"You know I don't like you using your mind-control spell on castle guests," Sir Henri said.
Well, there was an eloquent rebuttal. That certainly put Algernon in his place.
But, incredibly, Algernon did look disconcerted by it. "Henri, I had to. You don't understand how dangerous these two are."
Deanna looked to Oliver for support, but he was still preoccupied with getting all the grime off himself. He was wiping his hands on his pants but obviously wasn't satisfied. Any moment now, she thought, he would start licking them clean, and how would she ever explain that?
She didn't have to. From the room next door came a scream.
In that first frozen moment Deanna tried to relate the scream to what was going on with her and Oliver and the watch in this room, and couldn't. Then the voice began yelling, "Help me! Do something!"
In the next moment they were all on their feet. Sir Henri got to the door first and flung it open hard enough that it slammed into the wall and bounced back in the way of Deanna behind him. It only delayed them a second and they were all right behind Sir Henri as he raced down the hall and burst into the other room.
The first thing Deanna saw was Leonard, the ratty peasant's blanket still around him. He was in front of a chair, as though he had just stood up, his feet in a bucket of steaming water. But certainly it hadn't been Leonard who had screamed; Deanna was sure the voice had belonged to a woman.
And there was a woman in the room, a servant girl, who was standing by the fireplace, which she had apparently lit to get Leonard dry and warm. Even as Deanna registered that thought, Algernon shoved her out of his way so that she would have fallen if Oliver hadn't been behind her to hold her up. Algernon ran to the servant girl, grabbed her by the shoulders, and threw her down on the floor.
It was only then that Deanna realized how smoky the room was, and how the smoke smelled funny: like the time cousin Sid had dropped a cigarette ash onto Aunt Verna's expensive new sweater. Like burning wool.
She clutched at Oliver's arm, still around her.
The servant girl screamed again as Algernon rolled her on the floor and tried to beat away the flames that were eating away at the skirt of her long gown. But it wasn't only her gown that was ablaze. She must have accidentally dragged her skirt through the fire, then tried to brush the burning cinders away: the floor-to-ceiling tapestry on the nearby wall had ignited also.
Sir Henri took a step forward, then seemed to remember that his hands weren't free. "Here," he said, shoving the Mickey Mouse watch at Deanna. He strode forward and yanked the tapestry off the wall. Dust and burning bits of fabric flew into the air, then wafted down on air currents.
Deanna's eyes darted back and forth as she tried to keep track of all the leaf-thin glowing fragments, to make sure they didn't start their own fires.
The servant girl continued to scream. She was so frightened she was fighting Algernon's attempts to beat out the flames with his hands.
"Throw the rug on her!" Deanna cried, meaning the fur floor covering. Her hand closed convulsively, praying that Algernon could smother the flames before they ate through the thick woolen clothes to the girl's legs. She became aware of the watch biting into her palm.
Their problem, a tiny inner voice told her. Take the watch and run.
But Sir Henri, stomping on the burning tapestry, didn't seem to be doing much good; and if the fire got out of control, the whole castle could go. And no fire trucks for at least several hundred more years.
Your life's in danger, too, the voice said.
Oliver was still holding her, watching her, waiting for her. With no pockets in her gown, she shoved the watch down the front of her dress and ignored the little voice which called her an idiot. "What we need is water," she said.
With a tilt of his head, Oliver indicated Leonard, who was still standing in the water bucket.
"Leonard, get out of there," Deanna said.
If Leonard heard, he gave no indication. He just stood still, his eyes wide in horror.
Oliver gave him a push, so that he fell backward into his chair, then pulled the bucket out from under Leonard's feet. Oliver struggled, but managed to lift the heavy bucket. "Now what?"
Algernon had put out the fire in the servant's skirt, so she pointed to the tapestry and said, "Throw the water over there."
Oliver hesitated. "Sir Henri's in the way."
"Just throw it."
He looked at her in stunned disbelief. "It's water," he said.
"Oliver, throw it!" she screamed.
Oliver threw it.
The water hit Sir Henri, but it hit the tapestry too. There was a sizzling, then a smell of wet—as well as burned—wool, then Sir Henri and Algernon stamped out the last of the flames where the water had missed.
"Fast thinking," Sir Henri said to Deanna and Oliver. "Good work." He turned to the servant girl. "Are you all right, my dear?" he asked as water dripped down his collar.
She nodded, wiping her sooty hand across her cheek.
"Are you sure? You're unharmed?" Sir Henri seemed torn between modesty and the desire to check the girl's legs for himself. He helped her to her feet and brushed ineffectively at her scorched dress.
The girl forced a smile and curtsied. "I'm so sorry—" she started.
"Nonsense, nonsense," Sir Henri said. "The important thing is that everybody's all right Leonard?"
"Ah..." Leonard said, still looking somewhat dazed.
"And you're not burned at all?" Henri asked the girl again.
She shook her head and began to blush at all the attention.
"Well then, no harm done. Why don't you get somebody from the kitchen to clean this up, and you take the rest of the day off. You've had a nasty scare."
"Thank you, sir." The girl dipped into another curtsy, and yet another for Algernon, then she scurried away.
"Leonard, why don't you go to your brother's room for now?"
"Ahh..." Leonard said.
Sir Henri took him by the arm and led him across the hall, both leaving a wet trail behind.
Deanna stole a look at Algernon, who had not acted as she would have anticipated, and saw that he was watching her. Oliver was, too. She stared at her feet.
Sir Henri came back across the hall. "We need to finish talking," he said, and led them back to his room. He took an extra blanket off the bed and wrapped it around himself. "Now," he said. "What were we talking about?"
Algernon wouldn't stop looking at Deanna. "We were talking about Lady Deanna's watch."
"That's right." Sir Henri scratched his head. "Now where did I put that?"
Deanna considered saying Gee, I don't know, but with her luck Algernon had seen. "Excuse me." She turned away and fished the watch out from her dress. She held on to it tightly.
"And," said Algernon, "we were talking about dangerous people."
"Dangerous?" That was the last straw."Dangerous? You're the one who's dangerous. Affecting people's minds. Making people disappear. And what is it that lives in your room, Algernon? Explain that." But even while Deanna challenged him, she remembered how he had dashed to help the servant girl, how he had risked getting hurt for someone else.
"You can make people disappear?" Sir Henri asked in surprise. "You never told me that."
"I can't," Algernon said. "I never did."
He seemed so sincere when he said it, so genuinely baffled. "Leonard said so," Deanna persisted, but less sure of herself now.
"Leonard said people disappear?" Sir Henri mused. He snapped his fingers. "I'll wager he meant those elves last summer." He turned to Algernon. "Remember that tall, green-haired lad the goosegirl was swooning over all that while? And how angry she got that you sent him away?" He turned to Deanna. "Algernon didn't make them disappear, my dear. He just forced them to go back into the forest." Then, as though guessing her thought, he said: "We forced them into the forest. This is no place for elves, Lady Deanna. Their ways are strange and often incompatible with ours. They work for good, but
their good isn't necessarily our good. They do things—and we can't begin to guess why."
Like leaving plant messages, Deanna thought. Like giving me only enough information to confuse me.
Sir Henri was still talking. "But Algernon does them no harm. He does no one harm. He's a healer. Why, just yesterday he healed a horse with a broken leg."
Deanna felt like a total fool.
"He works to protect us, the castle. That's all. I'm disheartened that you could have ever thought otherwise."
She examined his face. Perhaps Algernon was making him say this. But his eyes looked perfectly clear and alert. Or at least as clear and alert as they ever did. And the way the wizard had acted in Leonard's room...
"What about your room?" she asked. "There's something in there—"
"There are many things in there," Sir Henri said. "But Algernon has made them invisible to protect them from the servants, who have a tendency to go where they've been told not to. Let's see ... He has owls, a monkey, several snakes. Oh, and then there's the slime monster. He's ugly as anything but very affectionate."
"Chemical experiments," Algernon added. "Not to mention the basilisk. Good thing for you that you didn't see him: a look into his eyes kills." He glared at her. "And what of you? Lying and sneaking around." He paused, then suddenly sat back and regarded her quizzically. "Until just now," he admitted. "You did help with the fire. Why didn't you leave when you had the chance? Why didn't you take your watch and flee back to ... Bretagne?"
Wrong: she had been wrong about everything. She had seen only what she had expected to see and had refused to let anything else sink in.
"I never said we were from Bretagne," Deanna said. "At least, not until you did, Sir Henri." She looked from him, to Algernon, to Oliver, back to Sir Henri. She wasn't clever enough to be a convincing liar, she knew. When she had tried being devious, she had only gotten deeper into trouble. And even if she knew how to lie, she didn't know which lies would help and which would hurt even more. She sighed, took a deep breath, sighed again, inhaled again, and plunged into the truth. "I'm from a place called Greeley, Colorado. Oliver is from Chalon. You haven't heard of either place before because they don't exist yet, and they won't for another nine hundred years or so."
Sir Henri raised his eyebrows.
"You are elves," Algernon said.
"No. But they sent us here."
"Irresponsible time-meddlers."
That wasn't what she had expected him to say at all.
"Those elves have no sense. Time passes at a different rate in the forest, and there's one clearing in there that's ... I don't know ... like a seaport, leading to strange lands."
"A gateway," Deanna said. "A temporal loophole."
"Yes, exactly." For a moment he seemed pleased to be supplied with the exact words for which he had been searching, but then he frowned as though at further proof that she was in league with the elves. "You can't go around playing with time," he scolded her. "One of these days, you're going to slip, you're going to make a mistake, and the world may never recover. When are you people going to learn responsibility?"
"I am not an elf," she said. If he started in on her the way the fair folk had done, she was going to throw something. "I am not an elf. I am not a friend of the elves. I am not working for the elves." He was listening—they were all listening—and she made a conscious effort to control her voice. "Something from my time—accidentally—fell through to your time. It was my fault. I didn't mean to do it—I didn't even know I was doing it. But I did it, and the elves won't let me return home until I get it back, because somehow it caused just what you said: a mistake from which the world—my world—never recovered."
"This ... watch?" Algernon took the watch from her hand, and she didn't even know whether to resist. "What manner of implement is this?" he asked.
"All it does is measure the passing of time. Of itself, it's harmless. I wasn't telling the truth when I said it could shorten lives. But somehow, by its very existence here and now, it's changing the nature of things to come. It's destroying my world as it should be. It doesn't belong here."
"And you assumed that I would be the one to misuse its power?" Algernon asked. His question started indignantly but finished sounding distressed.
"Someone does." For goodness' sakes: if not him, who? "Today."
"I've done nothing with it," Algernon protested.
She glanced at Oliver. If Algernon was telling the truth, shouldn't Oliver be feeling the change?
He was watching her every move, never saying a word.
"I've done nothing with it," the wizard repeated. Suddenly he bit his Up. "Except send word about it to the bishop."
"The bishop?" she echoed. She remembered the fair folk's warning that the watch would cause dissension in the Church, enough dissension to form a schism, to destroy feudalism before its time, to prevent the flowering of the Renaissance, to lead to a twentieth century in which she was never born.
She must have paled or looked faint, for Sir Henri took her arm. "Are you all right, my dear?"
"That might do it," she told Algernon. "I think that's it."
"The bishop's not an evil man," the wizard said.
"It makes no difference. I know because, you see, the fair folk put a spell on Oliver so he could help me. When we got the watch away from you, I touched it, and Oliver felt..."
"A shifting," Oliver explained, his expression daring anyone to ask what the spell was.
No one did.
Algernon sighed. "I'm sorry," he said. He held the watch up by its strap and let it dangle in the sunlight that came through the window, and for one last moment Deanna doubted him and thought, Oh, no! What idea have I put into his head?
But then he held the watch out to her. "If it's that important, you'd better take it back," he said.
SEVENTEEN
Good-byes
Deanna took the watch quickly, before Algernon could change his mind, and fastened it around her wrist: 9:26, according to Mickey.
The first thing she did was glance at Oliver to make sure he didn't turn back into a cat then and there.
He didn't.
But he shuddered, wincing as though in pain. In a moment he had recovered. Hell be okay, she thought. After all, he'd started out as a cat and that was the natural thing for him to be. It was just that she'd gotten used to him being a person. She swallowed hard. He was looking at her with those big green eyes, still something of pain in them. And possibly there was fear there, too. It was hard to say.
Algernon stood. "Now what we have to do is get you back to the elves' clearing—to that temporal hole of yours—before something else changes which you have to fix. That was," he added as she got to her feet, "where I was planning to take you all along."
"I'm sorry for what I assumed about you," Deanna said, extending her hand in apology. "I'm new at all this and I've been making one mistake after—" He kissed her hand and she felt her face grow warm. She'd never get used to that.
Oliver stood abruptly. Starting for the door, he walked between them, forcing the wizard to re-lease her hand.
"Well, I'm glad that had a happy ending," Sir Henri said. "You find what you came for, everyone ends up friends, Baylen and I get to go to the tournament—"
He was interrupted by a knock on the door. His steward, Ransom, stuck his head in. "The bishop's here," he announced, "waiting in the Hall."
Algernon exhaled loudly.
Oh, no. Why did things here never stay simple for more than two seconds at a time?
"I've got to get back by midday," she told them.
Sir Henri said to Algernon, "He's going to need a proper welcome from both of us, or he'll want to know why."
"I'll delay him a bit," Algernon offered. "You get one of the boys to take Deanna and Oliver to the forest."
"Baylen," Deanna said quickly. Weasel that he was, he was safer than Leonard.
"Makes no difference," Algernon said. (Ha! Not for him!)
&n
bsp; "My sword," Oliver reminded him. "My dagger."
Algernon groaned. "They'll have been brought to the storeroom. The guard will never let you pass."
"Here, take this." Sir Henri pulled a signet ring from his finger. "Give it to the guard on duty," he told Oliver, "and he'll return your weapons. Deanna, you go to the stable and tell the lad there to prepare horses for you, Oliver, and Baylen." He kissed her hand.
She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "Thank you for all your help."
"Well—" He looked as embarrassed as she had felt. "Things will certainly seem quiet without you. We'll all miss you both." He clapped Oliver on the shoulder. "Good luck to the two of you." He swept out of the room with his brother. "I wonder if the bishop is going to Wharton's tourney?" she heard him say to Algernon. And then they were gone.
And she was alone with Oliver.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
He was leaning against the doorway, looking as sick as last night when he'd eaten ... whatever it was that he'd eaten. "It's starting," he said, though no change was evident.
"Good," she said. Then, reading reproach in his eyes, she tried to explain: "I mean, that shows Algernon can be trusted. That things are going..." Her voice got softer, all by itself. "...the way they should be."
He turned and left without a word.
Deanna wiped her sweaty palms on her dress. Irresponsible, Algernon had called the fair folk. He didn't know the half of it. Darn them. She gave a great sniff. Hay fever starting in early. Just what she needed.
She took one step into the corridor and ran into the tall, skinny goosegirl.
"Oh, miss," the girl said, "Lady Marguerite's been asking up and down for you."
Deanna covered the watch with her right hand, aware of the minutes passing by. "Tell her good-bye for me, will you? My quest—"
The girl took hold of her arm as she tried to ease by. "Oh, please, miss! She's been so upset since last night. She thought you'd left without telling her. Then when I told her the two of you were in the courtyard and that you'd gone to Sir Henri's room, she sent me to get you. Please. Your young man, he wouldn't stop at all. The lady, she'll be heartbroken if I have to tell her that"