Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded Page 12

  “The patriarchs have said so,” said Miss Flivvers. “And that ought to be enough for you.”

  What an odd way to answer the question. “Is it enough for you? Do you believe it?”

  Miss Flivvers looked at the closed door as if it might be spying on them. “No,” she murmured.

  “Then what do you think happened?” said Chantel.

  “I think—” Miss Flivvers’s haughty manner vanished in a moment, and she looked as young and confused as Chantel herself felt. “I think it was the patriarchs themselves who took the sorceresses.”

  “Oh.” Chantel remembered Queen Haywith’s words: Whoever had taken the sorceresses wanted power. She suddenly felt certain Miss Flivvers was right. “We’ve got to—”

  “This changes nothing,” said Miss Flivvers, becoming herself again. “You must find the Buttoning.”

  “But the patriarchs—”

  “May be misleading us, yes. Still, if we wish to keep Miss Ellicott and the other sorceresses safe, we must pretend that we do not suspect their prevarication.”

  “Just do as they say?”

  “Yes, indeed. And graciously.”

  “I don’t trust them,” said Chantel.

  “Nor do I,” said Miss Flivvers. “But we must dance to the tune that is played for us.”

  “I don’t th—I beg your pardon, I don’t think so,” said Chantel. “I’m going to talk to the king.”

  “The king!” Miss Flivvers couldn’t have looked more surprised if Chantel had said she was going to stand on her head atop Seven Buttons. “What earthly good will that do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chantel. “But he ought to be able to stop the patriarchs if anyone can. And he really ought to do something about those Marauders without the gates.”

  Anna and Bowser had been watching Chantel in silence, as if she were some kind of strange phenomenon, Chantel thought irritatedly. The Girl with a Snake in Her Head.

  “We’re coming with you,” said Anna, and Bowser nodded vigorously.

  “You can’t,” said Chantel. Down, snake. “I mean, don’t, please. You need to stay here and—”

  She looked at Miss Flivvers, and decided not to add and make sure the girls are safe. It wouldn’t be kind. But she was relieved to see that Anna and Bowser understood.

  If Chantel hadn’t already spoken to Queen Haywith, she would never have had the nerve to go up to the castle.

  Still, the higher she climbed, the more nervous she became.

  The castle perched on the top of the mighty block of stone that formed the peak of Lightning Pass. It was accessible only by a narrow stairway, so ancient that it was impossible to tell whether it had been carved from the peak, or built on.

  She started up, careful where she put her feet. Here and there a step had crumbled away completely. There was an iron railing, rusted and bent. Chantel took care not to lean on it.

  She stopped to rest, and looked down on the whole city . . . its neighborhoods and factories, its houses sitting almost on top of each other, its bridges and courtyards. All filled with her people, the people of Lightning Pass.

  Beyond that, you could see the Roughlands in every direction, except south where the sea flashed in the sunlight. Everything close to the walls, though, was cut off from sight. She couldn’t see the Marauder army.

  It was funny, she thought. If you didn’t know better you might think that all the power in the city rested here, at the top.

  The girl is nearly

  at the top

  of the stairs.

  Did we expect her to do this?

  Yes.

  But we did not expect her to do it so

  soon.

  Well, she has chosen.

  This is the greatest danger she has yet faced.

  After all

  the snake is in her head.

  The snake is in all of her.

  It is a very serious situation.

  But if she does not face this danger, all is lost.

  Yes.

  All is lost.

  And if she faces it and dies?

  What then?

  14

  IN WHICH CHANTEL LEARNS SEVERAL SURPRISING THINGS

  Somehow Chantel had expected things to be royal at the top of the stairs. She’d expected sentries, like at the gate in Seven Buttons.

  Instead there was a woman sitting on a stool, knitting.

  Chantel curtseyed. “Excuse me, ma’am, I—”

  “Just a minute.” The woman counted stitches to the end of the row. “There. Yes?”

  “I . . . I’m here to see the king.” It suddenly seemed like a ridiculous claim.

  The woman set her knitting down carefully in a basket at her feet. “What’s your name?”

  “Chantel.”

  “Shon-tell,” the woman repeated. “Hm. I think you’re the one they’ve been waiting for.” She got to her feet and peered at Chantel closely. “You are tall and black. You are neither shamefast nor biddable. Yes, Chantel. But you have no snake.”

  “No,” said Chantel, rather taken aback. She was not about to say the snake was inside her. This woman was sharp and brusque and did not invite such confidences.

  Besides, the fact that she’d been expected was somehow not at all comforting.

  “I’ll go see what’s wanted.” The woman left through a wicket embedded in the huge oaken door of the castle.

  Chantel waited impatiently.

  After a while the great door was flung open. A man appeared, dressed in a white uniform so clean and crisp that Chantel felt sorry for his laundress. He had a high, fluffy white hat with a long feathered plume, and a sword at his side. He marched out, stopped in front of Chantel, clicked his heels together, and saluted.

  Chantel curtseyed.

  “You are Chantel?” He looked down his nose, which was nearly rectangular and sat over a trim little mustache.

  “Yes,” said Chantel.

  “The king desires that you be brought into his presence.”

  “Thank you,” said Chantel. “That’s what I’m here for. I want to tell him—”

  “You are far too quick to speak,” said the man. “You must be meek and biddable. You will tell him nothing until spoken to. Do you know how to make a court curtsey?”

  “No,” said Chantel. “But I need to tell him—”

  The man turned and snapped his fingers. The knitting woman came up.

  “Teach her to do a court curtsey, Lady Moonlorn,” said the man.

  And so Chantel, who was burning to just go in and talk to the king, had to practice doing a court curtsey under the watchful eye of the knitting woman and the man in white. It involved crossing her ankles, bending her knees outward, and going right down to the ground and staying there, neck bent, until bidden to rise. The really hard part was the rising.

  Finally, with very sore ankles, Chantel was deemed good enough. She followed the man in white into the castle, into a high room with an arched ceiling painted with scenes of battle. Chantel craned her neck to look at them.

  But the man in white hurried on.

  “You ought to have done a court curtsey to me,” he said, “as I myself am a prince. I am My Royal Highness, Prince George. But as you didn’t know, I shall be lenient.”

  “Thank you,” said Chantel, annoyed at having to thank him for nothing.

  They passed through a hallway in which the paintings reached down to the floor. Chantel stopped to look at a picture of a woman being chased from the city by what looked like wild dogs—only they were the size of horses. The woman, terrified and bloodied, was fleeing through the city gate, pursued by the beasts.

  “What’s this?” Chantel asked.

  “The Exile of Queen Haywith,” said the prince. “A very famous painting by a noted artist of the last century.”

  “Are you sure? That it’s Queen Haywith, I mean?”

  “Of course I am sure, girl,” said the prince.

  Chantel kept staring at the painting. The woman
was wearing what was left of a flowing white gown. She had clouds of red-gold hair, and her eyes, wide with terror, were green.

  “Was there more than one queen named Haywith?” Chantel asked.

  “Of course not. Who would name a girl after a traitor? Now come along. You are keeping the king waiting.”

  They walked on, although Chantel kept looking back at the painting, which looked nothing at all like the Queen Haywith she had met in the Ago. And Miss Flivvers had said she’d died in the castle.

  The prince held up a hand to stop Chantel, walked through an archway, and shouted ringingly, “My lord King! The girl Chantel!”

  He stepped aside and nodded, and Chantel went in.

  The enormous, octagonal room was painted red all the way up to its high, groined ceiling, with details picked out in gold. In the center of the room, pacing around a small table, was a tall man in green velvet.

  He stopped pacing when he saw Chantel.

  “Curtsey!” the prince reminded Chantel in a loud whisper.

  Oops. Chantel crossed her sore ankles and sank to the floor, her robes spread around her. She bent her neck until her nose almost touched the tiles. They had little dragons painted on them.

  “The king is signaling for you to rise,” said the prince. “Approach him, but do not sit.”

  Chantel got to her feet. Her legs were trembling, as they hadn’t been when she’d met Queen Haywith. Fortunately her robes hid this. She stopped halfway to him, as the knitting woman had instructed her, and waited.

  “So. The girl Chantel comes to us.”

  King Rathfest’s voice was fruity and rich, and Chantel found it oddly comforting. But his eyes and mouth narrowed into a smile that struck her as smug.

  “We expected you to come bearing a snake.”

  Chantel felt the snake inside her twitch uncomfortably.

  “You are surprised to find we were expecting you, no doubt,” the king continued. “And that we set our own mother to watch. She has been waiting out there for a week, in fair weather and foul, during which time she’s knitted seven scarves and a mitten. You took your time, girl. We almost grew impatient.”

  “Oh,” said Chantel, nonplussed. “Er. Do you know why I’m here then, er, Your Majesty?”

  “We do,” said the king. “But it would amuse us to know why you think you’re here. Please sit down. We shall sit first, as is proper.”

  The king sat, and looked at Chantel expectantly.

  Chantel cast a nervous glance at Prince George, in case he disapproved, and then sat on the velvet-cushioned chair the king indicated.

  King Rathfest turned to the prince. “Do bring us some refreshments, George, Your Highness, won’t you? The sort of thing girls like.”

  The prince sniffed, nodded haughtily, and left.

  “Now then.” The king smiled encouragingly at her. “Tell us your story.”

  So Chantel did. She talked about the disappearance of the sorceresses, and about her visit to the patriarchs. But when it came to her flight through the catacombs, she decided not to say that she had ended up outside the wall. She felt it would merely complicate matters.

  She did not mention Franklin.

  She wondered what terrible dangers he was facing, while she sat on a velvet cushion and talked to a king.

  The prince came back, wheeling a little cart that rattled across the tiles.

  “Excellent, Your Highness,” said the king. “You may leave us now, as we discussed. Will you be so good as to serve, Chantel?”

  The prince bowed and withdrew.

  Chantel got up and took the things off the cart, managing to do it quite gracefully thanks to her deportment. There was a pot of tea, and two extremely breakable-looking cups of breath-thin china, and a plate of little cakes with pink icing, and another of raspberry and blueberry tarts. Chantel tried not to stare in disbelief at these delicacies.

  You would hardly know that, down in the city, eggs were selling for five dollars each.

  When the tea was poured, the king urged her to take at least two of everything. Chantel did, and tried to eat slowly. The cakes were rich and buttery, and the tarts oozed sweet jam that she had to catch with her tongue to keep it from glopping on her robe.

  The king merely nibbled at a single bit of cake. Chantel wondered if there would be leftovers, and whether she might be allowed to take some to the girls at the school. She could not possibly ask such a thing, so she said, “Thank you, your Majesty. We never have anything like this at the school.”

  “No?” said the king. “And why is that? We thought girls liked cakes and so forth.”

  Chantel told him about the shops and markets, and how little there was to buy and how much it all cost, and how the patriarchs bought things in the harbor and then sold them for much more inside the city walls.

  “Oh yes, they control the markets,” said the king. “We ourself suffer from it. We have been reduced to living without servants, as you see, and being waited on by our mother and our siblings.”

  Too small, Chantel thought. Who had said that to her? She couldn’t remember. Anyway, the king’s concerns were too small.

  She expected to feel the snake inside her writhe with impatience. But Japheth was oddly still. Waiting.

  “The patriarchs want to strengthen the wall,” Chantel told the king. “Even though, according to them, the Marauders have demanded the walls come down or they’ll kill the sorceresses.”

  “Kill the sorceresses? How will the Marauders do that?” said the king.

  “I don’t think they can.” Chantel took a deep breath. “I think the patriarchs kidnapped the sorceresses themselves.”

  “Dear, dear,” said the king, shaking his head. “Well, you do right to bring this to our attention, Chantel. We have been concerned about these overreaching patriarchs for some time.”

  This isn’t about you and the patriarchs, Chantel thought. Too small!

  “‘So why didn’t Your Majesty do something,’ you are thinking,” said the king. “Well, we had to wait until the time was right. Now, we believe, the time may be right. For, you see, we have you. And that is not all.”

  He snapped his fingers in the air, and Prince George was instantly by his side. “Yes, my lord King?”

  “Send them in,” said the king.

  The prince in white marched away, straight and tall. He flung open a pair of doors that formed an arch. And through the doors, in a moment, for they had clearly been waiting just outside, came the sorceresses.

  15

  IN WHICH CHANTEL HAS A HEADACHE

  Chantel sprang to her feet. She watched as the missing sorceresses walked forward in a line, gracefully encircled the table where the king sat, and dropped into deep court curtseys. Their robes spread out around them, like the petals of a many-colored flower, with Chantel and the king at the center.

  Miss Ellicott, in her green robe, was right in front of her.

  “You may rise,” said the king.

  The sorceresses rose elegantly, each one a perfect model of deportment.

  “The girl, Chantel, has come.” The king nodded at Miss Ellicott. “As you told us she would.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty,” said Miss Ellicott.

  “But she has no snake,” said the king.

  The snake, Japheth, was in fact squirming madly, as if sensing Chantel’s confusion.

  “Nonetheless, she is unusually powerful, Your Majesty,” said Miss Ellicott. “As I told you, that is why I chose her.”

  “Ptishptush,” said the king. “You told me you’d chosen any number of them.”

  If being ptishptushed annoyed Miss Ellicott (and Chantel was quite sure it did), the sorceress managed to conceal it. “Any of them might have been chosen,” said Miss Ellicott. “But I always thought Chantle the most likely.”

  “And none of them might have,” said the king. “The important thing is, this one was chosen, and now we have her in our castle. And we have you. The patriarchs never let us have any soldie
rs, but this should be almost as good, eh?”

  “I should think it was a great deal better, Your Majesty,” said Miss Ellicott with a touch of asperity.

  Chantel hadn’t been spoken to, but she couldn’t hold back any longer. “Miss Ellicott! What is this all about? We thought you were kidnapped! The patriarchs said the Marauders had you.”

  “The patriarchs lie,” said Miss Ellicott.

  “But . . . you mean you just left us?” Chantel began to feel really angry as the realization came to her. The snake slithered up into her head and battered at the inside of her skull. “You left us alone, and we had nothing to eat and we had to chase out a horrible manageress woman—”

  “Nonsense,” said Miss Ellicott. “I left you in Adelika’s care. I knew I could trust her to look after the school.”

  Adelika was Miss Flivvers’s given name. “She didn’t! She went all to pieces and we’ve only just gotten her back together again.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” said Miss Ellicott. “But it was a necessary temporary measure. Things have taken slightly longer to develop than I expected. We had hoped you would arrive sooner.”

  “Why didn’t you send for me, then?” Chantel demanded. The inside of her head began to feel hot.

  “We did not wish to draw attention to you,” said the king. “We had far too much to lose. How you ladies do chatter on. The important thing is, we have you now.”

  “Why?” said Chantel. “Why did you need me? You had all these sorceresses. I’m not a sorceress! I’m still learning. Why me?”

  “Now, Chantel,” the king chided. “Were you brought up to ask why?”

  “Chantle,” said Miss Ellicott, “where is the snake?”

  “He . . .” Chantel looked at Miss Ellicott. She looked at the sorceresses all around her. She didn’t understand what was going on. Miss Ellicott, who ought to have been at the school, protecting her students, had instead gone off to the castle, without telling anyone. This was not a Miss Ellicott you could trust. This was not a Miss Ellicott to whom you confided that a snake had crawled into your ear.

  “He’s away,” she said.

  “How long has he been away?”

  “Not long at all,” said Chantel, as the snake twisted angrily in her brain. “I’ve heard from him quite recently.”