Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1)

by W. R. Gingell

  The mutter of ‘Poly’ was passed between the gremlins with much teeth-snapping satisfaction until one of them held up his lump of cheese with a victorious cry of: “Polyolyoly! Ollyollyolly!” The others took up the cry, brandishing their cheese, and charged back into the walls, shrieking and yik-ing. Poly was left feeling rather uncertain, but since she saw neither a trace of webbed hand nor dust-bunny hair despite all her knocking and tidying and dusting, she let herself assume, a little uneasily, that she had pleased them.

  -inna walls- said Onepiece in her head, sniffing cautiously at the render of the walls. -all yikyik and cheese and She Poly-

  “Oh dear,” Poly said, with a tingle of foreboding. “I hope I haven’t sent them on a rampage.”

  -yes, but not in bookcase anymore- pointed out Onepiece prosaically.

  Later, Poly retired to the kitchen to fetch dinner, grinning to find that she had caught Margaret with her head out the kitchen window, berating a would-be caller in a loud whisper.

  “But Meg, you promised!” protested the lad. He was a boy with big round glasses and a natural expression of hopefulness that was at present somewhat strained, and Poly thought he looked rather nice.

  Margaret tossed her head at him and said: “Yes, but Luck’s home, Puss: you’ll have to go with someone else. Oh, Poly, there you are. I’ve put it all on a tray for you.”

  Poly said thank you cheerfully, and nodded at the boy in a friendly way that made him blush darkly, much to her amusement. She wandered back to the library with leisurely slowness, wondering how many boys Margaret was dangling on a string while she tried to attract Luck’s notice. The thought was a rather stringent one, and she wondered for a moment if she was jealous of Margaret; because unless she counted Mordion, Poly hadn’t even had one boy to dangle on a string.

  But then, thought Poly hopefully, I never wanted one. Not a courtier, anyway.

  The thought cheered her up. It would have been a rather dismal thing to find herself jealous of a petty sort of girl like Margaret.

  Well, she thought fairmindedly; Not petty. Just proprietary.

  Besides, Luck didn’t seem to notice her any more than he noticed the other village girls, unless Poly construed his not running away from Margaret as notice. In which case, Margaret was to be pitied rather than envied.

  She picked her way through stacks of books, placing Luck’s dinner beside him the floorboards, and received a sweet, absent smile from Luck that meant he hadn’t really noticed her. If that was what Margaret had to contend with, Poly did pity her.

  Poly went back to her own piles of books, nibbling at her cheesy potatoes whenever the hunger pangs struck her, and before long found that her dinner had turned leathery with cold. She eyed her plate ruefully, comparing it with Luck’s, which was still full and now congealed in solidified fat, and realised that Onepiece had gone to sleep curled up in his corner. Mentally apostrophizing herself for a thoughtlessness as bad as Luck’s, she picked him up and bore him off to bed, forestalling his sleepy mutters with a gentle caress of his ears.

  It was cold and dark outside the library, surprising Poly with the lateness of the hour, and when she tiptoed into Margaret’s room the girl was already in bed and heavily enough asleep not to wake at the opening of the bedroom door. Poly deposited Onepiece on the bed, covering him with the sheets just in case he turned human in his sleep, and stretched limbs that had, she now realised, become stiff and sore. How long had she and Luck been immured in the library? She’d lost track of the time, sorting madly to make order from chaos, and somehow it hadn’t seemed important to keep track of the rapidly advancing hour. Perhaps–heaven forbid!–Luck’s absent-mindedness was catching. Poly grimaced at her smudged reflection in Margaret’s bureau mirror, and decided that it was necessary to escape the dusty air of the house. She’d taken many moonlight walks back at the castle, letting the silence and coolness of the night slide over her refreshingly. It had helped to wash away Persephone’s petty snipes and the continual, battering assault of tiny, unkind magics from Mellisande and Giselle. Here in Luck’s village she was less likely to be remarked upon if she slipped out, and Poly was quite certain that Luck wouldn’t notice her absence.

  Poly made her way quietly back through Luck’s living room and out the front door. She was uncertain of what lay beyond Margaret’s real bedroom door and was unwilling to risk bumbling around someone else’s home late at night.

  It didn’t occur to her until she shut the front door that Luck might have some kind of magic lock on it, but when her convulsive grab at the doorknob turned it easily, she was able to huff out a breath of relief and feel thankful that at least Luck had thought to include her in the house spells, even if he couldn’t remember to make sure that she had dinner.

  It was pleasantly cold outside, but the touch of a cool breeze on her unfamiliarly bare arms reminded Poly fleetingly that the butterflower yellow dress Luck had made her was the only one she presently owned, and that her complete lack of both coin and apparel would have to be brought up with Luck tomorrow. But in the meantime, the moonlit village was quietly welcome, and Poly strolled through the tightly knit houses until she found herself at the outskirts of the village. The houses here were bigger, single-level dwellings that spread sideways in contrast to the neat, two-level condominiums at the centre of the village. Behind them the forest stretched out, silent and massive. Poly wandered closer to the shadowed trees, but when her hair uncoiled itself from the plait she’d confined it in and reached out waveringly to the forest she backed away rather quickly.

  There had been quite enough magic for one day, Poly thought decidedly.

  To her surprise, this time she didn’t encounter the village wall as she walked. The village had seemed somehow smaller yesterday, and Poly, wondering just what Luck had meant when he described the village as spiral, made an addendum to the list of things she needed to mention to him tomorrow. She had a shrewd idea that Luck worked on a different set of vocabulary to the rest of the world.

  There were even fields in the village, for heaven’s sake! Margaret had only shown the portion of the village that she considered pertinent–which tended to be shops and the houses of her cronies–and it was rather a surprise to find herself following deep ruts in the grass that served for tracks between the crops. They were smallish fields, perhaps only a quarter-mile square each, but they were full and whispering in the moonlight, just like fields should be. Poly amused herself by trying sleepily to guess what was in each field, but with indifferent success: after the familiarity of paddock after paddock of sheep, one green, rustling crop looked much like another. Besides, the villagers seemed to have a ridiculously eclectic mix of crops, some of which, Poly thought doubtfully, she was almost sure were not in season. A closer look at the fields showed a webbing of unfamiliar magic surrounding the crops that intrigued her enough to bring a halt to her stroll while she tried to puzzle out the thread of one of the closer spells.

  One of the threads was Luck’s, Poly was certain. She stretched out a finger to trace the single thread, and it gave a little beneath the pressure, taut but elastic. The other strands were myriad and completely unfamiliar, and they all had that slight skew to them that she’d noticed before. Despite Poly’s best efforts, she couldn’t tell what the spell was for. She was still gazing at the webbing and yawning behind her hand when it occurred to her that she was very nearly asleep where she crouched. The thought spurred her to rise rather hastily and turn homeward with a quicker step than before, an unwelcome vision of herself laying asleep and forgotten between rows of corn (or was it cotton?) slowly creeping into her mind.

  Poly hurried back through the rustling green stalks, mentally scolding herself for the stupidity of taking to the open air at night when she was plagued by a sleep curse.

  She wasn’t the only one taking the air, however: as she hurried homeward, Poly saw a broad-shouldered shadow struggling through the only empty, unploughed field in sight. The thread of stray, wrong magic that had drawn
Poly’s attention to the fact was quivering with barely suppressed hunger. Poly shivered, and disintegrated it with her antimagic hand as she passed. Poacher or mischief-maker aside, she didn’t care for the type of magic that had made the nasty little trap. She heard running footsteps and saw the vault of a shadow over the fence, and walked a little faster with the uneasy suspicion that she might have freed a poacher from the rightful grasp of his victim.

  The way back home was twice as fast as the way there, and Poly, who thought she’d managed to become thoroughly lost, was grateful to find herself trailing up the main road to Luck’s cottage in very short order. Luck was outside waiting for her, which explained the quicker journey back: he gave her a quick, critical look over and nodded decisively as if he were satisfied. Poly was too sleepy to really care what it was he was satisfied about, and when he opened the door for her in a rare moment of thoughtfulness, she merely murmured goodnight and took herself off to bed.

  The acrid burn of smelling salts woke Poly to a world that was far too warm. She sneezed three times, constricting a thin, bony little body that protested its displeasure in semi-articulated grunts, and battled her way out of tangled bedsheets, almost falling out of the regrettably narrow bed.

  “You’re lively this morning,” remarked Luck. He was looking bright and cheerful, thought Poly sourly, and his hair was standing up almost straight. She had an idea that he hadn’t been to bed at all.

  “I’m in my chemise!” said Margaret’s voice indignantly. She looked as though she wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or offended to find Luck in her bedroom. Luck gave her one of his wide, glassy looks until she scowled and dragged the sheets up to her chin, then turned back to Poly.

  “Wake up, Poly. I need you.”

  Poly put up one hand to rub her sleepy eyes and was bewildered to find that she had just knocked off her glasses.

  “I put them on you,” Luck said unnecessarily, pushing them back on her nose with surprising proficiency. He looked pleased with himself. “Wake up, Poly. There’s something sideways around the village and we haven’t finished in the library.”

  “Luck, I’m not dressed! No, let me go: I won’t be pulled around the house in my chemise!”

  “I don’t care what you wear,” argued Luck, still tugging. “I just want my books.”

  “Well, I want breakfast. And so does Onepiece.”

  “Yus,” said Onepiece explosively, clinging to Poly’s chemise in a way that threatened to become embarrassing. “Fist!”

  “Yes, darling; you’ll get breakfast,” soothed Poly, disengaging Onepiece’s grubby little fingers and twitching her own fingers out of Luck’s hand. “No, out! Out, Luck! I will come to the library when I’m dressed.”

  Luck protested, but she pushed him firmly out the door and shut it just as firmly behind him. When she turned around, Margaret was watching her, open-mouthed. Grey eyes met blue: Margaret’s mouth shut with a snap, and she said in the friendliest tones Poly had yet heard from her: “We need to get you some new clothes, Poly: you can’t keep wearing that yellow thing every day. Luck has an account at every store in the village, so we might as well go shopping this afternoon.”

  She met Poly’s surprised thanks with a shrug and a humorous: “Oh well, if people think we’re related you can’t go around dressed like that. It looks like Luck chose it.”

  “He did,” admitted Poly, feeling oddly protective of the yellow frock. “I think it’s pretty.”

  Margaret eyed the dress appraisingly as Poly pulled it over her chemise. “Well, it’s certainly bright. Here, these slippers should fit: you can’t go about barefoot. Should I ask about the glove?”

  “Probably not,” Poly said ruefully, gazing down at the lacy article.

  “All right, we’ll get dresses that match it. What about the hair?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it’s moving. Is it a spell?”

  The thought of her unnervingly active hair as an aid to beauty struck Poly as exquisitely humorous. “A hundred strokes a night and Gaipur Lotion, you mean? No, Luck threw some magic at me and it stuck.”

  “His magic did all that?”

  “Not all of it,” Poly said reluctantly. She crouched beside the bed to neaten Onepiece’s choppy brown hair and hefted him to his feet, ignoring his internal burbling with an iron will. She thought he was a little stronger today and wondered if it was just her imagination: certainly he was still as unbalanced as ever. “It was, well, different when I woke up. Onepiece, if you want to speak, speak aloud.”

  Onepiece made a rude noise at her and said ‘mwah’ sweetly to Margaret, who looked startled and giggled.

  “Oh, isn’t he the sweetest thing? Does he do that at Luck?”

  Poly grinned. “Just last night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Luck so startled.”

  “I’ll just bet,” said Margaret wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give to have seen it! You’d better let me braid that, Poly: we’re all Talented, but self-governing hair is out of the way even here.”

  Poly, who had been distractedly trying to finger-comb her hair and keep Onepiece from falling over at the same time, accepted the offer thankfully, hauling Onepiece along with her by his shirt collar. When she sat down the boy seized her knees, fingers thin and sharp, and tried cheerfully to not fall over.

  “There’s a Happening tomorrow,” Margaret said offhandedly, catching an escaped whisp of hair that had been tickling Poly’s ear. Fortunately, Poly’s hair seemed to be ambivalent toward Margaret’s particular magic, which sped up the braiding process considerably. “If we can find you something ready-made, you should come with me. Luck’ll be having callers until at least midday, and besides, everybody wants to meet you.”

  “Oh! A Happening,” said Poly, all at sea with the implied capital letter.

  Margaret gave a sniff of laughter. “I keep forgetting how quaint and old-fashioned you are, Poly: you sound just like one of the old table-tabbies. A Happening is just dinner and maybe a dance. You don’t even need a really plummy dress, so long as it’s smart.”

  If she took ‘plummy’ to mean fine, Poly thought she could just about understand that. Language hadn’t changed so very much in the last three hundred years, but travelling with someone as succinct as Luck had made her forget the small matter of colloquialisms.

  “Won’t the hostess mind?” she asked Margaret, a little at random. The thought that language hadn’t changed much was sticking in her mind, because language did change over three hundred years. No one who had studied the Elder Books at the castle’s library could think otherwise; those ancient tomes, heavy with years and almost entirely incomprehensible with outdated spelling and extinct words, were a written testament to the changeability of language.

  Margaret tied a ribbon into Poly’s braid end, letting it drop with a heavy thump, and said: “The Prime Lady, you mean? No, as far as they’re concerned, a bucket’s as good as a drop. You’re done,” she added unnecessarily, since Poly continued to sit, lost in her musings.

  Poly blinked a little and murmured thanks. Fortunately Margaret didn’t seem to expect to be repaid in kind, and she was able to make her way back to the library shortly thereafter.

  By the time Poly and Margaret set out on their shopping expedition there was a line of people sprawling from the front door all the way out the garden gate. Margaret, who had come to fetch Poly from the library, caught sight of them through the front window and hastily bundled Poly out through the kitchen door.

  “This way, Poly! If they can’t raise Luck, they’ll fetch whoever they can.”

  “What do they want?” asked Poly, peering over the hedge only to be tugged away by the other girl.

  “Charms. Spells. Some of them need magic mended or the forest pushed back. Luck’s contract says that they can call from first bell to midday to be seen to, but sometimes Luck forgets about them all morning and then keeps going until last bell.”

  Poly was about to remark that anyone who wanted the fore
st pushed back should perhaps hire a woodcutter instead of Luck when she remembered the quiet intent of the forest, and the way her hair had reached out to it. Perhaps the forest, like the village, was a little more than it seemed.

  “Is that what he does when he’s home?” she asked instead, obeying Margaret’s insistent hand wavings to scurry along half-bent behind the shelter of the hedge.

  “No, mostly he tries to get out of it when he’s home,” Margaret said carelessly. They rounded the street corner and she straightened, briskly tugging the wrinkles out of her bodice and setting her hat at a more flirtatious angle. Poly, following suit, regretted having no hat: back at the castle hats had not been worn, and she thought they were a delightful nonsense. Some of the older court ladies had worn turbans, but the girls wore their hair long and uncapped, threaded with flowers or jewels; or, if the lady were an enchantress, sparkling spells.

  Poly smoothed her hair instead, uneasily noticing that a whole fat skein had already escaped from the braid, and followed in the wake of Margaret’s bobbing straw hat, feeling oddly bereft without Onepiece’s constant nattering in her mind.

  “Are you sure your mother doesn’t mind watching Onepiece?” she said anxiously.

  It was perhaps the fourth time she had asked, and although she didn’t see Margaret roll her eyes Poly could hear the laugh in her voice as Margaret said: “Trust me, Mum is having the time of her life. She adores having a little person to cook for and clean and bully. No, not that one, Poly: Mistress Holly specializes in frumpy old tabby clientele. We want Hobsons.”

  Poly followed her dutifully, though she hadn’t seen anything wrong with Mistress Holly’s quiet, long-sleeved displays. She found herself, after the confusing silver tinkle of a bell somewhere above her head, enveloped in a close, bright world of fabric and dress-dummies. Something sharp pierced her foot through the borrowed shoes, and Poly curled her toes, instinctively looking down to find the source of the pain. A bright, steely gleam proclaimed the presence of a pin, which she picked up and passed to the effervescent lady who bustled over to them at the sound of the bell.