Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  “I can’t talk to him looking like this!” protested Francesca, pointing at her ash-smeared face.

  “You’ll have to pretend he’s just a gardener you don’t know, anyway,” said Mari. “It’s important. Stop and make it look like idle chat, but tell him to be on the lookout for bane-witches flying around outside Mo’wood later tonight. I hope he’s got some help.…”

  “I don’t … I don’t want to get him into danger,” said Francesca.

  “He’s a police officer!” exclaimed Mari. “He’s probably been in all sorts of danger already, only you don’t know about it.”

  “It’s easier if I don’t know,” said Francesca. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

  “You could make it your business,” suggested Mari. “Starting now. I mean, if this all comes off according to plan, he’ll be here for a while. You’ll see him again. Without the ash on your face.”

  “It’s not just the ash,” said Francesca. She gestured at her rough cotton blouse, sensible but ugly woolen skirt, holed stockings, and clumpy boots.

  “He was a sizar, too,” said Mari. “He knows to look past the wrapping paper.”

  “Does he?”

  “He’s Cook’s nephew!” exclaimed Mari. “And he was at Rolyneaux. They spend half their time staring into the dark there. You know what they say: ‘What you don’t want known, a Rolyneaux knows.’ Probably why he joined the police.”

  “I’m not sure that’s any better,” said Francesca. “Do you think he can read my thoughts?”

  “No,” said Mari, carefully not mentioning that mind reading would be unnecessary, Francesca’s main thought regarding Bill clearly visible in her face and eyes. “Look, we haven’t got much time. After you tell Bill, pick a coven of radishes and start carving faces. Do it here, but don’t let Jena and Rellise see if they come in before you’re finished.”

  “Radish girls?” asked Francesca. “Should I gather some yew twigs as well?”

  “No, I’ll get them on the way back from the library. Oh, we’d both better put on charms. Not that they’ll be all that much use against—”

  “Against what?” asked Francesca.

  Mari groaned through clenched teeth.

  “Something you can’t talk about,” guessed Francesca. “Something Diadem’s got—”

  Mari clapped her hand over Francesca’s mouth and shook her head violently. The questions were making the geas adopt sterner measures, beginning with her tongue swelling to block her throat.

  Francesca raised her eyebrows, acknowledging that she’d worked out that a geas was in effect. Mari took her hand away.

  “Lovely night,” commented Francesca, careful to make sure it didn’t sound like a question. “Full moon later. Lovely. I’d better be off.”

  “Yes,” croaked Mari. “Don’t forget your charms.”

  Both of them put on silver necklaces, the thin, spindly ones that were lent by the college to the sizars, courtesy of some ancient bequest. Francesca added a moonstone ring that was the only thing her debt-ridden father had left her, and Mari put on the turquoise and silver bracelet that had been her foster mother’s. Mrs. Garridge had never worn it, because she said it was too old and precious and had been in Garridge’s family for centuries. Mari had only worn it once or twice, when she had felt particularly at risk from malevolent magic—which essentially meant the two occasions when she had been unable to avoid responding to a call to Helena Diadem’s rooms without a witness.

  “I think Diadem and company will be waiting for us to try Englesham’s rooms,” said Mari as they went out. “But if you do run into them, retreat to the kitchen.”

  “You do the same,” said Francesca. “Or stay in the library. Be careful.”

  Mari nodded. They turned away from each other and went their separate ways: Francesca out to the North Quadrangle, and Mari through the Old Building, out along the path that ran the length of the Scholar’s Garden, around the base of the tower, across the Foreshortened Court, and into the hexagonal, six-turreted library.

  The college library was open all hours, though it was not much used at night, since most undergraduates borrowed books and took them away to read in the comfort of their rooms. But there was always at least one Librarian in attendance, sometimes more, though they were usually engrossed in their own tasks and paid little attention to the students, other than to get requested books from the stacks. They did not record what went in and out. All the college’s books were ensorcelled. They could not leave the grounds, and would return of their own accord in due course if kept too long out of the library.

  Mari was rather surprised to find the Librarian herself strolling between the desks of the reading room, idly flicking a feather duster at every second or third green-shaded lamp. Professor Aiken was not only the Ermine College Librarian, she also held the university chair of bookmaking, lecturing in magical type, paper, and binding. Mari had attended several of her lectures but did not know her, unlike most of the senior members, whom she had waited on as a sizar or known since she was a child in the porter’s lodge. Aiken did not live in at the college and was a very infrequent diner there.

  Professor Aiken looked across as Mari came in, and then surprised the young woman still more by coming over to join her at the index files, the feather duster still flicking as she zigzagged between the desks.

  “Miss Garridge, I believe?”

  “Yes, Professor,” replied Mari. Aiken was looking at her face, evidently curious about the ash.

  “Keeping up old traditions, I see,” remarked the professor. “Tribute to Mistress Wasp, I suppose?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The sizar ash,” said Aiken, pointing with her feather duster, which, now that Mari saw it closely, was not a feather duster at all but a wand with a feather duster end. “You know, you do look rather like that first portrait. A fine copy of the bracelet, too. Well done.”

  “Mistress Wasp was a sizar?” asked Mari.

  “Didn’t you know?” asked Professor Aiken. She wrinkled her nose, then reached into the pocket of her rather horsey tweed coat and pulled out a snuffbox, flicked it open expertly with one hand, and scooped out some snuff on the back of her thumbnail. Inhaling it carefully, she closed the box and stowed it away as Mari stood there gaping at her.

  “I suppose they do leave it out of that nasty little college brochure these days,” she continued, occasionally taking small, nasal breaths as if she was about to sneeze, but never actually doing so. “But she was a sizar. In her memoirs she wrote it was the greatest advantage she had.”

  “Advantage? Being a sizar?” spat Mari. “Uh, I beg your pardon, ma’am. About Mistress Wasp’s memoirs—in fact, I was hoping to look at them tonight.”

  “The memoirs are forbidden to undergraduates,” said the Librarian. “You can read them next year. But, yes, Mistress Wasp wrote that being a sizar gave her a great advantage. She said, ‘I have been forged in a hot furnace, my metal is of the strongest proof. Had I been born higher, I would have not striven to rise so high.’ ”

  “Oh,” said Mari. “I didn’t know.”

  “There is a portrait of her as a sizar. Not the big painting in the hall with her in lace ruff and cuffs. There was an earlier one that used to hang in the Mistress’s Lodge but was lost a century or so ago. Spring cleaning gone awry. But there is a fine plate of it in Landsby’s Colleges of Hallowsbridge. I’ll fetch it down for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Mari, who was rather stunned by this information. She had never imagined that Alicia Wasp, the most famous mistress of the college ever, had been a sizar.

  “What else were you wanting?” asked Professor Aiken. “I could get it on the way.”

  “Ah,” said Mari. “Well, I’m … I’m looking into the … that is … how Mistress Wasp and the queen nullified the Original Bylaws. I was hoping to find a reference.…”

  Her voice trailed off as Professor Aiken leaned in close and looked at her face again.

  �
��Hmmm,” said the Librarian. Her pale gray eyes were very sharp behind her half-moon spectacles. “More to this than meets the eye, I see. The Wasp memoirs would be the best resource, as it happens. Though there is some relevant material in some of the court correspondence of Queen Jesmay, which we don’t have here, though there is an almost complete collection over at Jukes.”

  “I see,” said Mari despondently. “And the memoirs are forbidden to undergraduates?”

  Professor Aiken leaned back and took another thumbnail of snuff. Mari looked at her with a hopeful expression, trusting that it was not too spaniel-like to be effective.

  “You sit your finals in three weeks, I believe?” asked Professor Aiken.

  Mari nodded.

  “I thought so. I read your essay on a choir of seven. You know, your foster father was always very helpful to me when I first came here as a junior fellow.…”

  “Was he?” asked Mari.

  “Very helpful. I’ll bring you the relevant volume of the memoirs. Sit down.”

  Mari slid behind a desk and turned on the green-shaded lamp. When the professor had gone, zooming up the circular stair in the corner to the stacks above, she looked at her bracelet. It was very old, and her foster father’s mother had given it to his wife, and the Garridges had been porters at the college for generations … but surely it couldn’t have once belonged to the fabled Alicia Wasp?

  Professor Aiken was back in under ten minutes, which was interesting. The stacks occupied four floors above the reading room, and three beneath it, and a book request, even in the daytime when there might be half a dozen Librarians available, often took an hour or more to be delivered.

  “There we are. The portrait is the frontispiece of this one, and here is volume six of the Wasp memoirs. The part you need starts on page one hundred and ten, but I would start at one hundred and six for a little more context.”

  “Thank you, Professor,” said Mari. “Thank you very much.”

  “I wondered why I needed to come here tonight,” mused the Librarian. “Sizar ash-face, and Alicia Wasp’s bracelet … yes, I’m a little slow, but I now realize it’s not a copy. Tell me—is that ash the result of the Original Bylaws being invoked?”

  “Yes. A fragment, anyway.”

  “Oh dear,” replied Aiken. “I wonder if whoever did it fully comprehends what it means.”

  “I don’t know,” said Mari. “Um, what does it mean?”

  “I’m not entirely sure myself,” replied Aiken. “But I believe there is a good chance that if even part of the Original Bylaws are released, the New Bylaws might be at risk, and the safety of the college … What time is it?”

  “Half past eight,” said Mari. The library clock was behind Professor Aiken.

  “We have until midnight, then,” said Aiken briskly. “Do you have the fragment?”

  “No,” said Mari. “I’m … I’m going to try and get it.”

  “Good. Read the memoirs,” said Aiken. “I must go and find the chancellor. Pity he won’t talk on the phone. Ridiculous superstition, entirely unfound—”

  “The chancellor!” exclaimed Mari. Raised in the college, she regarded the involvement of any of the university authorities as a very last resort, and the chancellor … well, the less he had to do with the college the better. “Shouldn’t you tell the mistress? I mean, I think she’s out, but surely—”

  “No, I don’t think so,” replied Professor Aiken firmly. “I really don’t think so. I’ll be off now. Do whatever you can, Miss Garridge. And good luck.”

  Before Mari could get another word in, the Librarian was striding off, toward the revolving doors that led outside.

  “Professor!” she called. “Couldn’t you—”

  The doors whisked around. The Librarian was gone.

  “Couldn’t you just take over?” muttered Mari. Somehow everything had got even more complicated, but she wasn’t sure what it all meant. What had seemed to be just a petty act of bastardry against her by Diadem was assuming a new dimension. Where had the bone wand come from? Why were the police secretly watching inside the college? Why did the Librarian not want the mistress to know what was going on?

  “One thing at a time, Mari,” she whispered to herself, echoing her foster father’s advice. “Get the fragment, and get it done with.”

  She opened Landsby’s Colleges of Hallowsbridge and looked at the tipped-in, hand-colored plate. It showed a young Alicia Wasp standing against the south wall of the kitchen garden. She was wearing a simple muslin dress and had the ash design on her cheeks and the bracelet on her wrist. The inscription on the painting read simply, “A Sizar of Ermine College.”

  Mari stared at the painting for a long time. Alicia Wasp did not look at all like her. She had straw-colored hair and freckles. But there was something in her eyes, something Mari recognized in herself. Not the color. Alicia’s eyes were green, and Mari’s so brown they were almost black. It was something else. Determination. An indomitable will.

  At least Mari hoped that’s what she saw in both sets of eyes.

  She closed the Landsby volume, picked up the memoirs, and turned to page 106.

  An hour and a half later, she hurried back to the sizars’ room, pausing along the way to break off and collect a bundle of hazel twigs from the branches that overhung the path alongside the Scholar’s Garden. Outside the room, she knocked and called out who it was, then entered. Francesca was sitting at the one desk that they all shared, cutting a face in the last of thirteen radishes. Twelve others sat upright around the rim of a silver bowl.

  “Almost done,” she called out. “Did you bring the twigs?”

  “Here,” replied Mari, dumping them on the desk. “Did you tell Bill?”

  “Yes. I told him. But he didn’t want to talk, and he practically ordered me back inside.”

  “You don’t seem to mind,” said Mari.

  “He cares about me,” said Francesca proudly. “He was worried.”

  “We should all be worried,” replied Mari. “There’s something bad going on here. I mean, really, really bad, not just Diadem making life miserable for a bunch of sizars.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not entirely certain,” replied Mari. “But I think that because part of the Original Bylaws have been invoked, the New Bylaws will cease to work. At midnight tonight.”

  “Does that matter?” asked Francesca. “I mean, they’re mostly about what time the gates are locked, the lights go on, what time breakfast stops and so forth.”

  “The Bylaws aren’t just about the mundane stuff,” said Mari. “They also describe the bounds and wards. Without the full Bylaws, original or new, the college is vulnerable to banecraft and … summoning.”

  Francesca’s happy look faded. Summoning wasn’t always banecraft, but it tended to be, because the things that could be summoned were enormously powerful and dangerous. Summoning was not taught to undergraduates and was used only under strict supervision at Cross-Hatch House, the university’s most secure laboratory, where summoned creatures could be properly restrained and, if necessary, banished.

  “You think Diadem’s going to summon something?”

  “I don’t know!” exclaimed Mari. “All I know is that we have to get that fragment back, and we have to get it in the ground under the shadow of the moondial. At midnight, between the chimes of the tower bell.”

  “And what exactly is the plan?”

  Mari knelt down by the desk, selected a hazel twig, and broke it into small pieces. She plucked one of Francesca’s red hairs and, taking a longer stick, used the hair to tie the smaller pieces on the end, making a serviceable miniature broom.

  “We make the radish girls and brooms lively at quarter to twelve,” she said. “We send them to Mo’wood to fly around outside Englesham’s window, drawing out Diadem and her cronies. At the same time, we go into Mo’wood on foot, get into Englesham’s room, and get the fragment. Then we dash to the moondial, do the incantation—”

  �
��What incantation?”

  “Sorry, the spell to nullify the fragment. I got it from Alicia Wasp’s memoirs. I’ve written it out, here—it’s only seven words. She was a sizar—”

  “What?”

  “Yes … look, I’ll explain later. It must already be half past ten. We do the incantation, bury the fragment between the bell chimes at midnight, and all will be well.”

  “All will be well!” snorted Francesca. She finished carving the face of the last radish and picked up some twigs to work on another broom. “I suppose we use your keys to get into Mo’wood? Even though you swore you wouldn’t ever again, after that time we were nearly caught in the Dean’s office?”

  “Yes, we’ll use the keys,” said Mari. “It’s too important not to this time—even if we do get caught.”

  The keys were a set that properly belonged to the porter of the college and were imbued with magic that was recognized by college locks, as mere mechanical copies of the keys would not be. Mari’s foster father had given the set to her with a heavy wink.

  “Not in anyone’s inventory, these keys,” he’d wheezed out. “Don’t use them idly, Mari. Keys can turn into trouble, easily enough.”

  “Jena and Rellise will be back at half past eleven,” said Francesca. She plucked one of Mari’s hairs and tied off her first broom. “We’d better clear off before then.”

  “We can wait in the Library Garden,” replied Mari. “I want to look at the moondial anyway. We’ll launch the radish girls from there, then run through the New House into Mo’wood.”

  “Why couldn’t my stupid father have just saved his money and stopped gambling?” asked Francesca rhetorically. “Other fathers manage it. Then I wouldn’t be a damned sizar.”

  “Like I said, this isn’t just a sizar thing now,” said Mari. “But would you really want to be just another rich and self-satisfied undergraduate?”

  “Yes,” said Francesca. “It would be so much easier.”

  “Alicia Wasp said being a sizar was the greatest advantage she had.”

  “I bet she never said that when she actually was one,” replied Francesca. She tied off another bundle of twigs. “There, that’s my six done.”