Castle Hangnail

by Ursula Vernon

  “But she wasn’t the real Master,” said Majordomo. “She was an imposter. This is the real Master. Real has to be better, doesn’t it?”

  Cook snorted and tossed her head. If Majordomo had been a Greek hero in the middle of a labyrinth and saw a Minotaur looking like that, he would have turned around and sailed back to Greece and taken up fishing.

  “Please? For me?”

  “Egg pie,” grated Cook. “All right. Is only doing this because you are asking, not because Master is asking. Is not being my Master.”

  I have to keep them separated, thought Majordomo. Otherwise Cook is going to wind up frozen into a block of ice. Oh, poor Miss Handlebram!

  He took the “egg pie” up to Eudaimonia, and found Serenissima leaving the room ahead of him. The two bodyguards were standing there, so he couldn’t speak to her, but she looked near tears.

  Then again, steam spirits are always a bit drippy, so maybe—

  “Steam girl!” snapped Eudaimonia as he brought the tray into the room. “Warm my water another ten degrees. It’s getting cold.”

  “Forgive me, Mistress,” said Majordomo. “I will send her up immediately. I shall just set your tray on the bed, shall I?”

  “Don’t bother,” said Eudaimonia, emerging from the bathroom. She was wearing a dark blue bathrobe and her hair was dripping wet. “Clearly she can’t do that right. I see that we shall have to see about training a proper maidservant, and then the steam girl can tend to the stables or something.” She waved a hand. “Where is my quiche?”

  “Here, Mistress.”

  Even the Sorceress could find no fault with Cook’s handiwork. She nodded to him. “Acceptable. You may go.”

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  He dragged himself back down to the kitchens, and found all the minions assembled around the table. Serenissima was crying and Pins was sewing and Angus was nursing some Wicked claw marks where the basilisk had scratched him.

  “Steam girl,” said Serenissima, sniffling. “She didn’t have to say it like that.”

  “It’s not a nice basilisk,” said Angus. “Hasn’t been treated well at all. I don’t blame the bird, you understand.”

  Pins was sewing pale blue bedhangings out of velvet. “I had to take apart some old dresses in trunks,” he said. “There’s not enough material. Do you think she’ll notice if I edge them in lace?”

  “Do your best,” said Majordomo heavily.

  “I’m going to need a tetanus shot,” said Angus.

  “Miss Handlebram’s frozen up solid,” said Edward. “I put a sheet over her so those bodyguards won’t gawk. Such a fine woman, and to come to this! We’ll have to find a way to thaw her out.”

  “I don’t know if the new Mistress will like that,” said Majordomo.

  “She didn’t trust me to steam the wrinkles out of her dress,” said Serenissima. “She said I’d probably set it on fire. Me!”

  “Quiche,” said Cook grimly.

  “And it’s a male donkey,” said Angus. “Nothing I can do about that. And who bathes in donkey’s milk, anyway?”

  “Cleopatra did,” said Pins. “But then an asp bit her.”

  “Wish I had an asp right now . . .”

  “Angus!”

  They all looked at Majordomo. The old servant took a deep breath. “Look. I know this is hard. We’ve all had a bit of a shock, and this new Master will take some getting used to. But if we pull together, we can manage. We’ve had demanding Masters before, and the castle was better for it afterward, wasn’t it?”

  There was some dispirited muttering around the table. Majordomo decided to treat this as agreement, because it was the best he was going to get.

  “We’ll manage.”

  No one would meet his eyes. They all stared at the table instead.

  “I can’t believe Molly lied to us,” said Edward sadly.

  And then, for the first time that long, horrible evening, someone looked up and asked, “Where is Molly, anyway?”

  Chapter 32

  Molly was with Eudaimonia.

  She was also feeling about two inches tall.

  She sat on the edge of the bed while Eudaimonia paced back and forth, like a hungry tigress in a cage.

  “Molly, my dear, what were you thinking?”

  “You got lots of invites,” mumbled Molly. “You said you didn’t want this one.”

  Eudaimonia tapped the wand on her palm. “As it happens, those other castles have also been filled.” Her eyes narrowed. “You remember my mother?”

  Molly nodded. Eudaimonia’s mother had been . . . weird. She always seemed angry.

  “She’d barge into your room all the time,” said Molly. “I remember that. Like she thought she’d catch you doing something.”

  “I had to set that alarm spell on the stairs just to get some privacy!” Eudaimonia scowled. “And she’d never let me go anywhere. If I so much as stepped a foot out the door, she thought I was going to run off and do something awful.” She slapped the wand in her palm.

  Evil, thought Molly, not just awful.

  Well, I’m Wicked partly because Sarah’s the good twin and that means I have to be the bad one. Maybe Eudaimonia’s Evil because her mother assumed she would be too.

  “So of course my dear mother wasn’t happy with the notion of me going off by myself, and she kept me home until—well, until I persuaded her to change her mind. By then most of the posts had been filled . . .”

  Something about the way she said “persuaded” made Molly shrink back a little. Thoughts of Majordomo talking about thralls and holding people’s minds down filled her mind.

  Maybe she didn’t know what it does, Molly thought. Maybe she didn’t know it was Evil.

  Looking up at Eudaimonia, Molly wasn’t entirely sure that it would have mattered.

  It was hard to think that she might be Evil. They’d been friends—maybe not great friends, maybe more like “Do this for me, and I’ll be your best friend!” than real friends—but still.

  You don’t think of your friends as Evil. Even if you know they’re in training to be an Evil Sorceress.

  I always sort of assumed she wouldn’t be Evil at me.

  She sighed. Which was a stupid thing to assume. It’s not like she was very nice to me anyway. I mean . . . well . . .

  She looked up at Eudaimonia. And up. And up. Eudaimonia had always been taller.

  “The Wizard at the last castle was very kind,” she added. “He was, I daresay, a little overwhelmed. He gave me this as a gift.”

  She held up the wand and smiled.

  Molly had a glum feeling that she knew just how that poor Wizard had felt.

  Overwhelmed. That sounds about right.

  “I don’t mind you hanging around the castle when I wasn’t using it, of course,” Eudaimonia said over her shoulder. “But now that I’m ready to take possession—now that the castle is mine—”

  She strode dramatically to the window and tried to throw the shutters back so the moonlight streamed down across her face.

  It would have worked if the damp hadn’t made the wooden shutters swell. One shutter banged back in proper dramatic fashion, and the other scraped, groaned, bucked a few times, then fell off onto the floor.

  “Um,” said Molly. “They do that sometimes. You have to work them gently ’til they’re over the sticky spot.”

  Eudaimonia let out a long, exasperated sigh. “And of course it didn’t occur to you to fix it?”

  Molly’s face felt hot. “I don’t know how to fix shutters.”

  “Not you, stupid,” said Eudaimonia. “You tell the servants—oh, I see.” She sat down on the bed next to Molly. “The servants. They’re terribly slack and they took just awful advantage of you.”

  “Everybody seemed to be trying hard,” mumbled Molly.

  E
udaimonia sighed again. “Dear Molly . . . you never could give anybody orders, could you?” Then she put her arm around Molly’s shoulders and it was just like being friends again, like when Molly did something stupid and Eudaimonia picked up the pieces and did it right for her.

  Part of Molly cried out for that. To go back to having someone else in charge! To have Eudaimonia make all the decisions so that Molly didn’t have to! To go back to just playing at being a Witch, instead of having a whole castle that was hers—her problem, her responsibility, her fault if it all fell apart.

  For a minute she leaned against Eudaimonia and felt the way she had when she was nine years old, and the older girl had showed her how to do her very first grown-up spell.

  But deep down inside, the Witchy part said, No.

  The Witchy part said, Nobody can do this all alone, which is why the minions were helping me.

  The Witchy part said, We were doing good. We fixed the boiler—all of us helping. We’d almost finished the Tasks. The Board of Magic was going to accept me.

  And she remembered the silvery glittery splendor of Wormrise and the patterns the bats made in the sky over the garden, and the burning smell of the dragon.

  She’d done that. Not Eudaimonia.

  The Witchy part said, You could do it again, if you had to.

  She pulled away from her former friend and stood up.

  Eudaimonia gave her a searching look, and her ice-blue eyes narrowed. “What I don’t understand, dear Molly,” she purred, “is why you pretended you were me.”

  “I had to use the invitation,” Molly said.

  “Silly,” said Eudaimonia. “You must have known they’d find you out eventually. Anyone can see you’re nothing like me.” She gave a high, tinkling laugh, like icicles shattering on stone. “And did you see the look on the old minion’s face?”

  “Yes,” said Molly, putting her hand on the doorknob. “I did.”

  Chapter 33

  She’s not in her room,” said Serenissima, coming back down to the kitchen. “And her clothes are gone.”

  “She’s not in the garden,” said Angus. “Nor the belfry.”

  Cook said nothing, but hunched her shoulders up and wadded her fists into her apron.

  “She’s not in the Great Hall,” said Edward. “Or anywhere else I could get to, with my knees.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Majordomo savagely. “Good riddance. She lied to all of us. She was never supposed to be the Master here!”

  They all looked at him. The silence went on for almost half a minute, and then they all looked away again, as if they had all silently agreed to pretend that Majordomo had never spoken.

  Majordomo’s face felt hot.

  “We’ll have to check Miss Handlebram’s house,” said Edward. “She may have gone there. Serenissima—?”

  The steam spirit nodded. “I’ll make sure her cat gets fed too, and see that the place is all locked up and the roses get watered. She’ll appreciate that when—when we unthaw her.”

  “I’ll check the stables and the hayloft,” said Angus. “And the moles may know something—not that any of us can talk to moles, but they’re smart little fellows, and perhaps we can work something out—”

  Pins walked slowly into the room and climbed up onto the table. He set a sheet of paper down in the middle of it, very carefully.

  It was covered in Molly’s slightly loopy handwriting.

  “She left this in my workshop,” he said.

  Dear Pins,

  I have to go. I’m taking the coat you made me, even though I probably shouldn’t, because it’s the best thing anyone’s ever done for me. I will think of you all whenever I wear it, even though I know you probably won’t want to think of me.

  I’m sorry I made a mess of everything. I never meant to hurt anyone. I will miss you all forever.

  Love,

  Molly

  Serenissima burst into tears.

  Edward put a gauntlet to the coin around his neck.

  Pins tapped the paper. “We have to find her,” he said.

  “No, we don’t,” said Majordomo. “She went home, don’t you understand? She wasn’t supposed to be here at all! She’s a little girl, and she ran away from home to come here—her parents thought she was at summer camp, for the love of Hecate! She’s gone back where she belongs and that’s the best for everyone!”

  Pins folded his burlap arms. “Is it? I liked Molly. I don’t know this new Sorceress at all, and she froze Miss Handlebram in ice.”

  “But she’s the rightful Master of the castle,” said Majordomo. “The invitation went to her. And she’s an Evil Sorceress—a real proper old-school Evil Sorceress! You just don’t get Evil like that anymore.”

  “We’re part of Castle Hangnail too,” said Pins. “We’re as much part of it as the mortar and the stones and what’s left of the moat. Don’t we get some say in who the Master is?”

  Majordomo stared into his cheese, as if hoping to find the answers written there. They were not.

  “But Molly lied to us,” he said finally. “She wasn’t who she said she was. Or what.”

  Pins shrugged. “I’m not saying that was right,” he said. “I wish she hadn’t, and I’m upset about that too. But the old Vampire Lord used to drain the blood out of villagers.”

  “Ungo the Mad once replaced your brain with a live hamster,” added Angus.

  “The Vile Hag made slime come out of the taps so you couldn’t get a bath,” said Serenissima.

  “Lord Edward’s had his head chopped off.”

  “Beastlord’s thugs is eating and throwing bones onto floor,” grumbled Cook from the doorway. She tossed her empty basket down on the counter. “And also being stealing sheep. Is not liking bones on my floor!”

  Majordomo shuddered. It had taken him weeks to get the smell of sawdust shavings out of his skull, following the hamster incident. Still—

  “That’s all true,” he said, “and they did a lot of bad things, but they were Wicked. They’re supposed to chop off our heads and things. We’re minions. It’s what we do. At least they didn’t lie to us.”

  “Ungo the Mad lied all the time,” said Serenissima. “Usually he said ‘this won’t hurt a bit’ and ‘no, it’s perfectly safe.’ And then you’d wake up wired to a lightning rod while he screamed ‘It’s ALIVE!’”

  Majordomo shoved the last bit of cheese in his mouth. “Maybe you’re all right,” he said, “but Molly’s gone. She lied to us and then she left us. And I still remember what’s due to the proper Master of this place.”

  Once again, everyone looked at him. It was getting a little unnerving. But this time Cook stood up.

  “Is not mattering where she came from,” said Cook. “Is not mattering how long she is staying or who is being told what. Molly is belonging here. Molly is being Master of this place.”

  She stared Majordomo in the eye.

  “All that is mattering,” said the Minotaur, “is finding her again. And bringing her home.”

  Chapter 34

  But they did not find her.

  They went from the top of the castle to the bottom, from the bats in the belfry to the Bees by the boiler, and found nothing. Serenissima opened every cupboard and every wardrobe (and found, incidentally, eighteen bedsheets and a full tea service for twelve). Pins checked every crawl space and secret passage, and his fish sat in a bowl in a high window, watching over the countryside for a small figure in black.

  “It is drafty,” the goldfish announced, wedged into her tiny sweater, with her waterproof scarf pulled up to her eyes. “The breezes are cold and smell of mold. I shall take a lung infection or an ague and be ill for months, assuming I don’t die of it. But none of that matters! We must bring Molly home! She looked up the scientific names of sixteen different diseases for me once—and their most obscure symptoms
—and that is how I found that I likely had Ich-Borne Fin Paralysis and was able to stop it before it became too far advanced. I shall not leave my post until Molly is found!”

  Everyone agreed that this was remarkable heroism for a goldfish, and Cook sent up a thimble-full of hot chocolate, which Pins offered to the goldfish in an eyedropper.

  Majordomo didn’t pay too much attention to the search. He was kept busy making sure that the bodyguards had their own rooms on either side of Eudaimonia’s suite, a task made more difficult by the fact that one of those rooms had a hole in the ceiling as big as a sofa.

  He didn’t much like the look of the bodyguards. It wasn’t that they looked like thugs—they did, of course, but that was fine. One doesn’t serve a magical castle for centuries without seeing any number of thugs, minions, henchmen, lackeys, servitors, and mercenaries. Majordomo had been thugged at by the best, and these gentlemen were not it.

  “Bargain-basement thugs. Not like the old days,” muttered Majordomo, dragging a tarp into the room with a hole in the floor that corresponded to the hole in the ceiling below. “Now, the Cursed Beastlord, he had a thug worthy of the name. Blast. Kicked me down the Grand Staircase once, for breathing too loudly on a Wednesday.”

  He dragged the tarp over the hole and weighted the edges with iron candlesticks. The end result looked depressingly shabby. Majordomo sighed and found a carpet from farther down the hall and rolled it out over the tarp, which hid things rather better.

  Now I just need a sign so people know not to walk on it—

  There was a crash from downstairs. Majordomo heard Edward yell something, and then there was an even louder crash, followed by a clatter, followed by that horrible teetering noise that a plate makes when it’s spinning slowly to a halt.

  “Blast!” Majordomo limped hurriedly down the stairs.

  Angus was standing in the Great Hall, his arms folded, glaring down at one of the bodyguards. There was a pile of armor on the floor behind the Minotaur, and the sheet had been yanked off Miss Handlebram’s ice cube.