“That’s all right,” Annabel said, grinning her own satisfaction. “I’ve never actually shown you what the staff can do, have I?”
“How exciting!” Isabella said. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for a demonstration ever since we were in the alley with the Old Parrasians, but I thought that was too frivolous, even for me. Do go ahead.”
“Not here,” said Annabel. “There. At the Records Office. Actually, probably in the room next door. No one will see us if we’re in there, will they?”
“There are two rooms by the Records Office, one on either side. There’s the teachers’ tea room, and the Awesome Aunts’ main office. The Awesome Aunts’ office is probably the safest—they only use it when they meet with parents and Important People.”
“All right,” Annabel said. “We’ll use that one, then.”
“Shall we? I daresay you’re right, but I find myself wondering exactly how you’re planning on spiriting us through a good foot of solid masonry and into the next room.”
“You’ll see,” said Annabel. “All right, take me to the Awesome Aunts’ office.”
Annabel could see the questions fairly bubbling on Isabella’s lips by the time they got to the Awesome Aunts’ office. She would have liked to have drawn out the moment a little longer, enjoying the rare sensation of displaying an ability utterly beyond Isabella’s skill set, but Isabella was so honestly interested that she didn’t have the heart to show off.
Instead, as she had always done in the Castle, Annabel sat cross-legged on the floor, digging for the pencil staff and her small notebook. This one was a new notebook, a present from Melchior at the start of the year, but it had already begun to feel fat and comfortable in her hand when she picked it up. Peter had given her other notebooks, too, but somehow she had always liked the feel of the ones she got from Melchior better, and they’d filled more quickly than the ones from Peter.
Now, in contrast to the last few sketches, which had been sketched with a normal pencil, and would only ever remain drawings, Annabel took up her pencil staff and started on a sketch that began to exist as she drew it. She drew a door; a simple, elegant, useful door in the wall opposite her, dwelling thoughtfully on the mason-work that Isabella said was between the two rooms. If they had to get through masonry, there would need to be a door-frame in heavy, sculpted stone-work, fitted together beautifully and casting deep shadows on the slender door it contained.
“Good heavens!” said Isabella, her eyes turning in wonder from the drawing, to the wall, and back to the drawing.
Annabel didn’t look up, because she already knew what she would see if she did. “You can open it, in a minute,” she said, circling a door-knob with shadow and light. “I don’t know what will be on the other side, though, so be careful. If there’s a bookcase, you could knock down a few books. If there are any breakable things, well…”
“Certainly,” said Isabella, in fascination. “Oh! Are you finished?”
“Yes,” Annabel said, and shut her notebook around the pencil staff. She would have to erase the door later—in a hurry, if anything went wrong—and she didn’t want to have to flip for it. The door was there ahead of her, just as it had been on the page. Once, she had felt a potent mix of excitement and fear whenever she saw something she had drawn come to life. These days, Annabel merely felt a sense of satisfaction. “You might as well open it.”
“Shall I?” Isabella sounded dubious, but her hand was already reaching out.
Annabel grinned. Isabella could never have resisted that urge, even if Annabel hadn’t said anything.
The other girl turned the doorknob with one careful, precise movement of her wrist, and pushed gently at the boards. The door moved, but heavily, and Isabella said, “Ooof! It’s heavy! Perhaps it’s a bookcase after all, Nan! How odd!”
“Actually, that happens fairly often when I don’t know what’s in a room,” Annabel said, matter-of-factly. “And it is a Records Office, after all. There are bound to be account books somewhere.”
“What a fortunate thing the staff wasn’t entrusted to me!” Isabella said frankly. She slipped through the door and gazed around her. “Good heavens, what I couldn’t do with something like that!”
“The staff is all right,” Annabel said, stepping through carefully into the Records Office after Isabella. As a matter of fact, she was very fond of the staff; sometimes it felt more like a pet than an inanimate object. “It wasn’t much fun running around in the castle to get away from Mordion, though.”
She turned a brief circle in the Records Office, taking in the two full walls of filing cabinets, and the shelving that framed the real door with tiny wooden hutches, each hutch containing something small and knicknacky that was different for each hutch. The wall they had entered by was indeed a wall of bookcases, but nothing there looked very interesting unless accounting was a subject of particular passion.
Isabella followed suit, and turned a complete circle. “Look on the bright side, Nan,” she said, with a lingering look at the pigeon-holed and slightly chalky wall. “At least it meant you were able to turn Melchior back into a human.”
“Not to mention giving the country a queen heir again,” added Annabel, irresistibly amused by the order of importance Isabella assigned to the business. “Though I suppose Melchior is happier as a man than a cat, so it’s not all bad.”
Isabella carefully closed the door after them both and asked curiously, “Do you really miss Blackfoot that much?”
“Oh, well…” Annabel trailed away. Isabella so rarely said what she expected her to say. “Not as much as I used to, but more lately. Melchior is being difficult all the time, and even when he was sharp as Blackfoot, at least he was always there. He doesn’t lie to me anymore—actually, I don’t think he’s lied to me since then, even a little bit—but he’s still tricky about what he does and doesn’t say.”
“I can’t help feeling that Melchior is being a bit too clever for himself,” murmured Isabella. “What do you think, Nan; where shall we start?”
“The filing cabinets, I suppose.”
“What exactly are you hoping to find?”
“I don’t know,” Annabel said, “but I keep wondering—if she’s here, how have they got her filed? I mean, what did they say about her as a student—where did she come from? What are their instructions regarding her? Or is she not in the filing system at all?”
“If it comes to that, I’m curious to know how they’ve filed you,” Isabella said. “I should think they had the same problem with you.”
“Oh,” said Annabel again. “Belle, I’ve just thought—what’s her name? The Pretender, I mean?”
“Good heavens,” said Isabella, and giggled. “Now that is something of a problem, isn’t it? Fortunately for us, the filing cabinets seem to be organised by year, and then alphabetically—it will take us a little longer, but I’m sure we’ll find it. Why don’t you look for hers?”
“Why, what are you doing?”
“Looking for ours, of course!” Isabella said irrepressibly.
She was as good as her word; Annabel was still searching through the second filing cabinet for any sign of an unfamiliar name when Isabella found the second of two files and sat down in a corner with every appearance of impish amusement. Annabel might have complained if she hadn’t come across an interesting name herself the next moment.
“Belle?”
“Mm?”
“Do we have a Lady Selma Morton at Trenthams?”
“Dear me!” said Isabella thoughtfully. “We don’t! More interestingly, neither New Civet nor Parras has a Morton title attached to any of its nobles.”
“Isn’t that a bit dangerous?” asked Annabel, pulling the file out. It was very slim—slimmer even than the one Isabella was currently reading, which had Annabel’s own name on it. “Wouldn’t it be very easy for people to discover that?”
“Not at all,” promptly replied Isabella. “There’s nothing easier than creating Old Parrasian nobles, N
an! It’s not particularly successful with me, since I’ve a rather more detailed source of information than most people, but it should be enough for anyone else.”
“A detailed—what, Luck? Does he care about nobles?”
“Not particularly,” said Isabella, “but he does have a library with a few one of a kind books in it that have been tampered with. He used to give me access to his library in exchange for looking after Onepiece once in a while when he and Poly first got married.”
“When you say one of a kind—”
“Oh, nothing magical,” Isabella told her, beckoning her forward so that they could both look at the Lady Selma file. “They’ve just been, well, tampered with.”
“I would have thought that would make them less useful rather than more useful,” said Annabel, settling herself down next to Isabella. “But that’s just me. Look, her file is even thinner than mine.”
“Very suspicious,” agreed Isabella. “The books are useful, Nan, because of who it is that tampered with them.”
“All right, who tampered with them?”
“Nobody knows for sure,” said Isabella. She added, frankly, “Well, nobody who is willing to share it with me, at any rate. I have an idea that Poly and Luck know who it is, and from a few things Melchior has said, I gather there’s somebody altering tiny pieces of the past to help shape now in the way it’s meant to be shaped.”
“I didn’t think it was possible to travel in time,” Annabel said. “At first, anyway. Peter said it was impossible and he’s usually right about things like that. But then we got caught in the castle and when it spat us back out, there we were, three years in the past. If someone has been meddling in the past, Peter will want to know about it. Oh! Perhaps that’s what he’s doing at the moment. Melchior wouldn’t tell me.”
“That’s probably why Poly and Luck don’t talk about it much. At any rate, in Luck’s library are the only books in the Two Monarchies that someone has altered, at the time they were written, to include correct information—and clues about mysterious happenings that should certainly happen.”
Annabel giggled. “Are you sure it wasn’t Luck himself? It sounds like the sort of thing he’d do—he’s always dropping hints. Oh! Well, if it comes to that, it’s right up Rorkin’s alley, too!”
Isabella sighed enviously. “I do envy you, Nan! You’ve even met Rorkin!”
“You shouldn’t,” Annabel said bluntly. “He’s even worse than Luck to understand. I only like him because he seems to like me, otherwise I wouldn’t like him at all.”
“That’s an odd reason to like someone,” remarked Isabella. “However, since I’m never sure whether Raoul likes or loathes me, I shouldn’t speak too loudly. I don’t think this file will be terribly useful, Nan; it’s bare bones and not very interesting bones at that.”
“At least we know her name is Lady Selma Morton,” Annabel said. “For what that’s worth!”
“It’s information worth having, if only for the fact that we know she’s a Pretender noble as well as a pretender queen heir. I’m very much afraid, Nan, that the investigating of Lady Selma Morton’s real antecedents will fall to Melchior’s lot—I have a few connections, but none that will be useful for this sort of questioning. It’s the sort of questioning I usually do on my own behalf, but I fancy we won’t have the chance to ask around New Civet about a newly minted Lady Selma.”
“Bother,” said Annabel gloomily. “Oh well, I suppose that’s all right. I want to talk to Melchior anyway.”
“Should you talk to him just yet, do you think, Nan? Shouldn’t you like to have some more information first?”
“I don’t think so,” said Annabel decidedly, climbing to her feet once again. “I’m certain he’s not going to tell me anything; but I want to give him the chance to tell me before I find out what I can from elsewhere.”
“In that case, I approve,” Isabella said. She rose and dusted herself delicately, and replaced the files she had purloined just as delicately. “Shall we meet once again when class begins? I believe you’re right; we can achieve more each alone.”
Annabel wasn’t entirely sure how much she could achieve alone, but she had the feeling that for this interview with Melchior at least, she would prefer Isabella not to be present. She was quite sure she wouldn’t be successful in getting information out of Melchior, and she was even more certain that she preferred to be without witness to her failure.
13
Melchior wasn’t in his room when she got there, so Annabel sat down near enough to the window to be able to see what was happening outside without being seen herself through the window. It was the stable side of the school, so it wasn’t likely that any of the girls who were trying to peep through the Pretender’s windows would see her, but she would rather not take that chance while she was visiting Melchior. On the other hand, it also meant there was little for Annabel to see in the way of alleviating boredom; the occasional footman wandered briefly between the cover of the stable roof and the covered carriageway, and Annabel once caught sight of Alice flitting around the stables—delivering a message to Dannick?—but there was otherwise very little to see.
Annabel left the window and was making herself a cup of tea by the time Melchior got back. He didn’t seem surprised to see her in his room, though Annabel thought his face might have brightened.
“Making yourself at home, Nan?” he asked.
“What’s yours is mine,” Annabel said. “Didn’t you know?”
“That includes the biscuits, does it?”
“Especially the biscuits,” Annabel averred. “They don’t give us these lovely gingery ones at tea; I don’t think they’re high class enough for the richer girls, and they’re far too big to be dainty finger food.”
“I wasn’t aware that ginger was such a plebeian root,” said Melchior. “Oh, are you making a cup for me as well? How kind of you.”
Annabel, pouring another cup, shrugged. “I might as well. If we’re going to be talking back and forth, we might as well have something to drink.”
“I suppose you’re here about the Pretender,” said Melchior, surprising her a great deal by cutting directly to the chase.
Annabel’s eyes opened very wide. She didn’t resist when Melchior, smiling faintly, took his teacup out of her hands. At last, she said, “You already knew about this, didn’t you?”
“If I remember correctly,” Melchior said, with a curl of his thin lips that Annabel found far too sarcastic—or perhaps mocking—for her taste, “we were together when we saw her.”
“Yes, but I want to know exactly how you knew to see her,” Annabel retorted, sitting down again. “It’s all very well to say that we were together, but it’s very unlike you to be sneaking around the halls without a very good reason for being exactly where you were.”
“Are we always to be arguing now, Nan? I suppose you won’t believe me if I reiterate once again that it was entirely by accident that I saw the Pretender, and that I didn’t know her for the Pretender then?”
Annabel, remembering one of their recent, more thought-provoking conversations, tried to consider this fairly. Was there any reason why she shouldn’t trust Melchior? She had trusted him since she was a child; and, except for a brief period after discovering he had been lying to her for some time, she had trusted him since escaping the castle.
“Well,” she said, “if you say that you knew nothing at all about a Pretender—”
There was a thoughtful silence that Melchior didn’t fill with either a confirmation or a denial. Annabel thought back to the way he had worded his statement, and her eyes narrowed.
“Well, that’s rich! Telling me I don’t trust you and asking me why we’re always arguing, when you’re very carefully not telling lies in a deceptive way.”
“Ah, Nan!” sighed Melchior. Annabel was almost certain there was laughter in his voice, but there was a kind of solemnity to it as well. “Once you learn to be suspicious, you seem to have the dreadful knack for separ
ating right between the bones. Very well, perhaps I knew something of a Pretender. How I knew it, however, I can’t share.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t share that, either.”
“Rude,” said Annabel again, gloomily unsurprised. Isabella was right; they would have to use other means of questioning Melchior. There was certainly a lot that he wasn’t telling her, and Annabel wasn’t content not to know it. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Melchior to tell her exactly what she needed to know; it was that she wanted to be the one to decide what she needed to know, and Melchior didn’t seem to share that desire.
“All right,” Annabel said, drawing a small, determined breath through her nose and setting down her teacup. “Then you’d better watch out, Melchior.”
“Had I?” murmured Melchior. There was a smile lingering around his mouth, and a brightness to his eyes that Annabel hadn’t seen for some time. “What will you do, Nan?”
“You’ll see,” she retorted. “And it will be too late to complain then, so don’t regret it!”
And Melchior, with what Annabel suspected, in surprise, to be a completely sincere anticipation, said, “I look forward to it, Nan. Oh, are you going at once? You might as well finish your tea—and where else will you get a ginger biscuit the size of a saucer?”
“All right,” Annabel said, careful to convey the air of one conferring a favour. “But only on account of the biscuits.”
Annabel found Isabella in their library a little later. There must have been an explosives class going on, because when she slipped through the door, at least half a dozen voices yelped, “Don’t step there!”
Annabel froze. “Delysia, is that you?”
Delysia looked up, her cheeks rosy and her curly hair free about her face. “Oh! Nan! You’re just in time! Please don’t step on any of the little brown buttons, though.”
“What brown—good grief, I can hardly see them! What are they?”
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