A Well-Timed Enchantment (8 page)

"Oliver, stay."

It had never worked when he was a cat, and it didn't work now. He held the door, waiting. "Darn you," she said. But time was running out. Tomorrow would be too late.

The wizard had said he lived in the tower, and that was easy to find: all they had to do to keep track was stick their heads out the windows—to the end of the corridor, up a flight of stairs, down another, around a couple of corners, through a columned gallery, around one corner, up a long curved stairway inside the tower itself, and they were there.

There was no handle or latch or lock on the door. Apparently you just pushed the door and walked in. That wasn't what she had expected. She didn't know what she had expected, but this wasn't it. Deanna straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, and put her hand to the door.

"We're assuming he's in the Hall with the rest of the family?" Oliver asked.

Good point. Deanna put her ear to the heavy oak door. Nothing. She knocked once, softly. Then again, louder. She took another breath. She
pushed the door open fast lest she think better of it.

The room was empty. Not only no wizard, but none of the wizardly apparatus Deanna had anticipated. No furniture, for that matter. Totally bare. Nothing. The walls were pure white, the stone floor was white, the ceiling—high as all the castle ceilings were high, but not so high as to be in shadow—the ceiling was white. There was no other door, no staircase leading away. They could see the orange blaze of the setting sun through the window, the only glassed-in window she had seen in the castle, whose other casements were protected against the weather by wooden shutters.

"This must be the wrong room," Deanna mused, though there was only one tower, and they were in it, and all the long spiraling flight up, there had been no other doors.

When Oliver didn't answer, she glanced at him. He had taken a step away, so that his back was against the wall opposite the landing from the door. He had his teeth bared.

"Oliver?" she said, remembering what had happened the last time she had ignored his instincts. He looked at her.
Scared,
she realized. "What's the matter?"

"Don't you feel it? The same as by the well. The same as in the courtyard when you acted so strangely with the wizard."

Magic. That was what he was saying. He felt magic in the air. She glanced at the room but there was nothing there. Just an empty room. A clean, well-lighted, empty room.

In a slightly dingy, dark, crowded castle.

And where was all that light coming from, with the sun setting and no candles?

That thought set cold fingers dancing on her back and arms.

But she had come here for a purpose: to retrieve her watch. She had been expecting something wizardly. Just because it manifested itself in the form of an empty white room was no reason to get all goosebumpy.

She stepped inside. Was it cooler this side of the doorway, or was that just her imagination? She took another step. Something brushed her leg. She jumped with a startled squeak. Nothing there. She yanked her gown up to her knees and brushed at her right calf, where she had felt the spidery touch. She shook the skirt in case anything had gotten up in there.

Oliver hadn't moved away from the far wall. But he had his head tipped as though listening, and he was sniffing the air.

Deanna paused to listen and heard nothing. She sniffed, too. Incense, maybe. A slight mustiness. She took another step toward the window, and her foot came down on something she couldn't see.

Something that jerked out from under her with a shrill cry like a peacock's.

She jumped backward, hitting her hip. Glass crashed as though she had upset a table. The unseen creature she had stepped on cried out again while some bodiless thing in the corner gibbered and hooted and screeched. Perhaps she was safe from that one, for there was a rattling sound also, as though whatever it was shook the bars of a cage.

Cold fingers, or at least they felt like cold fingers, wrapped themselves around her ankle. Deanna screamed. She tried to pull away, kicking with her other foot at whatever it was that held her. The room was still white and well lit and empty, but great flapping wings swooped near her face, tangling in her hair just long enough to make her lose her balance. She fell, still kicking at the thing which gurgled and licked at her ankle.

Her flailing hands knocked over more glass. A smell like chlorine bleach tickled her nostrils. Spilled liquid dripped audibly near her head, sizzling ominously, though there was no visible damage to the white floor. She swung her leg around toward that sound, and whatever had hold of her ankle hissed and let go.

Hands grabbed her wrists. She tensed to break away, then realized it was Oliver. He dragged her to her feet.

Her hands came close to something hot, but she ignored that, as she ignored the invisible glass crunching underfoot while Oliver pulled her toward the door.

Suddenly he pitched forward, letting go of her so as not to yank her down with him. He fell to one knee, brushing away at something which—judging from his expression—must be disgustingly sticky.

This time she pulled him to his feet She got him through the doorway and pulled the door closed behind them.

They both dropped to their knees in exhaustion on the landing. They had their arms around each other and this time she wasn't embarrassed at all.

"Do you think he'll notice someone's been in there?" she asked once she caught her breath.

Oliver gave her a look which indicated cats—
even former cats—didn't recognize sarcasm when they heard it.

She thought of how scared he had looked, refusing to come into the room, and how despite that he
had
come in when she had been in danger. She gave him a little hug, then stood, brushing herself off. "Never mind. We won't go back in there again in a hurry."

"Good," he said.

When they returned to the corridor where their rooms were, they almost stepped into a linen-covered tray which someone had left outside Oliver's door. Farther down the hall, Deanna spotted a similar offering by her door.

So, someone had brought them dinner. No telling who it had been. No telling, either, whether that someone had knocked on their doors and realized that they weren't in.

"Hungry?" she asked Oliver.

He shook his head. His face still had no color in it. She brought his tray into his room anyway, then fetched hers. She plunked herself down on his bed, her legs crossed under her long full skirt, with her tray on her lap.

"Let's see. Pigeon..." Her Aunt Emilienne had prepared that when Deanna and her mother had first arrived, so she recognized it. "...stuffed with ... pork, I think ... mushrooms ... fresh bread ... some sort of apple compote..." She patted the bed next to her. "You've got to eat, Oliver."

He looked like someone who's remembering the taste of vomiting.

"Oliver, apparently this new body of yours can't handle—" She fought off a wave of nausea of her own. "—what you're used to eating. But you can't just stop eating all the while we're here." She peered into the pitcher. "Milk!" She sniffed. "Or cream." Definitely not two percent.

At least that got his attention.

She motioned again for him to sit and this time he warily lowered himself next to her. She poured the milk into each of their goblets.

"Cheers," she said, which sophisticated people on TV said, and tapped his goblet with hers.

He watched her drink, then raised his cup, two-handed, to his mouth. For a moment he came close to choking, but then he managed nicely.

She patted his leg encouragingly. "How about some meat?" She cut a piece and held it out on the end of the knife. One thing she had seen at lunch in the Great Hall was that she didn't have
to worry about teaching Oliver fastidious table manners—these medieval people used knives, but no forks. The only spoons she had seen had been the ones on Lady Marguerite's nightstand.

Oliver nibbled on the pigeon.

"How is it?"

He nodded and took another bite.

And so it went. He hated carrots, but ate two or three mushrooms. Once she dunked the bread in milk, and he liked that. The apple he admitted was interesting, but he only took one bite. He spat out the wine, which she asked him not to do again, no matter what, and by then he was leaning against her shoulder, his eyes drooping heavily.

"I'll put the tray here, and if you get hungry later on, the stuff should be just as good cold." But by the time she set the tray by the window and turned back to him, he was curled up, asleep already.

She was used to people taking care of her. How had she ended up being responsible for somebody else? There was some sort of fur skin folded at the foot of the bed—wolf? she wondered—which she took to be the medieval equivalent of a comforter. She tucked it up around Oliver, then carried her tray back to her room.

Deanna took one step into her room, then stopped with a sigh.

She looked down. She sighed yet again.

She had put her right foot down into a huge bowl of blueberries someone—someone? Leonard, who else?—had left for her. Crushed blueberries oozed over the top of her castle slipper. Thick purple juice soaked through the fabric along the length of her foot, sticking her toes together.

Deanna lifted her leg. The foot came clear of the bowl with a rude, sucking noise. She watched as pieces of fruit slid off the slipper and plopped back into the bowl. "Thank you, Leonard," she muttered to herself. "You shouldn't have." She took off the slipper and hopped across the room to the table with the water pitcher, dripping a purple trail.

She cleaned her foot, and the slipper, as best she could, then set the slipper on the windowsill to dry.

It was beginning to get dark out there, the day almost gone, and she'd accomplished nothing. She stared across the way at the wall that surrounded the castle, protecting its inhabitants. Protecting her, for this one more night. Tomorrow ... tomorrow was a different matter.

Deanna was angry. Angry with herself for being unable to think what to do, angry with Oliver—who'd been sent to help her and was too busy flirting with Lady Marguerite and learning swordsmanship and getting sick to even be here with her, angry with Leonard and his gifts, angry with the elves, angry with the castle wall, angry with the words the ivy formed on the wall, angry with—

Deanna stopped in the middle of turning from the window.

Angry with the words the ivy formed on the wall?

She took a step away from the window, but only one. Behind her, the setting sun cast an orange glow across the treetops. Slowly she turned back to the window. The vines
had
formed a pattern on the wall, and they were words.

What the ivy said was:
Talk to the pigman, dumb twit of a human girl

Oh no,
she thought. If the fair folk had known all along, why hadn't they told her to begin with? With a groan of exasperation she put the cold, wet slipper back on and tore out of the room. And almost collided with the wizard.

"Good evening, Lady Deanna," he said, fingering her watch, which hung by a chain around his neck. "Looking for this?"

Deanna took a quick step back. "No," she said, remembering to avoid Algernon's eyes. He seemed to have no power over her if she just remembered to avoid his eyes. And, anyway, her gaze was stuck on her watch, dangling by its buckle on the wizard's chest. "Not at all. What is it?"

He leaned close. Close enough that she could see Mickey Mouse's red shorts. Close enough that Algernon's breath lifted a stray wisp of hair from her cheek. "Something very exciting," he purred. "Something more exciting than anything in my tower room."

Startled to find her intrusion had been discov ered so quickly, Deanna looked up. She backed away, and saw the gleam of triumph on Algernon's face.

"Are you and your inhuman companion willing to bargain, Lady Deanna? Are you willing to talk about it?"

Bargain? She turned and ran. Her heart beat so loudly she couldn't hear if footsteps followed. "Oliver!" she cried, bursting into his room. She slammed the door shut behind her and leaned against it.

Oliver had jumped up from the bed, instantly awake and alert "What's wrong?"

"He's got it," she said, grabbing his arm and shaking him. "Algernon's got the watch."

"Well," Oliver said, relaxing visibly, "you said all along that he would, so it shouldn't come as a surprise."

She came close to strangling him. If she'd thought there was time for it, she might have. "Are you well enough—"

He interrupted: "Why is one of your shoes purple?"

Of all the ridiculous things ... Still she knew if she didn't explain, she'd never have his full attention. "I accidentally stepped into a bowl of blueberries and couldn't get the stain out But that—"

"But it's purple, not blue."

"That's the color of blueberry juice. Listen—"

"Then why aren't they called purpleberries?"

"Oliver!" she screamed at him.

He waited patiently.

"The fair folk left us a message to talk to the pigman."

"All right," he said in a calm, infuriating, let's-not-get-hysterical tone. "Then let's talk to the pigman."

Gingerly she opened the door and peeked up and down the hall. No sign of Algernon. That was little relief. If he wasn't here, where was he? And wherever he was, what was he up to? She motioned for Oliver to follow quietly. Silly. Oliver was always quiet. Her slipper, however, squished noisily with every step.

No one seemed to hear, or at least no one stopped them as they passed through the castle halls and left the main building. They found the pigman, appropriately enough, by the pigpen. He was sitting on the railing, his feet up as though he were on a chaise lounge. The pigs were settling down for the night while he blew onto a blade of grass in his cupped hands. The resulting sound was music, soft and fluttery. The resulting sound was, in fact, a lullaby.

One of the pigs grunted, and—as though it had announced their approach—the dusty little man looked over his shoulder and saw them. Immediately he was down from the railing, and the shapeless cap was off his head. "Miss," he mumbled.