‘That’s not fair,’ Buttercup protested. ‘Taking the males away from the little pink one. She won the fight.’
‘Well – but,’ Sneeth stuttered, turning quite red. ‘That’s not a nice thing to say! If they had left the males there, she would have … well, it’s not something we could watch. Not good deportment, at all. Not civilized!’
She subsided, still thinking it had been quite unfair, but distracting herself with the thought of hot seed pie. She and Sneeth usually bought pies for themselves plus two to carry back, one for Gardener Ribble and one for the gardener’s boy. Ribble always had a boy, someone from the village or the surrounding area who was willing to work for three meals a day, a drawer to sleep in, and a seed pie now and again.
They wandered munchingly along the valley, licking syrup from their chins, climbing over a stile to ascend the hill toward Thrumm House, then stopping as they heard a sound in the underbrush nearby, a kind of stifled snigger.
Sneeth dithered, turning toward and then away from the noise.
‘Come on,’ instructed Buttercup. ‘I want to see what that is.’ She streaked away through the grasses, Sneeth tiptoeing guiltily behind, and threw herself at the top of an embankment to peer between two shrubs.
Below her in a tiny clearing was the latest gardener’s boy, and on the earth before him were two wild grislings engaged in battle. They were in no wise as lovely as the groomed ones Buttercup had seen so recently upon the stage but no less human-looking for that. Buttercup drew in her breath, letting it out in one long shriek of fury. The boy, the filthy boy, had cut the spurs from one of the grislings leaving her helpless before the paralyzing attack of the other. She had already been cut to ribbons while the boy sat there sniggering and playing with himself.
Buttercup was about to launch herself at him, with no clear idea of what she might accomplish – he outweighed her by half – when Sneeth came down the embankment, lashing away with his cane, catching the boy full across his face and sending him screaming away across the fields, blood streaming down his neck.
Buttercup cradled the maimed grisling, but it was far too late. As she held the little creature it sighed and expired in her arms.
She turned, hiding tears with difficulty. Only her long study of deportment let her continue the journey home without showing her feelings on her face. When they arrived there, she went up the stairs, intending to shut herself into her room, but was stopped halfway down the hall by the sound of conversation in the foyer below.
‘… whipped him and he ran off, but she had already seen it. Never should have been done where she could see it!’
Where she could see it? What had Sneeth meant by that? The rigged battle had been something no one should ever have to see. A fair fight in nature is one thing, she told herself. Nature is bloody and violent, as many of the books she had read had made quite clear. A battle during which one opponent is rendered helpless, however, was simply not to be thought of without disgust, even a battle between creatures as tiny as wild grislings. Where she could see it, indeed. Buttercup was angry all over again, and it took a long evening alone with the mice – feeding them the seed pie which had been destined for the gardener’s boy – before she could show herself with an unperturbed face.
That night she had particularly violent dreams in which a previously indulgent voice directed her with some hostility to quit fooling around and pay attention to what was going on. The dream, like most dreams, bothered her on first awaking and was forgotten by breakfast time. Inside Buttercup, Mouse was in a state.
Since it was a holiday, breakfast was served in the gloomy kitchen. On holidays the shutters were left closed all day. Those civilized beings so foolish as to leave secure shelter on holidays were said to deserve whatever happened to them, as those were the days when the tribes of wild Grisls moved down out of the mountains seeking – well – seeking whatever they sought. What they sought was never specified in Buttercup’s presence, and she had imagined several things which they might be after, some of which brought shivers of revulsion.
When Nursey had been present, she had insisted upon spending all of every holiday in the kitchen, as it had the fewest windows. Sneeth, however, considered it appropriate to sit in the schoolroom and do whatever work was needed, and he repaired there with Buttercup as soon as Cook cleared the table. Sneeth, unaccountably sleepy-looking, as though he had spent a wakeful night, managed to maintain an instructive manner for only about an hour, after which repeated yawns turned into a breathy snore and he laid his head upon his desk and slept.
Buttercup, at a loss for anything interesting to do, went to a shutter which was tightly closed across one of the classroom windows and found a knot at which she had been working for some time. A bit more prying and the knot popped into her hand, leaving behind a large, slanted knothole through which she could examine the hidden outer world of holiday-time.
And how strange an outer world it proved to be! Thrumm House had been invaded by wild Grisls. At least three camps of them huddled beneath the trees at the edge of the meadow. On the meadow itself, half a dozen robed females engaged in a stately dance. Observing them from the shelter of the trees were a number of males including a number whom Buttercup recognized from the village.
The tempo of the dance increased. Buttercup cast a quick glance at Sneeth, but he was quite unconscious of her misbehavior. She applied her eye to the knothole once more.
One by one the Grisls removed their robes until all six of them were standing quite naked except for their rather tawdry veils and gems. They began to display, rumps flushing crimson, eyes flashing, venom tooth gleaming, spurs positively glittering in the sun. Oh, the lovely length of those spurs, as white and unsullied as peeled wood, gently curved, sharp as needles. Here was no pretense! No flexible spurs to save wounding!
The females paired off and began to battle. Out of the shade of the woods the males crept, hypnotized by the scent of combat, fascinated by the sight of it, until a ring of them surrounded the combatants. Two battles were swiftly concluded, and while the losers lay bleeding and paralyzed upon the sward, the winners engaged one another. The males crept closer, showing obvious signs of arousal.
The third couple concluded its fight, a winner emerged from the second battle, and the two successful fighters now poised before one another, heads back, crowing, casting flirtatious glances at the circle of males …
And then the Grisls decided, simultaneously, that they need not fight one another, that there were plenty of males to go around. They turned, instead, to prance before the circle of wide-eyed, hypnotized males, selecting this one and that one to receive a love bite from their dripping fangs until each had three or four laid out on the meadow grasses.
As the rejected males slunk away, those accepted were used repeatedly by the successful females while Buttercup watched, entranced. When the females had finished, which took some time, they packed up their wagons and tents and went off down the valley, leaving the paralyzed males lying on the meadow.
Sneeth sighed dreamily.
Buttercup slipped the knot back into the hole and turned back to her books.
‘… reign of Euthasia,’ said Sneeth, completing a thought he had begun some hours before.
‘I’m tired,’ said Buttercup, much aroused. ‘I think I’ll go to my room and take a nap.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said Sneeth. ‘It probably wouldn’t hurt either of us.’
Buttercup left, only to return to the vacant schoolroom and put her eye to the knothole once more. Men from the village had come to the dusky meadow to pile the paralyzed lovers in barrows and carts, preparatory to hauling them back to the village, Buttercup supposed.
‘So that’s what it all meant,’ she murmured to herself, thinking on all the references to sex she had seen in this book and that. ‘That’s how it’s done.’ There were still things that were quite unclear to her, but she would not ask either Sneeth or Mr Thrumm. It was not something one wanted to discuss with a m
ale. Not for the first time, Buttercup wished for Nursey. If she wanted to know something about sex and had no member of her own sex to ask, the next best thing would be to have a Nursey to inquire from.
Not, she reminded herself, that she would necessarily get a truthful answer.
It was shortly after the knothole experience that Buttercup began to experience certain bodily manifestations. The hard, callused lumps on her heels began to itch, and it was not long before two ivory spikes showed there, glistening against the pinkness of her skin. A similar itchiness attacked her chin, and another ivory spike emerged from its tip to grow both upward toward her upper lip and downward into a hollow point. These protuberances grew very rapidly, and soon Buttercup herself could see her spurs and venom tooth emerging from the chrysalis of her childhood. When she looked in the mirror, it was with a sense of recurrent wonder, as though she expected to see someone else reflected there, someone without a venom tooth, someone without spurs on her heels. Someone with round ears. Someone green. And behind that someone, still another someone, a vaguely bipedal form which came and vanished like a windblown ghost.
Someone, Sneeth or Mr Thrumm or even one of the Ribbles, first commented on the change in her. Cook began giggling about it, making sly remarks. Mr Thrumm announced his intention of ‘sending word to the Palace.’ Sneeth merely looked more uncomfortable than usual, which, since the incident of the gardener’s boy, had been quite uncomfortable indeed.
Buttercup had naively supposed that the Van Hoostness which had caused her banishment had also disqualified her for consideration by the Palace. In this, she was quite mistaken. The punctilious arrival of the examiners should have informed her otherwise. Of course the Palace considered her. Why else would the examiners have bothered?
This insight came to her with some force when a personage arrived from the Palace in response to Mr Thrumm’s report. It was Fribberle, the perennial examiner, now arrived to take up residence at Thrumm House. Not to give lessons. Not to visit with Mr Thrumm. Merely to occupy a room from which he emerged at intervals to stare at Buttercup and make some remark apropos of nothing. On one occasion he said, ‘You need not think you will become a femme fatale just because you are growing up.’ Though Buttercup kept an imperturbable face, the remark disturbed her. She had never thought of becoming any such thing. She had never known there was any such thing. None of the books had mentioned such a creature, not even the ones in the root cellar.
Breaking one of her own rules, she asked Sneeth to define a ‘femme fatale.’ Sneeth flushed, stuttered, and fled. Obviously, she had entered upon a subject which was taboo. This irritated her. She was already irritated at the dream voice which was becoming a nightly presence, abjuring her to pay attention because something inimical was going on. Her conscious mind and that strange, inhabiting mind were washing at her like the flow of the Welling River, telling her again and again that she, Buttercup, was in danger and that there were things she must do about it. Even the composure resulting from seven years study of deportment could not hold back such a flow, and Buttercup acceded to it at last. She accepted that neither Mr Thrumm nor Sneeth nor Fribberle had been forthcoming in telling her what was going on. Somewhere there had to be information she needed, information which had been withheld from her, information she assumed could be found in Thrumm House, somewhere, which meant it had to be in one of the thousands of drawers.
Her search began with a systematic mental review of the contents of every drawer she had seen opened in Thrumm House. Her own room could be ignored. She had been through all of her own drawers repeatedly, even the ones near the ceiling, borrowing Gardener Ribble’s ladder for the process. She felt that some walls of drawers could probably be ignored as she had closely observed Mr Thrumm rummaging through them. These included virtually all those in the library, the salon, the dining room, and the three major suites, not including Mr Thrumm’s own room. Therefore, her search would concentrate on other areas than these. Every night, when the house was quiet, she would rise from her bed, take a lantern and begin her quest, retiring only at dawn. Since Sneeth, with the advent of Fribberle, had virtually abdicated his responsibility to educate her, there was no impediment to her napping in the daytime.
At length, only the upper drawers in the great hall remained unsearched. The ladder was too short to reach more than halfway up the wall. Making a stairway out of half opened drawers proved impossible as many of them were stuck. She resorted, finally, to a knotted rope let down from the balcony which let her reach a drawer she could open enough to stand upon. From this vantage place, other drawers could be opened, some of the drawers containing things evidently unseen since the time of Hermione.
She searched one drawer, then another, and another. And another still …
In which she found, wrapped in tissue paper, some white as though recently cut, others yellow with age, a dozen pairs of ivory spurs.
Grisl spurs.
They were not prostheses. Their bases bore the clear marks of the saw. They had been cut from the heels of Grisls – probably living Grisls. They had probably been cut here, in Thrumm House.
The sight of the amputated spurs brought back memories of the gardener’s boy and the wild grislings, and she heard Sneeth’s voice saying, ‘… never should have been done where she could see it!’
He had meant that she should not have seen a rigged battle between grislings, where one of them had had her spurs amputated. She remembered Sneeth’s discomfort with the grisling show. She should not really have been allowed to see the grisling show either, and only Sneeth’s desire for amusement had moved him to permit it. There had been something in both those spectacles she was supposed to be unaware of.
Buttercup had asked Mr Thrumm at one time why there were no other Grisls in residence. He had replied with his usual, vague insouciance, ‘There aren’t many needed, lass. Only a few. They come and they go.’
Inside her, Mouse’s voice spoke clearly. ‘Smarten up, dumdum. You’ve got all the pieces. Put them together.’
And in response to that voice, she saw what they had been hiding from her. It was evident to her at last and all at once that the Grisls who came into Thrumm House did indeed go – go as the pathetic wild grisling had gone before the gardener’s boy – to a prearranged and ugly defeat, despurred, and with their fangs undoubtedly suppressed with thube salve. Defenseless. Offenseless. Unable to do battle.
But why? Why? Why had this been done in the past? Was it being planned again? Why had an employee from the Palace been sent to … to observe.
‘Nitwit,’ said the voice from inside her somewhere. ‘Are you not a Grisl of Royal Blood? And do not Heiresses Presumptive have to emerge victorious from open combat with at least one heiress of Royal Blood?’ The voice had more than a hint of annoyance in it, as of an elder chastising a child guilty of an ignorance almost insolent in its totality.
Nonetheless, the voice was right. It all came back to her now. Those forbidden books in the root cellar. The system of Royal Challenge. And everyone knew, even Buttercup – for it was talked about constantly, by everyone – that the Old Queen was coming very close to the end of her reign, the end of her very long life.
So, Buttercup hissed to herself, feeling a coldness on one foot, raising it to find it wet with something … wet with venom dripping from the slender, hollow fang growing on her Van Hoost chin. So, they intended her to be a victim, did they. They intended to cut off her spurs. They thought the thube salve had suppressed the venom sacks in her chin. They thought she would be helpless. Incapable. They intended her to challenge the Heiress Presumptive, and they intended for the heiress to kill her.
She could imagine how they planned to do it. They would transport her to the Palace, fit her out with a pair of flexible false spurs, drug her into some kind of hypnotized trance, and then let the heiress make away with her.
Buttercup shut the various drawers she had opened, unknotted the rope from the balcony, and went back to her bed. No matter whe
n they planned, they would do nothing until the Old Queen died or was very close to death. She was sure of it. When the time came for the Heiress Presumptive to confront a challenger, they would want the challenger to look as normal as possible. This could only be achieved if they let the challenger alone until the last possible moment.
Well then, they had taught her deportment and imperturbability. Now was certainly the time to use it.
Some months passed. Occasionally, Buttercup would take the matchbox from the small drawer and look at it, wondering why it was important. Several times she tried to open it, but found it proof against her curiosity. Occasionally she would query that intrusive inner voice to learn whether some other intelligence knew something that would help her. The voice was stubbornly silent.
And then, in the middle of the night, in springtime, as the year was wakening from chill, everyone in Thrumm House was roused by the tolling of the village bell. From a distance, across a fold of hills, another bell gave answer, and from other valleys far and near, more bells rang out. There could be only one reason for such a clamor. The Old Queen was dead.
Buttercup had barely time to get out of bed and hide herself behind the door. Fribberle entered with the sound of the final knell, Mr Thrumm close behind him. Fribberle carried a saw in one hand and a hypodermic syringe in the other. Buttercup did not bother to ask him what it contained. That he carried a saw was evidence enough of his evil intent.
She had been practicing the leap and jab she had seen the Grisls using when she watched through the knothole. Fribberle, who was the larger of the two males, caught the first dose, impeccably delivered at the juncture of neck and shoulder. Her fang slid into and out of his flesh like a skewer into and out of a succulent roast. Thrumm saw it, but he did not react swiftly enough to save himself. Though she missed the exact location with her second bite, it did well enough. By the time she had caught her breath, both of them were quite paralyzed, staring at the wall, awaiting her instructions. She appreciated that. She had not wanted anything messy. She had given them little more than a love bite, as she wanted them ambulatory and cooperative.