Staff & Crown

by W. R. Gingell

  “She means,” Isabella said, “why are you here with us instead of wherever there Lady Selma has gone?”

  “That?” said Lady Caro coolly. “A fair fight is one thing, but I can’t stomach a queen who won’t look after her subjects. If it comes right down to it, I didn’t pick you as queen, and what do I care about Rorkin and his staff? If it was going to be a fair fight between the two of you, then I wouldn’t interfere. But they’re trying to take over Trenthams, and I won’t let that happen. Girls get hurt when things like that happen, and I don’t like our girls being hurt.”

  “You’d better go up with the others, then,” Annabel said. “It’s not safe down here. We’ll probably have to retreat as soon as they make it through the doors and up the stairs to us—they’ve got an awful lot of magic users.”

  Lady Caroline grabbed one of the blunderbusses as an explosion outside threw a plume of dirt and grass into the air beside the window. “I’m not going upstairs with the others.”

  “Good heavens, Delysia’s started already!” said Isabella. She tossed a look both amused and slightly respectful at Lady Caroline. “Do you think you can manage that, Lady Caro?”

  “I’d like to see you keep off that lot without me,” Lady Caro said, tilting her chin at the window. “And if it comes to that, I’ve been using Nurse’s old blunderbuss since I was about three.”

  “That seems like a dangerous pastime for a three year old,” remarked Isabella. “But I dare say your nurse knew best, after all.”

  “I think some of them are screaming,” said Annabel, peering out her window to look at the Old Parrasians below. A double explosion rocked the ground below, followed by a volley of blunderbuss roaring beside her, and the scene below erupted into chaos.

  Lady Caroline gave something that was very similar to a grin, as grim as it was, but Annabel wasn’t sure if it was at Isabella or the distress of the Old Parrasians. “My brothers didn’t like me a lot,” she threw at Isabella. “And they were all quite a lot older than me. They had a very lively appreciation for how soft a child’s head is at the age of three, and of how easily their bones break. Fortunately for me, my nurse was a very angry old woman who wasn’t very fond of boys.”

  “Yes, I suppose that would have come in very handy,” Annabel said, not sure whether to be amused or horrified. “You can take this window, Lady Caroline. We want to keep them from the door as long as we can.”

  “Don’t be mistaken,” said Lady Caro. She sighted along the blunderbuss and half closed one eye. “I still dislike you both. I simply refuse to have this school torn apart by a rabble of underbred Old Parrasians who have yet to move into this century. It’s the one place I’ve had a few moments of happiness.”

  “That’s all right,” Annabel said cheerfully. She tapped the staff lightly against one of the drawings she had made last night, and a series of small, potent explosions drove the Old Parrassians briefly away from the front doors. “We don’t like you much either.”

  “There’s no need for liking each other,” said Isabella, passing another blunderbuss to Raoul with business-like dispatch. “Look at Raoul and I—we neither of us like the other, but we’re the best of friends!”

  “Is that what you are?” Lady Caro raised a brow. “I keep meaning to ask you about that.”

  “Oh do you?” Isabella’s eyes danced. “I think we had this conversation once before, Lady Caro.”

  “Oh, well!” Lady Caroline shrugged. “I’m sure I’m not the one who claimed that men and women can’t be friends!”

  “May I suggest,” said Melchior, from the next window, “that you direct your shots at the Old Parrasians, Lady Caro?”

  Lady Caroline fired. Annabel, who was busily erasing the ground from beneath a few Old Parrasians, at first thought she’d missed. Then she saw the wall behind the Old Parrasians flash with something opaque and rainbow for an instant, and four Old Parrasians were bowled over into the hole she’d just made in the front lawn.

  “Very nice!” murmured Isabella. “Did you know it would do that?”

  “Some of the girls are throwing spells from the roof to help out, and magic reacts with magic,” said Lady Caro. “What do you do during Basic Magic?”

  “I design hats during Basic Magic,” said Isabella, without embarrassment. “In fact, the one I’m wearing today was designed during a particularly—”

  “I wasn’t really interested,” said Lady Caro. She settled herself back in the window. “Your highness, do you think you could make another hole right there next to the bike shed?”

  “All right,” Annabel agreed, finishing the shading on the solid wooden cover she’d drawn over the first hole. Unless the men were very strong magic users, they wouldn’t be getting out of the hole any time soon. It wasn’t until Isabella caught her eye that Annabel realised it was the first time Lady Caroline had ever called her your highness.

  “It is a day of Interesting Things, isn’t it?” said Isabella. “Oh, bother! There go the front doors!”

  Annabel heard the boom a moment later, and the building seemed to tremble.

  “Cover the stairway!” yelled Raoul, and the Guards turned as one, blunderbusses toward the hallway door. With them, Lady Caro turned on her toes without the slightest hesitation, her own blunderbuss trained on the hallway.

  The hallway seemed to bulge, or perhaps that was just Annabel’s imagination. Melchior said something through his teeth and made a savage thrust with one palm at that bulging reality. Despite that, too many Old Parrasian wizards pushed into the hall—far, far too many for them to have fit through non-magical means. The blunderbusses roared in almost complete synchronicity, and the Old Parrasians sank back like jelly sucked back into a mould, completely uninjured. The end of the hallway bulged once again—the jelly coming back out, Annabel thought—and there was the businesslike rattle of each Guard’s second shot being cocked.

  “Retreat!” yelled Melchior. “Back! Get back to the stairs!”

  Lady Caroline said something very unladylike and fired her second shot into the heart of the Old Parrasians that were still bulging into the hall. They stumbled but this time they didn’t retreat more than half a step. The invisible something at the end of the hall quivered.

  “Get back to the stairs,” Annabel said to the others. She tossed another blunderbuss to Lady Caro, who had thrown down the first in disgust, and said again, sharply, “Upstairs! Now!”

  “They’re waiting for you,” said Isabella quietly.

  “I know,” Annabel said. Her sketchbook dropped to the ground, leaves folding and flattening, and she raised the staff pencil. “I’m coming. But you all need to be out of the way first. Keep firing, Lady Caro!”

  “I wasn’t planning on stopping,” Lady Caro said grimly, as the others reluctantly began to file toward the stairs, shepherded by Melchior. She fired one shot, this time higher than the first, and something went ping far too quickly for Annabel to follow. Someone in the centre of the Old Parrasians gasped and dropped, but there was no sign of faltering from the others this time. Lady Caro fired her second shot, and at the same time, Annabel reversed her pencil and slashed with the eraser end.

  Lady Caro said something else unladylike, and dropped the second blunderbuss, teetering on the murky edge of what had once been floor but was now nothingness. The Old Parrasians on the other side yelled and stumbled backwards, but the hallway chandelier above them fell with a great, grand weight to it, and the floor shuddered beneath them. Annabel saw five or six of them disappear into the void, but she had no time to feel either victorious or sick about it; Lady Caro was still teetering on the edge of that chasm from which not even the strongest of magic users could escape. Annabel grabbed her by the braid and pulled her back from the edge before she could topple after her blunderbuss, and Lady Caro stumbled back, gasping.

  “What did you do to the floor!”

  “Never mind,” Annabel said. “It’s not there anymore—nothing is. It’s a big bit of nothing that will swallow
you if you get too close. We’d better go up now.”

  One of the men across the room said, “This won’t stop us for long. We’ve got our own magic users, you know.”

  “Of course we know, you stupid little man!” said Lady Caro. “How else would you have got this far!”

  “That’s the problem with rabble,” agreed Isabella, her head appearing above Melchior’s shoulder. “There’s no thought process to mention, and it tries to prove that might makes right.”

  “I hate to interrupt you both,” Melchior said, “but do you think we could complete our retreat instead of trading verbal blows?”

  “We might as well,” Lady Caro said. “It’s boring down here now, anyway.”

  She followed Annabel, a cold-eyed rear guard against the glares from the Old Parrasian wizards, and when Annabel stopped short at the next floor, she was the first to say, “What?”

  Melchior looked sharply at her. “Nan? We really can’t stop here; not without making a few more preparations.”

  “Go upstairs,” Annabel said to Lady Caro. “Make sure all the girls are on the top floor. Not on the roof, mind you—and make the girls who have been throwing magic come down to the fourth floor as well. Come back when you’re finished.”

  “Nan?” Melchior said again, and this time there was a question to his voice. “What are you about?”

  “I trust you’re not thinking of sending me to the top floor,” Isabella said. She was bright-eyed and a little bit pale. “I won’t go, you know.”

  “We’re not going to the top floor,” Annabel told them. To the line of mixed guards and footmen, she said, “And you might as well leave the blunderbusses here, too; they’re obviously not working anymore. How many of you are magic users apart from Melchior?”

  “Healing magic only,” said Dannick. “Sorry. And not much of it.”

  “You’ll stay with us,” Annabel said. “We’ll probably need you. Anyone else?”

  “All of us,” said Raoul. “Not enough to hold off that lot for long, but enough to make it difficult for them to get to you. We could possibly hold them off until Mr. Pennicott gets here.”

  “If he gets here quickly enough,” nodded Annabel. “No, we’re not going to do that. The staff is the strongest thing here; there’s no use hiding it away just to keep me safe. Rorkin told me that I was one queen heir out of a few possible heirs.”

  “No,” said Raoul. “We’re happy with you, your highness. We’ll make sure you don’t die for long enough to take care of that lot—or at least until Mr. Pennicott gets here if you can’t do it.”

  Melchior said, “Nan—”

  “Don’t worry,” said Annabel, straightening her shoulders, “I’m not going to die. You’d better stick close to me, though.”

  Melchior sighed faintly. “I seem to have the misfortune of watching my loved ones facing threats from which I can’t protect them,” he said. “I won’t be protected, Nan! We’ll fight side by side, but I won’t hide behind you, and so I warn you!”

  There was the light tread of Lady Caro on the stairs. Annabel asked swiftly, “Are the other girls safe?”

  Lady Caro nodded shortly. “For now. I made them come off the roof, at least. But I hope you know what you’re doing, your highness; because if you can’t save all of us down here, all of those up there aren’t safe, either.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Annabel, reversing her pencil staff again, “we’re all going to survive. Please stand away from the wall—no, not just the stairs, the whole wall.”

  Lady Caro, her eyes widening, hurried away from the wall. The guards and footmen followed her with alacrity, and Annabel began to erase once again. As she began on the lowest step, there was a shriek, and Delysia tumbled into the room, leaping over the quickly disappearing stair in a flutter of petticoats.

  “Delysia!” Annabel said in astonishment, as Isabella, laughing, caught the other girl. “What are you doing? I could have erased you!”

  Panting, Delysia said, “I thought you might need the immediacy fuses for the bits of explosive around the yard, and Lady Caro wouldn’t let us stay on the roof. You’re—you’re going back outside, aren’t you?”

  “As soon as I separate the top of the school from the bottom of it,” Annabel said, nodding. “I’d rather not have the wizards inside with the girls, even if they can’t get to them right now. They’re tricky and nasty, and I don’t trust that Gregor.”

  “Dear me!” said Isabella. “I’m proud, I really am! I have the most delightful friends!”

  “I thought you were convinced you were the most delightful of them,” remarked Lady Caro, causing Raoul to cough.

  “Well, perhaps I am, in general,” agreed Isabella. “But not today, I think. Now, I hesitate to be unhelpful, Nan, but once you’ve separated the top of Trenthams from the bottom, how do you propose we get outside again?”

  “That,” said Melchior, as the last vestige of the upper half of Trenthams separated from the lower beneath Annabel’s pencil staff, “will not be a difficulty.”

  Delysia squeaked and darted away from the dark circle that had begun to revolve in the outer wall. Annabel, to whom the phenomenon was as familiar as Melchior himself, was already moving toward it when it ceased to revolve and became a low, dark tunnel in the wall. With Melchior at her side and Isabella flanking her, Annabel stepped from the broken, out of place level in Trenthams school building, and into the sunlit turning circle outside the front of the school, gravel shifting beneath her feet.

  “They’re coming out again,” Melchior said. “They’ve been watching. School entrance.”

  The front doors hung drunkenly on their hinges, splintered wood digging into the stonework landing, and through that wreckage of wood strode the remaining Old Parrasian wizards, bringing with them a storm of magic that Annabel couldn’t see but felt the weight of despite that. The pencil staff felt very damp in her fingers. She watched the Old Parrasians approach, struck in a small, hazy part of her brain that wasn’t trying to calculate odds and possibilities, that Gregor was flanking the leader—not close enough to the front to be a leader, but not far enough behind to be picked off if anyone approached from the rear. He was in a place, in fact, that meant it would be the easiest for him to run away if things went badly.

  Annabel put that aside to think about later, and asked Melchior, “Can you make a protective barrier around us?”

  “I can, Nan,” he said, and Annabel wasn’t sure when his arm had gone around her shoulders, but it was there now, warm and protective. “But it won’t last long against that lot.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Just make it as strong as you can. I only need a few minutes with the staff. I shan’t bother with paper.”

  She couldn’t see the barrier as it went up, but she saw Raoul and the grouped guards and footmen exchanging a look, and when the foremost Old Parrasian wizard extended one hand with a triumphant smile, Annabel felt nothing.

  At her side, Melchior hissed. The sound woke Annabel from her stupor; she raised the pencil staff, sharpened tip pointing at the Old Parrasians, and began to draw without paper, without recourse if things went wrong, and entirely without mercy. The Old Parrasian wizards that thinned at the edges of the crowd twitched and began to change, their limbs shrinking and hardening. There was a dismayed shout from the wizard ranks, and some of the ossifying wizards began to look a little more lively.

  “No,” said Annabel mulishly, shading the texture with greater precision. “You’re stone!”

  And they were stone, shrinking or falling or sinking in on themselves until a small, ugly gargoyle rocked on a stone base in each place where once there had stood a wizard. Annabel, with the sweat sitting on her brow, knew that there were still too many wizards—she could hear the groaning of Dannick and Raoul, and one of the footmen passed out on the verge, his eyes rolling white and unresponsive. But she couldn’t do anything else, so she continued to draw wizards into gargoyles while the air grew hot and stifling around her.


  The barrier must have trembled around them, because Melchior shivered. Pressed against him, Annabel shivered too, and to the side Dannick dropped to his knees in the gravel driveway.

  “Perhaps,” said Melchior, with a great deal of effort, “perhaps you could draw a little more swiftly, Nan.”

  “I will,” Annabel said, but the staff was heavy between her fingers and no matter how many gargoyles littered the lawn there were always more wizards crowding forward.

  Still the staff grew heavier. Heavier and heavier, until it felt as though she couldn’t hold it up any longer, and until her strokes grew wide and wild. Raoul slumped, bracing himself against Dannick on one side, and the verge on the other, and this time when Melchior shivered, it seemed as though the entire world shivered, too.

  “Oh bother,” said Annabel.

  20

  Melchior shivered, and the world shivered. The Old Parrasian wizards swayed closer, while the staff grew so heavy that it seemed to weigh Annabel through the ground.

  “Oh bother,” she said again.

  And then, something shifted.

  “Oh!” gasped Annabel, as her legs gave way beneath her. She saw the cold flash of triumph in Gregor’s eyes; felt sharp gravel beneath her knees and the coolness of damp grass beneath one of her hands as she vainly reached for the sloped verge to steady herself.

  “Bother!” Isabella said. “Nan, I really don’t think you can stop now. If I try to—”

  “No,” said Annabel.

  “I really think, Nan—”

  “No.”

  Melchior laughed, soft and low, and crouched beside her.

  “Nan—”

  “You said to tell you if you’re being bossy,” Annabel said to Isabella, pinching a blade of grass between her fingers and wondering how it could feel so much plumper and alive than it had felt just yesterday. “Stop being bossy, Belle. I’m going to tell you what to do, and you’d better do it, because I won’t let you push me down an alley again.”