Sylvaine came near, and Margot instantly said: ‘You are not of Argantel either, Sylvaine.’
‘Oh, I know,’ came the answer, and Sylvaine looked as white and shocked as Margot felt.
‘My father is alive,’ said Margot.
Sylvaine said, ‘My mother is a clock.’
‘She… she is what?’
‘A clock,’ repeated Sylvaine, with every appearance of calm, but her hands trembled, and she breathed too quick.
‘The one with too many faces.’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know! I only saw that she was lost in it — trapped, I think — my poor father! He knew it, and could not get her out.’
‘And then you were both stranded here, and my father (and somebody else, I suppose!) lost over there, and what a sorry mess! Your mother must be got out of the clock.’
‘And Oriane and Florian and your father got back from Arganthael.’
‘And your father too?’
‘Perhaps.’ Sylvaine bit her lip. ‘I did not see him, I do not know if he is there.’
‘I saw him,’ Margot replied, and described her visions to Sylvaine.
‘Both past glimpses. Nothing of the future, or the present.’
‘I shall take the bottle.’ Margot wiped the glass dry, and tucked it safe away.
She looked up to find Rozebaiel and Mistral observing her with twin expressions of bright curiosity. ‘You are going into Arganthael?’ said Rozebaiel.
‘If we can find the way,’ said Margot, crestfallen when she recalled that even these creatures of magic had not been able to spirit themselves home. And if we can find the way back again afterwards, she added to herself, for had not her father been stranded in Arganthael for decades? It did not matter. The attempt had to be made.
‘The mirror is somewhere hereabout,’ said Rozebaiel. ‘If it has carried off three poor wretches in three days, then it will carry us, too! You must keep the ribbon,’ she said to Margot, quite as though the ribbon and the mirror were closely related in some obvious fashion.
‘And the other one has the coat,’ Mistral said with approval.
‘What of that?’ said Sylvaine, glancing down at her splendid garment in confusion.
‘It shows the way,’ said Mistral. ‘You would not wish to end up in quite a different Otherwhere, would you?’
‘There are more?’
Mistral smiled. ‘Many more. Your father knows a great deal about it, you may find. But the coat knows its way home, and shall carry you safely there.’
‘In that case, my own boots may carry me back here again.’ Sylvaine admired these articles, though being much scuffed and worn, and their chestnut-leather colour very faded, they did not especially deserve this tribute.
‘That mirror!’ cried Rozebaiel all at once, and indicated, with indignantly pointing finger, a spot on the rough-stone wall which was, as far as Margot could see, quite bare of interest. ‘There it was! I saw it, just now! Mistral! It glittered at me in a detestably winking fashion, and then off it wriggled, and now it is gone again!’ Incensed, Rozebaiel stamped her silk-shod foot, and began to mutter a string of invective under her breath. Then she darted for the door, where a few, bold tendrils thick with rose-leaves were creeping around the frame, and took hold of them with both hands. ‘The one thing my poor, starved flowers have done well in this miserable place is grow. You have taken it over entirely, my beauties, have you not, and made it all your own? You shall find the mirror for me!’ There came a rustling in response, beginning as a whisper and growing to a deep, thrumming hum as the roses came awake all across Landricourt. Margot felt the floor shiver beneath her feet. ‘Find it and hold it still!’ Rozebaiel instructed. ‘And I shall come for it!’
Margot jumped as vine-stalks shot across the walls, putting forth leaves and crimson flowers at an astonishing rate. Within a minute or two, all the walls of the shadowy storeroom were covered over with them, and the ceiling too. When she walked out into the cellar halls, and looked into room after room, she saw the same thing happening everywhere.
It was not long before Rozebaiel gave a crow of triumph, and cried exultingly, ‘They have got it! It is in a big, square room with holes in the ceiling.’
‘The ballroom,’ said Margot and Sylvaine together. Margot picked up her skirts and ran, Sylvaine just behind her; Rozebaiel and Mistral hurried in their wake.
The ballroom was in chaos. The roses there were in a high passion of some kind, and twisted and writhed about with a furious energy. Margot felt intimidated by them, for each bristled with thorns grown far too long. Not a bit could be seen of walls or ceiling and very little of the floor, for the flowers had taken full possession of the room. But Rozebaiel marched heedless into the middle of the madness, making her way towards what appeared to be the centre of the storm: a knot of fiercely tangled vines near the top of the wall, where some indignant thing thrashed, and blazed with cold light.
Margot and Sylvaine picked their way more carefully through the litter of thorns, and Mistral merely floated over them.
‘Bring it farther down,’ ordered Rozebaiel, for the mirror had been lurking very high upon the wall, and was out of reach. With a rustle of leaves it was duly lowered, protesting all the while, and finally fell into a listless sulk at the bottom, its light dimming.
‘Excellent,’ Rozebaiel purred. ‘I could not be more pleased with you, dears.’
The roses preened under this praise, and fluffed up their petals with pride.
‘You will let me through,’ she told the mirror sternly. ‘And no trickery!’ Without more ado, Rozebaiel laid her hand to the glass and was gone in a flurry of starlight. Only a lingering mist marked where she had stood moments before, and this soon dissipated.
Margot waited, hoping that Oriane might at any moment appear in Rozebaiel’s place. But nothing happened. Had Rozebaiel’s stern prohibition against trickery cowed the mirror so much that it had not ventured upon its usual antic? Or had the pattern broken into chaos, like everything else seemed to be doing?
‘I would not delay,’ warned Mistral. ‘The flowers will not long be able to hold it, without little Rose. Not in this place.’
‘If we go through, will someone from the other side end up in Argantel?’ said Margot.
Mistral said, ‘Perhaps.’
‘If they do, the effect will be reversed when we come back, no?’ said Sylvaine.
Margot shook her head. ‘If that’s the case, where is Oriane? Should not the return of Rozebaiel have sent her back to us?’
Sylvaine’s eyes widened. ‘Oh! What if Oriane has been sent into some different Otherwhere, instead?’
‘Make up your minds, and quickly!’ snapped Mistral. ‘There is not much time.’
Margot and Sylvaine exchanged a look, and Margot saw Sylvaine swallow. She quailed a little herself, somewhere inside, though this feeling she suppressed. ‘We must make the attempt anyway,’ she said. ‘There is no other choice, for what else can we do? Nothing has come of sitting here and waiting.’ She strode up to the mirror. Giving herself no time to reflect and doubt and lose her nerve, she set her hand to the glass at once — the hand which wore the ribbon that had been woven in Arganthael.
There was a lurching sensation, and the feeling of plunging face-first into cool water.
And then she was in a cellar again, a darker one than before, and with no roses or jars or anything in it at all.
There was only Pharamond Chanteraine, who sat slumped against the wall near the firmly closed door, looking ragged and exhausted and desperately unhappy. He looked at Margot with blank surprise and said: ‘A woman like a rose came through a moment ago.’
‘Rozebaiel,’ said Margot.
‘She turned into a shower of rose-leaves, and was gone.’
‘I can well imagine.’ Margot looked around at the bleak chamber, and again took in Pharamond’s hopeless posture upon the floor. ‘How are you, Seigneur?’ She noticed, then, that
he wore the odd mist-wrought trinket around his neck.
He smiled without joy. ‘Defeated, for the present, and I have no glad tidings for you. Hello, my dear.’ His gaze shifted away from Margot; Sylvaine had come in behind.
‘Father!’ said Sylvaine, and went to him at once. ‘What are you doing here? Are you all right?’
Pharamond sighed. ‘I found the mirror,’ he said bleakly. ‘At long last! But I came out in here, and cannot leave, and I do not know if I am even got to where I wanted to be.’
‘Arganthael?’ said Sylvaine, and won for herself a raised-eyebrow look of query and surprise.
‘I will ask you how you came to learn that name,’ said Pharamond. ‘Later.’
A soft wind blew through the room, and mist flew everywhere: Mistral had arrived. ‘Ah! Perfect,’ said he, smiling broadly, and vanished in another puff of wind.
Pharamond’s face brightened with hope and delight upon Mistral’s appearance, and fell again when he was gone. ‘Elements,’ he said disgustedly. ‘Not a scrap of sense between them.’
‘I suppose he did not realise you were stuck, father,’ said Sylvaine. ‘And why are you, in fact?’
Perhaps she expected a tale of some magical obstacle or other, some mirror required, or some enchantment necessary; Margot certainly did. But Pharamond only said: ‘The door is locked,’ and fell to laughing in a hysterical way. ‘Thirty years, and I am defeated by a locked door! I have tried every means to open it, and I cannot.’
‘Father, you have not been locked in here all day?’
‘All day and all night. We are in some distant storeroom in the depths of Laendricourt, I suppose, and no one else is ever likely to come into it. There is nothing here.’
‘The mirror—’ began Sylvaine, but upon turning to look she saw that it was gone again, and sighed. ‘I begin to feel as Rozebaiel does, and quite detest those wretched objects.’
‘I wish you had neither of you come,’ said Pharamond. ‘You came in search of me, and Florian and Oriane? I am afraid you have only landed yourselves in insuperable difficulties, as I have.’
‘Brace up, father,’ said Sylvaine stoutly. ‘I am sure we will contrive something—’
The door rattled as she spoke, so unexpectedly that everybody jumped. Then came the unmistakeable clatter of a metal key fitting into a metal lock, and turning, with a groan of protest.
Then the door swung open, and Florian appeared.
‘Oh!’ he said, and stopped a moment upon the threshold. ‘Well, how fortunate. I knew we should find you at last. But what in the world are you all doing in here?’
He turned his sunniest smile upon Margot, who felt that she had never been so glad to see him before, and only refrained from falling upon him in relief due to the presence of so many others. For she could see that someone else was coming in behind Florian, a woman in an ivory dress and with amber-coloured hair.
‘We were worried,’ she said to Florian, who looked unreasonably gratified by the information.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had not meant to disappear, you must know.’
‘The mirrors!’ said Margot disgustedly.
Florian grimaced. ‘Bothersome things.’
The unfamiliar woman smiled upon them and said: ‘Have we found your friends, then, dove? I am so glad! Only I do not know what possessed them to hide themselves away in here.’
‘Nynevarre,’ said Pharamond in a half-broken voice.
Her head whipped around, and she studied the prone figure upon the floor in stunned silence. ‘Pharamond?’ she finally gasped, then flew instantly from joy to rage. ‘Where have you been?’
Margot, however, was no longer listening, for behind Nynevarre came another person: a tall, spare, silver-haired gentleman in clothes that dazzled her eyes, his demeanour rather forbidding. She did not immediately recognise him either, but in half a moment she saw the traces in his face of another, blessedly familiar and beloved one; a face she had never thought to see again.
‘Father,’ she said, and the word emerged as a croak.
Ghislain De Courcey looked equally thunderstruck, and it took him some moments longer to recognise in the adult woman before him the little girl he had involuntarily left, so many years ago. But he saw it, and said her name, and then Margot did hurl herself upon him, heedless of her audience, and wept all over his coat.
‘I do hate to intrude upon all these joyful reunions,’ came Florian’s voice a little while later. ‘But there is some trouble afoot — just a trifle, nothing more!’
‘What’s the trouble?’ said Sylvaine, though without pausing in her unfriendly surveillance of Nynevarre.
‘Oh, well,’ said Florian apologetically. ‘It’s only that time is going speedily awry, and the magic is got all out of hand, and half of us are out of our minds over it. And I think, perhaps, that Oriane is in some little danger.’
Part Six
Oriane
Something was gravely amiss with the clock.
Oh, it had far too many faces, to be sure; all of them were either too fast, or too slow, and none had the serene, confident air of a clock accurate in its representation of the time. But these were merely the most obvious signs of peculiarity. There were more.
Upon first entering the many-sided room, Oriane had received the impression that the clock was displeased to see her. This she had dismissed as a mere fancy of her own, at least at first; something derived, perhaps, from the clock’s immense height, and the way it had of looming over her when she stood directly underneath.
But as the hours dragged by, and nothing happened to release her from the room, she had leisure and occasion to study the clock more closely. She was not required to wind it up again, had she been willing to do so, for it went energetically on, telling all the wrong times, and spinning its minute-and-second hands merrily around its thirty-seven faces. But while the feeling of being unwelcome gradually lessened, the feeling of being observed did not.
When, after some unknowable length of time, the clock began to sing to itself, Oriane was sure.
The clock was aware.
This realisation discomfited her extremely, for a little while. She had had enough of bizarre occurrences. Her tolerance for staircases that wandered off, doors that closed up and re-opened themselves, rooms that were never where they were supposed to be and food that tasted like something else entirely was much depleted; she had no energy to spare for a singing clock that eyed her with a degree of curiosity she could only term impertinent. She longed for the simple comfort and mundane predictability of her own, little cottage, her own plain furniture and warm, sensible clothes, her teapot that meekly poured tea when she lifted it up, and did not presume to disapprove of her, or serve her tea that tasted of cider, or tire of her and jaunt off somewhere else.
But time moved oddly in the many-sided room. She had the sense, sometimes, that it was dragging itself sluggishly by, every second taking an hour to pass. At others it skipped and burbled and frolicked along, speeding through hours at the rate of seconds. Oriane soon gave up trying to reckon upon how long she had been stranded under the dome of the clock room. She only became increasingly aware of two things: the persistent fear that she would never be released, and an aching loneliness.
Some part of her, then, welcomed the idea that the clock had some awareness of its own, however untoward it may be. Perhaps it could help her to escape. If not, it could at least bear her some company through the period of her imprisonment.
‘Hello’ she ventured, with a friendly smile. At least, she hoped it was friendly; how did one go about recommending oneself to a clock? ‘My name is Oriane, and I’m afraid I am stuck in here. It was not my intention to intrude upon your solitude, I assure you.’
She did not know whether she had really expected to receive a reply, but none was forthcoming. She fancied that the clock’s ticking hands sped up a trifle, and spun with a shade more of alertness than they had a moment before; but that was most likely her imagination.
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‘I do not even know how I came to enter here,’ she continued, for it was nice to talk, even without a response. ‘I was exploring, and going from room to room with an impunity which has now proved unwise. This terrible house! I knew it derived considerable pleasure from tossing me about, and tumbling me willy-nilly from room to room without displaying the smallest logic or sense. I had not thought, however, that it might carry me somewhere only to trap me, and never let me out again.’ She sighed, and sat down against the wall. ‘I am trying to bear it bravely but I am growing very tired, and hungry, and thirsty too, and I am afraid I shall starve to death.’
A plate appeared on the floor before Oriane, a delicate specimen decorated with great good taste, and proudly bearing a quantity of fresh bread soaked in butter.
Oriane, astonished, blinked twice. ‘I—’ she began, and stopped, for more was coming. A glass jug popped into existence, filled to the brim with cloudy yellow lemonade, and there was even provided a cup to drink it from. This little repast was rounded out by an elegant pastry-tart filled with apple preserves, and coated with sugar.
‘Thank you,’ she said, nonplussed but grateful, and immediately began to eat. She was not much surprised when the bread proved to taste of iced cakes instead, the lemonade of beer, and the apple-tart of (most puzzlingly) salmon. She was too hungry to object, and made a very good meal; the plates and jug were soon empty.
The clock gave a soft chime, and the crockery disappeared.
Oriane pondered this for a while, feeling braver now that she was fed. ‘I don’t suppose there is any use in wishing for a door?’ she ventured. ‘Or a window? Any means of exit at all would be splendid.’
There was no mistaking it this time: the clock was clearly engaged in some intense endeavour, and straining hard. It seemed to grow an inch or two, and loomed more grandly than ever. Its faces changed: some grew bigger, and some smaller, and all of the clock-hands spun at dizzying speed.
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