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I could tell exactly what she was thinking. A gray-bearded old man or a wrinkly old woman was her idea of a proper ducal magister, not scruffy me.

She was right about that, too.

I stepped farther into the chilly room, looking around. Pip hopped off my shoulder and flapped to one of the high-backed, uncomfortable chairs set next to the hearth. The little dragon landed on the back of the chair, and its claws scratched a gouge in the wood. I glanced over my shoulder to see if Miss Dimity had noticed. She stood near the doorway, watching me with her bulgy eyes. Captain Kerrn had joined her; she said something to the secretary, but kept her eye on me.

Miss Dimity gave me another one of her false smiles. “Do you approve of your rooms, Ducal Magister?”

Not really, no. They were too grand. “I'm not staying here,” I said.

Ignoring that, Miss Dimity walked over to another door and threw it open. “This is your dressing room.”

I didn't have enough clothes to need a dressing room.

“Do you see?” She pointed at a row of fancy-fine clothes on hangers, and three brand-new, shiny silk magister's robes. “Magister Nevery says that his manservant is bringing your things.”

For some reason, Kerrn's cheeks turned a little pink. “Benet is coming here?”

Miss Dimity's nostrils flared. “If that is his name, yes. But, Ducal Magister,” she said grandly to me, “as you can see, you won't need any of your old clothes.”

Oh, yes I would. I was
not
going to wear those primp-proper ducal magister robes.

Out in the main room, Miss Dimity glanced at the empty hearth. “Servants will be sent to attend to the fire.” She gave a sharp sniff. “Yes, I think that is sufficient.” Without another word to me, she hurried out.

I stood in the middle of the room. The frothy plaster and gilded ceiling arched way above me; the windows stretched up the walls; the empty hearth gaped like a wide mouth; the oil-painted wizards on the walls stared disapprovingly down at me.

Rowan hadn't seen these rooms, but Miss Dimity had told her they were
splendid
. They'd probably make a real ducal magister feel important and powerful.

They made me feel small and cold.

I went over to the window. Drats. The ducal magister's rooms were on the third floor, and there was no ivy growing up past the window, no nearby tree to climb down. I wouldn't be able get out that way when I needed to leave.

When I turned back to the room, I noticed Kerrn still standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. “I know what you are thinking,” she said.

She probably did.

She put her hand on the pommel of her sword and spoke like she was giving me an order. “My guards will be watching you. If you wish to go out into the city, you must inform me first, and be accompanied by me or a guard.”

Accompanied?
Followed and spied on, more likely.

She waited for me to say something. When I didn't, she turned and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

I looked around the room. It was fancy, but it was a prison, and I was
not
going to stay locked up in it.

 

C
HAPTER

6

B
enet brought my things, clothes, and some equipment from my workroom, and the box of books from beside my bed, but I didn't bother unpacking them except a few of the books. I wouldn't be living in the Dawn Palace for very long.

There was a knock at the door. As I walked across the carpeted floor to open it, Pip leaped from the back of the knobbled chair where it'd been perching and landed on my shoulder. I opened the door. The hallway was dim-dark.

After pausing to check that the magics were calm enough, I said the lothfalas spell, and Pip burped out a puff of pink sparks that floated up to hang over my head. In the glow of the spell, I saw one of Kerrn's guards standing stiff and straight beside the door, and a man wearing green livery, flinching away from the light.

“What?” I said. Pip leaned forward, snorting smoke from its nostrils.

The man edged away, his eyes wide and fixed on Pip. “A, ah—”

“It's not going to hurt you,” I said. Pip wasn't, I meant. “What d'you want?”

The man pulled a piece of paper out of his coat pocket. On my shoulder, Pip lashed its tail, and the man jumped back. “A note for the ducal magister,” he said quickly. Oh, he was a servant. Still backing away, he held out the paper.

I stepped forward and took it, and the man turned and fled, casting a glance over his shoulder as he went.

The guard beside the door gave me a quick look, checking the bruises on my face, I could see.

“If I go out, are you supposed to follow me?” I asked her.

“To accompany you, yes, Magister,” she answered stiffly.

Hmmm.

I went back into the ducal magister's rooms and closed the door. The paper was thick and cream-colored, with Rowan's house crest on it. The handwriting was sloppy, as if she'd been in a hurry when she wrote the note.

 

 

Pip ate pigeons and blackpowder. Sure as sure, Rowan wasn't going to have that at her dining table.

Right.

I looked around the room again. It felt like Rowan and Nevery and even Benet were trying to put me into a box that I didn't really fit into. I could feel the walls of the box pressing against me, turning me sort of square-shaped, and I didn't like it.

Well then, I'd better do something about it.

I had two problems facing me. First, figuring out how to settle both magics here in the city. Second, finding out who'd sent the kidnappers and what he or she wanted with me.

Three things, really, because there were the stolen locus stones to think about, too, but those had nothing to do with me, even though the magisters thought they did.

Once I'd worked out the problems, I could get out of the ducal magister's rooms and go back to living at Heartsease, and maybe Nevery would stop worrying about me all the time.

So, the kidnappers. I'd been wondering what kind of person sent men with fists to beat people up and then grab them, somebody who knew a lot about thieving, and I had a cold, snaky feeling in my chest that was telling me who that person might be. Somebody from the Twilight who wasn't supposed to be here in Wellmet.

Crowe, maybe.

When I was a little kid, Crowe had killed my mother, who was his sister, and he'd tried to turn me into his heir, the next Underlord. Instead of letting him do that, I'd run away and hidden in the streets of the Twilight, trying to keep out of his minions' hands, because every time they caught me they beat the fluff out of me and then dragged me back to the Dusk House. Then Crowe used his clicker-ticker, a palm-sized counting device made of metal with notched bone discs, to calculate just what I'd hate most as a punishment.
Click-tick-tick
with the clicker-ticker, and that would be three days locked in a dark room with nothing to eat. Just thinking of Crowe made a misery eel hatch and squirm around in my stomach.

There was only one way to be sure if it was him. Magic. The finding spell was big and complicated, and I couldn't do it here, not with a guard outside the door and servants all over the place, so I'd need to get out of the Dawn Palace and out of the Sunrise. My cousin Embre had as much to do with Crowe as I did—more, even—so I was sure as sure he'd let me do what I needed to do at Dusk House. The trick was getting over to the Twilight without any guards following me.

Digging through the books that Benet had brought, I found an old wizard's grimoire, one with lots of spells written in tiny, neat black letters, and looked up the remirrimer spell, which I could use to make a kind of shadow version of myself. Then I looked up the anstriker, a finding spell, which I also knew about but had never used.

I read over the spells until they stuck in my memory, then dumped everything out of a canvas knapsack that Benet had brought from Heartsease and refilled it with some magical things. I got to my feet and put the knapsack over my shoulders. “Pip!” I called.

The little dragon flew over from the windowsill and perched on top of the knapsack.

“Careful,” I said. I'd put two glass scrying globes in there, and they would shatter if they got bumped too hard.

The guard was waiting outside the door. “Where are you going, Ducal Magister?” she asked, as I set off down the hallway.

I ignored the
ducal magister
part of her question. “To the library.” That wasn't a lie; I really was going there first.

Rowan had once shown me the Dawn Palace library. The academicos library just had books and scrolls about magic, but the palace library had books about lots of other things, every book ever printed in Wellmet, plus other books from other cities. It took up half of the second floor of the palace, a big room with rows of tall book-stuffed shelves and long tables in the center. A good place for reading; an even better place to give a palace guard the slip.

Assuming the magics didn't do something strange when I tried the remirrimer spell, that is.

Followed by the guard, I went in the library door, past some tables where a few people were reading quietly, and toward the rows of bookshelves. At the end of the alley between two long shelves, I paused. “I have to look at a book,” I said to the guard. “Will you wait here?”

She nodded and folded her arms. Very alert.

Pretending to examine the books, I walked slowly through the narrow way between the two shelves. Here, all the way at the other end, where the light was dimmest. This was a good place. I stopped and stared straight ahead at a book set on the shelf.
A Young Person's Guide to Fighting Cephalopods
, the book was called. Slowly I reached up and put my hand on Pip's claw-paw where it clung to one of the knapsack straps.

All right, you magics. Let's do this right.

Whispering, I said the remirrimer spell. When I got to the end of it, Pip gave a little shiver and coughed out a fist-sized ball of writhing light and shadow. It hung in the air right by my shoulder.

Krrrr
, Pip said.

So far, so good.

I held my breath, hoping the guard wouldn't see what happened next.

As I stepped aside, the shadow expanded, taking shape and gathering substance, until a shadow-me stood beside me. It wore a knapsack and a scruffy black sweater, and had a crest of black hair shadowing its face, and it stared straight ahead at the kid-fighting-squid book on the shelf.

Then, with a
whumph
, all the doors and windows of the library flew open and then slammed closed again. At the other end of the bookshelf, the guard whirled away to look. From the other people in the library came shouts of surprise. The books shivered on their shelves.

With a rush of power, the magics poured into the shadow-me, and he started to grow. First he was just tall, and then he grew bigger and bigger until he was looming over the shaking bookshelves. He stood with his hands on his hips, grinning, his blue eyes flashing, and he really did look like me, only he was
huge
and zinging with magic. The shouts in the library turned to shrieks; the room grew dim as the shadow-me grew even larger, blocking the light. A wind leaped up and swirled around him, carrying bits of paper and dust.

“Ducal magister?” shouted the guard, her eyes wide, staring up.

It wasn't what I'd planned, but as a distraction it couldn't be any better.

I ducked from between the wobbling bookshelves and took off in the other direction; Pip clung to my shoulder. I darted around the end of the shelf and peered back to check on the guard. She had drawn her sword and was backing away from the giant shadow-me. Laughing, I skiffed across the passageway to another alley between shelves, then 'round a corner, through a room full of map books, and out into the hallway.

I heard the sound of shouting and running feet. Quick as sticks, I headed in the opposite direction.

I got away clean, out of the Dawn Palace and into the rainy city, sticking to alleys and backstreets, through the Sunrise. At the bridge I saw a pair of guards, but I hid Pip under my sweater and kept my head down, and they didn't notice me.

Finally I stepped off the bridge and onto the puddled streets of the Twilight.

Good! Now I could do the magical spell and find out who'd sent those kidnappers after me.