His Royal Whiskers

by Sam Gayton

  “Don’t worry,” Teresa said, shaking him from his thoughts. “There’s a way to convince you—every single bit of you—that our plan and our potion is the right thing to do.” She bit her lip. “But it’ll be hard on you, Pieter. I wouldn’t be your best friend if I didn’t tell you that.”

  He raised his head. “And I wouldn’t be your best friend if I didn’t trust you,” he said. “What is it, then? What will convince me?”

  She furrowed her brow, started several times to explain, until finally she just said simply: “The truth.”

  Pieter scratched his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Teresa gave a small smile and took a step backwards. “Then I’ll let our fairy folkmother explain,” she said.

  That’s when Pieter noticed the little old grandma in the corner.

  5

  Peekaboo from the Fairy Folkmother

  Standing by the fireplace, utterly still, was the most camouflaged old granny Pieter had ever seen. She resembled nothing so much as a chameleon: boggly eyes, leathery skin, gnarled hands clutching her old broom as if it were a branch. Her dress and shawl were made from the Petrossian royal colors—emerald, iron, and sky blue—in the same pattern as the Winter Palace’s wallpaper, making her blend in perfectly with the chimney-breast wall behind her.

  “Holy Sohcahtoa!” Pieter breathed. How long had the old grandma been standing there? She’d just appeared, as if by magic.

  “Pieter Abadabacus, meet our fairy folkmother: Amnabushka Baba Gale,” Teresa said, introducing them. “I’ve known Amna for a long, long time.”

  Amnabushka gave a crooked little bow. “Tallymaster and me have met before, my Patra,” she said.

  With a jolt, Pieter realized that was true. He had seen Amnabushka before: not just once, but thousands of times. She was always up and down the palace corridors, brushing away dust with her old broom of birch. Almost every day, on his way to his tallychamber or War Council meetings, Pieter had passed her by without a second glance. He tried to remember her entry in the Groansday book.

  49: AMNABUSHKA, PALACE SWEEP.

  Born in Tumber, conquered in the Western Woodn’t. Age: 89,801.

  He’d always assumed that her age must have been an error or a joke. But suddenly, with a strange prickling feeling, he wondered if it was. The wildfolk measure their age not in years but in the miles they have traveled, Teresa had said. Could Amnabushka really be her fairy folkmother, like in Cindestrella and all the other stories? Why else would she appear, here and now at their hour of need?

  “How did you get up here?” Pieter asked her.

  “By broom,” said Amnabushka, holding it out to him.

  Pieter gave her a skeptical glance. “You flew?”

  Amna gave a mad old laugh that ended in a sneeze. “Are we wildfolk nothing but simple fairy tale witches to you? No, my broom brought me here because dust gets everywhere—so because I am the Palace Sweep, I am allowed where I wish.”

  “The guards always let old Amna pass,” Teresa explained. “She was the one who slipped the snoozeweed in the Czar’s samovar on Alexander’s birthday. And she was the one who was going to pour the Catastrophica down his snoring throat, before Operation: His Royal Whiskers went wrong.”

  “Guards just look right through me,” Amna said. “Especially when I’ve got my peekaboo on.”

  Suddenly, she hummed, fluttered her fingers up and down her broom as if it were an oboe, and drew a hieroglyph in the air with her thumb.

  And Pieter couldn’t see her anymore.

  It wasn’t that she was invisible. Pieter knew she was still there. He just couldn’t notice her. The first time he tried, he blinked, and realized he was actually staring at the fireplace instead. He rubbed his eyes, tried again, and got distracted by a bit of peeling wallpaper behind her.

  Pieter grit his teeth and squinted, forcing himself not to look away from the spot where he knew Amnabushka stood. The old granny was like dust in his eyes. Pieter couldn’t look at her for more than a moment before he had to wipe her away.

  “She knows magic!” The realization was so sudden Pieter couldn’t stop from blurting it out.

  Wiping away the air with one hand, Amnabushka took off her peekaboo enchantment. “Babapatra only taught me the small spells,” she said, and threw back her shawl.

  Pieter breathed in sharply. Beneath her striped hood, Amnabushka Baba Gale had starry eyes and long white hair tied in a hundred braids. Swinging at the end of each one was a charm: little bells the shape of foxgloves, a marbled cat’s eye, twine-tied sprigs of mintflower, a wooden ankh, a reindeer’s tooth . . . and an iron wedding ring.

  “You’re not just one of the wildfolk,” Pieter whispered. “You’re one of the Baba Sisters.”

  Over the past few months, Pieter had tried to find out more about the roaming people, looking for some clue as to Teresa’s origins. There were dozens of different wildfolk: some tracked the reindeer herds across the Waste; others took great vaulted circus tents from town to town; still more lived in colorful trundle wagons and kept quiet company with the trees.

  None were quite like the Baba Sisters. It was said they began back in the reign of Boris of the Nine Wives, who had tried to force Babapatra, Queen of Eglyph, to marry him. She had escaped instead, and freed his nine brides too, and fled deep into the Western Woodn’t with them to hide.

  There, she taught them magic.14

  Others joined them—those widowed and wearied by the endless wars—and soon they were a gang of feared outlaws known as the Baba Sisters.

  Every czar since Boris had sent soldiers into the trees, to track down their pyramid camps. The Baba Sisters had been hunted mercilessly. Over the years, the nine brides had been recaptured and enslaved one by one, until finally Babapatra was killed at the Battle of One Knee.

  “Yes, a Baba Sister I was, many miles ago,” said Amna, touching the iron ring charm in her hair. “And a bride of Boris before that. And a girl of Albion before that. Three lives I’ve lived, and three names. I was born as Abigail, and then I became Baba Gale, but now I am just old Amnabushka. A crone in the corner no one notices, gathering dust.”

  “But why?” Pieter said to Amna in wonder. “Why be a slave for so long? If you’re some kind of witch, why don’t you fly off on your broom? And why don’t you take the Czar away with you, while you’re at it, and drop him on an iceberg in the middle of the Boreal Sea?”

  Amnabushka swung her head slowly to look at Teresa, her charms going tinkle and chink.

  “I know, I know,” Teresa said, rolling her eyes. “He sounds like an idiot when you first meet him. Give him a chance.” She took Pieter’s arm. “Of course Amna can’t fly, Pieter. Levitation is a powerful spell. It requires asking Gravity to temporarily forget about bringing you back to the ground—something it’s not going to do unless it owes you a huge favor.”

  “And even then,” Amna explained, “you must be very polite. Magic, after all, is simply an Asking. And an Asking is never granted if you do not say your please-and-thank-yous.”

  “Not even Babapatra knew a spell as big as flying,” Teresa continued.

  “If only she had,” said Amna, sorrow glittering in her eyes. She stared out the window at the Fountain of Sobs, where the marble Queen of Eglyph stood still at the end of all her miles, and wept bitter tears of defeat. “Maybe then her soul would not have been sent away with the Pale Traveler at the Battle of One Knee, and maybe I would still be free.”

  Pieter tried not to feel disappointed in their fairy folkmother. “So if you can’t fly, what magic can you do?” he asked.

  “Pieter!” Teresa nudged him and scowled. “Questioning a Baba Sister’s magic is rude.”

  Amna straightened her crooked spine. “I know the whistle that brings forth a hovering light that leads you to something lost. I can charm a bell so that it chimes whenever it hears lies. I have my peekaboo.”

  Pieter tried his best to look impressed. It seemed like their fairy folkmother knew spe
lls of traveling, and trickery, and disguise. Useful when hiding out in the Woodn’t but not right now. They needed thunderbolts called from the sky. Swords imbued with holy power. Things like that.

  In short, they needed a miracle.

  “Can’t you summon us an angel?” he asked. “Or shapeshift into a dragon? You couldn’t by any chance make a little kitten grow enormous, could you?”

  Teresa nudged him again, harder. “She does know a curse that’ll make your eyebrows grow up your forehead until they reach your hair. Sort your manners out!”

  “My spells are small,” said Amna, hobbling up to him. “But still, perhaps, I can help. It is you and my Patra Teresa who hold the power to defeat the Czar—it is within your minds. But part of your mind is locked, Pieter. Maybe I can provide the key.”

  Leaning forward, Amnabushka touched her glass cat’s eye charm and sighed across the laboratory windowpane.

  “This is the spell for homesickness,” she said, drawing a hieroglyph on the glass. “The spell that shows you where you are from.”

  Pieter frowned. “What good will seeing my tallychamber . . .”

  The words died in his throat. The window was changing, like a magic mirror in a fairy tale. Outside, the Winter Palace and the world beyond it could still be dimly seen—but another image was misting over it, like a breath across the glass.

  It wasn’t his tallychamber.

  Pieter stared through the window at a place far, far away. A place he had not seen for Bloom and Swoon and many a moon. A place he still saw now and then in his dreams.

  But not like this. This was no dream. It was a nightmare.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  He felt Teresa lay a hand on his arm.

  He heard her say, “They made the smart choice.”

  * * *

  14. Not particularly hard to do. Even those who do not believe in magic will know a little: for magic is only words, said or sung at the right time and in the right way. Only words, and nothing else. Why else do you think it is called a “spell?”

  Here is an example: Have you noticed how the phrase “Would you like pudding?” has the amazing ability to make room in your belly for more food, when just ten seconds ago you were certain that even one more mouthful would be enough to make you burst? “Would you like pudding?” is a powerful magic spell, you see.

  6

  The City through the Window

  Through the window, Pieter saw his home. The city of Eureka. The tall walls, the exam halls, the tallymarkets where things were not bought and sold, but taught and solved. The chessboard patterned plaza that led up to the Quantifax, the home of Eureka’s wisest mathemagician, whose great golden domed palace sat on the highest hill of the city, gleaming like an enormous bald head.

  But it was just the city Pieter saw, and nothing else. The halls were empty, the tallymarkets deserted. Nobody walked the crumbling roads that lay cracked and dusty in the sun. If he squinted, Pieter noticed the gold paint had peeled off the roof of the Quantifax, showing the white bleached stone beneath. It looked like the half-buried skull of a giant. The lifeless streets below it were like a jumble of old bones.

  The city was a graveyard.

  “Eureka doesn’t exist anymore,” he heard Teresa say. “That’s the truth. That’s why you have to fight.”

  “The Czar broke his promise,” said Amnabushka. “Czars always do.”

  “He told your parents they’d be safe if they surrendered you,” Teresa said. “But he lied. After he took you, he poisoned Eureka’s water wells with the Black Death.”

  Now Pieter noticed the boarded-up windows of each darkened house, and the red cross of plague painted upon every door. Cross after cross after red cross, like the city had taken a test and made mistake after mistake after mistake.

  “The Black Death?” Pieter shook his head. It didn’t make sense. The Czar kept just one vial of that deadly plague sealed away in his fortress to the north as a weapon of last resort. “He always says he’ll only use it in defense, if Petrossia is attack—”

  He stopped himself. Another of the Czar’s lies. One that everyone believed. But there had been more than one vial, he realized. More than one drop saved, ready to destroy an enemy. He could see it with his own eyes: the Czar used it like a weapon—a weapon that killed whole cities that threatened him. And no one in Petrossia knew.

  “You were the only survivor,” Teresa said, touching his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  Pieter couldn’t speak. He couldn’t think. He could only stare at the city through the window. It was like looking at a sum he didn’t understand. His parents, his tutors, his class . . . they were all gone. There was just him now. One last mathemagician in all the world.

  More than sadness, he felt anger. It rushed into his head like alchemy, dissolving that tiny stubborn part of him that had still wanted just to serve the Czar and survive.

  “Being clever didn’t save them,” he said eventually, his mind changed. “I didn’t save them.” He looked up from the window’s surface, a strange feeling in the center of his chest: utter, unshakable, hard-as-stone certainty. “But I can still save others,” he said. “We can still beat the Czar.”

  Amnabushka touched her glass cat’s eye again, and wiped Eureka from the glass. “Now he sees,” she said to Teresa. “Now his mind is opened. Start your experimenting again, my Patra. This time you will succeed.”

  Teresa threw her arms around Amna. “Our very own fairy folkmother. You’ve saved us.”

  The old sweep cackled and coughed. “Quickly, then,” she said, pushing them both toward the books and the equipment. “Three days left, and much to do.”

  Pieter nodded. He put away his thoughts of Eureka and his parents. Every bit of his brain was focused on the potion they needed to make.

  Flutter and hum, wriggle of thumb—Amnabushka Baba Gale cast her peekaboo again and raised up her shawl. The door closed with a quiet click, and she was gone.

  Pieter and Teresa were too busy experimenting to notice.

  7

  Grimaldi’s Recipe, with Diagrams and Everything

  Making the growth potion turned out to be totally impossible—but only a little bit impossible. To succeed, Pieter and Teresa would have to break several Laws of Reality.

  This is not impossible to do. The laws that govern reality are like a flock of grazing sheep. Most of the time, they stand around, safe in the knowledge that gravity makes things fall, and E=MC2, and the grass they are chewing is green.

  But Pieter’s genius and Teresa’s imagination pounced on them like wolves, and suddenly all of reality was running around in panic, and in that chaos Up was Down, and E was the square root of minus one, and the grass they munched on wasn’t green anymore and actually made of socks. Anything was possible.

  So it was that two days from the end of Dismember, Pieter and Teresa made their breakthrough.

  It happened at nine of the morn. Teresa was busy dissecting an apple seed (she was sure that inside there’d be a clue as to how tiny things grew bigger). Pieter, meanwhile, was methodically searching through Alchemaster Blüstav’s books, page by page. Each one was stuffed full of alchemical recipes and inventions—most of them either unfathomable, or useless.

  “This is all about turning iron to silver. Didn’t work out so well for Blüstav.”

  “Can’t read this one. Nice pictures though.”

  “Well, Teresa, if we ever want to know how to make a fartsichord, this is just the book we need.” 15

  He heaved the book back on the shelf, hauled off the next one, and yelled out.

  Teresa glanced up from her apple pip dissection, eyes blinking big as saucers behind a pair of scopical glasses. “Either you’ve seen a truly gigantic spider crawl out from the shelves, or you’ve discovered something interesting,” she said.

  “Interesting!” Pieter cried, lugging over the book. His hands shook. “Very, very interesting!”

  There it was on the page, written in l
ong spidery scrawl. With diagrams and everything.

  A Recipe for Size

  1. Take the shell of an acorn, this will be your cauldron

  2. Into the acorn shell put:

  • a strand of hair (for hair grows long)

  • a shoot of bamboo (for bamboo grows tall)

  • and a smile (for smiles grow wide)

  3. Mix together

  “Is that it?” Pieter was gobsmacked. It seemed so simple. “Only three instructions?”

  Teresa shook her head in disbelief. She scrutinized the book’s front cover. “All this time, and the answer was already scribbled down a hundred years before by some old bearded man with a cloak and an unpronounceable name.”

  “Libra Gargantua,” read Pieter slowly. “By Grimaldi the Most Wise. I think you threw that at my head once.”

  “Well it wasn’t very good at knocking you out, but it might be useful now,” said Teresa, plonking the book down by the cauldron. “It’s worth a go, isn’t it? At least we won’t wreck another cauldron. Look around for a shell of an acorn, Pieter.”

  He rushed to the window. It was the second-to-last day of Dismember, and below the North Spire the trees in the Winter Gardens all had leaves the color of flame.

  “There!” he said, pointing beyond the ivy maze. “Look, Teresa!”

  She jostled him to one side so she could see. “You sure that’s an elder oak? Not a rattlesnoak?”

  Pieter squinted, trying to see for sure. It was an elder oak—rattlesnoaks shook their acorns like maracas, to warn away any woodcutters who might be thinking of chopping them down.

  “But how do we go and get one?” he wondered. “The Czar ordered us to stay here in the laboratory. If we’re caught in the gardens it’s a certain probability that we’ll be—”