“And since they come back after riding out, there’s no need to wait for an answer,” agreed Annabel. “All they have to do is check when they come back. Well, if that’s the line of communication between the Old Parrasians and Lady Selma, we’ll have to get a look at a message or two somehow.”
“Without giving away that someone has seen them,” Isabella said, nodding. “I’m certainly not averse to sneaking a peek at their conversation, but I would like to remain undetected if possible.”
“All right. I’ll ask Jess exactly what time they come by,” said Annabel. “But you’ll have to distract the maid who collects the note. If we put it back right away, she shouldn’t notice anyone has looked at it.”
“Very well. In the meantime, I shall liaise with Alice; she’s been absent to a few classes during the week and she hasn’t reported to me since last night. I feel that I shouldn’t contribute to the delinquency of the girls any more than necessary, so perhaps a small word or two is in order. I shall see you in time for Elegant Elementaries of Ensorcellment, Nan.”
In fact, Annabel saw her rather sooner. Shortly before Advanced Conversation began, Isabella accosted her as she exited the library to join the class.
Her usually curved brows quite furrowed, Isabella said, “Nan, have you seen Alice today?”
“I thought the point was that you couldn’t see her,” remarked Annabel, closing the door behind her. She didn’t like to leave it open; no one could enter it without direct permission from either Annabel or Isabella, but if people couldn’t enter it they tended to report the matter to the Awesome Aunts. With the door closed, the security spells made the library significantly harder to see to all but those invited in.
“I don’t mind other people not seeing her,” Isabella said, and it occurred to Annabel that her freckles were just a little bit more prominent than usual—was Isabella actually pale? “But she should have spoken with me last night, and again this morning. That wouldn’t worry me, but the other girls say she hasn’t attended lessons since yesterday morning. There are five demerit marks next to her name in the dormitories.”
Annabel asked sharply, “What was she looking for?”
“That’s the thing,” Isabella said, biting her lip, “she didn’t tell me. I could have pushed, but I should have hated to share anything if I weren’t sure of it, either, so I let her have her head. She’s a bright little thing, and she has only been poking about the school, so she couldn’t have run into too much trouble. Surely not, Nan?”
“Do you think she’s been watching Lady Selma?”
“I think not,” said Isabella. “Whenever I did catch sight of her, she was out at the stables. There’s nothing unusual in that; she loves horses and I’m almost entirely certain there are a couple of hidden passages I haven’t found that start there and come into the school, but even hidden passages pall after a while if there’s no excitement or adventure forthcoming. If she was investigating something she thought big enough to curate, it was out there.”
“We’d better go out to the stables, then,” Annabel said. “Shall we send another one of the girls with a regret slip and a request to see the nurse, or should we try to disrupt the whole lesson before it starts?”
“Certainly I was born to this life,” said Isabella, a brief flash of amusement in her grey eyes, “but then there are the unexpected people like you, who come to this life and make it their own. You will certainly be a very good queen. I’ve an idea you’ll be a good general, too, if it should come to that. By all means, let us disrupt the entire lesson; the more distraction, the better.”
“I’ll send one of the girls to ask Delysia to smuggle something explosive into Advanced Conversation,” said Annabel. “Shall we meet at the stables at eleven?”
“At eleven,” said Isabella, nodding.
At eleven exactly, there was a small, dull pop from the direction of the Advanced Polite Conversation classroom, and an accompanying puff of chalk dust through the three open windows. Annabel, who was passing below the classroom, smiled briefly and went on her way. Isabella was already at the stables, her expression roughly that of an engaged terrier, and was poking methodically into corners, nooks, and crannies with a whip.
“You’ll have to check the stalls with horses,” she said, when Annabel appeared. “I can’t go in those ones.”
Annabel blinked at her. “Are you allergic?”
“Certainly not,” Isabella said. “I am allergic to nothing—in fact, I am entirely, disgustingly healthy and I only sneeze by design or request. I believe I mentioned at the beginning of term that I happen to dislike horses.”
“Dislike?” Annabel found herself grinning. “You mean you’re scared of them!”
“A queen should not jump to conclusions.”
“A subject shouldn’t tell her queen to search stalls that are full of horses,” Annabel countered. “The royal person could be trampled.”
“Oh, well, I suppose that’s true, after all,” said Isabella. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t alter the fact that I can’t enter any of those stalls actually containing horses!”
“Never mind,” Annabel said, still grinning. “I’m mostly ambivalent about horses.”
Fortunately enough, the horses were mostly ambivalent about Annabel as well, and it was a simple though smelly job to search each of the stalls. She had already gone through two stalls that were empty but for straw, a horse, and a few piles of manure, when she found herself in one that was empty even of a horse, but evidently hadn’t been cleaned in a day or two. Annabel stepped through the door, frowning. Although it contained no horse, the door had been shut as though it did, and there was a horse blanket thrown carelessly in one corner.
Annabel looked down at that horse blanket with the vague feeling that a horse blanket ought not to have hands and feet, and said quietly, “Oh.”
It wasn’t a horse blanket. It was a small, crumpled figure with a horse blanket thrown haphazardly over it, as if the person who had thrown both into the stall hadn’t been too concerned one way or the other about how well the body was wrapped, or how well disguised it was.
It hadn’t occurred to Annabel until that moment that she had expected Alice to be in no worse trouble than being locked in a stall as a joke by one of the stable boys. She said, her voice cracking a little, “Belle!”
“Did you—oh!” Isabella stopped in the doorway for the briefest of moments, then hurried forward and dropped to her knees, regardless of straw and dust-coated manure alike. “Alice! Alice, can you hear me?”
“Do you think it’s magic?” Annabel asked anxiously.
“No, I fancy that’s blood beneath her head,” said Isabella. She was even paler than before, although her voice was quite steady. “I believe someone has hit her quite hard—not, thankfully, enough to kill her, for she seems still to be breathing. Nan, do you suppose you can carry Alice’s feet if I support her head and shoulders?”
Annabel didn’t waste time with a reply; she lifted Alice’s feet as Isabella raised the girl’s head and shoulders from the horse blanket. The blue uniform revealed when they lifted Alice away from the horse blanket was torn and grubby, as if Alice had run for quite a way, then crawled, and finally wriggled through something both sharp and dirty.
“The Sanatorium!” panted Isabella. “Quickly!”
They bore Alice to the Sanatorium, stopping for neither wide-eyed classmates nor the hall monitors who began to call out a warning for tardy students and stopped abruptly at the sight of Isabella’s pale face. Annabel, sick to her stomach with the thought that she had not only allowed but encouraged Alice to poke about as best she saw fit, thought she might be about the same shade as Isabella. One of the lockpicking class girls saw them as they came and ran ahead toward the Sanatorium, her feet loud against the hallway floor, to bring the nurse out to meet them.
“Put her on one of the beds,” said the nurse, falling back to hold the door. “I’ll see to her at once.”
They did as they
were told, gently lowering Alice onto the clean white bed, and although Annabel couldn’t see it, she was certain the nurse was already working her own particular brand of magic. There was a line between her brows; and her eyes, scanning Alice from head to toe, seemed to see things that Annabel couldn’t see. The nurse stared at Alice’s head for some time with that same expression, and there was an anxiousness to the air that built up not only from Annabel but from Isabella as well.
“Take her shoes off, Miss Ammett, if you please,” said the nurse. “Miss Farrah, hold her right hand and my left. I shall use you as an energy source.”
Isabella did as she was told without question. Her face might have grown whiter, but Annabel, gently removing Alice’s shoes, didn’t think Isabella grudged the giving of that energy. Although she swayed, she continued to hold both hands until the nurse said, “That’s enough.”
“She’s still too pale,” Annabel said, biting her lips.
Isabella said, “I can keep going. You needn’t stop on my account.”
“That should do it for now,” said the nurse, releasing both of the hands she had been holding. “I’ve stabilised the wound on the back of her head and started the healing process. We’ll need to clean it, but it won’t get any worse. I’ve also started a sustenance magic to build her up enough to wake.”
“Will she be all right?” asked Isabella anxiously.
“She’ll wake, if that’s what you mean,” the nurse said. “Who did this? Someone chased her to exhaustion and then tried to kill her!”
“We don’t know,” Isabella said, her eyes blazing in that too-white face. “But we will certainly make it our business to find out!”
“See that you do,” said the nurse, surprising Annabel a great deal. “I’ve no idea what Alice was playing at, but I’m quite sure it had to do with you, Miss Farrah. That girl adores you.”
“It was my fault, actually,” Annabel said, still sick to her stomach. “She was looking into something for me.”
“Don’t be silly, Nan. You asked me if it was safe, and I said yes. It’s entirely my fault. Will she really be all right, Nurse?”
“She’ll be unconscious for another few days,” the nurse said. She seemed to relent at their aghast faces, because she added, more encouragingly, “I won’t wake her on purpose if she can wake naturally; I can’t see that anything’s been damaged badly, and my Sight is pretty good. If she’d been hit any harder—or any lower—it would have been another story. Whatever you’re doing, Miss Farrah—fix it.”
“We will,” promised Annabel.
A little later, safely in the library, Isabella said, “I really don’t understand.” She wasn’t so pale as she had been, now that the nurse had said there was no danger to Alice beyond another few days of unconsciousness, but her mouth was still very tight. “There should be no one in the school capable of this sort of thing. If it were the village I could understand it, but even Lady Caro would think twice about hitting another girl over the head.”
“Are you sure?” Annabel was doubtful. Everything she had seen about Lady Caro indicated an entirely ruthless personality when it came to her machinations. “She did shoot at that Old Parrasian.”
“Exactly,” said Isabella. “At the Old Parrasian. She wouldn’t hurt a Trenthams girl. Insofar as Lady Caro has loyalty, it’s to Trenthams. I’ve no idea why, but I fancy her life at home isn’t the kindest one. No, it must be one of the footmen or perhaps a master—but I don’t fancy the Deportment Master doing it, and Melchior is the only other master here.”
“Could someone have got inside the grounds?”
Isabella’s brow furrowed, but she said, “There are too many wards. Too many rich girls, too many influential parents—the Awesome Aunts wouldn’t leave that to chance.”
“But if no one from the outside got in,” Annabel said, finishing Isabella’s unspoken conclusion, “then how did Alice nearly get murdered?”
“Exactly so.”
“We can add that to the list of Things We Want To Know,” said Annabel. “In the meantime, shall we have a guard on the door? If someone in the school is responsible for hurting Alice, they might think they killed her. When they find out—”
“Indeed,” Isabella said. Her eyes were still very bright. “In this case, I fully advocate for telling Melchior. He’ll put Dannick on the door—or Raoul, if it comes to that. What next should you like to do, Nan?”
“I want to find out what Lady Selma and the bicycle girls are sending notes about,” said Annabel. “Because if one of the Old Parrasians did that to Alice, I want them out of the village and out of the school. I want to poke them all out of their dirty corners until this place is clean and safe again.”
The next morning dawned bright and hot, but Annabel had no difficulty in rising. There was a sharpness of worry to her stomach that she couldn’t quite place until Isabella said from across the room, “It’s all right, she hasn’t died.”
Isabella was already up—had been up for quite some time, if her well-dressed appearance was anything to go by—her face bright and her eyes dangerously sparkling. “Nurse says she’s perfectly fine, but she still wants her to wake naturally. Since Alice has already been through enough, I thought that best, too.”
The sharp gnawing of worry eased a little, but Annabel asked, “Did you stop the other girls already?”
Isabella nodded. “Every one. They’re not happy about it, but they’ll obey. Dannick was pretty unhappy, too—he says he’ll only take the order to stop directly from you.”
“I’ll have a word with him later,” Annabel said. “All right, how are you going to distract Lady Selma’s maid this morning?”
“Already done, Nan; already done!” airily said Isabella. “Lady Selma’s maid is discovering a distinct lack of left shoes in her room, and a distressing want of stockings. If you should like to nip down to the drop point, I shall go back to loitering around the maid’s room just in case anyone is kind enough to help her find the things she needs.”
Annabel dressed hastily. Surprisingly, Isabella had already left out a frock for her, even though the attempt to gain information from Melchior was over, and she was hurrying down the stairs fifteen minutes later.
Down by the crook in the wall, Jess had said, when Annabel asked her exactly where the bicycle girls stopped, and just past the two pencil pines. They’ll wrap it around a rock and throw it over.
It was a good place to drop notes, thought Annabel, strolling across the school grounds with careful casualness. A swell in the ground soon hid her from the view of anyone at ground level, and the pencil pines completed the job by hiding her from the view of anyone looking from the windows. There were more than a few pebbles and rocks there, too; if Annabel hadn’t been looking specifically, she didn’t think she would have seen the one that was wrapped with stone-coloured paper and tied with brown string.
“Got you!” she said happily, and pounced on it. She pulled one of the tag ends of sting just as a twig snapped behind her.
Annabel jumped guiltily, but it was only Isabella.
“Well, Nan?”
“I nearly jumped over the wall myself!” grumbled Annabel. She unravelled the string and separated the stone-coloured paper from the stone. “Oh. It’s just an invitation card. Goodness knows how they got it wrapped around the rock—it’s pretty stiff.”
She smoothed it out against her leg, but when it was finally uncrumpled enough to read, there were only six words to take in.
Wednesday, Blackwood Manor, Midnight, Supper Provided.
Annabel blinked. “Is that all?”
“Every bit,” nodded Isabella, gazing closely at it. “Not a drop of magical or invisible ink there.”
“How would you know?” demanded Annabel.
“I’m very good when it comes to secret inks,” Isabella told her. “Luck says it has something to do with my personality. Trust me, Nan; if there was anything else there, I would know it. Dear me! It appears that we have an appointment tw
o nights from now.”
“Yes, but—Well, is that all? Really?”
“Old Parrasians like to be ornate,” Isabella said, “but despite the fact that it looks like an ordinary engagement, it will almost certainly be for the purposes of welcoming Lady Selma to the ranks. Not to mention deciding what next to attempt. One can only hope they don’t intend on a complete overthrow of the government while they’re about it!”
“Then we should go, too,” Annabel said. “If they’re going to be plotting over what to do to overthrow me before I’m even crowned—”
“Naturally we should go! I have an interest in finding out exactly who has been damaging my poor Alice’s head, not to mention keeping you on your trajectory to official crowning.”
Annabel wrapped the card back around the stone and retied the string. Now that she knew Alice was well on the way to recovery, she was feeling distinctly more cheerful. “I’ll make sure to arrange a particularly nasty cell for whichever one of them did that,” she said. “All right, we’d better get going before Lady Selma’s maid comes along.”
Isabella giggled. “If she can find another boot! Lady Selma is a trifle enraged, Nan—I heard her shrieking from her suite as I came down.”
Annabel tsk tsked solemnly, but asked, “Will it be all right to go to the meeting? Both of us without any real magic, I mean? I can’t use the staff to make us invisible, you know.”
“Yes, there’s the real difficulty,” sighed Isabella, sober at once. “I believe I’ll have to visit the Blacksmith’s son during Interim Activities today, Nan. If I’m very tricky, perhaps I can manage to smuggle us in a decent invisibility spell.”
“But the magic sensors—”
Isabella sighed again. “I know. But we’ll need something of the kind. We could try to go early and sneak into a cupboard, but I couldn’t guarantee we’d end up in a useful cupboard, and I don’t approve of useless effort when it comes to informational gathering. Leave it to me, Nan. We’ll discuss it further at breakfast.”
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