Spindle (Two Monarchies Sequence Book 1) (4 page)

He was flicking at a butterflower with one pensive finger, eyes vague and just a little bit golden.

“Interesting,” he said.

Poly asked: “What’s interesting?” without much hope of Luck answering. He seemed to have forgotten about her again, and was engaged in ruthlessly pulling up handful after handful of green, sweet-smelling grass. It was only after he thoughtfully began putting grass blades in his mouth that Poly realised the grass wasn’t in fact sweet-smelling. It didn’t smell like anything, if it came to that.

She blinked and took a closer look at the clumps of grass Luck had uprooted. They were so bright and vibrant that they
must
smell sweet and grassy. Had the grass tricked her into thinking it had a smell, or had her own mind been playing tricks on her?

She asked Luck, who didn’t seem to hear and only said: “Yes, but I want to know
why
.”

“Let me know when you find out,” she said, a little sourly, and left him to his grass-tasting. She wended her way from the ridge she and Luck had arrived on, to the very top of the hill, intent on reaching its summery apex. The triad was almost offensively cheerful here, caressing the bonny faces of the butterflowers as she passed them and glancing vibrantly off every grass-stalk. The breeze was delightfully pleasant, and Poly wondered if her mind had created these impressions, too. She thought they became a little less strong as she wondered about them.

From the top of the hill Poly saw nearly a dozen hilltops decked in summery green, each more sunny and cheerful than the last.

“Oh, really!” she said to the general splendour. “Don’t you think you’re trying just a little bit too hard?”

Some of the distant hilltops were wooded and tree-lined, others bare and grassy, but all alike had a splendour of obnoxiously healthy countryside that Poly found a little smug. She narrowed her eyes at them, fancying that the surrounding hills were just a little...unreal, perhaps?

“I wonder,” she said aloud. And then: “
Oh!
It’s not that they don’t smell. It’s
why
don’t they smell!”

Poly looked at the hilltops surrounding her with narrowed eyes. There was some sort of insect buzzing away in the distance, surprising her with the knowledge that it was the first she had seen since she and Luck arrived at this place. Adding to the air of unreality was the fact that the bare, grassy mounds furthest away were a little fuzzy. Were they quite real? She wasn’t sure anymore.

Busy with her thoughts, it was a few minutes before Poly realised that the distant insect buzzing from one hilltop to the other, was in fact a
person
. The figure was travelling in short bursts of blue-green magic, disappearing on one hilltop and appearing on the next almost instantaneously. Moreover, it seemed to be quickly coming closer, as if intent on discovering what kind of insect she was.

As it came sporadically closer Poly was able to discern the bright starbursts that exploded in its magic: whoever it was, he or she was quite mad.

Soon she could see that the thing was a man, dressed in a hermit’s cassock that was ragged and indecently short of his knobbly knees. A wild bush of a beard stuck out of his thin face, threaded with flowers here and there. He was chasing a brilliantly blue butterfly, making little darting snatches at it and cackling gleefully when he missed, Shifting when he had to.

Poly was watching him with a mixture of bemusement and suppressed laughter, wondering if she ought to call Luck, when with frightening suddenness, the hermit was
there
, his face so close that his resounding “Hah!” fogged Poly’s glasses.

To her mortification, Poly shrieked and leapt backwards, her hair expanding like a cloud in immediate response to the threat. Then Luck was somehow in front of her, his strong, bright magic pulsing around him.

“Bravo!” yelled the hermit.

Poly bit back a giggle despite the hammering of her heart. He was projecting droplets of spit freely; and, by the look on Luck’s face, quite forcefully.

The hermit didn’t seem to realise, or perhaps he didn’t care. He continued to gurgle and clap his hands in glee, yelling: “Bravo! Bravo! No, Eureka! Hah! Eureka!”

Luck pointedly wiped his face with a conjured handkerchief, but the hermit paid no attention to the fact. Poly, taking courage from the fact that he seemed to be rather more mad than dangerous, was able to quiet her hair, and at last stepped out from behind Luck.

At the sight of her the man giggled again, and said: “I knew I was right. I
told
you I was right. Every three years it snows, and then it happens!”

Luck, looking put upon, said in a long-suffering voice: “Poly, I don’t suppose that one of those books you picked up in the castle was called
Angwynelle
, by any chance?”

“It snows!” burbled the hermit, oblivious to the cloudless blue sky and the full radiating heat of the suns. “Every three years, and then you know what happens. The snowflakes come!”

Remembering that it
had
been
Angwynelle
that had fallen open in her hand, and that the hermit was disturbingly familiar, Poly said guiltily: “Yes, but it
can’t be
that
–”

“Well it is,” Luck said, wiping another wet speck from his nose. “I told you that you’d ruined my shift spell.”

He seemed mildly pleased by the fact.

“But the hermit is a character in a book, not a real person!” protested Poly. She had read
Angwynelle
enough times to recognise a character as memorable as the hermit.

“You don’t think
he’s
real, do you?” asked Luck. “He’s a figment.”

But the hermit’s bony fingers, which were tugging at Poly’s hair and rapping her smartly on the skull,
felt
real. He looked up at her with bright, wild eyes, and said: “I’m just as real as you are, my darling snowflakes. Or just as unreal. In point of fact, I’m even more real than you are.”

“You’re just a character in a book,” Poly told him, a little rudely. She had already felt the oddness to the place, the way things seemed to be just a little too beautiful and faded around the edges. It occurred to her rather horribly that if she and Luck travelled as far as they could possibly travel they would find nothing but empty green hills until they finally came upon the hermit again.

The hermit was gurgling, unoffended. “Bravo, little snowflake! Encore! But I’m still more real than you are, you know. You’re not even as real as a snowflake.”

“Yes, I am,” argued Poly. The hermit’s way of speaking made her head spin.

“Wrong!” shouted the hermit, showering Poly with a fine mist of moisture. “Wrong and false! Ipso facto and tripe! I’m
far
more real than you are. You’re here in my little patch of words, and I’m all that exists here, so
you
don’t exist. I might not exist in your world, but you’re in mine now. Hah! A snowflake is a snowflake whether it’s made of ice or letters, so a snowflake is more real than you are, too. So there.”

“He makes a disturbing amount of sense,” said Luck, eyeing the hermit in some fascination. He asked: “Is there a way out?”

“Yes, my snowflakes,” burbled the man, shivering out of existence and appearing again beside what appeared to be a rather shakily fenced goat corral. “Come along, come along, come along! You mustn’t melt, you know; I would never get the water out of my nice new carpet.”

He had fizzed in and out of existence several more times before they caught up with him, and then skipped from one foot to the other in impatience when they stopped. “Hurry up, snowflakes! Through the gate before you melt!”

“That’s a goat pen,” said Poly.

“Hah!” said the hermit. “That’s all
you
know! It’s not a pen. Pen! Hahahaha! Not even a quill. Not it, oh no! It’s a door.”

“He’s right, you know,” Luck said, green eyes beginning to tinge slightly gold. “It’s an opening between two paragraphs, and it’s outward bound.”

The hermit clapped his hands, producing a blackbird feather with a flourish of starburst magic. He carefully tucked it behind one of Poly’s ears as if it were a jewelled earring and said: “This is yours, little snowflake. Such a long time to wait, wasn’t it? But now everything will come about again, so long as you’re right, right, right!”

“I suppose so,” said Poly, dubiously touching the feather.

The hermit, suddenly anxious, said: “Said too much, didn’t I? I wasn’t supposed to, was I? Right, right, right, that’s all I was supposed to say. You have to go now. Off, off, off! Off you go!”

“The book first, I think,” said Luck, holding out his hand for it and ignoring the harried shooing motions that the hermit was making.

“It’s mine!” Poly objected, annoyed to find that he expected her to give it up at his mere request.

Luck shot her a golden look, and then the book was in his outstretched hand without more than a whisper of magic.

“I’ll want it back later,” she said, but Luck had already lost interest in her. He was watching the hermit’s increasingly erratic antics.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Does it matter?” asked Poly, and encountered a reproachful look from the hermit. “I mean– well, you’re a character. You’re written that way. It doesn’t have to matter
why.
”

“I’m written very specifically,” said the hermit proudly. “Clever little snowflake, aren’t you? Go away.”

Since he emphasized the command by shoving Poly into the outbound passage, Poly was left with very little to say to this. Scenery blurred, and Luck must have grabbed her in passing, because when they tumbled back into the real world his arms were rucked uncomfortably under her arms and she had formed a closer acquaintance with his mud-stained coat.

Poly was obliged to dissuade her hair from clasping Luck to her side before he could disentangle his arms, by which time she was feeling hot and bothered and misused.

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Luck, his eyes very green. “I don’t particularly like being co-joined to you, either.”

Poly, who hadn’t thought she was
looking
in any specific way, blushed.

Taking unfair advantage of her confusion, he added: “I thought princesses were meant to take lessons in charm and deportment.”

It was rather a shock to be reminded that she was meant to be the princess. Poly had to close her mouth, which had automatically opened to correct Luck, before she said something unconsidered. She wanted badly to know why she had been used in an enchantment, and what exactly that enchantment was. Answers would undoubtedly be more forthcoming for a princess than a lady-in-waiting.

“I thought that wizards were meant to be versed in international diplomacy,” she pointed out instead, feeling that it was time she put her foot down if she meant to be the princess. “You laid hands on a royal personage–”

“I didn’t; I kissed you,” interposed Luck, curling a portion of Poly’s hair around one finger and closely observing it.

“That’s what I said.”

Luck disengaged his left wrist from the last of her hair and let go of the lock he held. “Then I seem to have been laying my lips on you, not my hands. Come along, Poly, and stop arguing. We have a long way to walk.”

Out of the unreal ambience of the hermit’s chapter the triad was glowing warm and welcoming, creating its usual three-pronged shadows. The plains spread out before them, the grass flowing in great, slow waves as the gentle wind swept close to the ground, warm and scented. There were wildflowers among the grass plumes; butterflowers, pettypips, occasional patches of lavender, and even a few flowers Poly didn’t recognise. She amused herself as they walked by naming as many of them as she could remember. Gwyn the gardener had taught her their names long ago, when he found infant Poly in his garden, happily engaged in eating his prized roses. Poly had spent almost as much time with Gwyn as she had with her parents in those young years. Poly smiled, remembering his leathered old face, and with faint surprise discovered that tears were gliding down her cheeks in gentle sorrow at this memory.

In an effort to stop them, Poly curled her arms more tightly around her remaining books and asked Luck: “When will we cross the border?”

She seemed to remember that the border was where the southern plains met the northern forests. Much of the tension between Civet and her neighbouring country of Parras had been over claims that the already land-rich Civet was poaching forest land along the border by felling trees. Poly remembered Lady Cimone’s curled lip at the rumours and realised with surprise and sudden understanding that the Lady had known all along what her country was capable of. It was unsettling, because one always felt that one’s country was on the side of right and justice.

“You’re not paying attention, Poly. There isn’t a border anymore.
Why are you sleeping?
”

Luck’s last words were sharp and laced with a cutting edge of his gold magic; and Poly, who had indeed been falling quietly asleep as she walked, misstepped in the shock between waking and sleeping, and tumbled over a small bump in the ground.