Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) Read online

  Poly patted her pockets absently, finding the bright yellow material already soaked with moisture, and sucked in a shallow breath of regret. No doubt they were already ruined. She tried not to mind too much, but a small sniff escaped her anyway. Onepiece, once again trotting under his own power, kept up a constant stream of complaint in the back of her mind.

  Poly was rather blindly wiping the rain from her glasses when Luck stopped abruptly. This time she stopped herself from tumbling into him with a quick half-step to the side, and reflected crossly that things would be much easier if Luck were to call marching orders. Or if he would walk by her side like any normal male instead of striding on ahead.

  “It’s raining,” he said. Poly thought he sounded surprised.

  “It’s been raining for the past half-hour,” she told him, amused in spite of herself.

  “I don’t like being rained on.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s not much you can do about it, you know.”

  Luck tilted his head back to observe her, a puzzled line between his brows. “Of course there is,” he said.

  He sketched a tiny figure in the palm of his hand, then blew out his cheeks and huffed it toward a convenient rock-ledge that was currently running along the path beside them.

  As Poly watched in astonishment, a white, tent-like structure bloomed, just a little taller than Luck and twice as long as it was high. She reached out a hand to touch the insubstantial stuff, expecting to feel her fingers pass through something like mist, only to discover that the pearly whiteness was in fact cold and springy.

  “What is it?” she asked Luck, but he was already stepping through a thin gap in the stuff. A puff of warm, displaced air succeeded him, inducing Poly to follow after him without wondering further about anything but that the shelter was warm, and above all, dry.

  She found her clothes dry and soft immediately upon stepping inside, which pleased her greatly. Onepiece, following close behind and about to vigorously shake himself, looked affronted and decidedly less pleased about the business. Nevertheless, he trotted after her as she walked curiously around the shelter, her fingers lightly touching the taut surface, and was interested enough to try burrowing at the white sheen that stretched below them and indented with each footstep before springing back.

  Luck, sealing the parting with two pinched fingers, shot the dog a green-eyed look.

  “Don’t do that.”

  Onepiece gave a small, growling bark but did as he was told, and sulkily climbed into Poly’s lap when she sat down.

  His flowing train of thought-speech said: -poor Onepiece, poor puppy. white is tight and warm but it’s sneezy-

  Poly amused him with her fingers for some minutes, twinkling them past his nose and tapping his paws while he watched in fascination and tried to capture them between his tiny teeth, before she said casually: “You have them too, darling.”

  Onepiece looked suspicious. -have fingers, yes. clumsy and heavy-

  “Well, they needn’t be clumsy,” Poly said reasonably. “Your legs must have been heavy and clumsy once. How is it you can walk and jump now?”

  -lots of walking- said Onepiece shortly, and she had a brief inrush of hazy memories that spoke of aching bones and aching cold.

  “It’s just the same with fingers,” she told him. “You must use them, or they’ll stay clumsy.”

  -dog is warm- Onepiece said sulkily.

  “It’s warm in here.”

  There was a barely audible huff from the puppy. -huh. fingers. no use-

  “Rubbish,” said Luck, making them both jump. He sat down next to Poly, stretching out his long legs comfortably in front of him, and roughed Onepiece’s ears. Onepiece gave a sigh of pleasure and flopped forward on Poly’s knees.

  “Can’t do that with paws,” pointed out Luck, giving the puppy one last scratch. He seized Poly’s hand and threaded his fingers through hers, displaying their linked hands to Onepiece. “Can’t do this with paws, either.”

  Onepiece’s stream of consciousness slowed, stopped, and threw out one hiccough of an idea. -mum?-

  Poly thought she caught the sense of a very tiny, human Onepiece holding the much larger hand of someone else, and was taken aback at the wave of longing that swept over the puppy.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But you’ll have to be human again.”

  There was a moment of utter silence from the puppy, while Poly became aware that Luck was still holding her hand and was now tracing the spiral of antimagic with one finger, a frown on his face.

  Then an overwhelming surge of clear magic shook the shelter, and the tiny, naked boy that was Onepiece was back again, huddled in her lap. His eyes were at first wild and frightened, but when Poly wrapped her arms around him, disengaging her fingers from Luck’s, he gazed up at her in perfect contentment.

  “Clothes, I think,” she said to Luck.

  That night, Poly had nightmares again. They woke her up, gasping, with the image of hundreds of frozen faces caught in amber-coloured magic seared through her mind, and for a confused moment she couldn’t tell where she was. There was green, and misty white, then there was warm orange interposed over both, and Poly came to the slow, heavy realisation that she was clutching a spindle in her antimagic hand, wooden spike digging bluntly into the silver curlicues and the pattern of the spindle embossed on her palm. She decided that it was too much trouble to wonder why she was holding a spindle, and automatically pushed it into one pocket to look at later.

  While the world decided whether it was going to be green or orange Poly pushed herself up blearily, carefully avoiding Onepiece, who had curled up under her arm in his dog form. She spared a brief thought to wonder where the little trousers Luck had magicked for him were, and if they would appear again the next time Onepiece turned human. Then the world outside the shelter made one last massive effort and decided to be orange, and Luck groaned.

  Poly sat up properly, crossing her legs and pawing at her eyes, and pushed her glasses on in order to look at him. His magic had gone wrong again but this time it was blackened instead of brownish, as if whole strands of it had gone badly over-ripe.

  Luck sat up with a paper-white face and fixed heavy, reproachful eyes on her. “Poly, you’ll be the death of me.”

  Poly drew in a small, exasperated breath. “I didn’t do anything. You’ve got Angwynelle.”

  “It wasn’t the book,” said Luck, climbing slowly to his feet. He walked unsteadily past Poly and shouldered his way through the slit in the white membrane, letting a flash of orange briefly into the tent. She heard him, a moment later, being very sick.

  When Luck came back he was less pale but his magic was still as black as ever. He was looking even more rumpled than usual this morning, and Poly wasn’t sure which she wanted to straighten more: his magic or his hair.

  Luck swiftly put any such charitable ideas out of her mind by narrowing his eyes at her saying accusingly: “You hijacked my spell. Why are you always hijacking my spells?”

  “What happened?” she asked, resigned to the fact that he wouldn’t believe she’d had nothing to do with his spell, hijacked or otherwise.

  “We’re at the Frozen Battlefield,” he said.

  Chapter Six

  The unwelcome recollection of thousands of frozen, orange-glazed faces sprang immediately to Poly’s mind.

  Shaken, she said: “You said something about a frozen battlefield back at the castle. Was that the glow I saw on the horizon yesterday?”

  “You’ve been putting my spells off for days,” said Luck darkly, his shoulders hunched. “You kick me and threaten me and– whoops–!”

  Poly watched him bolt for the slit again with the horrible feeling that this time at least, she just might be responsible. Her dream was simply too coincidental for the two occurrences not to be linked, whether or not it seemed possible.

  She sighed, following Luck outside, and began to straighten the worst of the blackened threads. Luck merely groaned at her and threw up again.


  When he had finished, he wiped his mouth and said with great precision: “You are a plague, madam.”

  He slumped against the tent, eyeing her owlishly, and if Poly didn’t know that he was entirely sober, she could have been persuaded that he was drunk.

  He pulled at the tent uselessly in an attempt to rise, and said at last: “Help me up, Poly.”

  She thought about putting her nose in the air with a remark about plagues but thought better of it. Instead, Poly helped him up and propped him against the dubious support of the tent.

  When she tried to back away, Luck said: “No, Poly, don’t go.”

  His blackened magic was fizzling around him with sparks of gold and tar, and Poly felt a slight tug, nearly light enough to resist. Nearly, but not quite. She took one step back toward him.

  “We have experiments to conduct,” he added. This intelligence gave Poly enough of a snap to break free.

  “No more experiments!” she told him firmly. “Especially not when your magic is doing that.”

  Luck muttered darkly at the failure of his spell. Then he reached out physically and tugged her forward by the ears, pulling her closer as much through the agency of surprise as superior force.

  “Ow! Stop it!” Poly demanded, outraged.

  Luck, without letting go of her ears, simply said: “No,” and enforced one last step toward him that brought her far too close to be able to box his ears. Poly couldn’t decide if that were a good thing or not.

  “Tilt your head up, Poly: I can’t see.”

  Poly, very frostily, said: “See what?”

  “The curse. It sits in the corners of your eyes and laughs at me.”

  “Ow! Luck, what are you doing? Let go!”

  “I’m kissing you again,” said Luck, reasonably. “I told you–”

  “No!” snapped Poly, snatching his hands away. She gave him a short, effective shove in the chest that had him far too busy trying to stand to follow her, and stomped away before she did something hazardous to her health, like punch Luck in the nose. Then she stomped right back, drew a circle in the moist dirt, and stood inside it.

  “Pay attention,” she told Luck grimly. “Pretend this is a magic circle.”

  “All right,” said Luck obligingly. He was still swaying on his feet but his colour had improved.

  “Magic circles have an equidistant circumference, don’t they?”

  Luck regarded her with gold-flecked eyes and nodded.

  “All right. This represents my personal space. You,” she added, fixing him with a repressive glare that didn’t seem to repress him very much; “Are to stay outside it at all times.”

  “Huh,” said Luck. He appeared to think about it for a few minutes, then offered: “You need a glove.”

  “A– pardon?”

  “Glove, glove. Women wear ‘em to parties.”

  Poly sat down in the dirt, bewildered, and began to straighten Luck’s magic again, as much in the conviction that Luck wasn’t going to make sense until his magic was right again as the desire to be doing something with her hands other than hurt Luck.

  “Why do I need gloves?”

  Luck, who seemed to be going back to sleep, opened his eyes a gold-edged slit, and said: “You’ll only need one. It’ll make a statement.”

  Poly managed: “Yes, but–” before the glove materialized and fell into her lap with a whisper of sound. She should have asked again, but the single glove was a beautiful thing made out of light, clingy material that laced up from the wrist to just beyond her elbow, and Poly decided after a moment’s appreciative observation that she didn’t much care why she was wearing it.

  Between the fingers of her other hand and her teeth, she managed to get the article laced and tied over her antimagic arm. It covered the spiral of antimagic completely, but left her unblemished fingers free– which, Poly realised belatedly, must have been the purpose of it.

  She went back to unravelling Luck’s tangled magic, admiring her new accoutrement as her fingers flew. Luck didn’t object, or even move: the bruising to his magic was worse than it had been after the Shift spell that took them straight through the mountain. Poly wondered, as she combed her fingers gently through the insubstantial threads, just exactly how far they had travelled this time. She could see the glow of orange in the corners of her eyes, and found herself thankful that she hadn’t had the leisure yet to look around, since she was sneakingly sure that she wouldn’t like what she saw when she did so.

  There was a stir in the already magic-fraught air, suggesting that Onepiece had woken, and a moment later, Poly heard his sleepy voice in her head.

  -poly. there’s orange deadthings-

  “It’s all right, darling; they can’t hurt you,” Poly said soothingly, hoping that she was right.

  “They’ve been stuck for nearly three hundred years,” observed Luck, adding his mite to the conversation, much to her surprise. “They won’t come out just to watch you eat breakfast.”

  -breakfast?- the puppy’s ears perked up hopefully. -breakfast where? chops’n’sausages?-

  Luck looked slightly ill again, and Poly said hastily: “You can have breakfast when Luck feels well enough to get it.”

  -yes, but hungry- said Onepiece sadly, climbing into her lap. He sniffed cautiously at her gloved hand and muttered his disapproval, but Poly ignored him. Luck’s magic was very nearly tidy again. It only needed– snap!

  That, thought Poly in satisfaction, shaking the whole out as if it were a freshly laundered pillowcase to be folded.

  Luck’s eyes widened, and he looked more awake and aware than she had ever seen him before.

  “Better?” she asked, but she already knew the answer, so it didn’t matter when Luck said: “Go look at the frozen people, Poly,” and dashed back into the tent.

  Onepiece followed him, presumably in pursuit of breakfast, and Poly was left to pick herself up, wondering if Luck ever said thank you. She thought not.

  When she could no longer avoid doing so, Poly turned her eyes on her surroundings. The tent was now freestanding instead of leaning into the shadow of an escarpment; behind it a vast expanse of green hills. Poly came to the conclusion that they were now well atop the mountain she had sighted through the ranges yesterday. It was bigger than she’d expected, and significantly hillier.

  When she turned stiffly, reluctantly following her orange peripheral, the first impression she had was one of unexpected stillness and warmth. There must have been thousands of people suspended in the orange glow before her: each one still and lifeless, not moving by so much as a single hair. The amber stuff itself stretched further than she could see, both to the right and to the left. Even the sky had taken on an orange tint above it.

  Poly stared, appalled, at bodies of men and women alike, frozen in immortality. None of them were kitted out as soldiers. It occurred to her that the Frozen Battlefield was singularly misnamed: it was neither cold, nor peopled by soldiers.

  She looked carefully at the faces within sight, searching for any trace of horror or surprise, but the only emotion she could pick out with any clarity on each of the faces was a fierce kind of radiance that was as alien as it was frightening. Poly began to have second thoughts about her assumption that this was no battlefield.

  She wandered further along the edge of the orange substance, wondering what the amberness would be like to touch but unwilling to find out for certain. It looked gelatinous, but that could just be the impression created by the smooth-edged surface. These people had certainly not suffocated. They looked like they had been enveloped and extinguished all in a moment, caught unawares in their terrifying rapture.

  It must be magic. Only, thought Poly with her brows drawn together, it didn’t feel like magic.

  Her eyes, running over face after face, snagged on three grouped together, and she was conscious of a mind-numbing shock. It was Persephone. Persephone as beautiful as she had ever looked, and twice as alive in the triumphant brilliance that mirrored every o
ther face around her. Beside and a little behind her were the king and queen, their faces likewise aglow; but Poly spared them only a glance, because there beside the princess, between Persephone and her mother, was a space. It leapt out at her, a vaguely man-shaped disturbance in the gelatinous amber, and her eyes followed the logical path the escapee must have taken.

  There! There was a disturbance in the surface of the amber, a slight dip running from the ground to somewhere roughly a foot above Poly’s head: the kind of indent that might have happened if someone had stepped out of a jelly-like substance just before it was quite set. The thought should have brought with it some relief, but Poly thought of one of those fiercely happy people roaming at large in New Civet, and shuddered.

  She hurried back to the safety of Luck and the white tent, and found herself in time for breakfast.

  For once, the thought of eating didn’t appeal to Poly; and at last, chasing blueberries around a bowl with a broad silver spoon, she said to Luck: “One of them got out.”

  He opened his mouth, and Poly could see his lips beginning to form the word ‘rubbish’. Then he seemed to think better of it.

  “Where?”

  “A quarter mile eastward. There’s a man-sized hollow space and a ripple in the surface.”

  Luck thoughtfully rubbed his head, forming wild spikes. He didn’t speak immediately, and when Poly passed him her unfinished bowl of breakfast berries he ate them automatically, drumming the spoon against the side of the bowl in a manner as aimless as it was annoying.

  Then he said: “No one’s ever noticed one of them missing before. Huh.”

  He said it more in interest than in disbelief, and Poly, letting him mull it over, went on to her next point of unease.

  “What’s wrong with them? They’re all–”

  “Disgustingly happy,” nodded Luck. “I’m sure I’ve told you about this before.”