We didn’t go out by the main door, but through the back where the priests lived. I paused in the kitchen to tap each of the hard black loaves waiting on the counter.
You’re good bread, I told them. You’re soft and you want to stay soft. And if I live through this, I’m going to make sure the priests get some of Bob’s best sourdough from now on. Assuming Bob is still…oh, damn.
“You all right?” said Spindle suspiciously.
I rubbed my nose and sniffed. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
Being out on the street again felt like my birthday. I was giddy. I wanted to laugh and dance and hug strangers. I swung around a lamppost just because I could. Spindle had to thump my shoulder and hiss, “Settle down! People are looking!” before I stopped giggling.
It was a beautiful night. It had rained in the evening, but that was done, and now the mist was rising from the water and the cobbles were slick and shining with reflected light. I could hear frogs croaking in the canals.
I was still feeling giddy and light-headed when we passed a constable. That settled me down in a hurry. He was slouched against the canal railing with his hands stuffed in his pockets, and I doubt I would have even noticed him, except for being a wanted fugitive and all.
“Relax,” muttered Spindle. “Don’t tense up. They don’t notice you if you just walk along and pretend like you’re going somewhere. Curfew isn’t for another couple hours yet.”
We went in a roundabout path, in case anybody was following us from the church. It didn’t seem likely, but Spindle was paranoid and that suited me just fine. There were more broadsheets pinned up, talking about the curfew and registering magical talents.
There was one that said:
* * *
Do YOU know an unregistered WIZARD?
WIZARD TRAITORS COULD BE ANYONE!
They could be your FAMILY, your FRIENDS, even your CHILDREN!
Loyal citizens will REGISTER TODAY!
* * *
Well, that was depressing.
“You okay?” asked Spindle. “You’ve gone all fishy-colored.”
“Nothing,” I muttered. “It’s fine.” It wasn’t that different from the others, but the notion of telling people to hand in their own kids for being magickers turned my stomach. I didn’t offer to read the broadsheet for Spindle.
When we passed by Peony Street, I looked down at Master Elwidge’s shop. There was a “For Sale” sign in the window, and someone had nailed a broadsheet to the door.
We didn’t see any that had my face on it. Maybe those were only near the bakery, or maybe they’d forgotten about me. I could only hope it was the second possibility. The notion of Aunt Tabitha having to go out and buy ingredients surrounded by all those printed faces…
Of course, sometime tomorrow I’d probably be in jail or exonerated, so they could take the broadsheets down one way or the other. The criers would have other news to shout. Hopefully it would be “Plot against magickers uncovered!” and not “Poop-covered assassin foiled in Duchess’s bathroom!”
Really, of all the ways to go…
Nineteen
All we had to do was get into the palace, make our way past the guards to the curtain wall, which was a kind of wall sandwich between the palace and the outer walls where they store all the stuff you don’t want to keep right inside the palace, like stables. And cesspits. Then we’d wait until nightfall, sneak into the cesspit hut, and climb up the inside of the garderobe wall. Which was three stories high and covered in…um…nastiness. Also, according to Spindle, it had metal spikes.
“Spikes…” I said faintly.
“They’re nuthin’,” Spindle said, waving a hand. “You can squish right by ’em. And they’re kinda handy, because we’ll tie a rope to ’em so you can climb easier.”
I did not feel convinced.
“I reckon they’d keep a grown-up out,” he allowed. “That’s what they’re for, see, to keep somebody from climbing up and stabbing the Duchess while she’s havin’ a—”
“Right. Thank you, Spindle. I get the point.”
The plan was for me to work in the kitchens until nightfall. The guards would notice a scullery maid trying to get into the palace late at night, but they probably wouldn’t notice if one of the maids who had come in during the day didn’t leave. I was afraid they’d notice a stranger in the kitchen, but Spindle snorted.
“That place? They wouldn’t notice if you came in ridin’ an elephant. Just act like you’re s’posed to be there.”
It turned out he was right. Getting into the palace was the easy part. Spindle had stolen an apron. I put it on and walked past the guards in the courtyard. I was clammy with sweat and my knees shook, but their eyes slid right over me.
I peeked into the kitchen. It was a crazy whirl of activity. The head cook was a red-faced woman who barked orders like a drill sergeant. People ran past carrying trays of food and buckets of water and great piles of dirty dishes. I was afraid to get in anyone’s way—what if they noticed me? What if they knew I wasn’t supposed to be there?
Then I saw a girl trying to cut out biscuits on a table and making a hash of it. She’d kneaded the biscuits far too long. They were going to be like rocks. I hurried over and nudged her aside. “You’re overworking the dough,” I said. “You want it to hold together, but that’s all. If you knead it too long, they turn into bricks.”
“Will you do it?” she asked, giving me a grateful look. “I’ve still got to cut up the ham and cheese for these, and there’s the eggs—”
“Of course,” I said. “Err—I’m new. My name’s Mona. Is there anything I should do?”
“Just make the biscuits,” she said. “I’m Jenny. I’ll be back in a minute.”
‘A minute’ in this case was nearly forty-five, but Jenny did come back. By then I’d finished three batches of biscuits. Whenever the cook looked in my direction, my knees quaked, but she didn’t stop me.
I used a little magic to save the first set of biscuits. You’re fluffy, I told them. You’re very fluffy and soft. You’re like little fluffy lambs, only without the poop stuck to your tail because that’s gross. They agreed to be fluffy. Biscuits are very accommodating that way.
Probably this was a waste of time since I had much bigger worries than fluffy biscuits, but hey, once a baker, always a baker. If I was going to get thrown in the dungeon, at least I was going to leave a trail of quality pastries behind me.
“You did it!” said Jenny. She was about my age, with thin little bird-bone wrists. “Cor! I hate doing those. My arms get so tired. How are you at kneading bread?”
“What I don’t know about kneading bread,” I said, with great honesty, “isn’t worth knowing.”
It was five hours later before I managed to slip out of the kitchen. It had gone from bread to chopping vegetables, and then Jenny left for the evening, and since I kept explaining that I was new, the other girls stuck me in the scullery. That meant I had to wash dishes.
A lot of dishes. And magic couldn’t help me with that.
There were four girls working in there, and they gave me the worst ones. I didn’t really mind. It’s never fun to wash dishes, but it’s sort of satisfying to get a really bad one clean. Some of them needed to soak with lye, there was no getting around it. I finally excused myself to go to the bathroom and ran into Spindle on the way to the privies.
“Where have you been?” he hissed. He was wearing the ash-sweeper rags and nearly vanished in the shadows around the low wooden buildings. “I been waitin’ for hours!”
“I was doing dishes,” I said. “I can’t believe this! Nobody’s asked where I’m from or anything! Anybody could just walk right in here!”
“That’s ’cos most assassins ain’t gonna waste time doin’ dishes,” said Spindle. “They’re lookin’ for scary people, not girls in aprons.” He pulled me into the shadow of the wall. “C’mon, let’s get moving. We wait much longer, it’ll be morning again.”
We passed two guards on the wa
y to the garderobe, and neither of them so much as glanced at us. An ash-boy and a scullery girl weren’t worthy of their notice. Spindle glanced around, made sure no one was watching, unlocked the garderobe door and waved me inside.
It stank. It stank a lot. I mean, the canals get pretty ripe in summer, don’t get me wrong, but at least there was a lot of air for them to diffuse in. This was a little stone chimney with a couple of narrow slits in the walls, and the smell had etched its way into the mortar.
There was a rope hanging down. “Left it earlier,” Spindle said. “While I was waitin’ for you to get out. The first set of spikes is easy to get to, so I tied a rope to it.” He gave me a patronizing look. “Well…easy for me…”
“Thanks, Spindle,” I muttered. “You’re just like a brother to me. In the most annoying possible sense.”
He grinned and gave me a quick punch on the shoulder. For Spindle, that was an incredible display of affection. I got a little choked up, but that might just have been the smell coming off the cesspit.
So. Shoulders against the wall. Feet against the opposite wall. Grab the rope in both hands. Walk feet up a couple of steps, brace them, hitch shoulders up, hauling on the rope. Brace, hitch, haul. Brace, hitch, haul.
The stones were cold, but that was almost a relief, because I hadn’t gotten more than two man-heights off the ground before I was dripping with sweat. It ran into my eyes and off the tip of my nose and down my back and it itched and tickled so that I thought bugs were crawling on me. Oh lord, I hadn’t even thought about bugs. What kind of awful bugs did you get in a garderobe?
I also hadn’t anticipated that there would be moss growing on top of the gunk on the walls. Moss is not good for climbing. It looks furry, but if you try to stand on it, it turns slick as ice in a hurry. When I passed one of the vent holes, the light coming in showed green streaks of moss along my hands, in addition to blackish streaks of something else that shall not be named.
Oh, this is delightful. I was going to get to the top and I would be covered in…stuff. Let’s go with “stuff.” I would pop out of a toilet covered in stuff and dripping sweat and maybe with bugs on me and expect the Duchess to listen to anything I had to say?
Soon I ran into the first row of spikes. I literally ran into them. My head whacked into one and thank goodness they weren’t very sharp.
They were more like metal fenceposts than spikes, arranged in an X across the garderobe. Spindle had been right, it seemed they were designed to keep out grown-ups, so there was more than enough space to get by them. Spindle could get through without even touching the sides, and I managed well enough, although I had to sort of shuffle around the chimney until I was under a gap, and there was a bad minute when I hit a slick patch of moss and thought I was going to fall.
The gingerbread man stood on a spike, grabbed my sleeve, and pulled. It didn’t help at all, but I appreciated the thought.
Spindle was waiting just above my head. He dropped down—the metal crosspiece made a muffled bonnnng that terrified me—and untied the rope, then scurried up the side of the garderobe to the next set of spikes. A moment later, the rope dropped down onto my head.
I went back to climbing.
Brace, hitch, haul…
I slowly passed two more sets of spikes and another row of vents. The vents were narrow, like arrow slits, but set horizontally. I stopped for a minute on the set of spikes just under it and put my face against it to breathe.
My legs were killing me. My shoulders were starting to throb. The problem was that I was stuck. Going back down was going to be just as bad as going on up, unless I fell, in which case I was going to hit a cross-piece and go “splat!”
“Here!” hissed Spindle above me. “At the top!” I looked up.
Light! I could see the light at the end of the…well, at the top of the…well, through the toilet seat…well, anyway, it was light. Spindle was silhouetted against it, like a spider. As I watched, the silhouette got an arm across the top and then hauled himself out.
I was nearly there. I went back to bracing and hitching with a will.
Fortunately, the last set of spikes was close enough to the top that I could put my feet on the cross-pieces and try to get my shoulders through the hole.
And then I promptly got stuck.
The spikes had…stuff on them. Stuff that made for bad footing. So I couldn’t push very well with my feet, and my shoulders were through, but that was about as far as I got.
Spindle grabbed my arm and hauled. The gingerbread man jumped down and pulled. The carved seat scraped at my waist.
“You been eating too many of your own pastries!” Spindle grumbled.
This was blatantly unfair, since I’d been at the church long enough to have dropped any excess pastry weight I might have been carrying around. “It’s easy for you!” I hissed. “You don’t have hips! Now pull!”
He pulled. I started to emerge. Unfortunately my skirt was rucked up under the seat, and while I was coming out, it wasn’t coming with me.
The gingerbread man covered his face with his hands.
Great. I was going to be covered in poop, sweating like a pig, in my underwear, trying to make my case to the Duchess…
…And at that very moment, she opened the door to the garderobe and walked in. She had a book in her hand and obviously planned to spend some quality time in the garderobe by herself.
If the Duchess had been a screamer, the guards would have burst in and things might have turned out very differently. But she didn’t scream. Instead she put a hand to her mouth and said “…oh.”
“Your Grace, please listen to me!” I said, sticking half in and half out of the toilet. “I’ve come to warn you of a plot against you!” Admittedly, I still wasn’t sure that the plot was against her, and not against all magickers, but I thought I had a better chance of getting her attention this way.
(Although in fairness, I suppose if a half-naked girl is being hauled out of your toilet by a boy covered in sewage, that garners plenty of attention, too.)
“Your Grace—please—” I was thoroughly stuck, like a cork out of a bottle, and now my feet were just barely touching the crosspiece on the spikes, so I couldn’t push at all. The skirt had slid down another few inches. Fortunately my underwear was still holding up. Faithful, faithful underwear.
“My name’s Mona, you saved me from Inquisitor Oberon a few weeks ago, I was in court and you stood up for me, so I came to tell you—you have to listen—please—”
“How did you get up here?” she asked. It was not exactly the response I was looking for, but at least she wasn’t yelling for the guards. I probably didn’t look like much of a threat, jammed into the toilet, and Spindle was awfully young and scrawny for an assassin.
“We climbed up,” said Spindle. “Weren’t hard. Well, ’cept for this bit.” He gazed at me in professional disgust.
I took a deep breath. That was probably a mistake. I could smell myself, and it wasn’t good. I tried to remember the speech that I had practiced all those nights in the tower, and for some reason all I could remember was the porridge and the way the straw poked me at night.
It was the gingerbread man that saved me.
He had clung to my ear for the entire ascent up the garderobe shaft, a lock of hair wrapped around one arm. I’d almost forgotten he was there.
He stepped forward, hopped down from my shoulder to the seat, then to the floor. When he was three paces from the Duchess—human paces, not gingerbread man paces—he dropped his cookie head and bowed deeply to the Duchess.
“Oh my,” said the Duchess faintly. I suppose most people aren’t used to being bowed to by baked goods. It occurred to me too late that the Duchess might be one of those people who found magic unsettling, but no, she worked with all those army wizards, right? The Golden General was her right-hand man. Surely she’d gotten used to it by now.
Regardless, it gave me the time I needed to assemble my thoughts. I took another deep breath. “Your
Grace, Inquisitor Oberon is sending out assassins to kill magic-folk, and I don’t know where it’s going to stop. I think it might be part of a plot against you. I think with the General out of the city, he’s going to try something. I had to warn you. Your Grace, I think you’re in terrible danger. I know we—magickers—are.”
And then the last thing in the entire world that I expected to happen, happened.
“Oh, my dears…” The Duchess’s face crumpled. “I know. I know. And I don’t know what to do!”
And she burst into tears.
Twenty
In that supremely awkward moment, Spindle came to the rescue.
“Right,” he said, apparently unfazed by the fact that the ruler of our entire city was weeping in front of us. “If I grab this arm, and you grab that arm, mum, I think we can get ’er out.”
The Duchess, to her credit, put down her book, gave a quick hitching sob, and grabbed my left arm.
They hauled. I popped out of the toilet with long red scrapes across both hips and tumbled headfirst onto the carpet. The gingerbread man dove out of the way. The carpet probably came off the worst in the encounter.
“Oh dear.” The Duchess found a towel and draped it over my shoulders. It was the softest towel I have ever encountered, thick and fluffy, and it seemed criminal to use it to scrub…stuff….off my skin, but I did anyway. Hopefully they could launder it or something.
“Errr. Thank you, Your Grace.” I tried to arrange the towel over my legs. Standing in front of the ruler of the city was one thing—standing in front of her in your underwear was something else again. Although in truth, she didn’t look much like a ruler right now. She looked smaller than she did in the parades and when I’d seen her at court. Smaller and older and a great deal more tired. When she walked, there was a faint hint of a shuffle, as if one of her knees pained her. There were dark purple half-moons under her eyes, and her brief tears had made her nose red and shiny.
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