The rain had stopped again, but the air was still wet. Sir Tombin had at last acknowledged that he was weary of driving the carriage, and had succumbed when Sagandran insisted he and Flip could do the job just as well, especially since Snowmane seemed to understand what Sagandran wanted him to do without having to be given commands. Now they were on the old road, Snowmane kept following it wherever it might lead. Sagandran had the reins draped across his knees, but this was more for show than anything else.
The old road seemed to know how to climb and how to descend, but nothing in between. Everyone aboard the carriage – and Sagandran was certain Snowmane felt exactly the same, only more so – wished that for just a short spell the road would take them on the flat, but so far it hadn’t chosen to. The horse had spent the entire time since leaving the broader highway either straining to haul them up some crazily steep hill or struggling equally hard to stop them from careering down the other side. Sagandran would call out to Snowmane to take a rest at the top and bottom of the hills. The horse would allow himself just a minute or two, his flanks going in and out like bellows and steaming, even in the dampness, before he trudged determinedly onward. Flip was right in his incessant complaints about the bumps too. If someone hadn’t deliberately scattered boulders and ruts around the roadway with malicious intent, Nature had done a very good imitation.
How long, Sagandran thought miserably, is this going to go on? My bottom must be blue from bruises.
The last time he’d been thrown around like this had been three or four years ago, when Dad had taken him on a little tramp trawler. The sea had been rough that day, and the vessel had been battered about by terrifyingly huge waves. Standing on the bow, half-hidden under Dad’s heavy waterproof jacket and with Dad’s strong arm clamping him firmly in place, Sagandran had loved every moment of it. He’d not realised how many times he’d whacked bits of himself against bits of the boat until later, when Mom had gone into a fit of tut-tutting over the bruises she found as she undressed him that night for his bath. Today, by contrast, he was aware of every jolt and thump his body was suffering, and he wasn’t enjoying the experience at all.
He wondered how Perima and Sir Tombin were faring inside the carriage. He suspected they were having a long and earnest talk, despite all the buffeting. Sir Tombin seemed a good sort of fellow to have a long and earnest talk with.
Just like Dad.
Sagandran’s eyes were stinging for some reason. He wiped his sleeve across them, forgetting that he was still clutching his little friend.
“Oi!”
“Oh, sorry Flip.”
Sagandran set the small creature down on the seat beside him once more, only for another bump to send Flip flying again.
“Can you stop that?” cried Flip as Sagandran retrieved him.
“It’d help if you were a bit bigger and heavier,” Sagandran grumbled.
“Just be thankful I’m not. I feel like biffing someone’s nose, and yours is the nearest.”
“Big talk, small fry. I wonder how far I could throw you if I really tried?”
The badinage continued between them. Sagandran wondered if they were doing the same sort of thing that Perima had been talking about: insulting and threatening each other because it was a way of not admitting the depths of their friendship.
He also suddenly realized he knew something about Perima that she didn’t know he knew. She hadn’t sneezed again, not once, since they’d let her out of the barrel, and he suspected she hadn’t needed to sneeze at all while she was in there either. Yelling out to them that she was really, really desperate to “powder her nose” would have been, in some obscure way, an admission of weakness, whereas attracting attention through irresistible sneezes wasn’t. He smiled, liking her more than ever despite all her prickliness and bugbears.
They lurched wearily to the crest of the next hill and Snowmane paused. Before them was the deepest valley they’d yet encountered, and Sagandran’s heart sank as he thought of how laborious it was going to be for poor Snowmane to drag them up its other side. Then he saw something that caused him to pick up the reins for only the second time. He twitched them to tell the horse he wanted this halt to be more than just a brief breather.
“Sir Tombin,” he yelled. “Come out here and have a look at this.”
The carriage rocked as the Frogly Knight emerged.
“Ah,” he said, “we’re here. That’s old Samzing’s house.”
In the valley below, beside a small lake, stood a dilapidated cottage. Sagandran would have taken the building to be an abandoned derelict had it not been for the coil of smoke rising from its chimney. In fact, now that he looked more carefully, he could see that it wasn’t much like a cottage at all. It was more like a lighthouse with small towers sticking out from the main structure in incongruous places. Surrounding it were avenues of beautifully kept maple trees, not the tumbledown wall he’d thought was there at first.
He wondered how his eyes could have deceived him like this, and then he remembered that Sir Tombin’s friend, Samzing, was a mage. Maybe the ramshackle cottage was what Samzing wanted people who arrived unannounced in Loristo Valley to see – at least at first, before he’d decided whether they were welcome visitors or otherwise. The wizard must have detected them almost as soon as they’d arrived at the brow of the hill overlooking the valley, then scanned them in some magical manner to make sure he wanted them to know he was there. Perhaps Samzing had even been able to tell that Sir Tombin was one of their party.
This last supposition of Sagandran’s proved to have been perfectly correct when, at last, a drooping Snowmane brought their carriage to a halt in front of the lighthouse-like building. There was a tremendous crashing and banging going on within, but it paused just long enough for a cracked voice to yell, “Quackie, you rogue. Forgive me this sorry welcome, but …”
At which point the expensive-sounding ruckus started all over again.
Sagandran looked around him at the tall maples, their generous branches moving slightly in the breeze from the lake. In other circumstances, he’d be glad of the opportunity to stay here for a few days. The restful feeling in the air reminded him of Grandpa Melwin’s cabin in the forest, a place where the passage of time seemed somehow different from that in the rest of the world. But thinking about the cabin emphasized why they couldn’t stop here for long. While saving Sagaria was a wooly large concept for Sagandran to get his mind around, saving Grandpa Melwin was something his brain was capable of accepting as a matter of urgency.
“Behave yourself,” came the voice from within the house, this time in the loudest whisper Sagandran could ever remember hearing. “We’ve got visitors. You want to look your best in front of visitors, don’t you?”
The noise subsided a little and the door creaked halfway open. Through the gap, Sagandran could see a pair of bushy eyebrows and below them, a long white beard that was almost as dirty and certainly as tangled as the horse’s mane had been. Completing this ensemble was an equally dirty blue robe that either had arcane magical symbols woven into it or had been splashed by numerous disgusting substances since it had last been washed.
“Good to see you, Quackie. Who’re these twerps?”
Sir Tombin, predictably, gave one of his deepest bows.
“I have the honor to present to you, my dear friend Samzing, the Princess Royal of Mattani, Her Royal Highness the Princess Perima—”
“Hm. Looks like a brat to me.”
“—and an astonishingly brave quester from afar, the fine young Sagandran Sacks, who’s come all the way from the Earthworld in hopes of saving Sagaria from the hordes of the Shadow Master—”
“Another brat.”
“—and the toast of Mishmash, Flip, the modestly self-titled Adventurer Extraordinaire.”
“A rat.” The old man hesitated, clearly wondering if there might be some flaw in his hospitality. “The horse looks fairly sensible though. You could bring him inside, if you like.”
“The
horse’s name is Snowmane.”
Samzing sniffed. “Pity about that.”
“My dear friend—” began Sir Tombin.
“Do any of them know anything about buttons?”
Perima groaned. “I do,” she said, stepping forward. “At my father’s palace I tried to keep as much distance between myself and the courtly seamstresses as I could, but it wasn’t … always possible.”
“Capital,” cried Samzing, clapping his hands. “Most excellent child.”
“That’s why they call me ‘excellency,’” murmured Perima sourly.
“Do come in, all of you,” the wizard was saying, throwing the door wide. “I’ve had a sudden onset of button problematics this morning, I don’t mind telling you, and it needs the attentions of an expert.”
As Sagandran followed Sir Tombin and Perima through the door, brushing past Samzing, he noticed the same spark of playfulness in the old wizard’s eyes he’d so often seen in Grandpa Melwin’s. He was just kidding us, Sagandran thought. Just pulling our legs when he called us brats.
“I like brats,” Samzing whispered, chuckling from behind his beard. “They’re my favorite form of children.”
He can read my mind!
“Yes, I can. Except it’s the other way round. Just at the moment I can’t not read people’s minds. Frightful nuisance. A spell that went haywire. I think the trouble was the eye of newt I bought wasn’t as fresh as the grocer claimed. Hurry on through, young boybrat – hurry on through. The spell should wear off in due time.”
Soon they were sitting around what was presumably, underneath the clutter of years, a table. Snowmane appeared in the doorway, and Sagandran gestured to him to stay there. It was difficult enough adding three full-size people and a Flip to the shambles inside Samzing’s house, without putting a horse in the mix.
“Lunch,” said the wizard, once more clapping his hands. “What a good idea. Anyone care to join me?”
“Lunch at dinner time?” hissed Flip in Sagandran’s ear. The little creature had hopped up onto his shoulder.
“Hush,” Sagandran whispered back. “He can read your thoughts.”
“It is only dinnertime, Master Flip,” said Samzing severely, “for those who were so stupid as to get up in the morning, rather than at a sensible time of the day.”
“Dear friend,” said Sir Tombin, “we have something important to tell you, something that concerns the fate of the entire—”
“But not,” interrupted the wizard, “as important as buttons. First, let me tell you what happened to me this morning.”
They sat and listened, Sir Tombin fidgeting restlessly, while Samzing recounted his sorry tale. He’d been cooking up something nice for lunch – he couldn’t remember what now, because he hadn’t finished cooking it – when one of the buttons at the neck of his robe had popped off. This would have been a nuisance to most people, but to a magic-user it was more than that. Landing on the floor and bouncing a couple of times as it rejoiced in its newfound freedom, the button had made a beeline for a hiding place. Samzing had conjured up the foulest imprecations he knew (there was still a faint blue haze hanging in the room) but still the button had refused to return to him. The racket they’d heard from outside had been Samzing resorting to physical force in his search for it.
“So you see, I need a button whisperer.”
“A button whisperer?” Sagandran felt as perplexed as his friends looked.
“Someone who whispers to buttons, of course. Someone whom buttons obey.”
As the old man spoke, Sagandran remembered hearing all about horse whisperers – hadn’t there been a movie called just that: The Horse Whisperer? He supposed the notion of a button whisperer made a certain sort of cockeyed sense. He turned to Perima.
“Quite right, boybrat. Then who should turn up on my doorstep just when I needed her but, courtesy of my old pal Quackie here, a girlbrat who’s also a buttons expert – or so she says.”
“I didn’t actually say—” began Perima.
“As near as,” corrected the wizard. “Everybody knows that ‘as near as’ is the same as the whole thing.”
Eh? thought Sagandran.
“Everybody but brats,” amended Samzing, scowling at him.
“Well, I don’t suppose it’d hurt to give it a try,” said Perima apprehensively.
Sagandran looked around him. The room held a billion places a rogue button could hide. It looked like the inside of a junk shop. Papers, pens, dice, colored crystals, mummified animals, a half-eaten apple with a worm in it, pointed hats, a cross-looking grandfather clock, wands of all different sizes, maps, a cauldron, curious alchemical equipment, a stuffed albatross whose wing was leaking straw, a pair of muddy soccer boots. I wish my mom could see this, he thought. She’d never complain about my bedroom again.
Perima was saying things like, “Here, butty, butty,” and, “Goooood little button-wutton,” but the errant button seemed to be lying low.
Sagandran was puzzled. “Why can’t you just use magic to get your button back?” he asked Samzing.
The wizard looked affronted. “Why, because it’s a magic button, of course.”
“Yes, but you’re magic too.”
“It’s my magic button, you see, boybrat. So it has as much magic as I do myself, only not nearly as much self-discipline.”
Sagandran looked around the room again and wondered about the “self-discipline” part.
“Everything is in its proper place,” said the wizard defensively, “even if it doesn’t look that way.”
“I’ve got some nice thread here for you, butsy-wutsy,” said Perima, oblivious to this exchange as she concentrated on a distant dirty corner of the room where there might or might not have been a furtive rustle.
“Here,” said Flip in Sagandran’s ear, “let me.”
He hopped down onto Sagandran’s lap then onto the floor, where he somehow – magically? – found a clear space. Turning toward the corner Perima was staring at, he put his forepaws on his rounded hips. “If you don’t come out of there, right this minute, I’m going to come in and beat you senseless, you little creep.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then the button slunk out of hiding. Sagandran never thought he’d see a button he could describe as shamefaced, but he had now. It went to stand by one of Samzing’s sandals and looked up the wizard’s leg as if begging for forgiveness.
Samzing stooped down and scooped it up.
“I’ve always wanted to call someone ‘you little creep,’” explained Flip to the room at large. “It’s the ‘little’ part that appeals, you see.”
After congratulations and, from Samzing, effusive thanks, they all settled down and Sir Tombin told the adventurers’ stories. The old magician could just as easily have read them out of Sir Tombin’s mind, but he seemed to enjoy hearing them from his friend’s lips. Samzing closed his eyes as Sir Tombin related his narrative, acting out some of the more exciting parts. It was hard to tell whether he was still awake, but every time Sagandran thought the wizard had dozed off he’d give out a sudden bark of “really?” or “amazing!”
“So, you’re going to Spectram,” said Samzing when Sir Tombin was done. “A wise decision, if I may say so. What Queen Mirabella doesn’t know is hardly worth knowing. Let me digest your tale, old friend, at the same time as I digest my … well, I suppose you could call it lunch by now.”
The night was dark outside the window.
“Golma!” roared Samzing suddenly, making everyone jump.
At once, there was the sound of heavy movement from the room above.
“A treasure, a real treasure,” explained the wizard confidentially. “You’ll adore her, I just know it.”
“I already do, old friend,” said Sir Tombin. Sagandran kept forgetting that the Frogly Knight had been here before, and it seemed the wizard sometimes did as well.
Footsteps boomed on the stairs, and into the room tromped a woman who appeared to be made entirely of bronze, as i
f she were a statue brought to life.
“That’s exactly what she is,” said Samzing, nodding toward Sagandran. “How in the world did you know? Never mind. Let me make the introductions—”
“What do you want, you old coot?” said Golma before he could start.
The magician looked crestfallen. “You’re still angry?”
“Yes.”
“It was all a mistake, I tell you.”
“It was, indeed.” She was tapping a metallic foot.
Samzing looked heavenward as if begging for help from there. “She said she wanted a palm tree for the garden so I – very lovingly, I might add – conjured one up for her. Only I must have been ambiguous when I was reciting the incantation, because what appeared was a tree all covered with hands instead of leaves. ‘Palm,’ you see – an easy enough confusion.”
“Every time I go anywhere near it,” said Golma, “it cracks coarse jokes and tries to goose me.”
“I’m sure it means well,” said Samzing abstractedly.
“Hmmf.”
“Now, Golma my lovely, you must meet these nice visitors.”
Once the introductions were over, Samzing announced that he was going to conjure up a delicious feast for their lunch. A look of consternation crossed the statue’s face, and she put a restraining hand on his arm.
“No,” she said. “I remember only too well what happened the last time. It was worse, much worse than the palm tree. I’ll cook us something.”
“And I,” said Perima, “will feed Snowmane and make sure he’s settled for the night.”
As Perima hurried out the door Sagandran yearned to follow her, but he sensed that she didn’t want his company. Perhaps after a night’s sleep she’d be able to relax with him again.
He hoped.
The rest of the evening was devoted to talk, laughter and fine food – Golma proving to be an excellent and inventive cook. All of their stories had to be told all over again. Sagandran couldn’t work out if his belly hurt from overeating or laughing so much, especially at Perima’s dramatic reconstruction of their encounter with the worg, Brootle. She managed to make both her eyebrows move entirely independently of each other as she mimicked perfectly the worg’s dull-witted tones. Flip told tales about Mishmash folk that had the others pounding their thighs with mirth – like the time Old Cobb had short-sightedly proposed marriage to a juniper tree. Luti Furfoot had spent a week trying to talk him out of his intentions; as a last resort, he told Old Cobb that the juniper tree was already married to somebody else.
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