Igraine the Brave (23 page)

Osmund’s soldiers groaned in terror. They retreated from the flames, but now here came the snakes. In panic, they stumbled into one another, trod on each other’s feet, pushed and shoved just to get away — but get away where?

The men ran off in all directions, anywhere but toward the place where the snakes were coiling around the tents with their tongues darting in and out. Cries of fear drowned out the rustling of the forest, and soon Osmund was alone on his dais. Only Igraine and the Sorrowful Knight were left on the now-deserted tilting ground — and a few steps away from them, grim-faced and with his sword drawn, stood Rowan Heartless.

The books were still humming, a deep and angry note, and now it sounded like bumblebees buzzing in two-part harmony.

The Fair Melisande pushed her dark hair back from her forehead and placed her fingertips together. Then she said softly:

Wicked evil, black as night,
Now be empty, airy, light!
May the earth of you be free,
Let it not infested be
By such cruelty and greed.
Be gone, away from here, make speed!
Treacherous miscreants, be off!
Melisande has had enough!

Light as a couple of balloons, Osmund and his castellan champion floated up into the air. However much they kicked and struggled, flailed their arms about, cursed and swore, they couldn’t get back to earth. They hung in the air as if invisible hands were holding them there.

Igraine couldn’t resist it. She went over to Osmund and gave him a push that sent him spinning around on his own axis like a top.

“Now, now, my dear,” said Sir Lamorak, hugging her tight. “We mustn’t take advantage of our prisoners’ unfortunate situation. That’s not chivalrous, is it?”

“You’re right,” said Igraine, burying her face in his robe. It still smelled very slightly of pig bristles and the stable.

“That’s what bothered me most about being a pig,” said Melisande, putting her arm around Albert’s shoulders, “not being able to give my children a hug.”

“You miserable magicians!” Rowan Heartless almost turned a somersault as he drew his dagger from his belt and sliced the air with it.

Shaking their heads, Igraine’s parents looked at each other. “What are we going to do with them, dear heart?” asked Sir Lamorak.

“Throw them in the castle moat,” Albert suggested. “Sisyphus will soon fish them out again, won’t you, Sisyphus?”

The cat expectantly licked his whiskers.

“No way!” said Igraine, picking him up. “They’d only give him indigestion. And they’d certainly bite my fingers when I feed the snakes. No, you’ll all have to think of a better idea.”

At this, Osmund and Heartless were perfectly still. Obviously they were worried by their conquerors’ suggestions. Only the Sorrowful Knight had said nothing so far. He stood there holding his injured shoulder and looked up without a word at his enemies dangling in the air.

“I think you ought to decide what happens to them,” said Igraine, taking his hand. “You’ve had more trouble with them than anyone.”

But the Sorrowful Knight shook his head. “I don’t want revenge,” he said. “I just want an answer. Where are the three ladies? Did you kill them, Heartless, or are you keeping them prisoner in some dark place?”

They all looked up at Rowan Heartless.

But he only smiled mockingly. “You’ll never find out, sighing knight!” he said. “However long you look, you’ll never find them.”

At this point Albert went over to him, looked up, and smiled his broadest, most typical Albert smile.

“That’s not very friendly of you,” he said. “But then, you never were very friendly. Now that I come to think of it, you were always an extraordinarily unpleasant person. Not much nicer than your bungling magician of a master. But we have plenty of time. We’ll leave Sisyphus here to watch you while we go back to Pimpernel Castle for some supper. If you happen to remember the answer to this noble knight’s question, just send us the cat. However, if you have visitors while we’re gone, for instance all the peasants whose pigs and chickens you stole or the men you forced to play soldiers for you, well …” Albert shrugged his shoulders. “Well, then it could get rather uncomfortable for you. Not everyone’s as peace-loving as we and this noble knight are. But perhaps you’ll still be alive when we come back, who knows? We’ll just have to see. Have fun, all alone in the dark.”

Albert turned and led Igraine away with him. “Oh, my goodness, speaking of fun …!” he said, turning back again. “I do believe a few of your men are already on their way back. But I’m sure they love you so much for your kindness to them that —”

“Stop!” Osmund’s voice was considerably shriller than usual. “Go on, tell him!” he snapped at his castellan, giving him a kick that sent his spiky armor rattling. “Give that miserable sighing drip his answer, will you?”

“No, darkness take it! I’ll do no such thing,” snarled Rowan Heartless, jabbing his spiky armor into his master’s side. “I like listening to his eternal sighing far too much. Why don’t you do something? What’s the idea, leaving us hovering here, making us look like idiots to everyone? I thought you were such a great magician!”

Osmund made no reply to this.

“At the moment he’s not a magician at all,” Sir Lamorak replied for him. “I took care of that. And as to whether he was ever a great one — well, opinions may differ on that point.”

Rowan Heartless cast his helpless master a scornful glance. “Be that as it may,” he sneered, “even if your men carve us into slices, I won’t say where those ladies are.”

“Then I will!” shouted Osmund. He was paddling so frantically in the air that his shoes fell off. “They’re in the tent! His tent!”

Igraine looked at him disbelievingly.

“Liar!” she said. “I’ve been in his tent myself. There aren’t any ladies there. I’d have noticed.”

Heartless stared down at her as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “What are you talking about, minx?” he growled. “You’ve never been in my tent.”

“Of course she has,” said Albert, speaking up instead of Igraine. “She broke the spell on your lance. Why do you suppose it didn’t help you to win your fight this time?”

For the first time, a little color rose to Rowan Heartless’s pale cheeks. “You just wait, minx!” he said. “When I get back on the ground again—”

“Which I guess isn’t going to be for quite a while yet,” Igraine coolly interrupted him.

Her father gently picked up a mouse that had jumped off Albert’s head onto his own, and put it on his shoulder. “Well, well, Osmund,” he said with a deep sigh. “So now you’re trying to lie to us. How shabby of you. I think we really ought to go in for supper, as Albert suggested.”

With the mouse on his shoulder, he went to the edge of Osmund’s dais. “Come along, my dear,” he said, giving Igraine his hand. “You must be ravenously hungry after all your heroic deeds.”

“I wasn’t lying!” bellowed Osmund. “The three ladies are in his tent. I turned them into birds. That’s what he wanted.”

Igraine stood still, thunderstruck.

“Birds?” she asked.

“Yes, birds, I said so!” Osmund was waving his arms about so vigorously that he suddenly found himself hanging in the air upside down.

But Igraine turned to the Sorrowful Knight. “He’s not lying after all,” she said. “I saw those birds. But there were four of them.”

28

T
hey all went to Rowan Heartless’s tent: Igraine and the Sorrowful Knight, Albert and their parents, but they left Osmund and his champion the Spiky Knight where they were, dangling up in the air with Sisyphus guarding them. The cat wasn’t very pleased, until Melisande conjured up a bucket full of fat fish that persuaded him to stay put.

It was dark in the Hedgehog’s red tent, pitch-dark, but Albert, Sir Lamorak, and the Fair Melisande were still covered with sparks from the magic lightning, and in their soft light the falcons on their perch were clearly visible. They were sitting hunched up with their heads under their wings. Once again the smallest falcon was the first to be on the alert, spreading its wings as it had when Igraine slipped past it before, and it uttered such a raucous cry that the other three brought their heads out from under their feathers, too.

“You see?” said Igraine. “Four falcons! Perhaps the one that keeps getting so worked up is the only real bird!”

“Perhaps.” The Sorrowful Knight went over to the birds and took the leather hoods off their heads. Bewildered, they blinked in the strange light that filled the tent.

“Noble knight,” said the Fair Melisande, putting her hand on his armed shoulder, “your courage gave us the time we needed to return to our former shape. Now let us help you.”

Incredulously, the Sorrowful Knight turned to her. “You think that you could break Osmund’s spell?”

“Definitely,” replied Sir Lamorak. “Ordinary magic is considerably easier to reverse than magical mistakes, you know.”

The Fair Melisande gently moved the knight aside, stood in front of the perch with the birds on it, and took the smaller of the Books of Magic off her shoulder. As soon as she sat it on her left hand, it began humming quietly.

The falcons jerked their heads, alarmed, and listened to the strange sound.

“Page 4,” said Melisande, and the book opened at a page that was covered all over with illustrations of tiny, colorful animals, birds, and insects. They were crawling, leaping, and fluttering over the letters on the page as if they were alive.

Melisande closed her eyes, raised the book a little higher in the air, and said in a voice that was hardly any louder than the whispering of the wind:

Be what once you were, you birds,
What you were so long ago.
Let me help you to remember,
You wore no feathers, well you know.

The thin golden perch broke like a rotten twig under the weight of the four ladies who were suddenly sitting on it. Yes, four. They landed with a bump on the carpet that Rowan Heartless had spread on the floor of his tent. When the confusion of skirts and veils had died down, the Sorrowful Knight helped his three lost ladies to their feet, with a happy smile on his face. But Igraine put out her hand to the fourth.

“My word, Baroness!” she said, helping the old lady up from the carpet. “What on earth are you doing here?”

With a deep sigh, the old Baroness of Darkrock pushed her tangled gray hair back from her forehead and looked down at herself.

“All present and correct!” she said, relieved. “Thank goodness. No more feathers, no claws on my toes.” She felt her face a little anxiously, and sighed happily again on discovering that she had a nose there instead of a hooked beak.

“My dear Igraine,” she said, tapping her smartly on the helmet and looking stern. “Couldn’t you have broken that horrible spell on me this morning? Didn’t I flap those wretched wings hard enough when you were stumbling around me?”

“But how was I to know it was you?” asked Igraine. “How come you let your own nephew enchant you?”

Embarrassed, the old lady picked a feather off her dress. “I thought he was quite nice,” she murmured. “I have to admit I was wrong.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Sir Lamorak. “According to Bertram, Osmund poured all your stock of spicy mead into the moat at Darkrock. Granted, that will be good for your teeth, but —”

“He did what?” the Baroness interrupted. “Where is he?”

But Sir Lamorak had turned his back to her, for the other three ladies were shyly plucking his sleeve.

They looked very like each other. All three had golden hair and were almost the same size, they wore beautiful but very impractical dresses, and they had tiny feet that would not be much use for running away from Spiky Knights.

“Noble sir!” said the tallest of the ladies as the other two smiled very sweetly. “We owe you and your wife our infinite gratitude. If you wish, my sisters and I will serve you to the end of our days. Perhaps you need child-minders for your son and daughter, or …”

Albert and Igraine looked at each other in dismay.

“No, no, that won’t be necessary, really it won’t!” Albert interrupted the lady hastily. “My little sister does need supervision, it’s true, but I can take care of that myself. And as for being rescued, you owe that almost entirely to this noble knight. Word of a magician’s honor!”