by All right, we didn’t set fire to all of it. Not even very much of it. But enough to keep Headmistress Jenifry very busy indeed, and the Mayor, too. It caused a great deal of frustration, I believe. Jenifry knew what we were up to, and we knew that she knew, but she was in charge here. She could hardly leave her precious town to burn, and its people with it, while she protected her own home. That kind of thing never does a person’s public reputation any good, now does it?
We’d chosen empty buildings in disparate parts of the town. Being conscientious, heritage-preserving citizens of the world, we had also selected buildings of little value, material or otherwise, and preferably those with easy access to a body of water besides. And considering Jenifry’s professed talent for calling down rain, little real damage would be done, all told. That said, I privately resolved to leave out those details when I made my report to Milady. Why bother her with trifles?
Archibald performed his part with gusto. By the time we had finished, his cloak of purple flame had diminished significantly, and we were no longer in danger of being fried alive if we got too close to him.
Which was convenient, because it was time and past for us to hightail it out of there, and over to Jenifry’s cottage. Or whatever it really was.
Archibald was happy to oblige.
‘Wait!’ I cried, as he reached one vast foot towards me, his claws still crackling with flame. ‘You still have too much fire, Archie. We will burn.’
‘Oh.’ He regarded his foot in pensive silence for a moment, and I felt a twinge of apprehension. What unpromising mental processes might I have sparked in that dim brain of his?
We were in a meadow on the edge of Dapplehaven at the time. A half-ruined barn of ragged oak planks was situated a ways to our left, purple flames licking up the empty frame of its doorway. If there had ever been a farmhouse that went with it, that building was long gone.
Archibald turned his head, coughed, and belched a gout of weak lavender fire all over the grass.
The grass promptly caught alight.
‘There,’ said the dragon, inspecting his polished claws with greater satisfaction.
The fire roared up towards my feet. ‘Er, time to go!’
Oof. Archibald swept me up, then Jay. Mabyn he caught in one back foot, almost as an afterthought as he rose into the skies. I heard her distant squawk of protest, and silently sympathised.
Archibald’s getaway was not quite so speedy as I had hoped, for he paused, circling the air, to admire his handiwork. The ground below was rather more ablaze than I had bargained for.
‘Note to ourselves,’ said Jay, eyeing our retaliatory diversion with dismay. ‘Be careful when playing with dragons.’
‘I would not hurt you,’ said Archibald, in an injured tone.
Jay patted his leg comfortingly. ‘I know you would not.’
Archibald smiled, and puffed a jaunty little ball of fire into the air.
‘At least, not deliberately,’ Jay amended, as Archie’s fireball missed his head by inches.
Mercifully, Archibald flew on after that.
The house of the headmaster proved to be a humble-looking place, though it was amply provided with a large garden ringing the cottage all around. Timber-framed, white-washed and crooked, with a neatly thatched roof, it was spriggan-sized, which must cause Jenifry no end of inconvenience.
It was not, of course, unattended. Archibald landed in the middle of the stone-cobbled street outside of it, but he had trouble squashing his huge bulk even into the widest part of the thoroughfare, and a sweep of his wings upset a cart full of fruit an outraged spriggan was trying to hawk on the corner.
‘Jay,’ I said, when my adorable and well-meaning partner began picking up spilled produce. ‘Focus. Urgent task at hand.’
He smiled sheepishly, handed off the fruit he had collected to the stall holder (who cursed him roundly for his efforts, and tried to box his ears), and re-joined me. Mabyn was already halfway up the street, striding towards Jenifry’s cottage with her Minister demeanour firmly in place. Brisk of step, chin high, she swept towards the two guards stationed outside of the front door, looking formidable indeed.
Jay and I hastened to catch up, leaving Archibald to reason with the stallholder.
‘I request access,’ Mabyn was saying when we reached the house. ‘As a former headmistress of Redclover School, and on behalf of the Hidden Ministry, who has reason to suspect—’
‘Nobody goes in,’ said one of the guards, a relatively beefy-looking spriggan with a domed, shinily bald head and a fine purple uniform. ‘Ms. Redclover’s orders.’
‘I am Ms. Redclover,’ said Mabyn impatiently.
I was beginning to think that half the citizens of Dapplehaven were called Redclover, and perhaps they really were, for the guards looked most unimpressed.
‘We were told that somebody might make an attempt,’ said the second guard, a near perfect match for the first, save that he had a full head of dark hair scrupulously coiffed. He looked us over, his leathery face cold. ‘If you persist, we are instructed to arrest you at once.’
‘You cannot arrest me!’ spluttered Mabyn. ‘As a representative of the Hidden Ministry, I am immune to all—’
‘Ms. Redclover said to make special effort to repel any Ministry folk,’ interrupted Guard the First. ‘You are immune to nothing, and I suggest you leave at once.’
Mabyn was slow on the uptake and continued to argue. Jay and I exchanged a thoughtful look.
‘Usual trick, then?’ said Jay.
‘I’m thinking so.’ I rooted in my heavy and ever-present bag — I will have the right shoulder of a wrestler, at this rate — for my usual supplies, though it took me a moment to find them around the soft, sleeping bulk of Pup and the angled, leather-clad shape of Mauf. I really ought to organise my things a bit better.
But I found them. Two of Orlando’s best sleep-pearls, each about an inch across, and encased in a jellyish coating. I gave one to Jay.
I’d retrieved my Wand, too. I threw my pearl up in the air, zapped it with a wave of the Wand, and it burst in a shower of pearly rain all over the nearest guard.
Jay threw his, and I zapped that too.
‘Hey—’ said Guard the First, as he fell sideways into the road.
Guard the Second followed suit, without uttering so much as a syllable.
They lay there, charmingly inert, and snoring repulsively.
‘That shouldn’t keep working so well,’ Jay said, stepping over the nearest guard.
‘Maybe I need a new signature trick,’ I agreed. ‘You know, the last time I tried to re-order a batch, I got an interrogation from Enchantments? They thought I might be putting them to some manner of misuse.’ I reached the door, and tried it. Locked. ‘Any keys on those gents?’
‘What kind of misuse?’ said Jay, bending down to pat the guards’ pockets. He shook his head.
‘They asked the usual kinds of questions. Was I experiencing any excess pressure at work, that I had been unwilling to report? Was I feeling any strain? When had I last taken time off?’
Jay shook his head at me: no keys. ‘People use them to self-medicate?’ he said incredulously.
I shook my head back at him, but in my case it indicated despair. ‘You are so very new, aren’t you?’
Mabyn gave a vast, noisy yawn, and toppled slowly into the street.
‘Oops,’ I said, regarding her recumbent and deeply asleep form with a twinge of guilt. ‘I hoped she wouldn’t get caught in it.’
‘She could probably use a nap,’ said Jay. ‘Seems stressed.’
Jay and I quickly moved all three of our victims, the intended and the unintended, to the edge of the street, out of the way of any passing dangers.
‘Time for the big guns,’ I said, and dived back into my bag. I had a lot of bits and pieces in there, rattling around in the bottom. Not quite as many as usual, since Ornelle, Keeper of Stores, had lately made me hand back virtually everything I’d had on loan (joy-killer extraordinaire). But Orlando’s people keep me well-supplied with consumables, and I had a really juicy one in there.
Somewhere.
‘Ah!’ I crowed, and from the depths of the Receptacle of Everything I produced a stick of bubble gum.
Jay looked at me. He had That Face again. ‘Gum? Really?’
‘It looks like gum.’ I unwrapped it, softened it in my fingers for a moment, then stuck it to the front door of Jenifry’s house. ‘But you really do not want to eat it.’
I waited.
It began to crackle after a moment, and then it melted into a trickling slime which dripped slowly down the door, taking the wood with it. All of it. Fine old oak planks dissolved into slush and dribbled away, leaving the doorframe nicely empty.
‘Don’t ever let me eat one of those by mistake,’ Jay said as he followed me inside.
‘You won’t. They taste like poo, and I mean that more or less literally. Safety measure.’
Jay made a gagging noise.
Jenifry had not left it to her guards and her locked door alone to keep us out, of course, but I was ready for that. I flicked the Sunstone Wand as we walked in, surrounding us both in one of my best wards. When the magickal alarm flared, sending waves of searing purple light flooding the interior of the cottage, the surge of power bounced harmlessly off our shared shield, making my ears ring but causing no lasting harm.
‘What is it with purple around here?’ I muttered.
‘You love purple.’
‘Exactly. It’s my signature colour.’
‘At least it proposes to be pretty while it fries us to a crisp,’ said Jay. ‘That has to count for something.’
‘My room defences have rainbow fire,’ I said proudly.
‘Really?’
‘No. But not for lack of trying.’
‘Is it purple?’
‘… Yes. Yes, it is.’
The cottage, as Mabyn had warned us, appeared to be just that: a modest abode, with only a few rooms, and everything in them of the most mundane. Jenifry had a small living room equipped with a worn green velvet sofa and matching chairs, and an array of suitable books. Her kitchen was charmingly old-fashioned, and she had a bedroom at the back.
That was it.
It took Jay and I less than five minutes to explore all this, and we met back in the little hallway, wearing, I imagine, identical expressions of frustration.
‘No signs of any secret doorways, I suppose?’ I said.
‘Nothing so promising. You didn’t run into any hidden staircases or trapdoors?’
‘Nope.’
It occurred to me to wish that we had asked Mabyn for more detail, though in fairness I imagine every inhabitant of the cottage has their own ways of concealing the secret spaces. Would Mabyn’s information have been of any use?
It might at least have been a place to start. Now we had nothing, and Mabyn lay outside in the street, asleep. She would remain so for at least an hour.
My bag rustled, and the pup poked up its head, sniffing the air. I patted her. ‘Sweet pup, I wish you could help, but I do not suppose there is anything around here that might interest—’ I stopped, because she was writhing like a mad thing to be let down, and succeeded in falling out of the bag altogether before I could catch her. She landed with a snort, but she was up again in seconds, her enormous nose drawing in great gulps of air.
That nose adhered itself to the floor, and off she went, tail high and wagging with excitement.
She went into the kitchen.
‘Right, then,’ said Jay, and we followed.
But when we reached the kitchen, the pup was not there.
I went back out into the hallway, in case she had sneaked past us somehow, but she was not there, either.
‘Huh,’ I said.
Jay joined me, and stood regarding the doorway thoughtfully. ‘She didn’t go straight through, did she?’
‘She was circling a bit, but she was following a scent of some kind, so that would account for it.’
‘It might.’ Jay approached the door again. Rather than walking in a straight line into the kitchen, he did as the pup had done: circled his way over the threshold in an arc, turning a full circle before he went through.
He still ended up in the kitchen, but that had given me an idea.
‘I think she went the other way about,’ I told him, and stepped forward to try it. ‘And with these kinds of things, it is nearly always widdershins that—’
‘—does the job,’ I finished, after a pause, for my own anti-clockwise circle had landed me in another room, but it was not the kitchen, and there was no Jay.
There was, however, the pup.
