Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) (24 page)

“Poly! Poly, you’re not about to do something silly, are you?” she panted.

“No,” said Poly, with great precision. “I’m going to box Luck’s ears!”

Margaret made a choking noise and snatched at Poly’s arm. “Oh, no you don’t! Poly, I’m doing this for your own good!”

Poly felt the spell before she saw it, a web of lethargy spreading along her arm. She peeled off the glove on her antimagic hand and swept the spell away without stopping, which made Margaret squeak in surprise and lose precious moments catching up.

When they reached the stable, Luck’s head poked out of the stable door, his hair spiked with sweat and dust, trailing cobwebs.

His eyes were already bright with magic, but when he saw her, they fairly blazed. “Poly! Finally!”

He dashed into the road, grabbing Poly’s hand; and before she knew quite what was happening, Poly found herself being dragged into a stable that was more cobwebby and less smelly than she remembered stables being.

“You’ve gotten spiky again,” said Luck unexpectedly, peering closely at her. “Why are you spiky again? No, never mind that: look at what I’ve found!”

“Annie’s field, Luck!”

“What? Oh, yes, it was very useful: pointed me straight here.”

Poly blinked in surprise, her anger momentarily arrested. “You mean you’ve fixed it?”

“Of course not. Why would I do that? I told you, it led me here.
Here
is where everything is happening. Can’t you feel it? There’s communication magic here that I’ve never seen before. It blazed up again a few minutes ago and everything got another little tug sideways.”

A pulse of anger made Poly hot and cold at once. When she wrenched her hand out of Luck’s, she thought that her fingers might be trembling slightly. It was a new and unsettling feeling, and she was glad that her voice didn’t tremble when she said: “What about Annie’s field? You told her that you’d fix it. Luck, they need to plant!”

“But this is more interesting,” said Luck, giving her the wide, glassy look that suggested she was babbling.

In another cold moment, Poly found something to do with her trembling hand that felt right.

Smack!

Luck’s eyes were suddenly very awake and narrow above a brilliant red handprint on one cheek. Poly had a moment to feel euphoric and oddly amused, her hand still tingling, before he said, very softly: “You shouldn’t have done that, Poly.”

There was no sensation of movement, but Poly found herself backed against the far wall with a decided thump, Luck’s hands on her shoulders as if he was going to shake her. A cobweb tickled her left ear, but she wasn’t entirely sure that the cobweb was responsible for the shiver that slid down her neck.

Oh well, she thought, looking into Luck’s blazing eyes: it could have been worse. She wasn’t in a spelled circle, for one thing. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure that Luck wasn’t going to retaliate in kind. His face was very close, his eyes very green and dangerous.

“Don’t ever do that again, Poly!”

“If Annie doesn’t plant now, they’ll miss the season,” Poly told him. She was surprised to find that she was still angry. Slapping Luck had been liberating, but not entirely satisfying.

“If they miss the season, they won’t have a crop; and if they don’t have a crop they’ll be running at a loss instead of a profit. That means there won’t be any coal for the winter, and just barely enough food to go around.”

If she was hoping to shame him, it didn’t seem to work. Luck didn’t answer. He was wearing one of the looks that she didn’t understand yet, and if anything, she thought he might have moved closer. Poly thought she could feel her shoulders slowly bruising under his fingers and became irritated.

“Personal space, Luck!”

Luck blinked once, allowing the uncomfortable moment to stretch for a minute longer, then stepped away, digging his hands into his pockets.

“Not everyone finds my kisses distasteful, you know,” he said.

Poly felt the familiar sense of bewilderment that came with Luck’s habit of metaphorically sweeping the rug out from under her feet. “Don’t change the subject!”

“I wasn’t,” he said, sliding a brief, sideways look at her. “Now can we get back to work?”

Poly looked at him for a long, silent moment, trying to decide if it was worth being angry, and if she could get up the nerve to hit him again. The answer to both questions seemed to be no, so she turned on her heel and exited the stables, passing a wide-eyed and open-mouthed Margaret at the door.

When Poly arrived at the contentious field, anger simmering, she could see the sideways pull of a great, big
something
dragging at the jinxed field. It was the same pull that she herself had noticed a few days ago, but now it was much stronger. Poly sucked in a deep breath, fidgeting with her glove as she surveyed the damage. There was certainly more than the sideways pull affecting the field.

She pinched away the sideways pull first, freeing the jinx from the draining influence that made it curl protectively in on itself. It relaxed slightly, a loosening of malevolence, and as she stepped over the stile, Poly felt it focus on herself. It was the questing, malicious feel of the jinx that made Poly tuck her glove into her pocket rather than put it back on. She turned in a circle, sweeping her antimagic hand through the air as a warning, and felt the jinx draw back carefully.

“Well, then,” she said to it, feeling for a fleeting moment as if she was dealing with Mordion again. “What should I do with you?”

The jinx suggested, though Poly wasn’t quite sure how, the idea of slitting her wrists and letting the blood seep into its soil.

“Aren’t you lovely,” Poly said, shocked. “No, I don’t think so. I suppose that would help you in some nasty way.”

Again, the jinx suggested in an indefinable way that, no, it would merely be amusing.

“I see.” Poly crossed her arms over her chest. She found herself wishing, traitorously, that Luck was here. He would probably look at the jinx with golden eyes and say: “Huh. Interesting.” Then he would flick his fingers in that annoyingly effortless way of his, and that would be that.

In fact, if he had done that in the first place, thought Poly, feeling a resurgence of anger, she wouldn’t be in this position.

Luck’s voice said: “It’s your fault anyway. Why shouldn’t you fix it?”

“
My
fault?” said Poly, so astonished at the statement that finding Luck suddenly in the field with her didn’t surprise her.

“Ever since I met you, things have been going wrong. There was the curse, to start with. How many people do you think it hurt when he used you?”

A familiar, sour taste seem to cling to the back of her mouth. Poly recognised it as dread, and said quietly: “Do you mean Mordion?”

“Ah. I thought you were self-absorbed,” said Luck. “Apparently you’re merely stupid. Why else do you think he picked you? Do you really think you’re important enough to capture his attention otherwise? He always wants something. In your case it was power– a
lot
of power. Enough to make an army.”

“I didn’t– it wasn’t–” Poly blinked her eyes rapidly, but Luck’s face still swam, cruel and almost unfamiliar, opposite her. “The Frozen Battlefield was my fault as well?”

“Of course. He must have taken on too much magic from you: he couldn’t hold it all and they got away from him. Then there was the bomb, of course, and the chocolates that nearly got Margaret killed. Yes, you’ve stirred things up very nicely. And then there’s the fact that someone’s been using every power source in the village to send some sort of message out. The message tubes must be too public for them.”

“They used the jinx as well?”

Luck heaved a quick sigh, impatience unconcealed. “I just
said
that. Good sources were drained of power, evil ones were drained of their checks and protections.”

Poly, feeling a wave of hopelessness and guilt, said miserably: “I’d better try and fix it, then.”

It was the fleeting look of angry surprise sweeping across Luck’s face that gave it away.

“All right,” he said quickly, but it was too late.

“You’re cleverer than I thought,” Poly told the Luck-shaped jinx, drawing in a deep, shaky breath. “I should have known when you answered questions I didn’t ask out loud. And Luck doesn’t know about Mordion, by the way.”

Jinx-Luck shrugged and became slightly less formed. “It was a reasonable guess.”

“You only know things that I know,” nodded Poly. Her voice sounded surprisingly calm to her ears: there was a panicked, shivery feeling in her chest that threatened to overwhelm her. She stifled the renewed feeling of regret that Luck wasn’t there, and said: “I think it might be best if I unravel you.”

There was a nasty laugh as jinx-Luck faded. To Poly, it sounded derisive: the jinx was daring her to do her worst.

“We’ll see about that,” she told it. There was a sense of general fogginess about the field that made her think the jinx was up to something else. She ignored it and concentrated on the jinx itself, picking tentatively at the outlying patches of it that reminded her of a tangled ball of string. Some of the ends frayed when she picked at them, but since they rejoined the moment she turned her back, Poly soon gave up the exercise and turned to prying it from the ground instead.

Whatever strength or power she had (and Poly was determined not to call it magic), it seemed to work momentarily, her fingers twitching slightly with the suggestion of lifting while something bigger and stronger inside her grasped the jinx and heaved at it. The ground quivered minutely beneath her, and then Poly found herself surrounded by a vast jungle of woven vines that met high above her head and blocked out the triad. For a claustrophobic moment she thought she’d been transported back into the castle with the thorn hedge stretching high and sharp above her, but an unfamiliar gleam of dark, shiny purple to the vines caught her eye.

Had the jinx really shrunk her, or was it playing with her mind again? Certainly that was the jinx high above her head, its creeper-like form evident at this scale.

Poly sighed. It was still playing with her: taking the power she’d used to lift it and blowing it out of all proportion until she did this to herself. It probably hadn’t had to do anything more than amplify the power she was using.

Very
like Mordion, Poly decided. There was still a pit of coldness in her stomach, but the dread had gone. Clever the jinx might be, and it might present a very good human front; but in the end, it was technically mindless. After the barrage of Mordion’s relentless, cruel intelligence, that was something of a relief. The jinx could be beaten.

Poly wasn’t sure if it was her own thought or the jinx that said into the back of her mind:
Then why haven’t you done it yet?

Poly didn’t trouble to make herself bigger again. There didn’t seem to be much point: if the jinx had tricked her into thinking she was small, the power would only be funnelled into something else of a more nefarious nature while she tired herself out. If she really
was
as tiny as it appeared, no doubt the jinx would manage to twist any spell she tried to reverse the damage, and Poly found that she didn’t like the idea of being a giant among women.

Instead, she spent some time trying not to think too much about how to defeat the jinx. It had shown such an uncanny ability to garner knowledge from her mind that she wasn’t sure it wouldn’t manage to stop her if she
did
find a way to dismantle it.

The jinx caught that thought and agreed. Better not to unravel. Nasty things might happen. And what would Annie do with an unravelled jinx, anyway? The jinx was what made her strawberries slightly sideways: normal strawberries would be nothing like so profitable.

“Oh, shut up,” said Poly wearily. She made herself comfortable on what should have been a small pebble but was now big enough to properly sit on, and let her fingers run aimlessly through the different threads that made up the jinx. “I’m not going to unravel you.”

The jinx did something remarkably like purring, so Poly continued to stroke her fingers through it, an idea stirring in her mind. She held it back carefully, determined not to let the jinx know what she was thinking, and let her bare fingers work sweepingly in silence. And if her fingers felt light and cool and slick with something, well, what did that matter to the jinx? It knew magic, warm and brilliant; and it knew antimagic’s sharp, cutting edge. Everything else was either fodder to play with or boring landscape.

And so Poly went on coating the jinx with a strong, clear
something
that she wouldn’t dare think the name of, for her own peace of mind as much as for the success of her ploy. The jinx purred again, settled, and seemed to let her existence fade to its peripheral. Something else was tugging at its attention; something outside the field that distracted it at once from Poly, who felt with some relief that the reinforcements must have arrived at last.

However, if reinforcements
had
arrived, it soon appeared that the most they were capable of doing was distracting the jinx. Unwilling to waste even that slight advantage, Poly pressed on anyway, keeping her mind as busy as her fingers. It was nearly finished.