.”

  There was a momentary build-up of ridiculously powerful magic that Poly’s hair extended, quivering, to meet. Displaced air huffed coolly in her face, and then everything...stopped.

  “Right,” said Luck; and Poly, whose only sense had been one of stillness and relief that nothing seemed to have happened, found to her stupefaction that she could no longer move.

  “Let me go!”

  “No,” Luck said, busily drawing loose threads of magic back into himself. “For one thing, you’re too dangerous: also, you’d probably kick me. Here we go–”

  This time the Shift was nothing like instantaneous. Every moment was marked and precise, drawing out in the suddenly thick air until Poly was convinced that she was not breathing the air so much as drinking it. Her spindle dropped from her fingers with a preciseness that felt almost deliberate, and in the same moment one of the books she had rescued fell into her open palm, binding down. The pages flicked through the thick air until at last they rested on an ink illustration. It swam in Poly’s gaze, black and definite against the vellum, but her dazed eyes didn’t have time to register which picture it was, because at that exact moment there was a sharp snap and a tug. Poly tumbled into grass, free and breathless, and found with some relief that the air had regained its customary consistency.

  Luck’s voice, somewhere above her head, said: “Huh. That was interesting.”

  Her head was resting on something soft. Poly allowed herself to enjoy the comfort until it occurred to her that her headrest was rising and falling in a rhythmic manner that suggested...breathing.

  Oh. Poly sat up hastily. It was Luck’s stomach that her head had been cushioned on.

  “A lesson in history, princess,” said Luck, without seeming to notice either that she’d been reclining on him, or that she’d moved. He was dreamily watching the clouds, and Poly thought that she could have continued using his stomach as a cushion without him noticing.

  “Roughly three hundred years ago–”

  Poly sighed. “I was alive then. I know–”

  “You’d just gone to sleep. Don’t interrupt. Roughly three hundred years ago, just after you’d gone to sleep, someone cast a huge enchantment with sharp edges and a wobbly middle that should have stopped it from working altogether.”

  Silence fell briefly, and when Poly looked down at Luck, he’d gone back to gazing at the clouds. Just as she thought he’d forgotten her, he said: “If the magic they used hadn’t been so powerful, the enchantment would have collapsed. As it was, it ran away with Civet, and before Parras knew what was happening there was a feral army marching for the border and killing everything it came into contact with.”

  “You said there was an enchanted battlefield–”

  “Two days,” said Luck, as if she hadn’t spoken. “That’s how long it took Parras to capitulate and accept terms. There were still enough Civetan knights who hadn’t gone rabid to make sure the terms were kept up, but when they went to stop the army, they couldn’t. Idiots. I could have told them that.”

  Poly felt sick. “We invaded Parras?”

  “Fortunately for the rest of Parras, something or someone finally interfered with the enchantment and the whole battlefield went up in enchanted amber. The Parrassians that weren’t dead were safe but the enchanted Civetans were all trapped.”

  “So when you talk about Civet and our capital city–”

  “New Civet a
nd the Capital,” nodded Luck. He sat up, grass clinging to his hair. “They moved it further into what was Parras and had a Council run the country instead of royals. As far as we knew all the royals were dead, anyway. The enchanted battlefield stayed where it was. Officially, it’s a civic reminder, but I think they just couldn’t clean it up.”

  Poly nodded numbly, meeting Luck’s eyes briefly and finding only vague disinterest there.

  “Impressive work,” he said. Poly thought she must have imagined the swift green glance that momentarily pierced his blank disinterest. “The kind of thing that makes you think there were a couple of enchanters mixed up in it all.”

  Poly said: “Oh,” rather listlessly. She wished Luck would get to the point.

  “I mention it,” continued Luck dreamily; “So that next time you throw off one of my small Shifters, you know which direction to go.”

  “Throw off– I didn’t throw off your Shift spell!”

  “The Capital is in Old Parras, for your information. Also, they don’t like people Shifting in and out because it makes security difficult, so there are magical filters that tend to shred people who try to get in. I don’t particularly like the idea of being shredded.”

  Poly reached unconsciously for her books and found them all stacked neatly together. She must have imagined that stretched out period of time before the Shifter brought them here.

  “I didn’t–”

  “Next time,” added Luck, seizing her chin between two fingers; “Try to get us closer to the Capital, not further away. And I want to know how you pushed my Shifter off course– there’s nothing of it in your eyes.”

  Poly pushed her glasses up on her nose, using the movement to jerk her chin away from his fingers. Unfortunately, scowling at Luck didn’t remind him about the small issue of personal space: he merely shuffled invasively closer again to peer into her eyes.

  “I didn’t do anything to your spell,” she said, edging back. “Whatever went wrong, it’s your own fault. I wasn’t even moving.”

  “Funny, that. Can’t find any traces of it on you.”

  “I told you,” said Poly. “I didn’t do anything.”

  Luck gazed at her with his head tilted back. “I know you did it, I just can’t see how.”

  Oh, bother you then, Poly thought. She waited until Luck sat back on the grassy hill again, and asked: “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know,” said Luck annoyingly. “I didn’t do it.”

  “I didn’t either,” muttered Poly, because Luck had stopped listening.

  He was flicking at a butterflower with one pensive finger, eyes vague and just a little bit golden.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  Poly asked: “What’s interesting?” without much hope of Luck answering. He seemed to have forgotten about her again, and was engaged in ruthlessly pulling up handful after handful of green, sweet-smelling grass. It was only after he thoughtfully began putting grass blades in his mouth that Poly realised the grass wasn’t in fact sweet-smelling. It didn’t smell like anything, if it came to that.

  She blinked and took a closer look at the clumps of grass Luck had uprooted. They were so bright and vibrant that they must smell sweet and grassy. Had the grass tricked her into thinking it had a smell, or had her own mind been playing tricks on her?

  She asked Luck, who didn’t seem to hear and only said: “Yes, but I want to know why.”

  “Let me know when you find out,” she said, a little sourly, and left him to his grass-tasting. She wended her way from the ridge she and Luck had arrived on, to the very top of the hill, intent on reaching its summery apex. The triad was almost offensively cheerful here, caressing the bonny faces of the butterflowers as she passed them and glancing vibrantly off every grass-stalk. The breeze was delightfully pleasant, and Poly wondered if her mind had created these impressions, too. She thought they became a little less strong as she wondered about them.

  From the top of the hill Poly saw nearly a dozen hilltops decked in summery green, each more sunny and cheerful than the last.

  “Oh, really!” she said to the general splendour. “Don’t you think you’re trying just a little bit too hard?”

  Some of the distant hilltops were wooded and tree-lined, others bare and grassy, but all alike had a splendour of obnoxiously healthy countryside that Poly found a little smug. She narrowed her eyes at them, fancying that the surrounding hills were just a little...unreal, perhaps?

  “I wonder,” she said aloud. And then: “Oh! It’s not that they don’t smell. It’s why don’t they smell!”

  Poly looked at the hilltops surrounding her with narrowed eyes. There was some sort of insect buzzing away in the distance, surprising her with the knowledge that it was the first she had seen since she and Luck arrived at this place. Adding to the air of unreality was the fact that the bare, grassy mounds furthest away were a little fuzzy. Were they quite real? She wasn’t sure anymore.

  Busy with her thoughts, it was a few minutes before Poly realised that the distant insect buzzing from one hilltop to the other, was in fact a person. The figure was travelling in short bursts of blue-green magic, disappearing on one hilltop and appearing on the next almost instantaneously. Moreover, it seemed to be quickly coming closer, as if intent on discovering what kind of insect she was.

  As it came sporadically closer Poly was able to discern the bright starbursts that exploded in its magic: whoever it was, he or she was quite mad.

  Soon she could see that the thing was a man, dressed in a hermit’s cassock that was ragged and indecently short of his knobbly knees. A wild bush of a beard stuck out of his thin face, threaded with flowers here and there. He was chasing a brilliantly blue butterfly, making little darting snatches at it and cackling gleefully when he missed, Shifting when he had to.

  Poly was watching him with a mixture of bemusement and suppressed laughter, wondering if she ought to call Luck, when with frightening suddenness, the hermit was there, his face so close that his resounding “Hah!” fogged Poly’s glasses.

  To her mortification, Poly shrieked and leapt backwards, her hair expanding like a cloud in immediate response to the threat. Then Luck was somehow in front of her, his strong, bright magic pulsing around him.

  “Bravo!” yelled the hermit.

  Poly bit back a giggle despite the hammering of her heart. He was projecting droplets of spit freely; and, by the look on Luck’s face, quite forcefully.

  The hermit didn’t seem to realise, or perhaps he didn’t care. He continued to gurgle and clap his hands in glee, yelling: “Bravo! Bravo! No, Eureka! Hah! Eureka!”

  Luck pointedly wiped his face with a conjured handkerchief, but the hermit paid no attention to the fact. Poly, taking courage from the fact that he seemed to be rather more mad than dangerous, was able to quiet her hair, and at last stepped out from behind Luck.

  At the sight of her the man giggled again, and said: “I knew I was right. I told you I was right. Every three years it snows, and then it happens!”

  Luck, looking put upon, said in a long-suffering voice: “Poly, I don’t suppose that one of those books you picked up in the castle was called Angwynelle, by any chance?”

  “It snows!” burbled the hermit, oblivious to the cloudless blue sky and the full radiating heat of the suns. “Every three years, and then you know what happens. The snowflakes come!”

  Remembering that it had been Angwynelle that had fallen open in her hand, and that the hermit was disturbingly familiar, Poly said guiltily: “Yes, but it can’t be that–”

  “Well it is,” Luck said, wiping another wet speck from his nose. “I told you that you’d ruined my shift spell.”

  He seemed mildly pleased by the fact.

  “But the hermit is a character in a book, not a real person!” protested Poly. She had read Angwynelle enough times to recognise a character as memorable as the hermit.

  “You don’t think he’s real, do you?” asked Luck. “He’s a figment.”

 
But the hermit’s bony fingers, which were tugging at Poly’s hair and rapping her smartly on the skull, felt real. He looked up at her with bright, wild eyes, and said: “I’m just as real as you are, my darling snowflakes. Or just as unreal. In point of fact, I’m even more real than you are.”

  “You’re just a character in a book,” Poly told him, a little rudely. She had already felt the oddness to the place, the way things seemed to be just a little too beautiful and faded around the edges. It occurred to her rather horribly that if she and Luck travelled as far as they could possibly travel they would find nothing but empty green hills until they finally came upon the hermit again.

  The hermit was gurgling, unoffended. “Bravo, little snowflake! Encore! But I’m still more real than you are, you know. You’re not even as real as a snowflake.”

  “Yes, I am,” argued Poly. The hermit’s way of speaking made her head spin.

  “Wrong!” shouted the hermit, showering Poly with a fine mist of moisture. “Wrong and false! Ipso facto and tripe! I’m far more real than you are. You’re here in my little patch of words, and I’m all that exists here, so you don’t exist. I might not exist in your world, but you’re in mine now. Hah! A snowflake is a snowflake whether it’s made of ice or letters, so a snowflake is more real than you are, too. So there.”

  “He makes a disturbing amount of sense,” said Luck, eyeing the hermit in some fascination. He asked: “Is there a way out?”

  “Yes, my snowflakes,” burbled the man, shivering out of existence and appearing again beside what appeared to be a rather shakily fenced goat corral. “Come along, come along, come along! You mustn’t melt, you know; I would never get the water out of my nice new carpet.”

  He had fizzed in and out of existence several more times before they caught up with him, and then skipped from one foot to the other in impatience when they stopped. “Hurry up, snowflakes! Through the gate before you melt!”

  “That’s a goat pen,” said Poly.

  “Hah!” said the hermit. “That’s all you know! It’s not a pen. Pen! Hahahaha! Not even a quill. Not it, oh no! It’s a door.”