Grizelda

by Margaret Taylor

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll interrogate this one myself,” he said with a snatch at Grizelda’s wrist. “You take the other. Good work, officers.”

  She struggled and actually managed to bite the man’s arm. He hissed in pain. Then there was a rustle of cloth and a pistol pressed against her cheek.

  “March.”

  Somehow, she managed to put one foot in front of the other and walk, though she wanted to scream. Every step she took, took her farther and farther away from Toby and Geddy, who were being strongarmed down the hall in the other direction. She could hear thumps like Toby was kicking, but he wouldn’t cry out.

  The warden took her upward into the main body of the prison. The place was unusually full for the middle of the night. It looked like some sort of a control center, with gendarmes going purposely to and fro on some secret mission. One of them came up to the warden and saluted.

  “Sir, we haven’t caught anybody yet from the north–”

  He noticed the warden was busy, trailed off, and slid away.

  How organized, she thought bitterly. This officer-turned-warden must have really worked at this. Yep, not incompetent like the old warden.

  He took her to an office. So, no ordinary interrogation dungeon for her. It was ordinary-looking, neat and tidy, maybe dangerously neat and tidy. There were two desks, the larger of which was empty. At the smaller one sat a secretary, writing. When the warden entered he looked up in terror.

  “Out.”

  The secretary skattled out of the room, sending several sheets of paper flying in his wake.

  The warden closed the door. Grizelda heard a lock click, then he took his seat, leaving her standing in the middle of the room. He steepled his fingers in the gesture she remembered all too well.

  “Grizelda No-name, sweatshop worker, arrested for making an unnatural paper doll on 20 November.” He spoke as if reciting off a list. The note of contempt in his voice didn’t seem quite genuine. “I remember you, all right. Who’s the other one?”

  Grizelda had known she was going to have to speak. But at that moment all the stories she’d prepared on the march up here flew out of her mind. She swallowed.

  “I – I don’t know him,” she said finally.

  “What were you doing in those goblin tunnels?”

  “I dunno,” she said, a little defensively. “I was exploring.”

  “Underground?”

  “I was exploring underground.”

  He got up, trying his very best to look leisurely, but there was a fire burning in his eyes. “I can get Chairman Grendel to tell me everything, you know. There’s no point. I’ll send a message down to him right now.”

  He knew! For a panicky moment, Grizelda tried to figure out what she was going to do now. Then something occurred to her. If Grendel was Chairman of the People’s Goblin Union of Lonnes, surely people must know his name above the surface as well as below. The warden was making an educated guess, trying to get her to betray something.

  She was afraid she’d already hesitated too long, but she said, “Who’s Chairman Grendel?”

  It was hard to tell if she’d fooled him. He started to pace, never looking at her. He poked into drawers, twirled a pen from his desk, anything to avoid eye contact.

  “That boy, is he part of your organization?”

  “There is no organization.”

  “What’s your agenda?”

  “I’m not in an organization.”

  “Can you give me names? How many are you?”

  “I’m not in an organization!” It came out a little too vehemently, enough to make him pause in his track around the office. She went on.

  “I worked alone. That paper doll, that was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been sabotaging the government for years.”

  Then maybe she was imagining it, but she thought she detected something he’d been doing his best to hide since he recognized her. Raw fear. That man could not sit still. He wouldn’t look at her. Men his age had been brought up to be terrified of the spellcasters. But he collected himself.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Robin Goodfellow!” She spat, but to her disappointment, he was out of range.

  “This is pointless,” the warden said, making another circle around her. Now it was a paperweight he picked up, passing it from hand to hand. “Whoever is working with you, they’re all doomed. We have gendarmes posted at every entrance to the holding cells. You can’t help them. But you still have a chance to help yourself. If you tell me something, a name, a place, I can arrange to have you cleared.”

  Yeah, right.

  “No, you won’t,” she said.

  “You’ll be free. Nothing on your record.”

  Her fists clenched. She hated him. The first time he’d interrogated her, he’d offered to let her off if she made a written confession then, too. Now he was offering to let her off if she turned in her friends, and he was expecting a different answer.

  “As long as the Committees are in charge of the government, I wouldn’t be free.”

  “What do you want, then? The life of your friend?”

  “Yes,” she wanted to say, but she forced herself not to. “I told you, I’ve never seen him before.”

  “He’ll confess to everything, you know. There’s no point.”

  “No, he won’t. He doesn’t have anything to say.”

  “The penalty for treason is the firing squad.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Even if we kill your friend, too?”

  “I’ve never seen him before. He had nothing to do with it.”

  The warden stopped circling, and the two of them stared each other in the face. Grizelda hated him so much she couldn’t stand it. She hated everything about him – the way he looked so ordinary but for the light in his eyes, the precision, the way the collar of his uniform was just a tiny bit rumpled. The way he was constantly moving.

  His grip slackened and he dropped the paperweight.

  “Bugger!” It rolled off into a corner and he flapped his hand as if he’d been burned.

  She was sure of it now. He was afraid of her. He was terrified of sorcerers, of her power, just like everybody old enough to remember the Auks and the blood tax was. Like Toby was afraid of her. She struggled to keep her voice even.

  “Do you really want to kill me?” she said.

  Then she kept silent and let him imagine what that meant. Maybe she really did act alone. Maybe she had in store for him some retribution from beyond the grave so powerful that it was beyond his comprehension.

  He managed to hold his own in the staring contest for several seconds. Then he turned away with a jerk. “All right, you have earned this. I’m going to apply the question to you personally. I’m leaving you here, alone in the dark, so you can think about it. When I come back, I’ll come with equipment.”

  She refused to answer.

  “Think about it.”

  The warden crossed the room. He turned down the wall lamp bit by bit, watching her all the while. She stared back at him, conceding nothing. Only a gutter remained, then it went out. When he opened the door he stood there a moment, as if puzzled. Then he shut it and all was blackness.

  As soon as Grizelda was certain he was no longer watching she groped her way to a wall and leaned against it, gasping. She had won.

  Chapter 28

  “Kricker, you did it!” Tunya said as they sped away from the gendarmes.

  “Did what?”

  He said it weakly, not really paying attention. Now that the crisis was over it was all coming back. The swaying of the ground. The nausea. He was starting to shake so bad he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to hold onto the reins.

  “Got over your fear of heights,” she said.

  He looked over at her. “What are you talking about? I’m terrified out of my wits.”

  “But you tried to rescue me anyway…”

  There was a very long silence. A couple of times Tunya started to
say something but didn’t manage it.

  Finally, she said, “Kricker, I’ve been a total shrew–”

  “I called you Frizzface!” he said, astonished that she should be apologizing to him.

  There was another silence.

  “Do you want to call it even?”

  He nodded.

  The Undergrounders had all huddled around a lantern in the meeting cave, surrounded by the bits of equipment for the mission they were now never going to use. All of them were there – except for Grizelda, Toby, Kricker, and Tunya. The waiting had gotten so that exhaustion blotted out everything else, even fear. Katarin had a dark, vindicated look. Every few minutes one of the ratriders flew out to search the tunnels for the missing Undergrounders and ratriders, or flew back in to tell them what they’d seen. Nothing.

  Nobody wanted to be the first to speak. If they opened their mouths, they would have to voice the fear that each of them was secretly thinking.

  Laricia flew back in from her turn on the search.

  “Any sign of them?” said Jamin.

  “No.” She landed on a pile of coats and climbed off her bat. “Apollo’s exhausted. I can’t go out again.”

  Jamin indicated a place by the lantern and she sat down, taking off her goggles and rubbing her face.

  After a moment she said, “Grizelda and Toby were scheduled to enter the cells at the same place Geddy and I got attacked. I’ve been up and down the entire route and there was nobody.”

  Now she’d said it aloud. She waited a moment, trying to be gentle.

  “We may have to call off the search.”

  People sagged, put their heads in their hands. They almost didn’t see the streaks of color as Tunya and Kricker, one after another, shot into the meeting cave.

  “We got attacked by gendarmes! What’s going on?”

  Jamin leapt to his feet. “Have either of you seen Grizelda or the bourgeois?”

  Tunya shook her head. Jamin sighed and sat down.

  They landed in the same place as Laricia. While Kricker crawled off his bat, looking exhausted, Tunya said, “We thought something was wrong, that’s why we came to the meeting cave–”

  “The breakout was a trap,” Solander explained. “They were waiting for us at all the entrances. We know for sure they took Geddy prisoner, and it looks like the bourgeois and Grizelda, too.”

  They were all silent, as if waiting with one desperate hope that Grizelda and Toby might come running into the cave, demanding to know what was going on. They didn’t come.

  Finally Laricia said, “You do know she’s been living with the goblins, don’t you?”

  There were expressions of amazement from the Undergrounders. “I just sort of thought she lived in the sewers, you know?” said Stevry.

  Laricia shook her head. “Their chairman, Chairman Grendel, favors her. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t let him know what she’s been up to for any other reason, but … it may be time to ask him for help.”

  “What could a goblin do?” said Katarin.

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  Jamin nodded, and the other Undergrounders gave their approval, too.

  “Right.” She stood up and pulled down her goggles. “I’ll need to borrow somebody else’s bat. Apollo won’t make it.”

  Wearily Kricker waved at his own bat. Laricia nodded, mounted him and flew off.

  Grizelda must have fallen asleep, because she awoke to the sound of a commotion in the corridor. There were grunts, then the thud of a body hitting the wall. The door slammed open and a tangle of limbs was flung inside. Just as quickly, it slammed shut again.

  She rushed over to where she thought she’d seen the body land. “Toby?”

  “Grizelda? I can’t see a thing.”

  All at once she remembered the dull glow in her bodice pocket. Tunya’s lantern-stick. She pulled it out and the room was awash in green light. Toby was on the floor, painfully pulling himself to a sitting position. He looked awful. His hair and clothes were all in disarray, one of his eyes was swelling shut, and he was cradling his arm.

  “Oh, my God! Did they torture you?”

  She knelt and put a hand on his bad wrist. It didn’t feel broken. Already there were bruises coming up, lurid in this strange light. Oh, poor Toby!

  “No. They just beat me up a little.” He tried to pull her off him, but she wouldn’t let go. “What about you?”

  “Nothing. Just questions,” she said.

  He leaned on her like an old man over to the warden’s chair. How strange to be this close to Toby, who usually refused to speak to her. He sat down, wincing, then put his hand in his shirt pocket.

  “What’s that?” she said, already guessing the answer but hoping she was wrong.

  “They let me have Geddy back when they were done. I don’t think he’s okay, though…”

  He drew the tiny figure out of his pocket and set it on the desk. Geddy lay curled up, not moving. When she saw it, her throat tightened.

  “Geddy?” she said softly.

  “Hoarfrost’s dead.”

  It was muffled, but the voice was definitely Geddy’s, alive. At least something was okay, here at the end of the road. Toby looked at her, questioning.

  “That was his bat,” she explained. “Geddy, are you okay?”

  “What kind of a ratrider am I? I got caught.”

  “So did we, Geddy.” She was trying to be as gentle as possible. She set Tunya’s lantern down on the desk and knelt so he was at her eye level. Something was clearly wrong with him, but she couldn’t tell what.

  “You don’t understand, do you? Ratriders don’t get caught.” He sat up and looked at her for the first time. “It’s like what I was telling you, the getting less pixie-like. I can’t sklein anymore!”

  Toby was now utterly confused. Grizelda didn’t completely understand either, but she thought she saw the beginning of it. They’d gotten too human. Too much time being near her and her friends, too much time caring about human things. Skleining was the only magic they had left.

  “Oh, Geddy. I’m so sorry.”

  “And that’s not the whole of it. They saw me, Griz. After two hundred years, I’m the one to break the covenant of secrecy. If they get the location of the ratrider grotto out of me, they’ll wipe us out like vermin.”

  Geddy folded his arms and looked down. Toby turned to her.

  “You didn’t tell them anything, did you?” he said.

  “Of course not!” Grizelda was surprised to find, even at this hour, she managed to be annoyed he would even ask. Then she realized there wasn’t any accusation in his voice. “The warden, he told me he was coming back for torture equipment, but he hasn’t yet.”

  “They told me they were going to kill us.”

  Kill us. It wasn’t just getting to be on the surface she missed anymore, she realized. It was everything she knew about being alive, above ground or below. Sight, sound, color, getting to hold things with her hands – in a few hours there would be a march to the firing squad, then all of that, in an instant, cut off. Without realizing it, she had started to shudder.

  Then Toby spoke, somewhere beside her. “If any of the others got caught, I think they’d be here, right? And we didn’t tell them anything – we’re not going to. They don’t know anything about the Underground. Everybody else is going to be okay.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. At first she didn’t realize what it was. It was such a surprising gesture, from Toby of all people, who hated her for being a witch. She put her own hand on top of his, tried to nod.

  As Laricia sped through the darkened streets of the Goblin Union, she wondered where she was going to go next. She had only a vague notion where the Chairman lived – in one of those housing buildings near the center of town. It would take days to search through every single unit, but that was where he was likely to be at this hour of the night. She landed on a carved stone gargoyle to think about it. There was a small chance he was still in his office; he’d been known t
o work late. It wasn’t a very good chance, but it was still better searching one place than hundreds of them.

  Of course, that meant she would have to get inside the government building. Easier for a ratrider to do than somebody else, but still not easy. She lit off across the square.

  As it turned out, getting through the front door was not so hard. The door was wooden, ancient, left over from the goblins’ glory days. It had sagged enough that there was plenty of space between the upper edge and the lintel for a bat and a pixie to squeeze through.

  But just as soon as she was inside, a horrible and overpowering smell blasted her. Salt. The security guys at the government building had really done their job well – a heavy line from one wall to another, well out of range of accidental scuffing from the door. The smell was so bad it was making her eyes water. She couldn’t bring herself to cross it.

  She landed on the floor behind the line. Peregrine was not as well trained as Apollo, so this might not work, but it was worth a shot. She got off his back and took a dried mealworm out of her pocket. Once she was sure she had his attention, she tossed it across the line. Peregrine fluttered up and over to snap it up, leaving the salt quite intact. Okay, then. She beckoned him back to her and tried again. Finally, on the third try, Peregrine dragged his wingtip through the salt and the spell was broken. From there it was an easy flight to the back of the building.

  The light was on in the Chairman’s office. She punched the air in delight, then squeezed with Peregrine in under the door. There were two goblins in the room, talking in low voices. One of them was the Chairman, but the other … Mechanic Lenk. Not good.

  The Mechanic leapt to his feet with a cry the moment he saw her. He searched around on the Chairman’s desk for something to throw at her. The Chairman stood, too, but slower.

  “Wait!” She had to leap quickly aside to dodge the ink bottle that came crashing down at her, shattering just inches away.

  “What have you come to do to us now?” he shouted.

  “Mechanic…” the Chairman started.

  But the Mechanic was already going for a heavy book. She was going to have to say it; there was no way she’d get the Chairman alone.