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Chapter Text

When Polly Plummer had adventures, they were consistently the fault of Digory Kirke. She stayed friends with him despite that, because Digory was mostly a good sort and Polly was loyal, but as she sat across from him in his jumbled little front parlour and tried to explain how she had reached this conclusion, she did wish he’d recognise that he was the only reason she ever found herself in fear for her life—and somehow, with Digory, it happened a lot.

“Come off it, Polly!” he laughed, when she said as much. “I’ll admit to being there for most of those times, but—”

“I didn’t say you were there for all of them,” Polly corrected, which should show you just what a thin temper she was in, for Polly never interrupted people if she could help it. “I said they were all your fault.”

“Maybe a few,” Digory conceded.

Polly shook her head, and set down her teacup with the firm click of a temper about to boil over. “All of them.”

“Surely not!”

“Every one.”

“Well,” said Digory, “I suppose that business with the antiquities thieves using that bookshop as a front was probably my fault. I do remember you saying the hours they kept were too irregular for legitimacy.”

“Even so, you would insist on checking whether or not they’d stocked a copy of that reference work you couldn’t find anywhere, and next thing you know, we’re in a crate being tipped into the Thames.”

“All right, that one was on me. Though it’s because of me you learned how to swim at all, so your escape from that is thanks to me as well, isn’t it?”

Polly declined to give thanks. “There was also the circus.”

“What fault was that of mine? You bought the tickets.”

“Yes, but you said ‘I think I’ve seen that acrobat in a police sketch’ and decided we should investigate his caravan before ringing up Scotland Yard. Then when he caught us it was all St. Catherine’s Wheels and throwing knives, like something out of a yellowback novel and nothing like why I wanted to go in the first place.”

“Very well. But the doctor keeping the sham lunatic asylum was at least as much your fault as mine.”

“I said ‘I’d like to visit your parents and Uncle Andrew’ not ‘I hope you insist that we creep around your reclusive neighbour’s garden, and stumble upon an inheritance swindle’. That straitjacket was beastly uncomfortable, too.”

“What about the stick-up job? I wasn’t even there when he—”

“You had me fetch you that statue from the college in a case stamped all over with RARE ARTEFACT and COSTLY: HANDLE WITH CARE. I tried to wrap it in my coat, but the wretched thing was like a beacon. It’s a wonder I only attracted the one thief that I did.”

“And you said he was very polite.”

“Pointing a revolver at me showed ill manners enough.”

“I don’t think you can blame me for the spies, though. They—”

“We were in Mesopotamia because of you. ‘Let’s go for a walk’ you said. ‘I know the land’ you said. ‘What could go wrong’ you said. It was a bally nightmare! And spies besides! Spies are never reasonable; they’ve no conversation to speak of, and they have only to meet you before they jump straight to torture.”

Digory at last had the grace to look abashed, and slightly uncertain. He dragged fretfully at the hair that was just beginning to overhang the back of his collar, though Polly knew it was too much to hope he would actually notice, in so doing, that he was overdue a trim.

“See here, Polly, I don’t know what you’d like me to say. I can’t go back and undo any of it, though if it bothers you this much I will say I dearly wish I could.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Polly said crisply, and took a sip of her cooling tea. “I didn’t ask for any of them, and I didn’t particularly enjoy them while they were happening—I don’t care for adventures, you know that—but now they’re done, I wouldn’t trade them. I only wish you’d see that every time I end up pinned to a wheel or plunging to my death or trying to remember the correct French conjugation for ‘I am sorry, we had no idea you were brigands, can you please lower the sword?’ it’s very much your doing.”

“Which is why you want to holiday alone.”

“Which is why I want to holiday alone.”

Digory, crestfallen, looked at the steamer tickets he had presented so proudly a few minutes ago. He’d been sure a little jaunt along the Barbary coast would be just the thing for two friends, so he was genuinely astonished at Polly’s refusal. When he’d enquired after her reasons, he had not expected the answer to be such an involved and rigorously cited argument against—it seemed—spending any time in company with him at all.

However when Digory, perhaps more petulantly than was becoming of a man with three decades to his name, said Polly might then be happier keeping different company in the future, Polly told him, with that particular frankness unique to friends of long acquaintance, not to be an ass.

“I only want a restful holiday. One week to myself, somewhere quiet, with a decent lending library and no pirates.”

“I think the Barbary coast isn’t quite so bad for pirates anymore.”

“Alone, Digory.”

“Very well,” said Digory, and let it go at that.

~*~

For two days thereafter they didn’t speak. That itself wasn’t anything out of the usual way, as they were both kept quite busy in their daily lives, except this time Polly knew it wasn’t busyness which kept them apart, but rather the fact that she had hurt Digory’s feelings. Digory had surprisingly fine feelings for somebody so prone to getting them both almost killed, and she certainly never went out of her way to wound them, but in this instance she knew the distasteful outcome had been unavoidable. She wanted a proper holiday, not an opportunity to ladder yet another pair of stockings.

Or at least, she’d settle for both.

She wasn’t sure at first how long it would take Digory to understand, but when the post came at the end of the week it included a small packet addressed in a bold, slanted script that she recognised at once. The little bundle held a return fare to Scotland and a calling card on which was inscribed the address of one Ogilvie Guest House. These had been tucked between two sheets of paper, the first of which was a note written in the same hand that had inscribed the envelope.

Dear Polly,

I've made a list and see now you’re quite right. Sorry about all the almost-getting-you-killed. Please enjoy the first of thirty-nine holidays I owe.

Mother always speaks of Mrs Ogilvie as being a particular friend; I'm sure she’ll be glad to have you. Scotland’s supposed to be pretty awful this time of year so nobody should bother you there at all.

Sincere regrets and fond regards,

Digory Kirke

The second sheet was a line-by-line examination of each time Digory had got Polly in over her head. Polly reviewed it and found it complete in every particular. The first event of forty, named simply ‘Herself in London’ was struck through to show that the debt had been cancelled, although the faint interrogation mark beside it suggested Digory wished to verify this was, indeed, the case.

Polly, now all over smiles, took up a pen of her own and struck out the second event (described as “that lion at the Zoo which did not actually call our names”) with a notation for payment rendered. Then she laid out fresh paper and wrote back.

Digory,

Don’t be an ass, we made Pax over the first one ages ago.

Thanks for Scotland.

Polly

She paired the note with the list, affixed the required postage, and first thing the next morning deposited her acceptance in the pillar box on the corner.

The day after that, Polly Plummer boarded a train to Scotland.

~*~

Ogilvie Guest House was situated beside a broad lake still locked in winter’s freeze. This was in turned ringed all around with small houses, large hills and unreasonable quantities of sheep who made their opinion often heard on the lack of ready grazing. The whole place felt like the farthermost end of the earth, and the shelves of the front parlour were crammed with books cast off by travellers from distant parts and times long past. It suited Polly to the ground.

Mrs Ogilvie, a spindly, stern Englishwoman who had at some point drifted far north enough to fall into marriage with Mr Ogilvie, ran everything with a kind of determined efficiency that kept her handful of off-season guests tiptoeing about so as not to disturb the admirable order of the lady’s housekeeping system. Polly, who did little more the first few days than curl up in a chair beside the radiator and watch a steady snowfall further obscure the solid surface of the lake, did not tiptoe; but then, she did not much move, either.

On the morning of the third day, as Polly and her latest book took up residence in their accustomed chair, Mrs Ogilvie scheduled time between clearing breakfast and ordering the dining room rug swept to comment on her new guest’s habit.

“You are one of the quietest guests we have ever had, Miss Plummer.”

“Is that a good thing?” Polly wondered.

“I don’t know. When Mabel’s boy said he’d a friend as wanted to come up, I expected you to be one of those modern girls.”

And by modern girls, Polly thought, she means the kind that were leaving school in the nineties, when I was still in my nursery. Goodness knows what she’d do if she had seen us at school! But aloud she only said, “Are you disappointed?”

“No indeed,” Mrs Ogilvie was emphatic on this point. “I don’t need any of that noise. None of your city ways for us, thank you. People come here to get away from all that, and I make sure we run a respectable establishment. Since Digory made it very clear you wanted some peace and quiet, I thought it would be all right. Only, I hadn’t thought you’d be bringing quite so much quiet with you.”

“I’m glad of the quiet,” Polly assured her. But she took this as a hint, and when the sun appeared for a few minutes that afternoon she tugged on her overshoes and coat, and went out the side door to see what the village had to offer.

Much to Polly’s delight, the village was almost as quiet as the guest house. There was one high street where the shops huddled, and two more roads of houses which were spaced farther apart from each other the higher the roads wound into the hills. Polly started to follow one of these to see what kind of view might be had from the top, but she had scarcely got halfway up the hill when the skies opened up to cast down a kind of snow-and-ice confusion, and, as she’d only brought a kerchief for her head, she was obliged to retreat to the guest house once more.

“Tomorrow,” she resolved, “I’ll take an umbrella.”

That night Polly tucked into her meal with such enthusiasm that Mrs Ogilvie hurried out to the kitchen to make sure she had ordered enough. The cook, who had seen Polly slip out the side door, assured her mistress all was well in hand.

“It’s the fresh air does it to them every time,” she said complacently. “These city people, they don’t know from a good appetite ‘til they’ve tried to climb that hill.”

This reflection arrested Mrs Ogilvie’s attention.

“The hill?” she said sharply. “Which hill, Bess?”

“Why, the western one, it was,” said Bess, no more than a little surprised at Mrs Ogilvie’s interest. “At least I think it was she I saw walking up, with that scarlet kerchief she’s got. Not easy to mistake her.”

“I suppose it’s all right,” Mrs Ogilvie told herself, as she collected the replenished serving platter and started back to the kitchen. “After all, it’s been years since the last time. But it was Mabel’s boy sent her to us, and you never know with that family. The Ketterleys run to strange ways. It’s not as though he’s actually here with her, but even if there’s a connection it could make for trouble.”

She spent the rest of the meal hovering in such troubled silence that even Colonel Arthur, a veteran of the Boer Wars who had made a wrong connection at Edinburgh five years ago, turned up at the guest house in great confusion and liked it so much that he stayed on ever since, stirred himself from dazed contemplation of his pudding long enough to say, “Something troubling you, Mrs Ogilvie?”

But Mrs Ogilvie was not interested in sharing her troubles with any save one. She waited until the guests were safely settled with their after-dinner coffee in the lounge before taking herself into the private parlour at the back of the house, where her husband was just settling down with his after-dinner pipe.

“John,” said Mrs Ogilvie, “the Plummer girl has started to climb the western hill.”

“Has she? Well, that will make good exercise for her. Put some colour in her cheeks. Girl’s far too peaky; I said so when she got here.”

“Don’t be foolish. She can’t climb the hill.”

“No? Sickly, is she? I marked she was pale, but that’s city girls for you. All noses in books. Too much brain work. Makes ‘em unfit to walk to the shops, much less climb a hill.”

“No, I mean she shouldn’t be let to climb that hill. Remember the last one? The—the soldier. Went up for a Sunday walk, and never came down.”

“Oh. Hrmm. Well, that was years ago. Hasn’t happened in ages. And never to a girl, that I can remember; they were all military men.”

“Yes, that’s what I would have thought too, only don’t you see, if she’s connected to the Ketterleys—”

“Now, Millie, there you go again,” John frowned, which was his way of saying he was finding the conversation too tedious or tricky to follow, and wanted to put it off. “Dinna fash. Just tell her it’s unsafe, on account of the terrain. She seems a quiet girl; she’ll want to stay inside where it’s dry and warm.”

Although John Ogilvie had no way of knowing so, in Polly’s case this would normally have been a fair assumption. But even at that moment, as she sat around the fire with her fellow lodgers, Polly was discussing her plans to tackle the hill.

“I started climbing it today, but then the weather drove me back.”

Colonel Arthur took a kindly interest. “Do you know the history of the area, Miss Plummer?” When Polly disclaimed any such knowledge, the Colonel warmed readily to his subject. “Fascinatin’ stuff. Some kind of witches in those hills, according to local superstition. Drawing menfolk away, devouring ‘em whole. All rot, of course—bad fogs come up, poor fellows pitch off cliffs, just what you’d expect—but I do gather seven men have been lost to it in years past.

“In fact, I tried myself to climb that same hill my first day here. Put my foot wrong like a green lad, and broke my ankle in two spots. By the time they got me all fixed up I didn’t find the thing so compellin’ any more. Curious, that.”

“Very,” said Polly, politely. “I shall be sure to mind my step.”

“Good, good,” Colonel Arthur approved, and drew his rug up a little better over his lap. The resident cat took these rearrangements as invitation, and leaped at once to settle on the gentleman’s knee.

Polly left them dozing comfortably together by the fire, and went upstairs to bed.

~*~

The following day dawned so clear, bright and coldly sunny that it might have been designed for a trek through the hills. Polly, emboldened by the promise inherent in this weather, elected to leave the umbrella at home. Over her warmest underthings, and an outfit of sturdy tweeds which would brook no interference from the wind, Polly layered a cardigan that owed its enduring place in her wardrobe more to function than form-flattery. After adding mac, gloves and woolly tam, she considered herself properly kitted out for the climb.

The first part of the trek went swimmingly (and if Polly had harkened back to any number of past adventures with Digory, she might have taken this as a kind of portent). Her boots were sturdy and comfortable, and the hill made for even easier going than she remembered from the day before. She had just come within view of the upper crest, feeling rosy all over from the glow of her hike and anticipation of the view, when the fog fell upon her.

It came out of nowhere. There was no other way to describe it. One moment Polly was standing in the clear, open air; the next, the whole snowy, sunny hill went silent and uncomplaining down the gullet of a thick grey miasma that seeped, unbidden, from the very air. She had never seen the like, and it disturbed her more than she cared to acknowledge. Seeing that she could no longer advance or retreat without risk of straying from the path, she very sensibly stood still. This is the exact right thing to do if you are caught in an ordinary mist, but in her heart of hearts Polly knew the dense, dark oblivion that clung all around was nothing of that sort.

That is probably why she hardly started at all when a voice came out of the fog, speaking just as pleasant and ordinary as anyone you might pass on the street.

“Well! You’re different.”

Some people might balk at being so addressed, but when you have a few adventures under your belt you take rather a different view of strange goings on. Certainly, you start to interact with them more boldly.

“Am I?” Polly tried not to sound defensive, though she keenly felt it. “Different to what?”

“Oh, all the others.” The unseen speaker did not seem bothered by this aberration; only mildly intrigued. “Will you take advice, I wonder? Or will you only bluster and yell as you demand I account for your presence here?”

Polly thinned her lips in genuine affront.

“Have I blustered or yelled?”

“You might.”

“I shan’t.”

“Oh you are different. Very well. Here’s advice, if you’ll heed it. Tonight you must take no food you cannot be sure of, nor drink of any cup you have not poured yourself. Collect proof of all that you see, though it may not serve the purpose you think.”

Polly waited politely, but that seemed to be the end of it, so she said, “Thank you.”

“Hmph,” said the voice. “Manners, too. You’re a rare breed. I should think they won’t know what to make of you, though that may be to the good. Very well, my mannerly maid, I shall make you a special present: at the end of this path you will find a cloak hanging from a tree branch. You are free to take it without consequence or cost. Wear it, and you shall pass unnoticed until you take it off.”

“Thank you,” said Polly once more, though this time with greater emphasis. “It sounds useful.”

“Hmph,” said the voice once more. Then the fog lifted in a very precise and elegant manner, like curtains being drawn back from a scene, and Polly saw at once what was wrong.

Gone was the broad, low crag she had climbed; gone too was the muffling blanket of snow. In its place was a jagged rock beneath a thin, brittle carpet of shale. Polly no longer stoon on the near side of the hill but the far one, and she could see at a glance this was not even the same hill.

In the valley spread out below her was not the sleepy loch and village she had left, nor any part of the countryside which might be expected to lie beyond it. This was a kind of market town, its plaster-and-timber houses and big stone manors crammed all uncomfortably close, with narrow grey cobbled streets snaking in between. On the far side of the town, halfway up another forbidding mountainside, was a spiky-turreted castle that seemed to have been carved from the very darkness of the mountain itself.

“Wonderful,” said Polly, in the tone of one who means quite the other thing. “Simply super.”

She knew better than to try to get back over the mountain the way she had come. Whether your adventures run more to the magical or the mundane, if you’ve had them in any quantity you’ll soon find you can’t just backtrack your way out. Adventures, once begun, really do demand they be had. So Polly squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and started down the hill.

At the foot of the slippery path was a tree. Gnarled and doubling back in on itself, it seemed to grow from the very rock, some petrified memory of a time when the hill did not look like the outcropping of a nightmare. From its lowest branch fluttered a long streamer of dark fabric.

Polly, remembering the offer made by the voice in the mist, took the streamer in hand. She tugged the thing loose and, holding it up, saw that it was indeed a cloak, though not the sort that promised any kind of warmth or did favours for fashion. The cloth was dark and dull, spotted in some places with what might have been rust or mould or both, though mercifully there was no odour in evidence. It was woven incredibly fine, like silk and cotton all in one, but thinner and stronger than any fabric Polly had ever worked or worn.

“It’s like spidersilk,” she marvelled, flicking it around in reluctant admiration. “Hideous spidersilk. How terribly clever.”

She was on the verge of settling it over her shoulders when a cascade of thin shale stayed her hand. The rocks all around her shifted and slithered irritably, stirred loose by the echo of hoofbeats. Polly, once she knew this was not thunder or any threat of avalanche, realised that horses—and a good number of them, too—were approaching.

Spurred on by instinct, Polly swiftly folded the cloak into a bundle no bigger than her hand, which she crammed down the front of her mackintosh. She had just got everything back into place over top when the first horse came around the bend. It proved a stomping, great creature, all glossy black, bearing scarlet tack picked out in gold and a barrel-chested rider in matching gold-and-scarlet livery.

“You there!” he boomed, so that his address echoed all around the rock walls, “stop, in the name of the King!”

Polly, who hadn’t actually moved since he appeared, folded her arms across her chest and tapped one booted toe in ill temper.

“Which King?”

This query took the guard considerably aback, and he repeated, with second-hand indignation, “The name of the King!” which redundancy did no favours for Polly’s temper.

“You’ve already said that. Which one? If I’m to do anything in his name, oughtn’t I at least be given it first?”

I think you had better know that Polly in her ordinary life is not so reckless in her confrontation of strangers, but the unwanted adventure had shortened her temper and her foresight considerably. As luck would have it, though, the big man on the snorting, blowing horse wasn’t the sort to really hear what people said to him anyway. Already he was giving fresh orders to the mounted guard who had come around the corner behind him. They pushed forward, jostling their horses together in a stamping, edgy knot, and soon had her hemmed in.

“In the name of the King,” repeated the first fellow, very lofty on his mount, “you are to be detained, and presented at court. His Majesty commands it.”

Polly pursed her lips. “Well he certainly doesn’t waste any time; I’ve only just arrived. How did he know?”

The guard lacked either the inclination or capacity to make an intelligent reply. Instead he leaned down from his horse and, as though Polly weighed absolutely nothing at all, caught her by the elbow and swung her up before him. She had no choice but to cling, limpetlike and sulky, as the horse was reined around and sent careening down the hill.

They passed through the village at such a clip, scattering townsfolk every whichway, that Polly was able to form a pretty accurate impression of how popular the King was with his subjects. She didn’t say so, for she had not the breath to make even the briefest or most caustic commentary, but only clung that much tighter to the coarse mane of the neck that surged and fell before her as they came through the town on the other side and started up the hill, toward the castle.

The castle, she found, didn’t improve its looks with proximity. The whole thing loomed up before her, monstrously menacing, and Polly began to feel like something out of a storybook: a wandering woman caught quite against her will in a Gothic mystery as they swept in at the gates and clattered to a halt in the courtyard.

Here she was obliged to dismount, swung down on the soldier’s arm with even less ceremony than she had been hoisted up in the first place, and she was pretty sure it was sheer annoyance that let her land squarely on both feet. She turned at once to address her grievances to the guard who had delivered her, but he was looking over her head and so completely missed the wrathful glare levied upon him.

“The next one,” announced the mounted guard to a new one. Polly, turning back to follow the direction of his pronouncement, found this new guard was a standing set of several, all lined up against the courtyard wall. She saw they also seemed a little less inclined to bluster, and more inclined to consider the innate oddity of Polly in her walking costume.

“But it’s a lady,” said one, which observation might have lacked nuance, but Polly thought it spoke to some capacity for observation on his part, and gave her maybe greater encouragement and hope than was strictly warranted. “Surely there’s been a mistake.”

“Never you mind what she is,” said the mounted guard, going a little purple around his nose at the effrontery of his colleague’s suggestion that he could have made anything like an error. “She was on the mountain path in the usual place and there wasn’t any other, so I’ve brought her along. Now what are you going to do about that?”

Although the foot guard didn’t seem immediately emboldened by this news, neither did they keep Polly waiting around. She was surrounded again and obliged to set a brisk pace into the castle, down some sort of funny, winding side corridor that opened into a grand, cold hall with a throne at the centre and a lot of courtiers in heavy finery standing around and looking rather stiff and miserable.

“Kneel before the king,” whisper-barked the guard at her back. “Or it will go the worse for you.”

Polly had no reason to doubt this, so she knelt and looked up into the face of the king. She had seen better kings and she had never been impressed by most men, so she found this one wanting in almost every regard. His chin was soft, his eyes hard, and there was a sour, sulky twist to his mouth. He looked exactly the kind of person who would let his guard go galloping through the streets of town at all hours, and Polly felt instantly vindicated in her dislike of him. His address of her only cemented the conviction.

“Who are you?” The king asked peevishly. Even his voice had a kind of rasping whine to it, as though petulance were of such habit he’d become positively steeped in it. “Where is the soldier?”

“I am a stranger in these parts,” said Polly, who thought it prudent not to give him the privilege of her name. “I only just arrived, by way of the mountain road. I met no soldier.”

“That can’t be right!” cried the king. He looked to the tall, thin man standing a little to one side of the throne. “Eruvian, what have you done?”

The thin man’s face flickered into a brief twist of irritation before smoothing over once more. Clearly Eruvian did not enjoy the privilege of frank address to the king. Polly wondered if anyone did.

“Your majesty will recall,” Eruvian said politely, “that I did urge caution over the wording. Summoning spells are delicate magic, and even the slightest adjustment to nuance or tone may have unintended consequence."

“You should have made it rhyme,” scowled the king. “I told you so at the time. I always like them better when they rhyme. Makes ‘em easier to remember.”

It was plain from the expression on Eruvian’s face that there were many things he longed to say about this, but could not. He settled for an apologetic shuffle of his feet, and this seemed sufficient response to suit the king, who shot a sideways, disgruntled scowl at Polly as he wondered, “Can you send her back?”

Before Polly could even think to hope for such a tidy solution, Eruvian bowed his head in regret.

“I cannot advise it, sire. If she does not attempt the task for which she was summoned there may be grave repercussions for all involved in the summoning.”

At this the king went sickly pale, then darkly red. He returned his attention fully to Polly, this time with a fresh glower of resentment she thought wholly unwarranted.

“Very well, young—er—woman. I present to you the problem of my kingdom, in the faint hope that you may be the key to its solution.” He gestured irritably for Eruvian to step forward. “My magician will explain.”

Polly gave Eruvian a degree of polite attention about equal to that she had given the king. If he found it lacking, he made no sign.

“Twelve daughters has the king,” said he. “Every night the princesses are quartered safely in their chambers. The entrance is well guarded, and none may pass through. Every morning upon their release, however, the dancing shoes of the princesses are demolished: worn through at the soles as though they had spent all night in revel.”

Good on them, thought Polly. What a cold, miserable sort of place this must be, if the man’s own daughters are locked in at night and run away to dance in secret!

“All efforts to wrest from the princesses the secret of their sport have failed. Whatever curse has been laid upon them has bound their tongues against revealing the nature of their revelry. The King, beset with concern for his beloved daughters, has given his solemn word that the one who uncovers their secret is promised the hand of a princess in marriage.”

Polly did not think she changed expression. She hoped she did not change colour. She kept her eyes on Eruvian’s face, and was relieved to note he seemed scarcely to be looking at her as he went on.

“The task is mine to cast the spell which will fetch only the bravest and most seasoned of soldiers and strategists. Each is given three nights and days to uncover the secret. We had hoped this time would bring us our worthiest candidate, but instead,” he concluded, losing a bit of his stage presence in the face of his own confusion, “you showed up. Of course,” he polished his address with a visible effort, “now that you’re here, you shall be accorded the same three nights and days as were given all the others to investigate.”

“Hrm.” Polly considered. “And if I’d really rather not attempt it, thanks all the same?”

“Then we advance the penalty of failure,” said the king. “Death by beheading.”

Polly’s mouth pulled into a tight crinkle of disgust.

“I see.” And she did see, very clearly, why a collection of daughters might seize any available opportunity to quit their home with this man. What she did not see was why they ever chose to return. “Three days, was it?”

“Three nights and days. At the end of the that time, if you have been so favoured as to uncover the secret of their escape . . .” The king faltered. He looked to Eruvian. “How will that work?”

The magician shrugged, plainly unconcerned. “I very much doubt it will come to that.”

“That’s so,” agreed the king, and seemed cheered by this thought. “Well then, my lady.” He favoured Polly with an entirely too-satisfied smile. “On your own head be it.”

As endorsements went this was hardly a ringing one, but Polly didn’t have time to resent it because the king beckoned impatiently at one corner of the assembled court, and two young women separated themselves from the throng to stand apart.

Though you might not have said they looked alike, being dissimilar in colouring and stature, there was an eerie sameness to the pair. One was a tall, angular redhead with a kind of lithe squareness to her that made one think of the old Roman gods. She would not have looked at all out of place in a gold helmet, bearing a spear and round shield. The other girl was a minute blonde of such marked delicacy and enormous eyes that she stirred in Polly a desire to shut up all windows and doors against any draught that might knock the wee creature over. The smaller girl kept her countenance downcast and leaned into the other for all the shelter her frame could provide. Their shared resemblance, however, lay not in the form of their features but in the otherworldly perfection of each girl that set her apart from all the rest, and in so doing, made them strangely alike.

Neither of them, thought Polly, looks like the nice normal sort of girl you’d meet on the street. They’re like something from a painting, all smoothed over and shining.

She did not think this with contempt, but rather an uneasy hunger that turned over the bottom of her stomach. She returned her attention to the king just in time to hear him say, “—so Claudine and Susette will see you to their quarters.”

Understanding her audience to be over and not minding that discovery in the least, Polly followed the princesses to a different side door than the one she’d come in by, and out of the great hall.

~*~

Chapter Text

As soon as they had left their father’s presence, both princesses went softer, somehow. At least, that was how Polly thought of it: she saw at once how much less rigid they were around the edges, and more relaxed. The taller one, Claudine, slung her arm around tiny Susette in a bracing gesture and glanced over her shoulder at Polly.

“Can’t wait ‘til Edwina gets a look at you. You’re not in the least what we expected.”

“But you were expecting someone, weren’t you?” Polly frowned. “How does that work? I mean, you certainly have a system in place for people arriving, and your magician said they summon people, but it didn’t feel anything like a summons when I arrived. I don’t believe I felt any magic at all.”

“I shouldn’t pretend to know the nuts and bolts of it,” Claudine sniffed, “but it definitely fetches people. Father commands Eruvian to prepare the spell, and once it’s ready Father casts it.”

Some of Polly’s confusion must have shown in her face, for Claudine sighed and waved her free hand in an approximation of magician’s mystic gestures.

“You know. He comes in and does the fancy bits that make it smoke and spark, after the real hard work’s done. They say it preserves the line of authority, having the spell be cast by the king. Sheerest nonsense of course, but it sounds good, and makes Father feel no end of important.”

Polly had a fleeting, uncharitable memory of Marie Antoinette playing pauper in her hamlet on the grounds of Versailles, and grimaced. Claudine, evidently reading comprehension in Polly’s face, went on.

“Once it’s cast, somebody new turns up and tries to solve us every time. Different people, but usually all of a kind. Men of experience, and action. Soldiers, mostly; sometimes an adventurer of a more general sort gets through, but always—”

“Men,” Polly echoed. She cast an evaluative eye down herself as they walked, marking the grit and dirt on her boots and walking costume. In spite of herself, she had to smile. “I must have given them a proper turn.”

“And well-deserved, too. Though what Edie will make of you . . . well. We’ll see.” Claudine and Susette drew up outside a magnificent set of doors, double the height of the guards stationed before it. Both doors were carved all over with a labyrinthine, twisting design that oozed power in such quantity that it made Polly’s head hurt.

“That’s a spell and a half, isn’t it?” she said, with feeling. Claudine shot her a peculiar look, half startled, half searching, and seemed about to speak when the guards pushed the doors in. A bloom of bright skirts and pretty faces flooded the corridor at such speed it was all Polly could to to keep count. Seven, eight—goodness, nine girls all rushed out, curious, eager and then stumbling to a staggered stop at the sight of Polly.

“Oh,” said one.

“Oh,” breathed another.

“It’s a lady,” whispered a third.

This was the same observation the guard had made, but it shared none of his disappointment. At worst one might have called them confused. In truth Polly thought they seemed almost awed. Even so, impressed as they were, Polly was not looking at the girls who spoke. Those breathless, fluttering nine were all clearly junior to Claudine and Susette, a kind of newly-left-the-nursery bloom resting on each. Instead Polly’s attention was riveted on the individual standing tall and calm in their midst, an anchoring fixture in the heart of a transient garden of girlhood.

This was a young woman whose nursery days were well behind her. She stood as tall as Claudine, but lacked her resemblance to a warrior or Roman statue. With golden-brown hair piled gracefully on her head, eyes of deep, fathomless grey and a painfully exquisite proportion of limb and figure, she looked every inch a queen, with all the assured, regal bearing that her father lacked. On top of that she had the same otherworldly glow of her sisters and something more besides. Something knowing. She looked at Polly with a kind of stark, hungry expectation, as though she were at long last living out something she’d planned in her head for years but never dreamed might come to pass.

“Edie,” said Claudine, with a deep note of warning that suggested she had seen everything Polly had, and understood even more, “don’t let’s get carried away, now.”

“I told you,” said Edie, still staring at Polly. “Didn’t I tell you so?”

“Yes you’re the Oracle and the Seer of Stars and the Great Midnight Diviner all rolled into one, praise be to them all,” Claudine snapped. “But there’s nothing you have to say now that can’t be said inside, is there?” And she jerked her head meaningfully at the guards.

This warning hit home. Princess Edwina seemed to shake herself clear of whatever mood had seized her and all the younger girls swept around Polly, bearing her into the rooms beyond on a rustling tide of silk and seething curiosity. The guards did not follow but stayed in the corridor to shut the doors fast behind them. Polly gave a start at the sound of a deep thud that echoed at its closing.

“Whatever was that?”

“Only the bar,” said the smallest of her escort, a stick-straight girl still gawky and angular with pre-adolescence. “To lock us in.”

“Why,” said Polly, “are you locked in all the time, then? Not only at nights?”

“Of course.” This was Edie, still staring at Polly with such curious, unwavering intensity that Polly’s skin was suffused with heat and prickles. “Otherwise we might escape. This way we are quite safe.”

A current of not-quite-amusement swirled through the sisters at this pronouncement.

“Yes, terribly well defended,” Claudine said dryly. “Father takes such care.” She had let go Susette’s shoulders but still stood close by her side. “Look, Edie, can we maybe keep staring at her over supper? Himself kept us standing hours today, and Su is all done in.”

“Yes, of course. Poor Susette, I should have expected that. We can begin at once.” She turned the full force of her stare back to Polly, but this time she added a smile. The effect was like flinging back the drapes to admit the full force of the sun.

“I do hope you will join us at table.”

Faced with a smile like that, there was no way Polly could have refused.

~*~

Edie herself escorted Polly into the meal, which did nothing to settle Polly’s nerves. That Edie seemed in perfect command of herself only drove home to Polly how very otherwise she felt.

“Normally you’d be a gentleman,” Edie confided, “and you’d walk me in. That’s how we’ve done it before. But I think we’ve wit to adapt to something new, and just as well, since you do make for quite a change.”

She fit her hand comfortably under Polly’s elbow and they headed up the parade of princesses that swept into a richly-appointed long room with a set of doors at one end and a tall window at the other. The table was laid with gleaming simplicity, six seats down each side and one at the very head, leaving the view to the window unobstructed. Thin, yellow-white evening light washed over the whole scene, brightening it in a fine, clear way that no amount of candlelight could hope to equal.

Polly, stealing a glance at her escort, thought she had never seen anyone lovelier than the eldest princess bathed in the glow of the setting sun. It made Polly feel utterly unequal to anything she might have hoped to accomplish, but even her apprehension could not make her look away.

If Edie was aware of the scrutiny she made no overt sign. She stopped at the head of the table and gently handed Polly toward the seat at her right hand. Polly, mountingly desperate to interrupt her own staring, contrived to ask a question.

“How many have there been before me? Gentlemen, I mean.”

“Oh, seven or eight, I think,” said Edie, after a moment’s reflection. “Pleasant enough fellows, but none of them came to anything in the end.”

She waited until each of her sisters also stood behind their seat before she took her own, then gave a signal that the meal might be served. The prompt arrival of the food neatly saved Polly from confronting the uncomfortable knowledge of what end all eight of those gentlemen—almost certainly Mrs Ogilvie’s disappeared guests—had met in this kingdom.

The food set before them was the best of every kind. Polly had not seen the like in a very long time. Rich, dark meat swam in savoury broth; fresh, bright vegetables and perfectly ripened fruit were chased with sparkling desserts of spun sugar that crunched and crackled between the teeth before melting on the tongue.

The princesses were not immune to the enjoyment of their meal, for all that they must have been accustomed to such fare. Several could have rivalled even Digory in his boyhood for the speed with which they tucked into their meal.

“Have a care, Susette,” said one of the younger princesses, whose sisters addressed her as Clarice. She snatched her fingers out of the way as Susette pounced on yet another sugared rose. “I know you’ve had a longer day of it than most, but I do like my fingers stuck on.”

Susette might have made an apology to Clarice, but it was lost in the general swirl of vigour as the company made short work of their meal. Polly could easily have matched her hostesses’ indulgence of their appetite, but being conscious of the warning in the fog she watched carefully to ensure that she ate only from communal plates and waved off anything that came as an individual portion. This also meant declining all drink, as the wine was poured by an attendant, but at the end of the meal she had eaten enough to satisfy herself and was confident she had partaken only of shared portions.

Edie watched Polly steadily throughout each course, but made no comment on her selective dining habits. At the conclusion of the meal she said only, “Now ladies, shall we retire?” and on rising once more caught Polly’s elbow lightly in hand, as any gentleman might have done under the same circumstances.

Polly’s stomach gave the most uncomfortably exhilarating flutter at the tight touch on her elbow. She fought it back down, to be replaced by deep annoyance.

Oh dear, she thought. Now that is inconvenient.

Edie, serenely unaware of what an inconvenience she posed to Polly simply by virtue of touching her elbow, led the company through to a beautiful sitting room. The ceilings soared above their heads and an elaborate lead-paned glass window occupying most of one wall admitted the last of the day’s grey, late autumn light. A fire roared in the massive hearth and some of the younger princesses produced the tools and ingredients required for roasting chestnuts, which they set to doing with every appearance of delight.

Polly, feeling more than ever like she’d entered a dream world, was enjoined to take her ease on a deep, comfortable couch. Edie sat by her side, pressed close enough that Polly could see the tendrils wisping into curls at her temples. It was the work of almost a minute to tear her gaze away long enough to see that Claudine, Susette and a few of the older sisters had arranged themselves on the furniture around them.

The following half-hour did nothing to dispel the sensation of living in a dream. Headily otherworldly were the heat of the leaping fire, the chatter of the younger girls and her constant awareness of Edie beside her, lush of curve, her cheeks warmed to gentle roses, conversation maddeningly witty. Polly very soon felt warm and tingly all over for reasons that had little to do with the leaping fire.

“He didn’t say it right, of course,” Susette was telling Annabel. “I knew he wouldn’t.”

“Does Father ever?” Annabel sighed. “But it worked even so, I see.”

“Yes,” said Susette, though she did not sound quite as certain about that as Annabel. “I suppose it did.”

In a colder room, with a clearer frame of mind, Polly might have made something of this conversation. But warm and otherworldly are the worst combination for any room in which you hope to stay awake, and Polly had her work cut out for her just keeping her head in working order, let alone using it to pick up on cross-currents she did not yet understand.

It did not help that the fire seemed full of leaping figures, dancing flames that twirled and twisted in the shape of girls clad in flowing gowns. You could not look at them directly, Polly found, nor pin them down with a stare, but when her gaze slid off to one side or the other she could see them plain as day: a dreamworld’s approximation of a moving picture, phantasmic figures fashioned of flame and flights of fancy, such as might convince anyone she was already more than half asleep.

Then came the wine.

It was arranged so quietly, so naturally, that Polly almost didn’t notice the arrival of the cup as they pressed it into her hand. Claudine had just made a joke. Another princess beside her—one they called Geraldine—responded in kind. At the beginning of the joke Polly’s hand was empty, and at its conclusion she held a heavy pewter cup, strangely comfortable in her palm, as if it had always been there. In its depths swirled the loveliest, deepest, richest red wine you could ever have asked for. It looked so pure and good to drink that even somebody who didn’t care for wine at all would probably have pressed the cup, unquestioning, to their lips and drank every last drop.

With the warmth all running through her, face flushed and eyes magic-bright, Polly nearly drank it down. It was only at the last possible moment that she lifted her gaze over the run of the cup and saw the youngest princess by the fireside, she of the pointed chin and stick-straight hair, watching Polly with a piercing gravity ill-matched to the roasting of chestnuts.

Polly’s hand faltered.

In that moment all the princesses turned in their seats to follow her gaze, and she knew they had marked her hesitation with a perception that suggested they’d been watching for it in the first place.

“Rose Beth,” Claudine said sharply, and Rose Beth gave a guilty start before turning quickly back to look into the fire.

Polly, with that kind of shaky, self-reproachful level-headedness which comes of having survived enough adventures to know when you’d come very close to not surviving the latest, tipped the cup of wine right over into the potted plant beside the couch. By the time the princesses looked at her once more Polly sat, supremely unconcerned, holding her cup at the ready.

“Do you know,” she said dreamily, “it seems like a lifetime since I roasted chestnuts. Quite a lifetime ago.” And, with a soft, sleepy, nostalgic smile, she lifted the glass to her lips and made as if to drink.

All the princesses drank from their own cups, and Polly pretended not to notice the way some thread of tension had been cut amongst them now that she had done what they needed her to. She let them talk around her, their chatter a sort of brisk, staccato melody that under different circumstances would have acted as a lullaby.

“Make more of them, Edie!” called a younger girl sitting near the fire. “Horses this time, please? With wings?”

“Shhh, Emmeline,” said Edwina, and the admonition seemed somehow to be meant for everyone, for the conversation took on a very gentle, formless hum after that, and its likeness to a lullaby all the more pronounced.

The air in the room was sweet and heavy. It pressed close. But Polly, fresh from the fright of her earlier close call, was not nearly so affected by the atmosphere as she had been before. Instead she deliberately yawned, dropped her eyes and hung her head, giving a fine impression of somebody barely keeping sleep at bay.

“Goodness,” she murmured, “how tired I am.”

The princesses around her all clucked and hummed their gentle sympathy, but through the veil of her eyelashes Polly saw their smiles. She suppressed her own smile with some effort, and concentrated on the deception she meant to practice. She called to mind similar subterfuge from very distant years, when she had not wanted to sit up with intolerable company and contrived instead to nod off and be carried up to bed.

First she nodded once or twice, and jerked awake a little slower the second time than she had the first. A very little while later she affected a gentle loll of her head to the side. Her breathing deepened and steadied, and such was her familiarity with the old trick that she doubted if any would have believed she was anything but soundly asleep. When she had been a child, this would have been Papa’s cue to rise with a sigh and indulgent cluck to take her into his arms, and bear her up the stairs. Tonight, as one, all the princesses sighed with relief.

“There, Edie, do you see now?” Claudine cried. “She’s no different than the rest. Why, she even stared at you the same way!”

“She did stare.” That was Edie, very level of tone and quiet. “But it was not the same.”

“Well, maybe not for you,” Claudine allowed. “I know you’re bound to like her better than the others. But she drank as they did so she sleeps as they did, which means we are safe, and in the end that’s all that matters. Come now, what are we waiting for? Let’s away. They’ll be impatient if we are late.”

There was a general rush of departure from the room. Polly laid as still and quiet as she knew how, one eye slitted just enough to let her spy through her lashes.

The princesses disappeared from the room in a soft rush of skirts and whispering, but Polly did not immediately trust herself to follow. Instead she laid on the couch, tracking their retreat by the sound of their footsteps and laughter until she heard the opening of a door some distance away. Only then did she leap to her feet and unfold from her pocket the soft, fine stuff of the cloak she had been given. This she settled over her shoulders and put the hood up over her hair, not entirely believing that it would do as she had been promised, but having, at the same time, no other alternative than to trust the unseen speaker in the fog.

Once the hood was settled in place she moved rapidly over the floor in the same direction she had heard the others take. She passed from the hall into a sort of narrow corridor beyond, and looking up and down the brief length of it, saw Rose Beth on the point of entering a room at one end.

Polly set as rapid a pace as she dared, grateful for the fine stuff of the carpet which muffled the clop of her boots so that she could almost break into a run. She reached the door Rose Beth had passed through just as it began to close and, permitting herself no time to consider that the cloak might be nothing more than an ordinary cloak, and the speaker in the fog a particularly mischievous, malicious form of sprite, she slipped into the room beyond.

Every princess was gathered in a dressing chamber more spacious than most peoples’ own living rooms. Great wardrobes and trunks filled the space and every one of the twelve girls was busy at her own, lifting out gown after gown, holding each up before her and executing a twirl or gleeful sashay of the hips.

The gowns themselves were every bit as otherworldly as the girls who held them. Stitchwork and lace were so finely worked that the detail was nearly invisible; the stuff of each dress was rich, yet clearly no burden. Polly, standing with her back to the wall so as not to pose a tripping hazard, was brushed with any number of skirts or bodices and availed of ample time to appraise their quality. The fabric of each was deliciously soft and wonderfully cool to the touch, even in the thickening heat of a room so filled with bodies and raucous, giddy chatter.

They were clearly not ordinary garments any more than was Polly’s cloak, whose powers were proved by the ignorance of every princess to her presence. They carried on like girls on their way to a revel, and paid her no mind.

“Not that one, Mariette!” Claudine chided, as she tugged a skirt from another girl’s hand. “You wore it only last night. Whatever would your beloved think?” Then the elder girl whirled away, skirt in hand, leaving the duly chastened Mariette to select a different gown.

“Hurry along now,” Edie urged them all. She was already bared to her combinations, arms naked and the shape of her legs clearly outlined thanks to well-fitted stockings and a short, fine shift of nearly transparent fabric. She wore a loose stay quite unlike the old patent contraptions of our world, which were at that time finally on their way out of favour. Edie’s stays, intelligently designed though they were, nevertheless supported her in such a way that curve of her breast was shown to excellent advantage. Polly’s mouth went dry and her face flamed hot at the sight, but despite a desperate awareness of how unfair it was to stare at Edie when she did not know herself observed by a stranger, she could not quite manage to tear her eyes away until Edie had covered herself in a shimmering gown that was the same silvery, stormy grey as her eyes.

Even then Polly might have gone on staring, had Edie’s next words not thrown her into a cold panic:

“Do be quick, all of you. I’ll go make sure that our guest still sleeps.”

“Take no liberties if she does!” Claudine called, laughing. “You are no god of the field, my dear, no matter how you may wish for certain of their privileges.” A few of the other sisters giggled at this, but Edie lost none of her composure as she put her hand to the door and stepped out into the corridor beyond.

This was the worst moment for Polly. She could not very well barge ahead of Edie into the hall, so she had to wait until the princess had left the room entirely before she was able to slip through. Then she could not run immediately, but had to slide past Edie on tip toe before she could bolt ahead, down the passage and back into the great room where the fire still crackled in the hearth.

There was no time to pack the cloak away neatly and conceal it on her person. Instead Polly had to settle for tearing it off her shoulders, balling it up and tossing it under the couch before she flung herself out across the cushions and affected to still be caught in the deepest sleep.

The moment Polly’s eyes closed, Edie entered the room. She crossed with a light step to stand before the couch, and Polly, inhaling in a studied imitation of slumber, willed herself not to stir.

It seemed as though Edie stood there for an age, her position between the couch and the hearth very slightly relieving the great heat from the fire. Polly breathed evenly, waiting, wondering, until at last there was a stirring from the princess, as if she made ready to leave.

But instead of moving away, Edie sighed. It was the soul-weary exhalation of a woman ready to depart the world and all its cares. The hearing of it nearly rent Polly’s heart. Then Edie bent forward, as if to get a better look at Polly’s profile, and spoke.

“I had hoped it might be you.”

The words meant nothing to Polly. Or at least, they meant a kind of something whose meaning she could not begin to fathom. Before she could let herself think about what it might mean, the skirt of Edie’s dress swished, the heat from the fire intensified with her departure, and Polly gave her entire attention to lying perfectly motionless until she was certain the princess had left the room again.

Then in a twinkling she was up, scrabbling under the couch for the cloak and flinging it round her shoulders. She rushed from the room to the corridor, where she saw Edie had not gone back to the dressing room door. Instead she joined her sisters, all of them now dressed and glittering quietly in the dim light as they filed in through a different door. Polly wondered at the speed of it: the sudden completion of their gowns and hair, as though they had been hours at the glass, rather than mere minutes. Then she gave herself a brisk shake and started after them, where she saw that the door they were passing through led to an enormous bedchamber.

All the beds were made up ready for sleep, but the princesses were dressed for dancing. Each girl put her hands under her bed, drew out a pair of dancing slippers and fit them to her feet. Edie crossed to the bed nearest the door, drawing the attention of one sister.

“There you are! I trust you have dispensed with the attendants, but what of our gallant knight? Is she sleeping sweetly still?”

“Don’t test me, Lenore,” snapped Edie. She crammed her feet into dancing slippers and joined the assembly as they clustered around the bedchamber hearth. The fire in it had been laid, but not lit. Polly supposed this was owing to the absence of the attendants, whom the princess had trusted Edie to deal with.

Gave them a sleeping draught as well, I shouldn’t wonder, Polly thought. Only how have they managed to avoid a beheading, too?

Before she could get caught up in that curiosity, another arose. Edie, resplendent in her deep grey silk, gems winking at her wrists and throat, put her hand to a candelabra set on the mantel. She gave it a peculiar series of turns, this way and that, so Polly could scarcely follow the logic of it. All at once there came a great shift of power in the room, like somebody had punched a hole in the air.

Into the void moved the whole interior of the hearth. It clicked and slid smoothly back and to the side, making a short, wide doorway by which all the princesses made their exit, and Polly went right along behind them.

Here was where she had her next brush with near-disaster. There was no light immediately visible beyond the fireplace, so crossing from the room into the darkness had a badly disorienting effect. Polly stumbled and trod heavily on something soft. Rose Beth, who was in front of her, cried out.

“Petal?” Susette called back from the darkness. “Whatever is the matter?”

“Somebody has caught hold of my gown!” cried Rose Beth, wrenching her skirt high around her knee and turning to confront whoever stood behind her.

Polly stood frozen, heart pounding so loudly she was certain all twelve of the girls ranging ahead in the darkness must hear it. But Rose Beth only looked right through her, as though Polly were not even there. Edie’s voice, calmly competent, cut through the confused chatter of her sisters.

“Your skirt might have caught on a nail. Come along, now; don’t let’s keep them waiting.”

Rose Beth hurried away in obedience to the command, and Polly, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, stepped more cautiously in her wake.

They travelled down an immense, winding set of steps, their dancing slippers pattering softly on the stone. Polly tried to step lightly, so that her boots did not stand out amidst the running-water rustle of their passage. Gradually, as they continued their descent—and continued, and continued, travelling what felt like fathoms below the castle—the outline of the steps became better visible, so Polly could step with greater confidence. The farther down they went the lighter it got, until a faint shimmer of light rose up to meet them and bathe the face of everybody not wearing a cloak of invisibility in a gentle, otherworldly glow.

Polly, happening to look around as the light settled on them, nearly lost her footing all over again at the sight of even sulky little Rose Beth transformed in the gleaming fairy light. The sharp little nose and petulant scowl were no longer the sulks of a half-grown girl, but the haughty disdain of something only human-shaped, and looking none too pleased about it. The sisters all around her had undergone a similar alteration, their unsettling perfection now intensified to something so inhumanly beautiful that Polly was almost frightened.

Still they continued to descend, the light rising up around them until at last the stairs curved to one side and ended in the midst of a beautiful garden. The trees glowed in the same fairy light that had washed over the party, and their clusters of heavy fruit bowed the branches. A breeze that should not have existed so far below ground stirred the leaves to a strange, clattering rustle.

Intrigued, Polly stepped off the garden path and put her hand on a branch. Why, she thought, the leaves are silver! And the berries are rubies, surely.

The admonition of the voice in the mist came back to her, so she gave it a twist and the branch broke off in her hand. It made a little snap, and Rose Beth gave a start.

“Oh!” She spun around to look searchingly into the grove. “Is someone there?”

“Rose Beth?” Edie looked back also. Seeing the younger girl adrift among the orchard, she beckoned impatiently. “Do come along! We haven’t time for this.”

Rose Beth hovered a moment longer before she turned and followed her sisters through the grove. Polly, her heart thumping swift and strong, counted to ten before she tucked the branch beneath her cloak and likewise set out after them.

They came in short order to a second grove, where all the trees glinted dull and richly heavy. These were not made of silver, but of gold. Polly did not pause to marvel, but only put out her hand to wrest a second branch from its fellows. This one was much smaller than the silver one she had broken off before, and it did not snap like the first, but being soft and pliable neither did it part easily. Rather it set the whole limb to shaking and swaying, which disturbance Rose Beth had not gone far enough ahead to miss.

“Why, what is that?” she cried, turning back. “I heard something that time, I’m certain.”

“There is a breeze tonight, darling,” soothed Edie. “Do come along; let’s not keep the others.”

Rose Beth again obeyed the summons, but more slowly than before. Polly followed as far behind them as she dared, losing sight once or twice of the swish and shimmer of skirt, chasing phantom trills of laughter around this bend or that in the light-limned garden path in order to bring her quarry back into view.

They were much farther down into the heart of the chasm, now. Heat of a source quite apart from the sun rose up thick and heady all around them, so that Polly dashed once or twice at her brow and wondered if they might be going into the innermost heart of the earth.

“Almost there,” called Edie, her encouragement of her sisters drifting back to encourage their unseen pursuer in turn. “Not much longer now.”

“Oh do go on,” cried another, whose name Polly could not place, but knew only it was not Claudine or Rose Beth. Claudine would not have sounded half so fretful, and Rose Beth she could plainly see before her, addressing nobody as she tripped lightly along at the end of the procession with Edie a pace or two ahead, and Polly trailing as far behind them all as prudence would permit.

They were passing through a third grove now, glimmer-graced branches clacking with clustered—oh no, Polly thought, arrested in her progress in spite of herself. Surely not. But she put out her hand as one who has learned better than to always trust her best judgment, and soon discovered for herself the honesty of her own eyes.

The branch beneath her hand hung laden with diamond clusters, whose stages of maturity seemed marked by their degree of lustre. Tightly-closed buds of rough, rock-salt colour and consistency hung higher up, while the ripest of their lot blossomed clear and dazzling though no hand Polly knew of could have possibly cut and polished them all. It was these most finely-finished stones which were within her ready reach, and they boasted a cold-blooming brilliance that belied the truth of the heat hanging ‘round her.

Polly, fingers acting in obedience to past precedent, snapped the nearest cluster free to clatter in her hand. They rolled bright and brilliant in her palm, and the smallest two rolled right out of it. They could hardly have landed with a sound louder than a pin drop, and yet Rose Beth spun on her heel at the far edge of the grove, eyes wide and wild, searching almost angrily through the darkened bower for the source of a sound Polly did not see how she could have even heard.

“Who is there?” she shrilled. “There is someone, oh, I know it! Show yourself now or else—”

“Rose Beth!” laughed Edie. “Little goose.” She spoke with fond good humour as she caught her sister’s hand in hers. “You are so jumpy tonight. Who do you imagine might be out there? Everyone you want to see is waiting for us across the lake. Perhaps it is their impatient grumbles that reach you now.”

Rose Beth looked unconvinced, but allowed Edie to draw her away down the path once more, over the final hill and down its far slope toward a body of water shining cold and brilliant beneath a moon that did not exist. The lake was large enough to have an island at the middle, and on that island was a fine palace made of gleaming silver and shining glass, fashioned so that it looked like a sparkling crystal in a dark and lovely setting. The sound of something that was a little like a waltz, only much fiercer and merrier than any waltz from our own world, was borne out to them from within, carried across the water like a summons. Polly could just make out bright, swirling shapes through the glass walls, a company of dancers at a grand party.

She let Edie draw Rose Beth farther ahead, patiently counted twenty, and followed them down the garden path toward the shore.

~*~

All twelve princesses, and Polly, gathered at the edge of the lake. Claudine put two fingers between her lips and gave a piercing whistle, summoning twelve fine figures from inside the crystal palace. These got into twelve boats moored along the bank, and as they set out across the water Polly saw they were twelve men, each more beautiful than the last. They had the same quality of eerie unreality as the princesses, and it occurred to Polly to wonder if she herself, without her cloak, might look like somebody who more properly belonged to a higher realm.

Somehow, she doubted it.

As each little boat bumped gently against onto shore, the prince who piloted it leaped out to greet a specific princess. There appeared to be some order to the proceedings, each one decidedly paired off with another, but Polly didn’t dare waste time sorting out the details because she had to get to a boat.

She chose the one piloted by Rose Beth’s escort, reasoning that since the princess was the smallest, she allowed Polly the most room to tuck herself into the bow without risk of brushing against the other passengers. Even so, as the boats launched Rose Beth’s prince struggled to manoeuvre the little craft. They sat low in the water and made much slower progress than the rest.

“Not easy going tonight,” the prince admitted, once they were almost to the island “I wonder if her majesty has stirred up a current of some sort.”

“Why should she do that?” frowned Rose Beth. Then she shifted uneasily on her bench seat, as though her apprehensions of earlier had all returned at full strength. Presently she added, “Do let’s hurry. I have the strangest feeling something isn’t right. If we can only start dancing perhaps I’ll feel more like myself again.”

“Doing my best,” said the prince through set teeth, and Polly saw the truth of this standing all out along the lines of his arms and in the creases of his brow. If he had been a person in the way that Polly understood humans she would have counted him a boy still at school, only a year or two Rose Beth’s senior. He had not the height or heft of his fellows, and got them to the shore a good distance behind the rest, after the others had already tied off and disembarked.

“Oh!” cried Rose Beth, impatience dashing all apprehension from her mind, “let me.” And she bent to fumble a knot into the end of the rope, obliging the prince to stand back and wait respectfully for her to finish before he was able to stoop and secure the thing properly, lest it lose itself altogether to the whims of the lake.

Polly did not quite dare push past them on the narrow bit of dock that was available, and so she was forced to wait until the rope had been fastened twice before she could start off softly in the wake of the rest, following them up the wide, low steps cut into the lakeside hill.

The stone used to fashion the steps was none Polly recognised: gleaming black and bright, it swallowed each unearthly sound so that when she trod upon the steps, she could not even hear her footfall. She knew she should be glad of the concealment, but the effect was one of being swallowed up, sound and all. One could not even be certain of screaming in this moment and being heard.

To banish this uneasy fancy, Polly fixed her eyes on the figures that swirled bright and graceful beyond the high-arched windows which opened onto the steps. The room was a kind of ballroom or a conservatory, flooded with music unmoored from any musician. The melody filled the air as if formed by pure act of will, a song without beginning or end. They might well be lost in the middle of time, and never know it if the music never stopped.

There I go again, Polly fumed; thinking utterly unhelpful things, I’ll be bound, and what earthly good will that do me? I’d better get my head in order if I want to keep it on my shoulders. Now, where’s Edie got to?

It did not occur to her to wonder why she wanted to find Edie. It seemed the most ordinary thing in the world—or under it—to look for Edie as soon as she entered the room. She did not see her at first, for the dancers made a dreadful, dazzling whirl, all colours brighter and more brilliant than any sort we see every day, and quite beyond description simply by virtue of having no presence in a place where any might need to describe them. It was the gowns of the princesses from the overland that proved a boon to Polly now. They had seemed dazzling above ground, but here they could not help but appear duller and more muted than the finery of those around them. The effect was to create a kind of void in each place a princess stood, her own unearthly visage supplying all her radiance while her clothing, made above ground as it was, paled in comparison to such unearthly splendour.

Once Polly knew to watch for the places that colour was not, it was easy to spot the princesses. She saw Claudine escorted by a prince of equally martial bearing, her cerulean dress faded to robin’s egg blue. And there Annabel, whom they called Annie, who had dressed in something the colour of emeralds and new grass that now looked like dried sage, although her face glowed radiant above it. Rose Beth’s magenta satin might have passed for a violet long pressed and faded between the pages of a book, and—there.

Sure as wishing, swift as thought, Polly found her: a princess grey-gowned no longer, but looking almost deified in a column of rustling granite-white. Edie shone out above the forgettable drape of her ballgown in such a way that Polly knew she need not fear losing sight of her again. Not even in this place, where Polly had begun to doubt the necessity of her own magical cloak as an instrument of concealment, for who could trouble themselves to look at Polly when everyone around her was brighter than the sun?

Even so, Polly drew the cloak a little closer around her before she joined the crowed, content to mingle unaddressed, listen unheard and watch without being seen. She might have continued in that manner all night, only she noticed that the ballroom was only one of two in which the party was ongoing, so she thought she had better acquaint herself with the other, for the sake of being thorough.

She kept to the edge of the dancing throng, amusing herself in passing with trying a step or two, and even joining a whirling central ring as a matter of expedience in crossing the last dozen yards between her and the grand, arching portal that separated one room from the other. When at last she took a turn at the far end of the circle and danced herself free, she found the second room set up for a banquet, with curtains hanging before a dais on the far wall and great, long tables arranged after the manner of the old Medieval feasts you might have read about in your history books at school.

Only, of course, none of your history books could make a Medieval feast sound half as fine as this one looked, though I have no doubt they tried. None of this food wanted any creative dressing to make it look clever or delicious; it simply was, so that anyone who looked at it could see at a glance how fine and tasty it must be, not to mention how perfectly filling.

Even Polly was not immune to its charms. It did not matter how well she had eaten at supper; suddenly she felt she had never been as hungry for anything in her life as she was for this food, and she really thought for a minute that she might die if she did not partake of it—and there, of course, you can see what a powerful and dangerous thing magic can be. Polly actually took up a nearby goblet and raised it to her lips, thirsting desperately for all it contained, and I think she really would have drank it down if the branches concealed in the cloak she wore had not moved when she did. When the silver twig pricked her side, Polly came over all coldly frightened and returned to her senses at once.

Goodness, what a goose I might have made of myself, she thought, and lowered the cup with a shaking hand. If anybody ought to know better, surely I would.

Possibly she was a little too hard on herself. Anybody must know the power that fairy food can have over those who come upon it unaware, and it’s a grievous sort of magic indeed. But then, we do make sure to warn our children almost from the cradle through story and song and any other means we can devise to teach them of this peril, so perhaps Polly had the right of it, and she had been behaving foolishly in that moment.

Whether her actions merited grace or rebuke, they were the reason Polly had all her wits about her when the curtains on the far wall swished back with impossible ease and the music of the dancing gave way to that clear, bright bugling which seems in almost every world to herald the arrival of someone important.

Polly had not meant to think of the overland king in that moment, but something in the trumpeted fanfare made her remember him all the same, and so she kept him still in mind when a lady in clothing as white as Edie’s, though infinitely more brilliant and finely worked, came out upon the dais. The lady was tall and queenly, and you could have thought her impossibly beautiful if only it hadn’t seemed a presumption to think anything about her appearance at all. She was quite outside most things that form human thoughts, and you could not look on her without knowing it.

She led a retinue of exquisitely beautiful courtiers to the centre of the platform, where she sat upon a graceful throne and all her court ranged out around her. The overland king, thought Polly, could never in all his lifetime have looked so grand. It gave her a rather satisfying, if somewhat spiteful pleasure to know it.

Nobody stopped eating or dancing at the great queen’s arrival, so it seemed that her appearance was an expected and accustomed event. Polly, who had not expected it and did not think she could ever become accustomed to such a person, had to make a particular point of not looking in the lady’s direction if she wanted to think of anything else at all.

She focused on the nearest table, trying to make out the shape of the food which had so stirred her senses and even now made her stomach grumble and her whole mouth flood with longing to partake. But her wits were not twice addled, so she was able to also see how unlike our own food any of it was, and to understand that if she were to eat any of it there was no way she could have gone home again.

Further distraction arrived in the form of three of the overland princesses. They came in from the dance floor flushed and glittering, and all three fell upon the food with an eagerness that did nothing to disturb Polly’s conviction. If anything, their ability to eat the food without care only strengthened her suspicion that the otherworldly radiance of Edie and her sisters was exactly that. This gave Polly a kind of startled satisfaction and relief to have hit upon the most likely explanation for their collective, utter unlikeness to their father.

But did he also know they were not fully human? Polly considered. Surely he must. Yet if he did, how could he not also know where they went every night?

She drifted closer the three princesses, who were sharing cups and conversation with one ardent and attentive prince. Two other princes, likewise attendant, stood in conversation some little distance away from the table, and Polly turned toward them to see what she might learn.

“—won’t go back.”

“She must, though I know she may not like it.”

“I cannot ask it of her! If she dreads so much her return—”

“None can gainsay what has been spoken, Loric.”

Loric, thus addressed, flushed in a way that helped offset the painful perfection of his features. Polly felt almost comfortable looking at him as he sulked and shook his head, and she thought there was something not unlike Digory in his manner as he wrestled with this unwelcome news.

“If someone were only to explain—”

“What can her Majesty ever need explained!”

“Surely, if she knew how unhappy—”

“What do you imagine there is that her Majesty does not know?” The counsellor shook his head, amused yet sympathetic, and set his hand upon the other’s shoulder. “Great favour is yours in the offer of her hand. Lest you fall from grace I say you should have only patience, and trust that all is well.”

Loric looked exactly as pleased by the suggestion that he only be patient as most human men would, and Polly thought none could look less ready to have only patience, and no action, than he. Before he could reject the counsel another pair of dancers broke in upon them from the room beyond, and Polly, at the sight of Edie, at once could think of no reason to look anywhere else.

“There you are!” said Edie’s escort. Polly wondered if this inclination to state the obvious were a trait of men both overland and below. To judge by the look of quiet fatigue on Edie’s face, she supposed it was at least a trait of this one. “Are you keeping secret counsel? Or may anybody join?”

“I had better get back to Thomasina,” said Loric, and suited action to the word. Edie watched him go with something more alert than her prior fatigue, then turned a silent question on the one he’d left behind.

“Oh, yes,” he sighed, evidently having understood her meaning as readily as Polly. “The same trouble. You could not ask her not to speak to him about it, I suppose? Until the matter’s settled? It might set his mind at ease.”

“You’ve asked me this before, Myrel, and my answer has not changed. I would not for the world counsel secrets kept from one she loves.” Edie, in glancing over to the table where Loric had rejoined the rest to witness their reunion, had turned her head in such a way that meant she looked at Polly too. Although she could not have known it, her features pulled and softened in such a painful, longing way that Polly’s heart gave a terrible leap, and set to hammer at its prison with such mad fervour she feared those around her could not help but overhear. It was equal parts agony and relief when Edie looked back to Myrel to add, “And she does, you know; as much as he does her. Of course for them it’s very hard.”

“But not for the rest of us?” frowned Myrel.

Edie gave a quick, impatient sigh. “You will insist on giving counsel when you understand so little. You are happy with your match, I know, but speak not to me of love when what Loric bears for Thomasina inspires him to reckless hope and all you can say he best should do is wait.”

“What can he do but that?” Myrel demanded. “Her Majesty has said—”

“Oh! I know well what her Majesty has said. But bound or not, we are robbed of much your leisure. You cannot know what it is like, to live the life we do. The time we feel pass slowly, which to you is endless revel . . . gods. Let him yearn, Myrel. In this at least he proves himself a match for Thomasina, that he can understand her torment because he bears it, too.”

“You recommend I suffer as an aid to courtship?” Myrel scoffed, and Polly thought Edie did very well to only narrow her eyes.

“I would not presume to recommend aught to which you are unequal. I, at least, have better sense than that.”

Without waiting for Myrel’s answer, Edie turned on her heel and led her escort to the table where her sisters sat and supped. She joined them, and by dint of clever footwork and a little jostling and wiggling, Polly did too.

Polly took no food or drink, but greedily partook of conversation shared unguarded as the party carried on. The sisters spoke at volume, their princes chiming in, at such speed and with such implicit understanding that Polly heard much of which she could not hope to make true meaning. Whenever all hope of sense outpaced her, as often times it did, Polly gave up listening and simply looked at Edie.

She was different underground. All the sisters were, but Edie’s differences were unique to theirs, and Polly took some pleasure in teasing out their cause. At least part of it, she suspected, was that Princess Edwina was not here as hostess, obliged to act with poise and grace that masked a vigilance required for the task of drugging and subduing a watcher set among them. Here she was some kind of guest, and Polly saw the lines of tension that aboveground sat deep beside her eyes fade and soften by the minute.

She could not like half so well the change in Edie’s carriage. The calm unruffled bearing that held her shoulders square and spine erect seemed here to desert her, a kind of restless fluttering took over both her hands and Polly wondered if any at the table who had not worked to notice it might mark the way Edwina used her cutlery to cover the sheer impossibility of stilling both her hands.

If these people had served dinner rolls, thought Polly, Edie would be shredding hers.

As night wore on toward the dawn, or whatever down here passed for that, fatigue stole in on those whose flesh could feel it. Polly now missed more conversation than she followed, and struggled not only to listen, but also to stay awake. Rose Beth, who had brought her prince to join them some nameless course before, slumbered soundly on Edie’s shoulder and some of the other sisters, the ones closer in age to Rose Beth than Edie, had also begun to flag.

Presently their sister marked it too, reaching down the bench to here tweak one nose fondly, and there tuck back a straying curl behind a shell-pink ear.

“Faustine, you look about done in,” Edie clucked. “Thomasina, you are no better. Very well. I suppose it’s time we take our leave. We might want to get a little sleep before dawn, after all.”

Faustine, drooping against an equally droopy Thomasina, dug sleepily at her eyes and nodded her agreement.

“Yes,” she said, “only let’s first say good bye to Grandmamma.”

Polly was almost too weary to make sense of this remark, but as she lurched up from the bench and unfolded her own half-numbed limbs, she realised the princesses had formed some kind of procession, princes at their side, which made its way across the banquet hall toward the curtained dais.

Polly’s legs were too stiff for her to follow, so she missed whatever conversation passed between Edie and the queen. She saw the kiss, however, bestowed upon each girl’s brow, and the one each princess pressed in return to the cheek of that fearsome, lovely face. The princes made no comment that Polly heard or saw, but simply served as escort to the throne, then back again.

Polly held herself off to the side as they passed, and fell in line at the back of the procession behind Thomasina, who was escorted on one side by Loric and on the other by Rose Beth’s own young prince. The latter had succeeded where Rose Beth had failed to stay awake, and he held Thomasina’s other arm while Rose Beth slumbered soundly and drooled just a little on Edie’s escort’s shoulder.

They did not pause in the ballroom, but carried on outside and down the wide, low steps. Once on the staircase that Polly’s limbs at last returned to proper working order, and she cut around the stately progress at an undignified half-run. She made a beeline for the boats tied up upon the shore, and took advantage of the opportunity to arrange herself in the bow of the largest and sturdiest-looking available craft without alerting anyone to her presence.

The procession reached the shoreline shortly after, and Edie, after carefully depositing Rose Beth into the craft piloted by the youngest prince, permitted herself to be handed into the same boat as Polly. Polly scrunched herself up against the bow as small as she could, but even so could not entirely avoid brushing against the hem of Edie’s gown. Possibly Edie’s limbs were as numbed and wearied as Polly’s own, for she made no remark; only sighed and sank back against a low cushion she found waiting there, and watched her escort effect their transit with each slow, certain stretch of his arms.

“Are you tired, I wonder?” she mused. Her prince looked up in surprise.

“I? Certainly not.” Another pull at the oars, and then, “Why, are you?”

“Mmm.” Edie gave a kind of sleepy, sideways stretch. “Yes. Always, at the end.” She watched the shore draw closer for a quiet span of time before she wondered, “What will that be like for you? To have a wife who tires.”

The prince met this musing with a helpless, bewildered look. It was clear to Polly he did not know how to answer, and Edie seemed to know it too, for she laughed and shook her head, and bade him never mind her now.

“I might say just about anything when I am tired,” she explained. “You must learn to think it of no consequence.”

“Oh no,” the prince protested, as the boat ran up at last upon the shore. “I shall always attend closely to what you say, and consider it most carefully.”

“Except when I tell you not to, I see,” Edie said lightly. Then, smiling kindly at the resurgent confusion on her ferryman’s face, she got to her feet and gave a wobbly little stretch, under cover of which Polly tumbled gracelessly out of the back of the boat and onto the waiting shore.

“Good night,” said Edie behind her, and possibly the prince replied in kind, but Polly, who had got her feet once more beneath her, was already racing up the garden path and too far away to hear.

~*~

The princesses did not travel home with half the eagerness or energy as they had left it, and so even in her wearied state Polly found it no great task to outpace them. She might have doubted her way back if the path itself had not seemed to glow before her, infusing her every stumbling step with fresh confidence that she was travelling exactly as she should.

The grove of diamond trees had a lighter look about it now. Sunrise could not be the cause of it, yet the effect was much the same and gave Polly that same sleep-deprived drunken giddiness as the same sight might bestow on one in our world who has spent the whole night journeying in darkness, and sees in the grey pre-dawn light the promise of journey’s end.

When next she reached the grove of golden trees, it occurred to Polly that now would have been the better time to take her proofs of presence here, as the princesses were so far behind. She checked hastily in each inner pocket to ensure she had no need of fresh evidence, but the branches and diamond cluster lay where she had hidden them, and so she rushed on, putting the golden grove behind her too.

The silver trees were a longer time in coming. Polly had half begun to fear she had made some error in her direction before she came again upon it, and so gave a shaky sigh of relief at knowing her path was true. It was tempting to pause a while there, if only to let one of those sturdy, shining trunks bear her up as she caught her breath, but the murmur of not-so-distant voices drove her on. The promise of pursuit sent her rushing onward from the silver forest and down the darkest part of the path, retracing her steps to the foot of the staircase that had led them down into this weird, unwild underworld.

She knew the worst moment would be when she reached the top. She had no hope of working the charm from the inside, having already forgotten the gestures Edie had made when working the candelabra, so Polly was forced to wait as the princesses started up the stairs. She stood as near as possible the place where, when she put her hands out and groped through the darkness, she could just make out the seam which joined the rough, heavy stones of the hidden door.

Edie was first to reach the top, which Polly thought she might have been able to tell even if they remained in perfect darkness. But as it happened that thin grey lightening of the unseen sky overhead had reached them up there too, so that the pale glimmering threads of Edie’s once-grey gown shone out like new silver in the gloom.

Polly could not make out the gesture Edie used on this side of the door, but she marked the moment that magic took effect and the door slid open again: marked it, and acted on it in almost the same breath. Before Edie could so much as gather her skirts Polly slipped past in front of her and raced across the hearth rug, over the thick crimson runner that ran the length of the floor, out of the bedroom and down the corridor to the great room, where she was supposed to have been left sound asleep.

Not daring to trust in the luxury of time to effect perfect concealment, she tore the cloak from her shoulders and got it half folded up before she recalled her stolen treasures. Then she had to empty them from her pockets, unravel the cloak again and use it to bundle up the branches and diamond cluster, all of which she wedged gracelessly down the front of her cardigan before collapsing in genuine fatigue on the couch.

Polly had almost got her breath back to normal when a flurry of footsteps alerted her to the presence of more than one inspecting princess.

“Oh,” said Rose Beth. Her voice was thick with sleep and suspicion in equal measure, and only the weight of Polly’s weary limbs prevented her tensing at the sound. “She’s here.”

“Yes, darling,” said Edie, gentle even in exhaustion. “Does that settle you? She is just as we left her, and may it ease your sleep.”

They must have departed then, and though others may likewise have come to look upon her Polly never knew it. For the last time that night she raced past them again, bound not for the palace, the stair or the boats, but to sleep.

~*~

Chapter Text

Everyone behaved at breakfast exactly as people at breakfast might be expected to behave. Polly found it very trying to play at so much make believe, but she did her best. She answered some overly-solicitous enquiries about her time on the sleeping-couch with solemn assurances of its superlative comfort, and made overly-solicitous enquiries in turn as to the princesses’ state of health and wellbeing. These were answered with rather more uncertainty than solemn assurance. Polly permitted herself the indulgence of a grave nod.

“I am glad to hear it. I’d been worried your feet might have hurt once you lost the better part of your shoe leather.”

So saying, she proffered a vibrant green dancing slipper purloined some quarter-hour before from beneath its owner’s bed, which conversation piece she was pleased to note inspired brief flashes of discomfiture on more than one lovely face.

At last Claudine said lightly, “Ah! Yes. We’d almost forgotten the reason for your visit. How good of you to remind us.”

Conversation did not flow quite so freely after that, but Polly did not mind. She felt almost victorious, as though she had scored a point in a game nobody expected she would even know how to play.

After breakfast Polly was invited to take a walk around the garden with some of the sisters, though not all—a nap, Claudine explained, was the custom of several, and two others were always called upon to join their father’s court, but the rest often enjoyed a little walk outdoors—and Polly, after certain deliberation, chose to accept.

She found herself in close company with the four eldest girls. Thomasina and Lenore had gone off to court, Thomasina still imperfectly concealing utterly head-cracking yawns behind a handkerchief much too dainty to perform any meaningful office, and the other six were all back abed already.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t join them?” Polly could not resist enquiring. “One does need one’s rest, after all, especially after exerting oneself all night.”

“Indeed,” said Edie, with matchless equanimity, “one does. But I find that some need more than most.” And Polly, recalling Edie’s idle query of her labouring prince, suffered sudden unease that served as a kind of rebuke for her decision to make light of the night’s exertions.

Because Edie, she could well see, did not think everything perfectly fine about whatever it was that awaited them belowground no matter how well other of her sisters might like it, and Polly reproached herself for speaking so carelessly in her presence.

“Do you enjoy dancing?” This was Mariette, seeming almost civil in her query save that Edie cut her such a caustic look Polly knew there must be hidden jest within it. All the same she answered with perfect civility, and deemed it a kind of penance for having upset Edie.

“I don’t mind it, though I don’t go very often and I don’t suppose you’d even recognise what I consider a dance. You must do them far more grandly here.”

“What makes you say that?” Claudine asked, and Polly did not think she imagined the sharpish edge to her tone.

Suspicious, she thought. Not only Rose Beth, but all of them. Goodness, what a lot they must think they stand to lose, even if they don’t imagine I’m the one to take it from them.

Aloud she explained, quite truthfully, “Oh! Only that I come from a very different kind of world, and my life there is so unlike your own. I imagine anybody who lives in a palace has grand balls and that kind of thing. Is that not so?”

“Sometimes,” said Claudine, evidently mollified by this response. “Though Father does not care for parties if he has no visiting dignitaries to entertain.”

“Or impress,” added Susette, earning feeling nods from the rest.

“What sort of parties have you, then, in this different world of yours?” Edie wondered. She didn’t ask as the younger girls might have done, all wide eyed and curious, nor did she have any of that caustic edge which one would have expected from the elder sisters. It was not, Polly thought, even the gentle good manners of a hostess that inspired the question, though it was probably nearer that than any of the others she could have named. Edie, thought Polly, really wondered. She actually wanted to know.

Polly supposed it made sense for a princess who lived in two worlds to be curious about an unknown third. She tried very hard to persuade herself that this curiosity, which was wholly natural and perfectly easy to understand, was all that prompted Edie to ask, and she strove to answer her in kind.

“I suppose there is a temptation to describe one’s own world always as ‘quite an ordinary one,’ or ‘nothing in any way unusual,’” she reflected, as preface to her reply. “For of course to oneself that is exactly how it seems. For you, I think you might find it rather darker than you are used to—or at least,” upon careful second thought, “not nearly quite so bright.”

“Doesn’t that mean the same thing?” Susette wondered. Polly said no, not the way she meant it.

“You have such colours here, you see. So much more vivid than any we have at home. At home when I say a thing is green, I am talking of how it looks. Here when a thing is green, why, I think one might almost taste it. And though the smell and sound of your world is not very unlike mine, your sky I think is closer to the ground, though I can’t understand how I know that.” At which point Polly looked up in honest bewilderment at the louring grey-blue sky, so much brighter and more springlike, yet infinitely more foreboding than the snowy Scottish April she’d been obliged to leave behind. Really, it did almost look like you could reach right up and touch it, in a way she’d never known the sky to look at home.

“That is a funny difference,” Mariette decided, and everyone seemed eager to learn a little more, so Polly found herself acting to oblige them.

Round and round they walked, being told all about locomotives and automobiles and the wireless—which must, Claudine decided, be a little bit like Eruvian’s speaking-glass, that he could use to overhear things but not to actually communicate with anyone, making it decidedly less like the telephone Polly had also described—and India-rubber and tea shops, and anything else it came into her head to name, until she began to wonder how long she had talked and what on earth she could have said to so completely hold their interest.

When at last Polly felt she really must stop talking lest she offend all sense of good taste and conversational proportion in any world, three of the princesses were content to accept her silence and drift away to newer subjects. But Edie waved them on without her, and instead elected to draw Polly off a little distance where they might be seated on a bench and screened, to some extent, from view on either side by a tangle of rose bushes that had surely seen better care in days gone by.

“I think it makes perfect sense that you are here,” said Edie. “I could not imagine at first what mistake it must have been that Eruvian summoned you, and I thought perhaps—” Here, something in Edie’s face went grey and tight, then smoothed quickly over. She sighed.

“Thought perhaps . . .?” Polly prompted, but Edie shook her head.

“No matter. I don’t see how it can be you, but I’m also sure it must be. From the very moment that you came, I was so sure you would be the one to figure everything out.”

“Perhaps I will,” said Polly, and though she spoke lightly enough she made a very close study of Edie’s face as she said it, for she wanted very much to see what Edie thought of that.

Edie smiled a little sadly, and shook her head.

“I don’t think it will signify very much either way. Nothing can really ever change, you see, whatever you might discover. I’ve known that for some time now. Yet I will own part of me still hopes you will find everything out, and somehow it will all be different. Nothing like what I know, or even thought.” She looked over at Polly with an expression so raw and searching, and wholly unlike any Polly had ever seen on her before, that for a moment it was like being taken to yet another world entirely. Polly’s heart beat desperately at her chest as Edie wondered, “Is that mad? I think it must be. Only, I am so tired of being split down the middle I almost wish it would end any way that it can. But the choice is not mine to make.”

Still that otherworldly closeness sat heavy all around them, so that Polly was not even sure she dared to breathe, much less speak. It felt somehow like her cloak hung all around them, heavy and secured, sealing them off as something quite separate and set apart and out of reach. It was this recognition which gave Polly courage enough to ask,

“Why isn’t it? Your choice, I mean.”

Edie’s face worked terribly, like something wanted to come out but she struggled to find the shape it required before she could let it. When she spoke she seemed almost to craft and deposit each word with particular care, shaped fine and all precise, one after another.

“Because this place is built on magic, and we are more bound by it than most. Even if I wanted to tell you everything of our situation I could not do it, and you could not get it out of me. Nobody can.” A shadow passed over her face. “Though Father did try.”

Polly did not ask what that meant. She worried this might be cowardice on her part, but really it was more like charity. Edie so clearly did not relish the memory, and Polly could not bear to demand it of her.

Instead, she put out her hand so that it sat on the bench just beside Edwina’s. She looked down at the shape of it, her nails blunt-cut and knuckles tanned, those too-close past four years of let’s not talk about all that right now writ into each crease and line of the hand she’d used to do . . . well. Better not to talk about all that right now.

She looked instead at Edwina’s hand, which was exactly as any artist who sat down to draw the hand of a princess from a fairy tale would have made it. Polly did not regret the contrast, but she marked it all the same, and when she looked up to find Edie studying her closely she knew that she had marked it, too.

“You have adventured, of course,” said Edie. It was not a question, but Polly answered anyway.

“Oh, yes.”

Edie nodded. “You’d have had to. But I don’t think he could have known what kind. He wouldn’t have thought to say. They wouldn’t believe it mattered.” Still she studied Polly, so searching and so longing that it made Polly all the more achingly aware of the moment their strange little set-apart space began to slip away from them, and the outside world encroached once more. “It does matter, of course,” said Edie, very serious. “It’s why they could never get it right.”

Then it was gone, that separate space, and Polly wasn’t even sure she dared to nod, much less answer. She coughed instead, and cleared her throat, and thought it maybe sounded like oh, of course, if you were in a charitable frame of mind.

At least that’s what she hoped.

~*~

The middle part of the afternoon, in that world, was not in the least inclined to drag on. Rather it was the time of day when all the princesses awoke, and came together in a kind of reckless merriment that Polly could not altogether like, though neither could she keep away. The otherworldly gleam of them was most in evidence then, when their eyes sparked and snapped and they made sport of each other in a way that sent something fierce and crackling through the air, which even Polly was half convinced she need only turn a little sooner to truly see.

“I want to go hunting,” said Clarice, to nobody in particular, and at once two other girls took up her cause.

“Make us a target, Edie!” they begged, until Claudine cut them a look that slapped chastened guilt across all three faces, and sent something pricking lightly down the length of Polly’s spine.

When they looked to her to see what she had made of this, Polly made a point of affecting to study the needlepoint on the cushion at her elbow, and thought she made a good job of it. A bubble of self-satisfaction rounded out inside her when they moved on to other topics, and this, of course, was an unwholesome thing.

I suppose it was that same reckless bubble of self-satisfaction that still had hold of her, when a guard appeared at the door to escort Thomasina and Lenore back from court, and to announce that Polly was enjoined to take counsel with the court magician, if it suited her.

Thomasina was no longer yawning, but Lenore was. She was at once embraced on either side by sisters who fussed and fretted at her, bearing her up and away to rest much as they had done for Susette the day before. The guard did not seem at all concerned by this, and Polly’s reaction was in no small part inspired by his obvious lack of care.

Declining to point out that if it suited her seemed more a matter of form than function, Polly said very graciously that she did not mind at all, and went away with the guard through the swirling magic of the door into the cold, grey width of the palace corridor.

By the time she noticed that her escort was taking her in a direction quite different than the one she’d come yesterday, she was too irritated by Eruvian’s presumption and the guard’s unconcern for Lenore to be nervous. When the guard delivered her to a cramped little audience room some distance down the corridor and up two flights of stairs, Polly was in just the right temper to blaze coldly in upon him and forget that perhaps she’d have done well to be cautious.

“I was told I had three days,” she said, when the door banged to behind her. “It’s only been one!”

Eruvian frowned. “Do sit down.”

“I won’t,” said Polly, who had been about to. “I only want to remind you I was promised three days, and this is very reckless conduct on your part. It would hardly do for you to go and break the terms of your own spell now, would it?”

“No,” said Eruvian, in an odd tone, “you’re right about that.”

Polly’s eyes narrowed and she contemplated the man in the wake of this statement. He seemed not in the least defensive, or even impatient. He did not act as one who had summoned her to demand an account of her time, and it was the recognition of that which at last, quite belatedly, inspired Polly to be wary.

“Why have you brought me here, then?”

Eruvian sighed, and indicated the chair across from him. Polly put up an eyebrow at it, and then at her host. He sighed again, in the patronizing tone of deputy head masters the world over, and inclined his head.

“Very well. I will be brief. Have you followed them underground yet?”

Polly blinked. She knew she must look thoroughly out of countenance, and she hated herself for it, but the question had been so unexpected she couldn’t help it.

“Have—I—”

“Followed. Them. Under. Ground.” Eruvian placed each word quite separately beside its fellows, as if he feared Polly’s ability to parse them. “The little princesses, down to the great queen’s court. Have you gone with them yet?” He searched her face keenly and coldly, as one might scrutinize a specimen under a microscope. A wintry little smile warmed his chin. “Ah, yes. I see you have.”

How he could see it, Polly did not know or care to ask. She regarded him with a distrust almost equal to her dislike, and said, “If you think you know, then—”

“Why not inform the king?” He nodded. “It would not make sense to you, of course. But you see, if the king knew they maintained the connection he would seek to cut it off, and we simply can’t have that.”

“Can’t we?” Polly asked, not reassured in the least. “Whyever not?”

Eruvian clucked his tongue. “What do you know of hereditary magics, Miss—er—?”

“A bit,” said Polly, diplomatically non-committal. Eruvian frowned.

“That’s not—well. Yes. The princesses, you see, have a certain quantity of hereditary ability. Not very much, of course, and of little use to them in the ordinary way, but—”

“Oh!” said Polly, with sudden understanding. “I see. You use them for it, don’t you?”

Eruvian clearly would have preferred she not see at all, or at least that she not put it like that. He looked—not angry, Polly thought. Not really. Just the kind of annoyed a person can look when they are particularly embarrassed by something, and think that anger will be the more dignified response.

That he was incorrect in that hope did nothing to relax Polly’s guard. Instead she spoke in what she hoped would pass for a soothing tone, saying, “I did wonder, you know, how Susette spoke of the summoning spell. It isn’t your work at all, is it? It’s hers.”

Her soothing tone, she thought, probably wanted some work. Eruvian still looked fiercely grey-red all around the stiff lines of his neck, and she thought she’d better make an effort to further smooth him down.

“You know, I don’t think she even minds. She spoke of it easily enough, and not like it was something that bothered her. As for the others . . .” Polly considered. “Do you use them too? For different things?” Flickers of memory cropped up here and there, parts of a puzzle she hadn’t known she was bothering to solve. “Edie can do figures, can’t she? The palace staff and attendants are her work, I should say. My goodness you must get some mileage out of her. Rose Beth—”

“Have a care,” said Eruvian, and Polly looked up in almost genuine surprise.

“Goodness, you don’t mind me knowing, do you? Why should you?”

She strove with every mote of her being to conceal from him her understanding of the reason. That, she knew, it would never do to show him she understood.

It seemed to work, too, for he did relax the worst of his reddish folds, and seemed to settle deeper into his chair. He did not take his eyes off her, though, and Polly kept herself quite consciously still and at ease, so as not to awaken further suspicion when he went on.

“I would send you home, of course,” he said. “It’s why I brought you here. I can arrange to send you back—” Arrange to make Susette do it, you mean, Polly thought, though naturally did not say. “—and put you safe beyond the King’s reach.”

All so she would not tell him where the princesses went. Polly considered.

“I suppose you have worked out a way to do it.”

“Of course,” said Eruvian smoothly. “I did it for all the others.”

Oho, thought Polly, oh, no. You don’t catch me that easily.

“And here I’d no idea,” she marvelled. “I really thought they all had been beheaded. Your own camouflage, then, was it?”

“Entirely,” Eruvian agreed. “I am not without my own tricks and talents, you see.”

“Oh yes,” Polly agreed, almost breathless with sincerity. “Yes, I do see that.” She passed a hand gently over the fabric of her skirt, thoughts skittering madly this way and that. She took one deep, cautious breath and said, “I suppose it’s the best way forward, isn’t it? I see how impossible it is that the king should tolerate an opening into another world, and yet, I think you mean to tell me the princesses will be quite lost to their powers if that world is lost to them. Is it not so?”

“Alas,” said Eruvian, in a manner not unlike that he had adopted in court with the king, “it is exactly as my lady says. The rare gifts and talents of their little highnesses should be lost to this kingdom forever if the breach between the worlds were sealed, and this would be a great loss. Yet what price a father’s wish to guard his children? I fear he would act in haste, and cost us much.”

“A price much too high for you to pay,” Polly agreed meekly, and she had the presence of mind to be looking at her own boots when Eruvian looked up a little too sharply at this. “I think you’ve come up with a really clever solution, all considered. You’d send me home right away?”

“Well, not immediately,” Eruvian said guardedly, and Polly contrived to look attentive. “We must wait out the full time allotted. His Majesty would naturally want to be informed of your failure first.”

“Naturally,” agreed Polly.

“After that there’s a usual period of confinement to the dungeon, you know, and I think that would be the time to effect the switch. Princess Edwina really is a wonder with simulacra, and I am sure she would oblige us with a credible one of you.”

“How thrilling,” murmured Polly. “One does sometimes speak of being beside oneself, doesn’t one? And here I might actually find . . . well.” She smiled a little too brightly at the man in the chair. “I can see you’ve thought it all through.”

“Good,” said Eruvian, with transparent relief. “Then you will agree to leave it all to me?”

“I’m sure that’s the wisest course of action,” Polly said demurely, and thought it a real stroke of luck that Digory had not accompanied her on this particular adventure after all. There was simply no way he could have heard her say that and held back a laugh.

~*~

Again that night Polly permitted her hostesses to imagine she had taken their wine and fallen prey to its wiles, though this time her heart beat rather harder as she pretended, for reasons entirely unlike the last. She timed her departure from the room a little better, and she thought it helped that Edie did not come tonight to verify she slept although she still lost precious minutes worrying that someone else might take her place.

Tonight she walked with confidence through all the glittering groves of trees, not troubling herself to take anything she found there nor troubling Rose Beth with proof of her phantom presence. She rode across with Claudine, correctly guessing that any prince thought worthy of Claudine would sooner pitch himself into the inky waters of the lake than confess to difficulty with the oars, and they reached the palace just as they had the night before.

Polly let the rest advance before her, but this night stayed closer and gawked much less. The thing had the air of a re-run moving picture, where the second viewing cost you much of the startled wonder that had accompanied the first.

Did they always dance, Polly wondered, or were there other pastimes underground? What manner of life might the princesses hope to make down here? Then she considered the closely-guarded existence of their lives aboveground, and supposed they might see the differences between one world and the next as near enough so as to make no odds.

Edie seemed also to tire sooner, tonight. She sent her prince away to fetch a cup of this or that, declining early on to dance but retiring to a corner from which she might observe. Polly contrived to join her there, and though her entry to the alcove was a trial she quite relaxed inside it, finding the space opened up generously at the rear and gave her plenty of room to stretch and settle without fear she might tread on someone’s toes.

Edie grew rather careless with her cups, to the point that Polly soon suspected she saw them only as a contrivance by which she might rid herself of her ever-attendant prince. By the time six or seven had piled up all around, Polly saw little risk in helping herself to the first golden goblet he had fetched. It was empty, being the only one of which Edie had partaken fully, as worked all around its exquisite golden surface was a motif of revellers and grapevines that made one’s head spin rather terribly if it were looked at a little too long. It would serve, Polly thought, as additional compelling proof of where she had been and all she had seen, and it sat quite low and heavy in her pocket. She took uneasy comfort from its weight against her thigh as, unbeknownst to Edie, she stood still and upright at her back and they watched together all the dancers swirling by.

Uninterested though Edie was in joining the revels, neither that Polly could see did she advance the time of their departure. It was again quite as late as the first night when the eldest princess at last rose from her sheltered perch and went out to seek her sisters, gathering each and every one with prince in tow to form the same procession as the night before.

This time Polly’s legs stood her in good stead and perfect working order, so she made a point of scooting quickly ‘round the outer edges of the banquet hall and drawing very near the dais and all attendant splendour of the court. She had a perfect view of Edie approaching at the head of the procession, looking every bit as grand and regal as she had done the night before, to bow her head before the great Queen and have her forehead kissed.

“There, now,” said the queen, in tones so low and rustling they seemed almost to Polly to come from the curtains around them as they did the queen herself. “Another revel ended. And did my girls enjoy their night?”

“It was a fine diversion, Grandmamma,” said Edie, which polite rejoinder sparked sharp interest in the lady’s eyes.

“Oho. A fine diversion, was it? With no vow of your enjoyment to be heard. What diversion, pray tell, would Edwina have enjoyed above this?”

Polly did not exactly expect Edie to deny the truth of that assumption, but she was surprised when the princess said, without hesitation, “We have a guest at the palace over land, whom Father has charged to uncover our secret. I would prefer to ensure she is where I trust she will do least harm.”

“Much joy may that man’s meddling bring him,” drawled the queen. And then, in a tone Polly could not hope to like, “She?”

Edie looked up at the queen without speech or expression, as though she knew no answer were expected of her. At length the queen gave a sharpish sigh, and shook her head.

“It won’t do, my girl. They don’t keep underground.”

“I did not ask to keep her, Grandmamma.”

“Like her too well even for that, do you? I see I must keep a closer watch on that mountain path in future.” Then, more as if to herself than to anyone else, “And I made sure he’d given all that up.”

“Only for a little while,” said Edie. “When the last one didn’t come.”

What there could have been in her saying so to make the queen look at her like that—so swift and searching—Polly could not imagine. But at length the great lady said, with the air of one rattling off a long-practised benediction, “Away with you, then. Back to where you were born, until such a time as you may begin at last to live.”

Edie dropped at once to a curtsy, then rose to press a kiss to each of the great Queen’s cheeks before she turned, took the arm of her hovering prince, and walked with stately grace away from the throne.

~*~

Polly made better time on her return trip too. Having wasted much less of her evening in aimless wandering she felt quite fit for a mad dash through magic woods, and even spared breath to laugh, with giddy disbelief, at the pure impossibility of it all.

She was underground! In another world! With gold and diamond trees dancing all around her, and silver branches hung with rubies, and what, even, could one hope to say about any of that? What sense could one hope to make? It should rightly make anyone’s head whirl, and yet for Polly, now clambering up the steps, resolving never ever to ask what lay so steep below on either side, it seemed somehow inevitable that she should have come here.

Impossible to imagine a world wherein Polly Plummer had boarded a train to Scotland, there spent a quiet week, and gone sedately home again with nothing more interesting than a sleet-storm to show for her time away. Inconceivable that Digory Kirke should have sent her anywhere something did not take place that could not have happened. Digory would, thought Polly, have picked the only guest house in Scotland that sat at the foot of a hill which ate adventurers for midday meals and spat them out on an otherworldly slope, there to be doomed to failure in their quest to uncover the secret of the twelve underland-dancing, overland-dwelling princesses. He was probably incapable of choosing any other kind.

It was intoxicatingly simple to slip in ahead of Edie tonight, and fly through the corridor to the place of her imagined repose. Polly even had time enough to slip the goblet free of her pocket, and the branches from the cushion under which she had concealed them after putting on her cloak, and fold the whole thing up quite neatly in a tidy little packet she then bundled back beneath that cushion before lying down upon the divan and throwing herself into a perfect impersonation of a perfectly insensible person.

She imagined she might even have convinced herself, so assured was her performance. Whoever the whispering, rustling girls were that came in to gaze upon her she neither knew nor cared, being blissfully confident of her ability to deceive the whole dozen a dozen times over, should they care to take her measure. Why, Polly thought, I really do believe I was meant to come here! How I’m supposed to sort it all out yet I can’t quite see, but I think it’s clear enough I am meant, and surely that’s not nothing.

I think you may imagine how pleased and comfortable she felt with this assurance drawn up snug and close around her, as warming as any blanket could have been and twice as sure. Indeed it comforted her all through the night and right into early morning, and gave her a settled satisfaction that lasted until the very moment of her awakening.

Polly opened her eyes to morning’s light, the warmth of a new-laid fire, and the sight of Princess Edwina, already dressed for the day, sitting straight and tall on the opposite sofa with a golden goblet and three priceless broken branches arrayed in her lap.

“Good morning,” said Edie. “I hope you slept well.” Her hand passed lightly over the silver branch with rubies at one end. A kind of fearful smile touched one corner of that mouth, and Polly, though her own was parched with fear and foreboding, found she could not look upon that mouth without wanting to kiss it.

Edie, evidently heedless of the effect that her mouth had on Polly, gently cleared her throat.

“We need to talk.”

~*~

Chapter Text

When Edie said we, Polly learned, she really meant it. All twelve princesses, daytime bright, deathly grim, arrayed themselves around her at breakfast and robbed Polly of any appetite she might otherwise have felt. Leaving her plate untouched, she looked from one face to the other, determined to hear whatever they were willing to tell her but also more than a little bit afraid.

Not, she thought, that they would hurt her really. Not that they would have to. Edie had the goblet and the branches, after all, and what more did any of them need to do but keep them from her until the end of day tomorrow when her time would be up and her head deemed forfeit for her failure? Eruvian certainly wouldn’t save her; he would keep their secret, keep his power, and carry on. She might, of course, explain herself but no more than that could she hope to do, since the working of the mantel’s magic was still quite beyond her.

She would have only her word to go on, and they could safely leave her to it.

So the chance that sat before her now, Edie’s promise of talk and the presence of all twelve, must surely mean something more than that was planned, or at least that it was possible.

At least, that’s what Polly hoped it meant.

“You followed us,” said Edie. It wasn’t a question, but Polly nodded anyway. “When?”

“Last night.” Polly cleared her throat. “And the one before.”

“I knew it!” Rose Beth looked fiercely from one sister to the next. “Didn’t I say?”

“You did,” Edie agreed. “But say less for the moment please, darling. Our guest is trying to explain.”

Polly didn’t see that she had much to explain, but she supposed it might look like that from their end.

“You did know that’s why I came here,” she reminded them, a trifle defensively. “I never made any secret of it. Your own father—”

“Him!” cried Claudine. “He has set plenty of men to spy on us before now, and not once has any of them met with success. You can’t imagine we set any store by him.”

That, Polly thought, made sense enough. Men had come before her, she’d been told that already. Seven, hadn’t they said, or eight? Although, that didn’t really tell her—

“How long?” she said suddenly, and looked from Claudine to Edie. “In your world, I mean. How long has it been since he started making Susette bring men to discover where you go?”

The men from the guest house had been going missing for years, but had it been the same on this end? For Polly had considerable experience with time not linking up just right between worlds.

“It’s been a year,” Edie said. “We had one every month at first, but the last one they sent for didn’t show up. Father called them all here by casting a prepared summons into your world, seeking an adventurer. Eruvian told him the soldier must come from another world if he was to break the curse, because our mother came from another world to set it. He chose yours because he says it’s the easiest world to reach by magic.”

“Is it?” Polly murmured, and wondered, absently, why that might be so. She also tried very hard not to do the sums out backward, as it were, and work out how much time she’d lost since she arrived here. There’d be time enough, she hoped, to sort that out later. “Why did he so particularly want a soldier?”

“Father has it in his head that it must be a warrior, or at least a man of many adventures and battles, who could defeat a fairy queen. He doesn’t need to know where we go, or how we get there, to be certain she is at the back of it. So that’s the summons Eruvian had Susette cast. Only, the last one he summoned didn’t arrive.”

“It was like he got stuck halfway,” Susette put in. “It all started off all right, but then he never turned up. I had an awful pain in my tummy for days after.”

Polly thought of Colonel Arthur, his rug pulled over his legs by the fire and the house cat on his knee, and couldn’t suppress her smile.

“I think if your father saw the last one you called, he’d understand why.”

“Well, it had been three months since he tried, so Father tired of waiting and wanted to try again. Only this time he was in such a temper that they rushed it rather.”

“It went perfectly,” Susette said, sounding more than a little smug. “Eruvian always makes such a fuss over the wording, but Father was too angry to care. This time he finally muffed it. He just summoned ‘one who has adventured’ and that was quite enough room for you to fit through.”

Polly looked askance at Susette, but before she could find out if Susette had actually been trying to make an opening for something different to happen, Edie went on.

“When you turned up I don’t think Father knew what to do. He wouldn’t imagine you have any chance of solving it, but he can’t conjure another while you’re still here. Susette’s made sure of that, and of course Eruvian can only relay what she tells him as though it’s his own design. So I should think Father hopes you will fail right away, that he may behead you and summon another.”

Polly tried not to feel wounded by this ready dismissal of her ability, but some of her hurt must have shown on her face, because Edie hastened to apologise.

“I didn’t think you need fail, though. In fact when you came to us I knew it must be you who broke the curse right away, because everybody else was horribly confused at finding themselves here, but you behaved as if you’d almost expected to find a whole other kingdom done up inside your own.”

“Like a parcel,” Polly murmured, remembering how she had felt as the layers of fog rolled back. “A box within a box.”

“I suppose,” said Edie. “At least, I believe you must be right. See how simple it was for you to put it like that? Because it’s just the kind of thing you must be accustomed to! I think that must be significant. But Father can’t see you’re exactly what he’s asked for. He would only think you were another curse brought on him.”

Polly frowned, not because she misliked being seen by the King as a personal curse, but rather because this point in general gave her pause.

“Your father did say you had been cursed, but he didn’t mention he was. Why should he think he was cursed as well?”

“Self importance,” Claudine muttered, and earned an exasperated shush from Edie.

“He thinks he must be cursed by Grandmamma for stealing Mother from her court.”

“Did he really?” Polly asked, greatly surprised. “However did he manage that?”

“He was admitted from the overland by one who bore Grandmamma a grudge. The traitor showed him how he might fashion Mother’s bridal ring from metals from the underworld, and use it as a kind of talisman to bring her up to this one.

“So long as Mother wore the ring she was bound to him up here, but Father feared that Grandmamma might still contrive to fetch her back. He sought counsel from Eruvian, who told him twelve children by a mortal man will bind any fairy to the mortal world.”

“Not the man,” Lenore put in, with emphasis. “The world. The twelfth child a fairy bears a mortal man will make her fully human.”

“Father thought that meant she’d be his forever,” Claudine said dryly. “He didn’t realise mortal cuts both ways. The night Rose Beth was born, Mamma bade all her guards drink to her good health. She’d worked her herbcraft on their wine so that when they drank it down, they all fell fast asleep. Once they could not stop her, she went up into the highest turret, and jumped.”

The cool, matter-of-fact statement sent shivers down Polly’s spine. For far from the first time she was struck by the chilly otherworld-ness of the twelve girls, with their too-smooth skin, their too-golden hair and the bright jewel tones of their eyes. They were like something painted for a nursery wall, come to gruesome life in the twilight of a child’s most panicked pre-sleep imaginings.

Rose Beth, for all the part she’d played in the tale, seemed unperturbed. She perched on the edge of her seat, too tidily arranged for normal childhood, not a strand out of place. Her only expression was one of slight impatience.

“Are we going to dance?” she asked. “I want to dance.”

“Yes, Petal, we’re going soon enough.” Susette petted the little head. “We only must make the not-soldier understand why she mustn’t stop us.”

“We did not bother to make the others understand,” Rose Beth frowned. “We only made them sleep, and they were killed.”

“That’s because they were men, and could be enchanted by potions and wiles. Human ladies of this neighbouring world must be rather more canny, for this one has discovered us and so we must take time to explain.”

“How tiresome,” said Rose Beth, and lost all interest in the conversation.

Edie, meanwhile, leaned in across the table and looked searchingly at Polly’s face. Polly, feeling very much like Edie had something else she wished to say, but could not before her sisters, frowned.

“Is this the curse he thinks is yours, now? Is that why he locks you in?” She looked uncertainly from one princess to the next. “He thinks you’ll jump?”

“He might,” said Claudine. “He knows us little enough to believe it. But I shouldn’t think he’d be half as worried if that were all he thought we’d do.” She made a great show of stretching languidly, and leaning back in her chair. “Really I think he believes Grandmamma will find a way to enter the overland and make an end of him. That’s the sort of thing that would really keep him up at night.”

“Whatever it is,” Edie added, “he will not give up trying to stop us. If you do not succeed he will only call another, and another, and on until it ends.” She shook her head in something as much like distress as Polly had ever seen her. “It will never end.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Polly, before she could think better of it. “Why shouldn’t it end? I could tell him, couldn’t I? Show him what I’ve seen? Surely then he would at least stop summoning soldiers!”

“He would learn how we go down there,” said Edie softly. Her eyes fixed bright and begging on Polly’s puzzled face. “He would find the mantelpiece, and destroy it. And we would all be bound here overland, as surely as was Mother.”

“Oh,” said Polly, “I see.” And she meant it, though probably not the way it sounded. She hastened to clarify, “Then you want to go back down there. To dance there, underground? The way you’ve done all these nights, you weren’t unwilling in the least; you chose to go.”

“More or less,” said Claudine, with a sidelong glance at Edie. “We might not have minded a respite now and then, for we really do get tired. But the way the power works we must go down each night or lose the ability to go at all. Edie and I might last a little longer, since Mother was hardly human yet when we came along, but for the likes of Clarice, Emmeline or Rose Beth . . .” she trailed off, then shrugged. “They’re too human to go more than a day without needing to go back down again.”

The notion of describing Rose Beth as too human was so incongruous to Polly’s understanding of the girl, it took her quite aback. But then, she supposed the way the youngest princess had twitched and twisted at every sound she’d heard was rather more human than not; compared to how placid and unruffled Edie had been, Rose Beth’s reaction had been far more normal.

This made Polly look at her almost kindly as she said, “Very well. If we can’t sort it out up here, I suppose the only help for it is to sort it out down there.”

And she took no small amount of satisfaction in seeing she’d shocked them at last.

~*~

That night, after much debate between the eldest three, Polly was enjoined once more to put on her cloak. The effect elicited cries of surprise and admiration from all twelve girls, the youngest of whom all crowded round to touch and poke at her and assure themselves she was, after all, still there.

“You say you found it by the path?” Edie looked searchingly very close to the actual spot where Polly’s face would be, and Polly was glad of the concealment for her blush as she assented.

“The voice told me to take it, and it was just as she had said.”

“How peculiar,” marvelled Edie. She weighed a handful of the fabric. “I cannot help but think it shows you’re meant to be here.”

“Don’t say that,” Polly begged her, “please, really. I was thinking it myself just before you found the branches, and so . . . I shouldn’t like it to become a sort of thing one says just before we’re proven wrong, you see?”

“A cautious superstition,” smiled Edie, “but perhaps a canny one as well. All right then, we will not speak of your grand purpose more tonight. Only do, please,” with a little laugh, “let me take your arm as we descend, or I will never be easy in my mind that you’ve not fallen over the side!”

This concession Polly gladly made. They linked arms not only down the stairs, but all the way through the groves of trees and down the garden path, coming out together by the lake where Claudine’s whistle once again summoned the little fleet of rowboats across the water from the far shore.

Tonight Polly rode with Edie, who made room for her on the bench at her side. In answer to her prince’s solicitous query after her comfort, Edie merely smiled and assured him she had never felt better.

He looked greatly relieved to hear this, and so forgot himself as to say, “Oh, good. I was worried you know, because you don’t look—” He caught himself rather too late for tact, and coughed.

Edie, who wore the same unadorned taupe silk she had dressed in that morning, merely smiled without comment. All the princesses, handed out on the farthest shore, stood arrayed as Edie: in their ordinary day clothes and footwear, with no adornment of any kind save that which they had selected before the glass this morning. They all, in concert, politely declined the offer of the princes’ escort and moved as one body, with a thirteenth hidden in their midst, up the low steps and into the crystal palace.

The Queen was not yet on her dais when they arrived, but emerged just as they entered the banquet hall. If she was surprised to see them approach her so early she made no sign; only watched thoughtfully as they approached, and, when Edie stepped out to the head of their number, put out her hand to beckon her close.

“What new amusement have my daughter’s daughters devised for me this evening?” She looked from one face to the next. “I see there is some plot afoot, and I should like to know its name.”

“That,” said Edie, “we do not know, for she never gave it.”

“She,” echoed the queen, alert and meaning in her tones. “She, again? And you do not know her name? My daughter’s daughter, I like this not.”

“I hope,” said Edie softly, “that we may prove your fears unfounded. But I do not think that we can do it here.” And she bent to place in her grandmother’s hand the silver branch with ruby blooms, which brought the first real deep emotion Polly had yet seen to the ageless woman’s face.

“By the powers,” she said, in a voice that could only be called terrifying, “what does it mean?”

Edie only stood in patient silence, with a face that promised answers, until the Queen at last grew restive and got to her feet.

“Very well, then,” she said. “This way.” And she bade them all to follow, which they did, and Polly too.

~*~

The room behind the curtain was quite unlike the banquet hall. It shared high, arching ceilings and the same style of window, but here the furnishings were simple and few in number, though each looked rich with promise of supernatural comfort whichever one you might choose.

“Tell me,” she said sharply, turning to face them all. “Who broke the branch? How? It should not be possible for any one of you, bound as you are, and yet—”

“She did not know it meant something,” said Edie. “I can tell you that myself. When I found them—”

“Them?” the queen repeated. “Midnight Diviner, there are more? How? Who? Edwina, I may be immortal but try my patience thus much longer and—”

“She can’t give you my name,” said Polly, and set aside her cloak. “She already told you, she doesn’t know it.”

For a moment, Polly feared very much she had misjudged her position, and might be struck down on the spot. At last, though, the wrath of the immortal queen passed from her perfect face and settled rather farther down, in the set of throat and shoulder.

“Speak, then,” she said hoarsely. “Tell me all they would have me know. For they would not have dared to bring you here if they did not imagine it were to our good; this much, at least, I know.”

“I’ve come to break the curse,” said Polly. “I think.”

“You think . . !” the great queen shook her head, almost incredulous. “And surely you do know I cannot kill you here, or else you would not dare to stand before me.”

Polly hadn’t known, but she had hoped, and found it a great relief to have confirmed.

“I did wonder,” she admitted. “I’m already under contract, you see, even if I wish I weren’t. I thought there might be something in it that would prevent you . . . er . . . indulging yourself that way.”

“Your terms of work with the overland king are the only contract by which you are bound,” said the queen, “but there is another magic on you whose name I do not know. I think I could not break it even if you were not sworn unto the king.”

“I never swore him anything!” said Polly, indignation goading her briefly beyond the bounds of common sense. “Oh, if he dared to lay something on me that says I did—”

“He laid nothing on you but the bonds of Susette’s summoning spell,” said the Queen, looking at her with an interest that bordered almost on the academic; at least, Polly thought it was very like how Digory was inclined to look at one of his especially interesting artifacts. “The other is older, and as much a part of you in its own way as my daughter’s daughters are of me. It will be with you, I think, for the rest of your life.”

Well, Polly thought, that’s something new, and I suppose it would be worth worrying about in any other circumstance. But I hardly think I’ve time to wonder now.

Aloud she said, “I broke the branches off because I was told to take proofs of all I’d seen.”

“Proofs,” the Queen frowned. “For the overland King?”

“Yes. I meant to show him signs of where I’d been, so that the curse on his daughters could be broken. But now, of course, I think I’ve got that part backward, haven’t I?” she watched the great queen’s face with particular care as she added, “The curse isn’t on them, is it? Nor even on him.”

“You are correct,” said the Queen, and inclined her head. “It is on me.”

~*~

The furniture proved every bit as comfortable as it looked. Polly, terrified though she was, could not help but want to sprawl out on the divan the moment she sat down on it, and only forebore to indulge because Edie sat beside her, and when Polly sprawled out on Edie’s lap she definitely did not intend for all her family to be looking on.

“My sister,” said the queen, “lost a war to me. It was many of your lifetimes ago, but time is not to us as it is to you, and her hatred of me burned for more than a century before she hit upon her method of revenge.

“My daughter’s husband, the overland king, was admitted to my realm by way of a little-used portal which brought him to my sister’s province in the night garden. There she gave him metals of her own design, and told him how to fashion such a ring as would bind my daughter to his kingdom for as long as she wore it.

“Her revenge on me is that curse. The overland king bound my daughter with my sister’s gold and so has the power to hold her daughters in his kingdom, which they cannot safely leave without his edict. Nor can they long remain away from here, if ever they should wish to return. So I host my party and they visit when they can.”

“You host a party every night,” said Polly, a trifle overwhelmed by the scale of it all. The Queen looked startled, and shook her head.

“Just the one,” she corrected. “This party, now.”

The import of the statement took a moment to land. When it did, Polly felt rather like she might be sick. Neverending things and notions always had that effect on her.

“It’s the same party,” she said weakly. “The one they’ve been coming to for—” she looked askance at Edie. “A year?”

“And a half,” said Edie, and seemed so unsurprised by this revelation that Polly supposed she must already know.

“Time runs slowly here,” said the Queen. “It means very little when we have it all.”

“Yes,” said Polly, still feeling somewhat faint and sickly. “I see.” She fought to marshal her senses. “I suppose—well. How does one secure the edict, then? The king’s permission for the princesses to stay? Could he be told where they come, and . . . tricked, I suppose, into granting them leave?”

“He could,” agreed the Queen. “But you’d be bound here with them if he did.”

“Would I?” Polly was more confused than alarmed. “Why?” And then, a moment later, she answered her own question. “Oh yes, I see—the terms of the, ah, contract.”

“You are owed one of my daughter’s daughters if you succeed,” the Queen nodded. “You would need to follow her here. But it would be bad for you. Mortal women do no better underground than faerie women do above it. Only half-faeries may have the luxury of choice. Although you, perhaps,” the Queen added, looking at Edie, “would be pleased if we were to devise a work-around.”

Edie looked pink and disconcerted, but made no comment. It was Claudine who shook her head.

“Father would never stand for it. She might remain in that world, but he’d never allow Edie her choice. No more than you could, if she came down here. Edie is doomed to misery in either world; I think she knows it by now.”

It was an appalling thing to say, and Polly at least was appalled by it, but she could see in Edie’s expression that she had born this knowledge for quite some time now and seemed accustomed to its carriage. Somehow, though, Polly did not like the knowing of it.

“Very well,” she said, as much to distract herself from Edie’s resignation as anything else, “so we cannot permit the terms of the contract to stand. Could he void them, do you think? If I asked it? I could tell him the secret to prove I’ve solved it, and then decline the princess of my choice. If he permits that, then do you think we might manage it?”

“Perhaps,” said Queen, and looked thoughtful. “I would not have said so before, but this . . .” Her hand played in wonder over the splay of the branch in her lap. “This changes a great deal. It cannot be denied, though I also cannot yet explain it.”

A small frown sat deep between her eyes, then cleared as she looked up.

“Such power and protection as you require to effect the effort, I shall grant you. If it is accomplished, then . . .”

She did not speak the rest aloud. She did not have to. In the silence of the antechamber, the air around them sang with hope.

~*~

Chapter Text

When at last they climbed the stairs it was closer to dawn than it had been either of the two nights previous. A stumbling kind of exit was made by twelve weary, overwrought princesses and Polly Plummer, her cloak of invisibility drawn close, because everyone felt it was probably simplest to avoid explaining her to a prince.

“They’re uncomplicated people,” said Edie, not unkindly. “I really think it would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

So Polly stayed a secret from all the underworld save its lawful queen and her descendants, and ascended still invisible to the castle of the overland king where she armed herself with branches and goblet and longed, more than anything else, for a really hot bath in which to scrub off the layers of the last three impossible days before she braved the fourth and, she hoped, final of its kind, though not final overall.

It seemed an especially crucial distinction to make.

“You’ve got the wording written down?” Edie asked again, and Polly, rather than snap that yes she really did, just as she’d had it the last six times Edie asked, only put out both her hands and took Edie’s slim, cold hands between them.

“I know them by heart.”

Edie went quite calm and still. Polly looked searchingly into her eyes, then repeated, “By heart. All right?”

Edie blinked. Trembled. Then nodded at last.

“All right,” she whispered, and for just a moment Polly could believe that it was.

The summons came earlier than it ever had before, according to the shocked indignation of all the girls who’d been there for the others.

“He won’t want to waste any more time on me,” Polly supposed. “Well, that’s fair. I shouldn’t want to waste any more on him, either.”

This, to her considerable surprise, startled a laugh from Claudine. Then to her even greater shock, she found herself enveloped by that same girl in the kind of hug she supposed might be customary for a half-faerie, wholly-warlike kind of princess you’d just made laugh by insulting her father. She didn’t suppose she’d ever have another such to compare it to, but she was also fairly certain she’d never forget this one. It flowed swift and warm all through her, root to crown.

“There, now,” said Claudine, dropping back abruptly. “You were a surprise start to finish. But that’s all right.”

On which ringing endorsement Polly took her leave, and permitted that the guard who waited outside the door should gather round and escort her from the chambers of the king’s twelve daughters and into the presence of the king.

~*~

Polly, on being ushered into the royal presence with all the courtiers once more gathered round, found the king even less estimable than he had appeared when first she saw him.

You have an entire kingdom laid out under this one, she longed to inform him. Doesn’t that make you wonder what you might be laid out underneath in turn? But she did not bother to ask, because she knew by now he wasn’t the sort of man who wondered about anything that might be larger than himself.

“Here,” she said without preamble, and drew from her pocket a gold goblet and three branches from trees too impossible to exist. “I have followed your daughters to an underworld kingdom where each night they dance with twelve princes and dine in the court of the great queen.”

Eruvian made a motion here, a kind of agitated lunging-forward gesture, but Polly did not flinch. Instead she held fast to the goblet and the memory of Claudine’s arms came back around her once more, all martial strength and sealing-off, a hedge of protection such as only an otherworldly gift could carry. The goblet seemed to warm in Polly’s hand a moment, then cool as she went on.

“The great queen owns to no name in this world, so I cannot give it to you, but I daresay if you change the locks you won’t need to know it anyway.”

The king, whose eyes had widened at the appearance of the goblet and bulged at the sight of the branches, seemed more likely to verge on apoplexy at the mention of the queen than to undertake any task so menial as to seal up a portal. But Polly could be patient, for a human, and waited out his thought processes until at last he turned to Eruvian and warbled,

“The means to seal such a portal . . . are they known to you?”

Eruvian looked perhaps a little less than confident, and a little more like he wanted to lay a sealing power on Polly instead, so Polly deemed it wise to chime in.

“They pass through the fireplace in their bedchamber, your Majesty. I don’t suppose the mechanism that operates it could survive a little interference, if the, ah, learned court magician were to imbue the act with the power of his craft.”

She could tell by the way the king looked at her and then back to Eruvian that he’d have himself convinced this had been his own idea before the day was out, but she didn’t let that worry her. She did not intend to linger that long anyway.

“Very well,” said the King, “it is so ordered.” He seemed about to turn away, and then, with a sudden lurch and uneasy look, recalled everything about Polly that this success entailed. He looked to one side, then the other, and Polly could just about see him wondering how easily he might make an end of her, and so she hastened to divert his thoughts.

“A moment of your time, your majesty. Before you set your plan in motion.” Since he was bound to get there anyway. “I quite understand I was not the soldier you hoped to summon, and so I thought, to spare the king the burden of his own noble character, I might beg leave to waive my claim on any boon you chose to grant. With your majesty’s leave I seek only to be quit of this, ah, very interesting kingdom, and return hence to my own.”

She could not have chosen a better boon to beg if she had actually tried, she could tell. The look on the king’s face was one of naked relief as he barked, “Granted!” and fairly shot up from his throne in his eagerness to get on with it. “Eruvian! The doorway.”

And Polly watched with ill-disguised contempt, and open amusement, as the court magician stumbled off to feign the preparations of his art.

~*~

It was the impropriety of a large audience ushered into their chambers which spared the princesses the indignity of greater witness to their lament. A chorus of cries and wails went up from the girls huddled at the end of the chamber, and the King’s ill-tempered assurances that he meant it all for their good did nothing to soothe them.

Rose Beth shrieked “Grandmamma! Grandmamma!” until her whole face was purple, and even Susette could not calm her. Claudine glowered fierce and fearsome from the front row, while Edie stood slim and straight some little ways off to the left, set apart from the group in a way that Polly, who had gone along to confirm the choice of fireplace from the three on offer in the bedchamber, could not quite understand.

“Enough!” cried the King at last, when Mariette began to moan in mounting hysteria and Eruvian’s third attempt to charm the workmen’s hammers, however half-sincerely, ended once more in sad disaster. “Get them out of here. Into the next room, all of you, and gabble there. I will not have you interfering with this work.”

So all the princesses were sent into the dressing chamber beyond, and continued their lament beyond the doors as Eruvian, struggling with the illusion of honest labour, contrived at last to work a spell that would empower the hammers to smash the mechanism above the fireplace into hopeless disarray.

“Your lines, your Majesty,” he panted, as the hammers swung, so the King fumbled in this pocket and that for the scrap of paper, and squinted at the script thereon.

“Ah. Yes. I hereby banish below this world all who there now dwell, that nevermore shall they walk this earth, and bind them there as well.” He paused, impressed in spite of himself. “Why, you even made it rhyme!”

“Did I?” Eruvian frowned. “That is, yes, of course I did. I know your feelings in these matters, Sire. And there!” with a grimace, as the hammers completed their task. “Just in time. Well, this is a great day for your Kingdom, and—” He winced as a princess beyond the door struck a particularly unearthly note. “Perhaps it would be a kindness to, ah, leave their highnesses to console one another in their time of, um, loss.”

The King agreed with alacrity and did not wait long to flee the room, leaving only workmen to collect their tools who, at their departure, left only Polly.

Polly looked around the room, and sighed.

Silly, really. To be so upset. It had all gone just as she had hoped, and yet somehow . . . She crossed to the fireplace to stare at the shattered stone. She hated herself for hating the sight.

“Did it work?”

For a moment, it did not seem the words could be real. Then, understanding she had heard them, Polly spun around to stare, shocked and uncomprehending, as the door to the dressing room swung in and Edie stepped through. Behind her the dying enchantment of an otherworldly simulacurum echoed in the phantom chatter of eleven princesses who had gone through the fireplace half an hour ago, and would never be seen aboveground again. The twelfth princess, who would never again be seen belowground, crossed to the hearth to inspect it.

“You—” Polly shook her head, baffled. Bewildered. Not dismayed, she was ashamed to note. No, not a little bit dismayed. But definitely confused. “You aren’t supposed to still be up here. You can’t—Edie, what happened?” A note of real horror found her then. “Now you can never go back to your family.”

“Not that way,” Edie agreed. She looked a little wistful, perhaps, but Polly did not think she looked troubled. Edie trailed a hand over the fractured stone mantel. “They’ve made a thorough job of it.”

Still Polly stared, trying to convince herself that the princess was not a creation of her own imagining.

“Why are you here?”

Edie looked into the fireplace as if she might find the explanation there. At last, with too deliberately light an air, she said, “Perhaps I have seen that my future does not lie beneath the ground.”

“Well,” said Polly, “maybe not. But I can’t imagine your father will make life terribly pleasant for you once he finds all your sisters have escaped and you’re the only one left in the palace.”

Edie turned the full force of her fathomless blue gaze on the not-a-soldier who had come down over the mountain to free twelve princesses from a family curse. “Perhaps I have also seen that my future does not lie in my father’s court.”

Polly blinked, uncomprehending, and then the penny dropped.

“Oh,” she said. Then again, with a broad smile and worlds of feeling in the word, “oh.”

And Edie smiled, too.

~*~

Nobody stopped them on their way out of the palace. This was because Polly had a cloak of invisibility, and it just so happened that when two girls pressed just as close together as they possibly could manage, that cloak fit around them both.

Quiet as church mice, cheek-to-cheek, arms snugged fiercely around each other’s waists, Polly and Edie huddled beneath the cloak and stepped carefully, cautiously, alone the corridor. Nobody saw them. Nobody stopped them. Under the cover of the cloak they were able to smuggle themselves out of the palace, through the town and back up the hillside without occasioning comment.

They waited until they were past the gnarled tree to remove the hood of the cloak, but even then they did not think it safe enough to break apart. No sooner had they agreed on this than the same thick, grey mist that had delivered Polly descended on them again.

“I see you’ve done it,” said the speaker in the mist.

“Er.” Polly pressed close to the slim, supple warmth of her stolen princess. “Yes. I suppose I have.”

“Running away are we, Edwina?” the voice added. Edie stiffened, which made Polly suddenly furious with the speaker.

“And why shouldn’t she?” she fired back. “She’s a right to leave if she’s miserable there, doesn’t she?”

“She hasn’t any rights to speak of,” the voice countered calmly. “Not in her father’s kingdom, anyway. She’d have had some in her mother’s kingdom, of course, but that was never going to be the place for her. No more than it was for me.”

Edie shifted uncertainly beside Polly.

“I’m sorry, have we met?”

“Not as such,” was the answer. “But I was very fond of your mother, so I suppose I felt I must atone. It wasn’t meant to happen as it did, with her so miserable. I was only angry. I made a foolish mistake and she paid for it. I wanted to set that right.”

Understanding eased over Polly even as the mist that settled around them began to lift.

“You’re the Great Queen’s sister. The one she crossed to gain her throne.”

“The very same.”

“Well then,” said Polly, “will you let us pass?”

“Have I stopped you?” snapped the fairy, peevish. Then, still ruffled, “oh go on with you both. And take that cloak with you. You’ll be glad of it where you’re going; they aren’t much used to fairy blood these days, least not that which runs as pure as Edwina’s. She’ll want to keep that under wraps.”

Then the fog lifted, and with it vanished the whole grey, cold world of Edie’s childhood.

Polly and Edie stood together on a snowy hill under a sunny sky, and the world around shone clean and bright.

~*~

It soon became clear what the fairy had meant when she said they’d want to keep the cloak. The trouble was Edie’s whole self was not in the least suited to our world. What had been grand and otherworldly in the kingdom over the hill was, in this one, positively dazzling.

“Anybody will take one look at you and know you aren’t from here,” Polly decided, as soon as they both stepped out from under the cloak and Edie put the sun to shame with her cold, glimmering brilliance. “I’ve been through something like this before, though that was ages ago. And of course, we hadn’t any cloak at the time. Here. Give it a try.”

So Edie pulled the cloak over her shoulders, and at once the worst of the glamour was dimmed and dampened, allowing her to pass for nothing more remarkable than an uncommonly good-looking young woman, a shade on the tall side, with a curiously ancient expression for one so young.

And that was how Polly Plummer came down the mountain about an hour after she climbed it, towing the prettiest girl anybody in that village could remember seeing in all their lives. Mrs Ogilvie’s Bess was all agog with the news that afternoon, telling anyone and everyone who’d listen that their own Miss Plummer from London, a particular friend of Mrs Ogilvie’s friends the Ketterlys, had found a girl on the mountaintop. Fortunately Bess was not known to be the most reliable bearer of tales, so this one was accepted with the sort of polite scepticism that most of Bess’s tales warranted, allowing Polly and Edie to escape the worst of what might otherwise have been some very uncomfortable speculation.

As for their hostess, Mrs Ogilvie might not have minded the sudden addition to Polly’s party quite so much if the new girl hadn’t seemed more than a trifle eccentric.

“Wears that cloak inside,” Mrs Ogilvie complained to her husband after dinner that night. “As though I didn’t set by enough coke to keep us snug and cosy well into June! Not that she complains of cold, mind you. But it’s no better than if she did, for she won’t take it off for anything.”

“Well, they’re leaving tomorrow, aren’t they?” said Mr Ogilvie, in search of peace and quiet temporarily denied. “You won’t have to worry about it then.”

“Worry!” cried Mrs Ogilvie. “As though I were the sort to worry or complain. No, it’s only the ill manners of it that upsets me. Not, again, that she is rude or anything of that sort. Very well-spoken, in fact. Got a nice manner to her. But I do call it strange, all the same. She won’t take that cloak off for even a moment.”

In this assertion, however, Mrs Ogilvie was incorrect. It’s true that Edie had kept the cloak very snug around her ever since she came down from the mountain, even when she was indoors. It’s also true that she and Polly had spent the past half hour in serious conversation about how to preserve the cloak’s property of concealment in a manner that might make Edie rather less conspicuous. They had thought of folding it up a bit and fashioning it into a shawl or capelet, or even a kerchief crossed around the neck, if the fineness of the material would stand it. Both agreed that their travels of the next day would, when possible, be spent in this type of experimentation.

But as to Edie never removing the cloak, Mrs Ogilvie could not have known how mistaken she was. Even as that lady voiced her complaint, in the little room at the top of the stairs Edie had slipped out of her cloak and every garment she wore beneath it.

She shone like the stars in the dark of the room, but only Polly was there to see.

~*~

Chapter Text

The telegram left Edinburgh at the same time as Polly and Edie, though it arrived rather in advance of them both. Digory received it in his office that morning, and spent longer than he would have cared to admit to Polly simply staring, uncomprehending, at the message.