Castle Hangnail Page 14

  It was in that big spellbook she had, the one bound in griffin leather. Near the back. She wouldn’t let me look at the spellbook, of course, but she told me the words . . .

  Molly stifled a sigh. She could have been twice the Witch she was, if she’d just had a good spellbook. If I’d had the Little Gray Book then, I bet I could have done all those spells . . .

  Well, some of them . . . she probably wouldn’t have wanted a cow or a dragon in her bedroom . . .

  She frowned. “It can’t be a hard spell! It doesn’t have any components, just the words and your shadow, and if you say the words, it happens!”

  She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “So why can’t I find it in the books?”

  “What was it called?” asked Bugbane, hanging from a shelf near the ceiling. He ran a claw over a dusty binding. “Maybe I can help look.”

  Molly shrugged helplessly. “Eud—um. I mean, the girl who taught me didn’t show me the book. She just recited the words for me.”

  “And then her shadow came off?” said Bugbane over his shoulder.

  Molly felt as if she’d been standing in cold water and it had only just soaked through her boots. She could feel a realization climbing very slowly up her body, starting at her feet, until it finally reached her brain.

  “No . . .” she said slowly. “No, it didn’t. Her shadow didn’t. Mine did, when I said the words, though.”

  “Maybe she couldn’t do the spell,” said Bugbane.

  “But—”

  Of course she could do the spell! She was—why couldn’t she? It’s a simple spell!

  Molly tried to summon up the memory of that afternoon—of Eudaimonia’s bedroom, with the dark blue wallpaper and the dark blue bedspread and the light coming through the glazed window and shimmering like ice. Eudaimonia had been sitting on the bed, with the great black spellbook open on her lap, and Molly had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the origami tiger still wandering around in front of her.

  I said the words back to her. I didn’t do anything special. My shadow came off and bowed to me. My heels tingled like they were falling asleep and I got that weird fizzy feeling in my chest. And Eudaimonia—

  Just for a minute, Eudaimonia had looked surprised. Frightened, even. She’d rocked back on the bed and put up a hand as if to ward the shadow off.

  And I said, “Is that right?” And then she tried to look like nothing had happened and said, “Well? Order it!” and I stood there with my mouth open like an idiot and said, “To do what?” and her voice got all high-pitched and she said,“Tell it to do something!” and so I said “dance” and then my shadow did a saraband and a fox trot and then she said, “Now tell it to come back!” and I did.

  And she said, “So good, dear Molly! Two spells in a row! You’re a perfect little child prodigy, aren’t you?”

  Molly hadn’t liked it when Eudaimonia used that tone. It had a lot of Sorceress in it, and icicles dripped off the edges. She’d said, “No, Eudaimonia,” and then the older girl had laughed and said, “Well, they were very simple spells. Try this one!” and it had been a hard spell, something where you knit up the wind into knots, and Molly had gotten her tongue tangled up and the wind turned into a sock and then into a sweater with five arms and then unraveled into air in her hands.

  Eudaimonia had laughed merrily and closed the spellbook. “It was a good try, Molly dear,” she said. “But I suppose you’re not quite ready for that yet.” And then she had knit the wind into a scarf the color of nothing and wrapped it around her shoulders, and her hair moved in an endless invisible breeze.

  Molly had forgotten the origami tiger spell and never tried knitting the wind again, but she remembered the dancing shadow spell. She’d done it four or five times, until the fizzing in her chest started to bother her, and then she didn’t do it very often anymore.

  “Everybody thinks that if they can do something, it has to be easy,” said Bugbane, yawning. “I can fly and you can’t. You can do magic and eat with a fork and I can’t. Maybe the spell’s not easy for everybody.”

  “But why did she want me to do it, then?” asked Molly.

  Bugbane shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t think you’d be able to.”

  Was that it? Did she set me a spell she thought I couldn’t do, because she wanted me to fail?

  It wouldn’t be a nice thing to do, but Eudaimonia hadn’t always been nice.

  She really did seem surprised when it worked . . .

  But if it’s a hard spell, why did it work for me and not her? I’m bad at magic compared to her! I can’t knit the wind or do anything.

  Molly slowly flipped through the Little Gray Book. There was a spell in there about shadows, but she didn’t much like the name of it.

  To feed the hunger of shadows, it said. And it called for a drop of your own blood.

  Even Molly knew that blood magic is one of the oldest and strongest kinds. Only bone magic is older and stronger and deeper and darker.

  Use only in emergency, said the Little Gray Book, when life and limb is at stake. She who feeds the shadows risks waking a greater hunger.

  Why would I even want to feed a shadow? thought Molly, putting the book down. My shadow’s not hungry. It just likes to dance.

  But she remembered Freddy Wisteria shrieking and backing away from the shadow, and suddenly she wasn’t so sure . . .

  “Don’t take me there! It’s not a real place!” What was he talking about? Did he mean the Kingdom of Shadows? Could my shadow even do that?

  Her shadow lay dozing on the floor, giving no sign that it felt hunger or anything else at all.

  Chapter 30

  There’s someone at the door,” said Edward.

  “Yes,” said Majordomo. “It was the hammering that gave it away. I’m surprised the door knocker hasn’t fallen off—” And before he had quite finished, there was another series of knocks.

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  “I’d have let them in,” said Edward slowly, “only I don’t like the look of them.”

  Majordomo raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s a Sorceress,” said Edward. “Um. Not a very nice-looking one, though.”

  Majordomo raised the other eyebrow. “A Sorceress? Here?”

  “Perhaps she’s one of Molly’s friends from Witch school,” said Edward hopefully.

  “Er,” said Majordomo, “. . . Witch school. Yes.” Molly was out in the garden with Miss Handlebram. “Yes. I suppose—”

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  “Well, it wouldn’t do to keep her waiting,” said Majordomo. He opened the door.

  He’d gotten about halfway through the long, drawn-out squeal of hinges, when the door simply slammed the rest of the way open. The hinges let out an offended “Sqrrrk!” and Majordomo rocked back on his heels.

  The Sorceress was young and had white-blond hair and skin the color of ice. Her eyes were glacial blue, and she had very long fingernails.

  Her gown was floor-length and shone all the colors of coldness, from the deep blue-violet at the heart of a glacier to the snapping green of an iceberg.

  There were two men with her, both of them rather large and rather vague around the eyes. They hardly registered at all next to the woman dressed in ice.

  “Dog!” snarled the Sorceress. “How dare you keep your new Mistress waiting!?”

  A large part of Majordomo, the part that had served a great many Masters, said, Yes! This is how a Master behaves! His knees wanted to bend. His shoulders wanted to hunch. Large parts of his back and spine tried immediately to grovel.

  A somewhat smaller part of Majordomo—which included the vocal cords—said, “Err—what?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve already got a Master, miss,” said Edward.

  “WHAT?” The Sorceress drew herself up to her full height. She was very tall.

>   (Generally, when you are much taller than everyone else, you do one of two things. Either you rather enjoy looming over people, or you spend a great deal of time hunched over, trying not to run into doorframes and doing your best to make yourself look smaller so that people don’t panic and run away. It was clear that this Sorceress did not spend any time trying to make herself smaller.)

  “Do you know who I am?” roared the Sorceress. Her two bodyguards took up positions on either side of her. Edward began, slowly and clankingly, to try to put himself between the men and Majordomo.

  “I am the Lady Eudaimonia!”

  Into the sudden terrible silence came a very ordinary noise. It was the sound of Molly and Miss Handlebram laughing together as they came out of the garden.

  They entered the Great Hall together. Molly had dirt on her knees and a pair of gardening shears still in one hand.

  “And you thought it was mugwort!” she said, laughing.

  “Well, it looked like mugwort,” said Miss Handlebram stoutly. “And anyway, it’ll grow back. Plants usually do . . . hello, what’s this?”

  Majordomo was watching Molly.

  She looked up, puzzled, and caught sight of the visitors. And then her face went very white, almost as white as the Sorceress, and her lips formed a name.

  Eudaimonia.

  And Majordomo knew.

  Molly was an imposter.

  All that time, as angry as he’d been, he’d never once suspected that she wasn’t who she said she was.

  As if it was not enough that she was leaving, now it seemed that she was never supposed to have been there at all.

  Eudaimonia caught sight of her and trilled a laugh, a high, swooping sound like a bird of prey about to fall on a pigeon. “Dear Molly! So this is where you got off to!”

  “Yes, Eudaimonia,” whispered Molly. Her whisper kicked up echoes that went rustling like blown bits of paper through the Great Hall.

  “But—but there must be some mistake—” said Edward. One mailed hand crept toward the coin hung around his neck.

  Molly shook her head.

  Edward slumped. He turned toward Majordomo, the eye slits of his helmet wide and baffled.

  “Apparently,” said Majordomo coldly, “we have been laboring under a misapprehension.”

  “So you’ve been playing house here, have you?” said Eudaimonia, strolling into the Great Hall. “I don’t mind, dear Molly—you know, we’ve always been such great friends!—though I did wonder where my invitation had gone—”

  Molly went even whiter, then flushed a sudden, ugly red, as if she were about to cry.

  “But you said—”

  Eudaimonia waved a hand at her and said, “Bygones, dear, bygones.” Her gaze traveled over the Great Hall and the ruined staircase. She clucked her tongue. “How shabby. I see it’s been far too long since this place had a proper Master.”

  “Far too long,” said Majordomo, looking daggers at Molly.

  “Now see here!” said Miss Handlebram, stepping forward. She brandished her shears the way a knight might brandish a sword, and lowered her sun hat to do battle. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I do know that Castle Hangnail’s got a Master! Molly’s in charge here!”

  “Molly?” said Eudaimonia. She stifled a patently fake yawn. “Dear Molly. Such a talented little girl . . . but run a whole castle? Do be serious.”

  Molly shrank.

  “She does a fine job!” roared Miss Handlebram. “And as for you, young lady—does your mother know you’re leaving the house dressed like that?”

  Eudaimonia’s lip curled. “I left my mother’s house to get away from carping old women. I won’t put up with another one in my own castle.”

  She clicked all of her fingernails together, dipped two into a pocket, and came out with a little black wand about four inches long.

  “Guar and Grappa,” she chanted. “Avocet! Rattle bone, still tongue and tone!” And she waved the wand at Miss Handlebram.

  It is possible that if someone had moved quickly enough, they would have been able to stop her. Spells that need words can often be broken if you can keep the spellcaster from saying the final word. But everyone was too caught up in the awfulness—except for Molly.

  “Eudaimonia, no!” she shouted, and at the word Avocet she was flinging herself toward the older girl.

  One of the bodyguards picked her up by the scruff of the neck like a kitten.

  The air went stiff and then there was a noise rather like thwang.

  Frost crystals formed on Miss Handlebram’s clothes and on her hat and on her face. Frost—and then more than that. The frost became a zigzag of ice, and then the ice thickened until it was as thick as ice on a treacherous road, then as thick as an ice cube, then finally as thick as a frozen lake in winter.

  And then there was a block of ice four feet thick with Miss Handlebram frozen in the middle of it. Her pruning shears were held up in front of her defensively, and the look on her face was the same one she wore when battling weeds.

  “Interfering old biddy,” muttered Eudaimonia. She clicked two long fingernails together and her bodyguards each picked up a suitcase from just outside the door. “Now. Someone stable my basilisk.”

  Chapter 31

  It was nothing short of miraculous, Majordomo thought, that they got through that evening in one piece.

  Eudaimonia—the real Eudaimonia—was not pleased with her quarters. Her four-poster bed was too small, her bathtub was an old claw-foot and not a deep bathing pool, the tapestries were moth-eaten and the wrong color and there was not enough deep blue velvet for anyone.

  “Really,” she said over her shoulder at Majordomo, “you should have rooms in every color. What if a Purple Djinn should wish to stay here? Or a Midnight Hag?”

  “It’s never come up, Mistress,” said Majordomo. “Purple Djinn are extinct, for one thing—”

  “Are you contradicting me?” said Eudaimonia, turning on him. Her face was calm, but there was something terrible in her eyes, something that Majordomo couldn’t quite identify.

  “Err—no, of course not, Mistress! I shall—um—have Pins see to redoing the rooms at once—”

  “And one in plaid,” said Eudaimonia, turning away. “In case we’ve a Scottish Haggischarmer come to stay. I plan to entertain a great deal, but not while the castle is in this deplorable run-down condition! Really, it might be easier to pull it all down and rebuild from scratch!”

  Majordomo took this blow without wincing. Partly he was too stunned by the evening’s events, and partly it was that he was picturing an entire room in plaid, from floor to ceiling. He’d only met a Haggischarmer once, a pleasant little man with a troop of well-behaved performing haggises. Certainly neither the Haggischarmer nor his troop had done anything to deserve being shoved into a solid plaid room.

  He would have put her in Molly’s room—it was the best in the castle, and clearly Molly had no rights to it—but it only had a shower and Eudaimonia was very clear about her need for a nightly bath.

  “And I shall require donkey’s milk once a week,” she said. “For bathing.”

  “. . . um,” said Majordomo.

  “Will that be a problem? I believe I saw a donkey in the field as we approached?”

  “No—no, Mistress—well—only—it’s a male donkey, Mistress.”

  “I see.” Eudaimonia drew herself up and glared down at Majordomo. Her eyes glittered like ice. “I see that this place has become slack.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  “I will fix it.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  “Because I deserve better than to live in this—this hovel. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely, Mistress.”

  She narrowed her eyes, tapping her wand on her thigh. Majordomo, who had lived through Sorceresses and Beast Lords and
Vampires, kept an expression of absolute humility on his face.

  “You may go,” said Eudaimonia, turning away. “Have the kitchen send me up a quiche, and tell the maid to draw a bath. I am fatigued.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” said Majordomo, his heart sinking.

  “And send Molly up. I see we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  He hurried away. Her bodyguards sneered at him as he scurried from the room.

  “Quiche,” he muttered, limping down the stairs. “Hot bath. Oh, blast, blast, why did it have to be a Sorceress? Another Witch—a real Witch—and we could have muddled through, a Hag even, but we’re in no shape for a Sorceress!”

  Witches liked nature. Witches liked gardens. Witches were a little bit shabby around the edges and they liked cobwebs in the corners.

  Sorceresses liked ice and palaces and luxury. There was never anything remotely shabby about a Sorceress.

  “Oh blast . . .”

  He didn’t know what he was going to tell Cook. But worse than that, he’d finally identified that glitter in Eudaimonia’s eyes.

  It was anticipation.

  The moment that any of them in the castle failed—and with such standards, how could they help but fail?—she was going to encase them in ice.

  And she was looking forward to it.

  • • •

  Quiche?” growled Cook, slamming a ladle down. “Quiche, she is wanting?”

  “Egg pie?” said Majordomo. “With, um, vegetables in it?”

  “Is not fooling me! Is being quiche!”

  Majordomo looked at the Minotaur, her horns quivering with outrage, took a deep, deep breath—and begged.

  “Cook, please. We—the minions—we’re all having some problems settling in. This has not been a smooth transition.”

  “Transition,” said Cook, mouthing the word as if it were poisonous. “Not wanting transition. Was liking Molly.”