Blackfoot Read online

  Blackfoot, very calmly, said: Then we would all have been dead.

  “But– but–”

  What were your other choices? It was die there or die here, and there was slightly less chance of dying here than there was of dying there.

  “Well?” said Peter impatiently. “What has the cat got to say for itself? And don’t say that I don’t believe it talks so what’s it to me, just answer me.”

  Annabel made a face at him. “All right, clever clogs! He says it was a guess, and that’s all there was to it. We’re just lucky he was right.”

  “What guess? What made him guess that? Why? Wait! Ann, stop your cat from walking away while I’m talking to it!”

  Annabel watched dispassionately as Blackfoot sprang up onto the partial wall-section behind the dais, climbing light-foot through the precarious bricks, and said: “You should be more polite if you want him to listen to you.”

  “It’s. A. Cat.”

  “That’s no reason to be rude,” said Annabel, just slightly more smug than she had been before. “Even if he is just a cat, he’s still a cat you want something from. You should use your manners.”

  Peter hurled his shoe at Blackfoot instead. He was usually a very fair shot, so Annabel could only assume that he had meant it to fall short of Blackfoot and drop back onto the dais for him to put on with a sour expression.

  “I’ll find out about the sealing myself, then,” he said, and vanished back into the brambles.

  Blackfoot, by contrast, leapt back down to drop a blackberry beside Annabel, and said: You wanted something to eat, Nan?

  “I meant porridge or scones or bacon,” said Annabel grumpily, but she ate the berry anyway. That reminded her stomach that she hadn’t eaten since last night, and she spent the next half hour picking and eating berries right off the canes before she was sated enough to gather some for Peter as well.

  Peter didn’t come back for his berries until the late afternoon heat from the triad had begun to make the stuffy throne room even stuffier. While he was gone, Annabel, her face too hot and distinctly sticky, drew with her tiny pencil nub in the small book of paper that he had given her yesterday, shading carefully so as not to ruin the drawing. There were only so many palm-sized pieces of paper to a book, and she didn’t want to waste any of them.

  She drew the throne room free of brambles, the way she would have liked it to be, and sketched in a door that had long since been bricked up by rubble at the far end of the room. By the time she was working on the walls of the throne room, Peter tumbled back through the brambles, panting.

  “I haven’t ever seen anything like it!” he said, eyes glowing. “Ann, you should see it!”

  “Well, I can’t,” said Annabel. “There’s no need to rub my face in it, either.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Too hot, are you? Look: I brought you some water.”

  Annabel brightened. “Really? Where did you get it?”

  “There’s a magic-crank pump and a few flasks in the bit that used to be the laundry or something.”

  “Wasn’t that broken?” asked Annabel, remembering a similarly stuffy day when she had been unable to slake her thirst until they left the ruins for the creek.

  “It was,” said Peter offhandedly, tossing her a flask. “I fixed it. I thought it’d come in handy if we’re here for a while.”

  “Yes, but will we be here for a while? Won’t Mordion get sick of trying to get to us? Blackfoot?”

  “It doesn’t matter if he gets sick of us or not,” said Peter, while Blackfoot batted a stray leaf across the dais without giving any sign that he’d heard her question. “That seal around the castle: it’s not going anywhere. And we can’t get out, either. I tried.”

  “You tried–”

  “Oh, well, someone had to try,” said Peter. “I didn’t see you or the cat wanting to try, what with Mordion being out there and everything. It’s really strong magic, Ann: I haven’t seen anything that strong before. Even my magic–”

  Blackfoot laughed in Annabel’s mind. Good heavens. He’s comparing his magic with the magic Rorkin worked on the castle.

  “Even my magic–” Peter said again, uncertainly; and then, “Ann, is the cat laughing at me?”

  Annabel blinked into her best expressionless face. “No.”

  “It always looks so satirical,” said Peter, unconvinced. “Anyway, what I really meant to say is that we can’t get out of here today or tomorrow or maybe ever, so we’re going to need to fix a few things around the place.”

  Annabel, who was about to remark that the last time she’d needed water and had asked him to operate the pump, he had only looked at it and said: “It’s broken”, decided that on the whole, she’d rather drink the water than begin quarrelling again. Accordingly, she drank the water.

  “What about Mordion?” she asked, between sips. “Has he gone away yet?”

  “I didn’t see him,” said Peter.

  Blackfoot said: No. He’s still there. I can feel him pressing up against the sealing, trying to find a way in.

  “Blackfoot says he’s still there,” Annabel said, passing Peter the stained handkerchief full of berries that she’d picked for him.

  “I know that,” Peter said loftily. “I said I didn’t see him. Anyone could sense him doing magic against the seal.”

  Anyone with stronger-than-usual magic, said Blackfoot. His voice still sounded sarcastic. Nan, I’ll never understand why you associate with this horrible little boy. You’ve got enough bad habits of your own without learning his as well.

  “Hey,” said Annabel, only mildly resentful. She did have a lot of bad habits, after all. “You’re not exactly perfect yourself.”

  Peter said: “What?” in surprise, and then: “I wish you wouldn’t talk to the cat at the same time as talking to me, Ann. It makes you look really mad, you know.”

  Annabel shrugged. She was used to people thinking she was mad, or not quite all there, or stupid. Most of the people she had met at Grenna’s cottage looked at her round, expressionless face and rolls of fat, and assumed she was stupid. It had been a very useful screen for Annabel.

  “What are we going to do, then?” she asked. “Are we going to stay here forever?”

  No, said Blackfoot. Don’t worry, Nan: things will work out. Right now, the castle is the safest place we can be.

  “I’ll do some real tests tomorrow,” said Peter. “That Mordion, though– his magic is barely anything. I don’t see him getting through that seal in a hurry.”

  That’s the problem with Mordion, said Blackfoot, and Annabel thought his voice was a little bit bitter. He never seems exactly strong, but somehow he always manages to wriggle back to the top every time someone throws him to the bottom of the pile. He’s already taken Grenna’s magic and used it up. He’ll come back when he’s replenished himself again.

  “He’s going to kill someone else? Peter, Blackfoot says Mordion will just go and get magic from someone else.”

  “Oh,” said Peter. “In that case, I don’t much like the idea of being stuck in here while he goes off to get more magic. We should be trying to get away while we can.”

  I’m sure that would be a very useful attitude if we could get away, said Blackfoot. But since we can’t, perhaps Peter could turn his mind back to fixing things again.

  “The cat’s giving me that look again,” said Peter.

  “He says we can’t get out,” Annabel reported, weary of translating. “So it’s no use trying.”

  “That’s stupid,” Peter said. “It’s like saying that it’s impossible to fly without magic, so we should stop trying to invent machines that fly. It is possible, it’ll just take some work.”

  Blackfoot flicked his tail and sat down neatly next to Annabel. Or like saying that time travel is impossible without ever trying to make it happen?

  Annabel snickered, and made another face at Peter when he said an annoyed: “What?” That, of course, annoyed Peter enough to send him out to study the seal aga
in, leaving Annabel free to sketch, and Blackfoot free to make the occasional sarcastic remark at either Annabel or Peter’s expense.

  Annabel ignored them as she almost always did. Sometimes she thought Blackfoot made sarcastic remarks at her for the pleasure of having them ignored, soaking into her thick skin without making a mark. She gave up on her drawing of the throne room for the time being: she had been trying to draw it without the blackberry and raspberry brambles, the way it must have been so long ago, but she couldn’t see enough in the shadows to draw it right, and she didn’t like to draw things if she couldn’t draw them correctly. Instead, she worked on a portrait. It wasn’t a quick sketch of Peter as most of her portraits were; this one was a sketch of a man Annabel was quite sure she hadn’t met, but whose face she was equally sure she knew. In its way, it was just as hard as trying to draw the throne room in all the shadows. She drew in a sharply angled eyebrow and then erased it, only to draw it back in with very little adjustment; shaded beside the vague suggestion of a nose only to realise that it should certainly be thinner and more aristocratic.

  In the end, she left the portrait unfinished as well. Nothing was sitting quite right with it, and she couldn’t for the life of her decide how the mouth should be drawn in. That was annoying, because Annabel was sure she knew how it looked: it was just that she didn’t seem to be able to draw it.

  Giving up? Blackfoot said, his head popping up to nose into the paper block. How unusual of you.

  Annabel rubbed his stomach with her free hand for the pleasure of seeing him fail to resist purring. He could be as prickly and sarcastic as he liked, but when she scratched his stomach, everything gave way to purring. His irritated and slightly offended pleasure always amused Annabel.

  Don’t think you can get around me by scratching my stomach, warned Blackfoot, but he flopped down with his head on her knee anyway. Your habit of giving up on things when they get too difficult is likely to come back and bite you, you know.

  “So are you, but I still keep you around,” said Annabel, and went on to a more amusing drawing where the castle grew in spires and random stair-ways to the clear sky.

  Annabel was stiff and sore when she woke the next day. To her relief, the throne room wasn’t as stuffy as it had been when she went to sleep: a fresh, cool breeze was rolling across the marble floor to tease her hair. It wasn’t until she sat up, careful not to disturb the still-sleeping Blackfoot, that she saw the reason for the freshness: the door at the other end of the room was now mostly free of rubble, and quite a few of the berry-canes were also gone.

  “Good for Peter,” yawned Annabel, climbing rather grimily to her feet. Peter must have worked hard to clear all that away. He wasn’t anywhere in sight, which probably meant that he had gone back to his study of the seal– or, thought Annabel hopefully, to look for somewhere they could bathe. Her flannels were very much worse for the wearing, now, stained from climbing about the ruins and stiff and smelly from running until she sweated yesterday. She could also see a frizz of brown hair in her peripheral, which meant that her hair was in much the same state. When she tried to run her fingers through it there were so many bramble strands that she gave up and simply pushed the frizz back from her face.

  She wandered over to the cleared doorway, wondering if Peter had gone through it instead of back to the edges of the sealed up ruins, but when she called out his name into the darkness of the newly uncovered corridor, there was a scrabbling from behind her.

  “What?” said Peter’s voice, grumpily.

  Annabel turned her head and blinked stupidly at him. She hadn’t seen him asleep by the side of the raised dais: his brown trousers and green shirt had blended right in with the leaf-litter there.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought– wait, didn’t–”

  Peter sat up, yawning, and saw her by the cleared doorway. He whistled. “Ann! You cleared that?”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Annabel, staring. “I thought you did it!”

  “Really?” Peter scrambled eagerly to his feet and hurried over to her. “I wonder if the ruins shifted in the night?”

  Annabel, chewing anxiously on the collar of her flannels, said: “We would have heard it. Wouldn’t we?”

  “I suppose so.” Peter stuck his head through the door frame, turned it left and right, and pulled it back in again. “It’s a bit dark, isn’t it? I would have thought there’d be more light.”

  “There wouldn’t, you know,” said Annabel, mentally piecing together a map of the bits of the ruins that they knew. “It goes into the bit that’s all lumpy and fallen? It’s probably buried under too much rubble to get the sunlight.”

  “Should we– we should have a look, shouldn’t we?”

  “Yee-eees,” agreed Annabel doubtfully. “But shouldn’t we bathe first?”

  “Good idea,” said Peter, and it occurred to Annabel that he was just as nervous of going down that dark hall as she was. “There’s the pump I fixed last night. It’ll be a bit cold if the triad’s not up, but at least we’ll be clean.”

  By the time they grubbed their way out of the brambles again, Annabel was so hot and scratched that it could have been a fine winter’s morning and she would still have put her head under the pump for washing. It was very far from being a fine winter’s morning, however: the first sun of the triad was certainly up and hot, but there was a humidity to the air that suggested a storm. Annabel, who had been feeling more than slightly suffocated in the throne room, now found to her dismay that it was hardly less stifling in sight of the sky.

  When Annabel and Peter finished washing, Blackfoot was sitting in the partial doorway to watch them splash each other. Peter had scrubbed the blood from Annabel’s face, and Annabel had returned the favour by scrubbing the back of his neck for him, so they were both rather cleaner than usual, though Annabel was still flapping about in her wet flannels.

  “Never mind, Ann,” said Peter, grinning. “If we find the secret treasury, maybe we can get you some clothes that aren’t completely moth-eaten!”

  “I don’t care if they are moth-eaten,” said Annabel, who was beginning to feel hot and heavy again. “So long as they’re not flannel!”

  There is no secret treasury, Blackfoot said. That’s just a story told to gullible children.

  “How would you know?” demanded Annabel, rescuing her note-pad and pencil from the swiftly approaching puddle of water that was encroaching on them. “You’re a cat.”

  “Cat being rude again? I don’t know why you keep it, Ann.”

  I don’t know why she keeps you, if it comes to that, said Blackfoot, sending a particularly glassy look up in Peter’s direction. That made Annabel giggle, but since it was too hot to be arguing with Peter, she avoided his suspicious inquiries and led the way back to the throne room, this time more slowly.

  It was still too hot in the throne room, but Annabel’s wet cuffs were pleasant to wipe her face with, and there was an ominously cool breeze coming from the newly cleared doorway.

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” said Peter. “What’s down there, I mean. If there’s a breeze, there has to be another opening in there somewhere, but I’ve never found another entrance to this part of the castle.”

  This part of the castle wasn’t here yesterday, Blackfoot said. As for it being another entrance…well, I suppose we can hope that’s what it is.

  “What do you mean?” asked Annabel, alarmed, but Blackfoot had already vanished into the darkness of the corridor without waiting to answer her.

  “What?” said Peter, who was watching her.

  “Blackfoot’s being mysterious,” Annabel said. “I hate it when he does that. Most of the time I think he’s just pretending to know things.”

  Blackfoot sniffed somewhere at the back of her mind, but Peter looked as uneasy as she felt. “Oh, well, there’s no use standing around here, anyway. We’d better follow the cat.”

  They entered the corridor together, and the coolness of it immediately sank through A
nnabel’s wet flannels with blissful effect.

  “Ugh,” said Peter at the same time. “Cold!”

  Annabel, on the other hand, found herself walking more swiftly. “It’s nice,” she said. “Sort of refreshing. I can’t see Blackfoot, can you?”

  I’m here, said Blackfoot, twining around her ankles a second later. Annabel, who would have shrieked if it hadn’t been for the split-second of warning, still jumped. Stop quivering, and follow me.

  “Never mind,” she said. “He’s right at our feet. Where are we going, anyway?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” complained Peter. “It’s all very well to be exploring dark tunnels and unseen parts of the castle, but why? Shouldn’t we be working on getting safely out of the castle? Or at least trying to get rid of Mordion?”

  What a good idea, said Blackfoot. What a shame I didn’t think of it.

  There was a brief silence, into which fell the sound of footsteps. Then Peter said: “What? What did the cat say?”

  “He says he already thought of it and it’s no good,” Annabel said diplomatically. She listened to Blackfoot’s explanations for an uncomprehending few moments and added: “He’s saying something about the only way out being to go further in. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Don’t paraphrase me, Nan, said Blackfoot. You invariably get it wrong.

  “I do that on purpose,” Annabel said. “If you want Peter to know what you’re saying, talk to him yourself.”

  I couldn’t broach that level of self-contained disbelief if I tried, remarked Blackfoot. And I prefer not to try while that disbelief continues to be upheld by such disgustingly powerful magic.

  “What’s it saying?”

  “He’s complimenting your magic,” Annabel said, with the vocal equivalent of her solid, stupid look. “He’s impressed by how powerful it is.”

  From Peter, there was suspicious silence; from Blackfoot, silence that could have been either amused or annoyed. At last, Peter, ignoring the issue completely, said: “Well, it could make sense, Ann. It depends on what sort of magic someone used on this place.”