Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

~1~

It looked as though today was not going to be the day after all.

Part of the problem, Wizard Howl thought, was that Sophie Hatter looked quite becoming when she was pouting. Her face flushed and she clenched her fists and stomped around with her limbs tensed into lines of righteous indignation, her red-gold hair fwooshing behind her as though catching the updraft from all the energy glowing off her face. Right now she was mopping, and in between hearty mop strokes her eyes were crackling and spitting fire left and right, daring anyone to question her.

Which of course was what Howl intended to do.

"Sophie," he called across the room from his workbench, "have mercy on that poor piece of floor; it's only wood, after all."

Whump-fwssh, WHUMP-fwssh went the mop, with a harder WHUMP the second time for emphasis. "There's a huge horrible stain here," the girl said in between whumps. "This is the only way to get it out and the floor ought to thank me for trying." She spoke through gritted teeth; Howl enjoyed her smoldering expression for a few moments too long and was punished when she turned her head and intercepted his gaze. "What are you looking at, Howl Jenkins? Are you going to tell me that you like the stain here too? First spiders, now this!"

"You wound me, Sophie," Howl said, putting on his best wounded face. "I would never criticize your methods of floor torture. My tender heart is going to burst at any moment from this flagellation."

"If it does then you'll have to clean it up yourself," Sophie snapped. Whump-fwssh. Whump-FWSssh. So far, so good. Searching his memory for recent things he could have done to bother her, and discovering nothing of consequence, Howl changed tacks. He asked, "How's Lettie? Did you, er, buy any more boring clothes down in Market Chipping? Has she told you all about Mrs. Fairfax's aunt's cousin's sister's newest horrible hat?"

WHUMP-FWSSSssssh. Sophie's mouth contorted and she shot a particularly withering glare down the mop handle at the stain on the floor. "Lettie," she growled, "is in fine form today. She's doing splendidly, thank you very much." WHUMP-clatter! She hit the floor a glancing blow, sending the mop handle crashing to the ground; and then the fire blazing in her small face lilted to the side and flickered down a notch. "You useless stupid thing!" Sophie said to the mop, wringing her hands and seeming to abandon all pretense of paying attention to the conversation. "Bother Lettie! Bother all of them!"

Caught between the urge to laugh and a sudden surge of worry, Howl said, "I'll get it." He flicked out a hand toward the fallen mop, so that across the room it sprang upright again, nudging Sophie's limp-fingered hand like a small animal that wanted to be petted. Far from being helpful, however, this actually seemed to make her angrier. She knocked the handle away and rounded on him.

"And you! You can keep your magic to yourself, mister!"

"What have I done?" Howl yelped, jumping up from the workbench and preparing to defend himself. He wasn't quick enough, however, to keep a loony grin from splitting his face. Now he was definitely in for it.

~*~

The problem, Sophie thought, quite calmly given the situation, was that Howl thought he could cheer her up by being insensitive and clever, and therefore slither out of having to deal with the issue at hand. Well, it wasn't going to work. She was going to show him just how un-cheered-up she could be.

"You haven't done anything!" She cried, advancing across the wood floor toward the wizard to give him a piece of her mind. "That's exactly the problem!"

His eyes and brows were trying to arrange themselves into something apologetic, but a smile had snuck its way across his lips and utterly ruined the look. "I'm—" Howl said, obviously choking back laugher. "I'm fl-flabbergasted, Sophie, I've been as helpful as I possibly know how to be, and I am—heh—completely in agreement with your opinion on that stain on the floor, it absolutely has to go, right now, quite violently if necessary—"

Sophie looked around for a weapon and noticed that Howl was sneakily attempting to summon the mop from across the room, presumably to put between the two of them. "Oh, no, you don't," she snapped, reasonably certain that since she used the thing on a weekly basis it ought to have more loyalty to her than anyone else. "Don't you dare listen to him, mop!" At Howl she cried, "You're missing the point!"

"If there had been a point I imagine I would have!" Howl said, positively gleefully. Then he sobered, or gave the appearance of sobering. "I think the problem here is that you're simply—" The mop, which had been scootching slantwise across the floor, halted in its path, obviously torn, and the wizard leaned forward and made a grab for it— "not—" The mop made it into his reach, but not before Sophie had got one hand's grip on the wooden handle. "—communicating effectively!" Howl finished with a maddeningly serious expression stretched across his features.

"Ugh!" Sophie gave her end of the mop an exasperated yank, but he had the squishy wet woolen end clutched to his chest by now, and to get a better grip on it she had to slide her hands right up against his blue-velvet-covered ribs—which did not leave her in a position much suited for pulling. She could see that she was not going to be able to gain the upper hand, even with all the limberness her eighteen years afforded her.

It had been two months since the Witch of the Waste's curse had broken, and Sophie was still being continually surprised that she no longer creaked and wheezed when she tried to do something strenuous (like wrestling a mop from an impertinent wizard). She felt sometimes that she probably should have gotten used to it by now—but then again, two months was not too terribly long a time when you thought about it. It hadn't felt that long at all. It really felt like just yesterday Howl had held her hands in his and declared happily ever after, and since then they'd needed time to settle down to the comfortable rhythm of the flower shop and Calcifer's daily absences and a great upsurge in demand for Howl's magic at the capital. That is, the aftermath of certain Witch- and wizard- and prince-related events hadn't yet stopped affecting their future.

Which was what she ought to have said to that busybody, Lettie.

Today was Sunday and the flower shop was closed, and Sophie had spent the morning with her younger sister—Mrs. Fairfax's Lettie, not the Lettie-who-had-recently-confessed-to-being-Martha-Lettie—in Market Chipping, which was usually quite enjoyable in a Lettie sort of way. That is, there was a whole lot of gossiping and admiring new clothes and chatting with acquaintances from town who were out and about. All Sophie had to do was stand next to her sister and dip into the conversation if it interested her; invariably she watched the people more than she spoke, and quite often she would imagine what kind of hat they would have bought from the her late father's late hat shop, for apparently old habits lingered.

"That one's definitely a swan hat," she had told Lettie this morning as they waved goodbye to a portly lady dressed in cream with a dour smile on her face. "Thinks she's happier than she is."

Lettie's laugh pealed bell-like over the cobbles of Main Street. "Poor thing," she said. And then she looked straight at Sophie's face, right into her eyes. "But really, Sophie, you're starting to sound like an old maid again. Honestly, how are you doing? Are you happy?"

"Yes," Sophie had said. There had never been a question to which she'd had to hesitate less. "What makes you ask?"

Lettie gave her most conspiratorial wide-blue-eyed downward glance, peering at her sister from under long lashes. "Mrs. Fairfax is worried about Wizard Howl, that's all. She thinks he's going to work you to the bone cleaning that grimy old castle for free, and she keeps picking at me to warn you that if he hasn't married you by now you ought to run off and find some prince to chase after you instead. Oh my, speaking of princes, did I tell you?"

And Sophie, blindsided by the sudden turn of the conversation, could only mutter, "What?"

"Prince Justin came calling again last week," Lettie squeaked. "He keeps trying to get me to finish off at Mrs. Fairfax's early so I can go to the capital and study with Suliman. Sophie," she said under her breath, big eyes dead serious as she dropped the newest shocker, "He tried to kiss me."

"Really?" said Sophie, who felt as though something had soured in her stomach. She was used to Lettie having gobs of admirers and moreover to hearing about them each time she spoke to her younger sister; but to throw in that ridiculous bit about Howl, and now to change the subject before she even had a chance to retaliate, seemed unfair and petty. But she had to ask: "Well—um, did you enjoy it?"

"Oh, I don't know," Lettie breezed. "I stopped him before he could." She looked to the side, suddenly unsure. "I have so much more to learn, I don't think I could get married now. Sure, it's nice to have someone around, but then I'd have to become a housewife and do all that sort of wifely stuff and maybe have children and then I'd never have time to get anything done."

"Did you say that all to him?" On one hand, Sophie admired her sister's quest for knowledge. Lettie had shown herself to have a clearer head than any of the family would have hoped for two or three years ago. On the other hand, Lettie couldn't do much better for herself than being courted by the King's own brother. And it seemed a waste of a kiss, which didn't have to lead to anything anyway. Sophie mentally tutted at herself. A year ago perhaps nobody would have expected her to think such thoughts either. But—

Lettie shook her head again. "Well, sort of, rather. He didn't seem upset by it—he said the offer's still open, especially if I come live in Kingsbury. Anyway I'm sure he's got other girls coming out of his ears, so I can't imagine it can be too bad for him. But then again—" and here her sister's voice sped up as it tipped into emotion, "Should I at least have given it a try? He was a part of Percival too and I used to think I was in love with him, until it turned out he was actually two people…what if I could like the Prince just as well? What if I actually just missed my chance at love, and with someone so rich, too? Oh, Sophie, what do you think I should have done? You're in love, aren't you, Sophie? How can you tell?"

The directness of the question shot straight through Sophie's stomach; she almost stopped walking in the middle of the street at Market Chipping.

"I—" she said. "I don't know." A thousand fragments of thought shot through her mind at once, but nothing resolved itself to anything so decent as a way to tell. It wasn't as though she was always happy when she was around Howl. In fact, half the time she felt like she was living with a small temperamental child, and another quarter of that time was spent being extremely cross or extremely tired. But really there was no denying it.

This answer was apparently inadequate, because Lettie huffed a sigh and peered more deeply into her sister's face. "Sometimes I worry about you, Sophie," she said. "Sometimes I get this idea that Mrs. Fairfax is right."

"It's certainly none of her business," Sophie growled. That sick feeling surged up again in her chest. "It's not something that I can put into words, but there's definitely…something. Now are you quite finished, Lettie? I was enjoying our chat about Prince Justin. Do go on about him."

At that Lettie had narrowed her eyes. "Sophie," she had said warningly. And then a new thought had struck her, and in the same insufferable manner she'd jumped subjects again. "What's it like kissing a wizard? Ooh, does he give off sparks or something?" And at the deep flush of horror that Sophie couldn't stop from flooding onto her face—"Oh, Sophie, he has kissed you, hasn't he?"

~*~

"Now doesn't that at least sound reasonable?" Howl gibbered at Sophie. His serious face was slipping. The mop's head, which smelled of lye and lavender soap and was beginning to make his eyes water, pressed dampish into his shoulder. If anyone had asked, he would have had to admit that this hadn't exactly been his plan as far as mop-placement went. Thankfully, nobody was going to ask.

Sophie simply snorted. Her soft-lined face was glowing with the heat of the argument. "You horrid, no good, traitorous piece of furniture," she finally growled, her eyes leveled at Howl's chest. "I ought to smash you into splinters."

Assuming that she was now addressing the mop, Howl relaxed and let the impending smile slink back onto his face. "There's no need to take it out on the mop," he said in what he hoped was a soothing manner. "I daresay it was helpless to resist my charm. Look, have you punished me quite enough yet? I was getting rather fond of this suit, and now it's all wet and…floor-y."

"Ha," Sophie said, looking straight up at him once again. Then her eyes crinkled up and she gave the tiniest smirk—but, for its size, it was the wickedest and most delighted smirk he'd seen for a good while, or at least since he looked in the mirror that morning. Howl was seized with fervent gratitude that the girl was no longer disguised as a ninety-year-old woman. A smile like that would have been hopelessly lost among the wrinkles, and that would have been a crying shame.

Pleased with himself, and hopeful that Sophie had been more or less mollified—no one can deny the restorative power of a good argument—the wizard pushed his hair from his face and released his grip on the mop, which swung down and hit the floor with a whump. Sophie pulled it away from him wordlessly, the smirk softening into something more like a real smile. And without really thinking about it, the wizard took her by both shoulders and leaned forward, trying to push her back towards the waiting stain on the floor. "Now since we've made so much progress here, I suppose I'll go back to my business and you to yours—"

He ended up a lot closer to her than he'd intended, because for some reason Sophie's feet seemed glued to the floor. Her smile disappeared without so much as a trace, and Howl felt her shoulders stiffen under his palms. They were quite alone in the flower shop; Calcifer was out and Michael was running errands. Howl's heart gave a jolt that was almost painful—which was unsettling, since he'd so recently come back into its possession—and by then the girl had backed away out of his grasp and slammed the mop back in the bucket. All the tension that had been strung across her face earlier was back twofold.

"Excuse me, I'm going out to get some air!" Sophie said over her shoulder, and banged out the door with the knob orange-down.

Howl stared after her, shaken. His heart definitely hadn't recovered from whatever had just happened and now it was already having to try and make sense of something else. He would definitely complain when Calcifer got home.

"The floor's going to be all wet, Sophie," the wizard murmured helplessly to the closed door. "At this rate I'm going to have to stop telling people that you never do things by halves."

Then he said, "Dammit."

~*~

Chapter Text

~2~

Mondays were not normally wretched days of the week. They could be rather busy, but Sophie generally liked being busy, especially Monday-busy, which tended to be a mad scramble of blossoms and customers and pruning shears and mild panic. In any case it was much more exciting than making hats.

But this Monday there was no denying that something was off. Sophie had a glancing suspicion that the something off about it was herself, but she had a go at blaming everything else just in case. Like usual, she had gotten up in the greying mists just after sunrise to cut swathes of flowers in the waste, and that had been nice enough. The sweaty heat of the summer was wavering in its decision to never let fall come again, and the last of the summer blooms were bravely struggling on; they hung in there, but only with a little extra talking-to. As a result their colors seemed a little deeper and more desperate, but Sophie generally thought they were the more beautiful for it.

"It works for you," she said to a bunch of bell-shaped flowers with petals like purple velvet. "Lucky."

"Morning, Sophie," Calcifer hissed from the grate when she came into the castle parlor, three buckets of flowers dangling from each hand, her boots tracking dewy mud.

"You're back," Sophie said, stomping through the parlor to the door on the stairs. "What took you so long?"

The fire demon poured himself up through the logs and zipped through the air to hover above Sophie's shoulder. He gave off a slight warmth and a singed smell seemed to follow behind him wherever he went, but he could stay mobile for quite a long time now without having to burn anything. It had taken him weeks of experimentation after the curse was broken to stay out for more than a day at a time. He still hated the rain, but it didn't seem to have the power to extinguish him anymore. Obviously Sophie's creative methods of curse-breaking had done a number on him; but everyone was still at a loss as to what that number was, exactly.

"Howl's had me out in Porthaven," Calcifer explained as the girl ranged through the flower shop, setting out buckets and boots and lilies and rushes and orchids and velvet-bellflowers. "Everyone over there keeps asking for Sorcerer Jenkin. Autumn is when the storms start over there, you know. It's already all murky and wet."

"Oh, you poor thing," Sophie muttered, without meaning it at all. "Could you go check the mail, Calcifer?"

"Another task! My favorite!" Calcifer hissed. He complied, but not before snatching one of the velvet-flowers out of a bouquet and munching it down in a burst of cinders. "Hmm," he said— "Musky, but with a subtle spice. Very nice—" and zipped off to the fireplace.

They opened the shop. It was a cooler day than yesterday, and the townspeople were about testing their long-shawled and tall-booted finery for fall. Sophie sat at the counter and tried her best to smile, but her smiles kept coming out wrong somehow, and people kept leaving without buying anything. Bother, Sophie thought. It is me. And this made her smiles fly even further from the mark. Flowers wilted in their buckets. "Stop cringing," Sophie growled at them. "It's not your fault."

Midmorning crowded up Market Street; the shop door opened and in walked Martha Hatter, slender and fair and completely spell-free. Sophie managed to turn the look of annoyance on her face to a look of shock and from there to a look of appreciation. She didn't feel much like a visit from Martha today; her conversation with Lettie yesterday had been bad enough. But it really wasn't Martha's fault any more than it had been the flowers'.

"Sophie!" Martha said with a grin.

"Hello, Martha," Sophie said. "If you're looking for Michael, he's in the backyard," she said. "I think he's working on a spell."

"Dear old Sophie," Martha said, cheerfully ignoring the attempt to pass her off to someone else, which only served to make Sophie feel more wretched. She came over to lean on the counter, twiddling her thumbs. "I came to talk to you too!"

"I'm not old anymore," Sophie grumped, miffed. "Anyway, how are you doing, Martha?"

Earlier in the week the shop had received an order of boutonnieres and corsages for this evening, and she was busy sewing mounds of cornflowers onto gold lace cuffs. Her sister peered at them curiously, but rather absently. "I'm on break from Cesari's and it just occurred to me: why not pop over to the shop for a few minutes? Imagine, I've never thought it before, and you've been living here for months now. And here I thought I was getting near as clever as you."

Sophie didn't know quite what to say to that. "Hmm," she said. Attempting to be mollified and kind had never been this difficult when she was living with her two sisters. Whereas Lettie and Martha got along marvelously now that they no longer had to see one another on a regular basis, Sophie seemed to have gotten worse and worse. Maybe it was the fact that there had always been people and things for Martha and Lettie to argue about; Sophie had had quite enough people and things to deal with from the two of them, so she had never bothered acquiring her own. And now?

"Boutonnieres," Martha observed dully after Sophie explained, in response to her sister's enquiries regarding how exactly she was doing (though she left out the wretched part.) "I can see that. I suppose it's just like cakes for me. Anyhow—"

"Sometimes I quite enjoy boutonnieres—" Sophie interjected, jabbing a delicate silver thread through the gold fabric.

Martha kept right on talking over the interruption. "What about your sweetheart, Sophie? Is he working right now?"

Sophie nearly stabbed her thumb right through with the sewing needle.

"Howl," she said fiercely, after a moment in which she felt her brain flopping around a bit in her head like a dead fish, "is not my sweetheart. Heavens, Martha."

Martha frowned. "But you're living…I mean, you're going to…you're like Michael and I, aren't you, Sophie? What else can you call it?"

"Yes," Sophie growled. She was going to ignore the rest of the question.

"Well…" Undistracted, Martha's brow furrowed in concentration; she was obviously putting her mind to the task, which was the last thing Sophie wanted. "He's not your betrothed, for you aren't engaged to be married… That doesn't mean he's your lover, does it?" She seemed mildly distressed by this phrasing. Then again, so was Sophie.

"Heavens, no," she said again. "He's not my anything, Martha. He's just Howl! And right now he's not even here, so don't bother asking." This was true, as far as Sophie knew, though that was never very far where Howl was concerned.

Martha narrowed her eyes at Sophie in a way that reminded her strangely of Lettie, though the spell that had swapped her sisters was really and truly gone by now. "You are an old grouch today," she said. "It's no use trying to hide it. You have that slump to your shoulders and you're smiling too much. But you're not going to tell me about it, are you, Sophie? One of those 'eldest' things again, I guess."

Sophie found that her fingers were putting the pin in and out of the cornflowers, but the thread had escaped some time ago and was lying across the counter in a listless pool. Martha's expression was a softness between resignation and pity that made Sophie's heart hurt faintly just looking at it.

"Bother," she said at last. "Run along, Martha. It's just a little thing and I'll be over it in no time."

A smile wavered onto Martha's face, but it was a kind one. "Yes, I thought so. I'm sure you've got it handled down to the last detail, anyway," she said, dusting her skirt off and preparing to go in search of Michael. Halfway across the room to the back door she added, a bit too cheerfully, "But if the problem is Wizard Howl, don't worry, he'll regret the day he ever laid his glass-marble eyes on you!"

"Howl's eyes look nothing like glass marbles!" Sophie protested. "At least now he's got his heart back."

Martha just laughed, a little pityingly, and disappeared out the back door.

Unfortunately the wretchedness didn't stop after that—which hadn't really been at all wretched, if one were to make a standard of wretchedness and place this morning on it—and the more wretched she felt the less things Sophie could find to blame it on. Three or four customers came into the shop, looked around, caught the waves of Sophie's smiles that were still scattered across the shelves, and hastily left. A short while later Michael came into the room smiling so blissfully that Sophie accidentally squashed an entire blue blob of cornflowers and had to get a whole new bunch for corsage number twenty-two. By that time the boy had caught a whiff of Sophie's mood too: he twitched nervously, gathered up several daffodils from one of the displays and took off without looking at her.

From the castle room came Calcifer's voice, transmitted and booming magically across to where Sophie could hear it: "Kingsbury Mail!"

That took long enough, Sophie thought. A moment later, a pile of letters appeared on the corner of the flower shop counter, trying very much to look like it had just been there all along, sitting quietly among the spools of thread and thimbles and discarded leaves.
"Porthaven Mail!" Calcifer cried next, and several more letters were added to the mess; by the time he called out "Mansion Mail!" it had lost all pretenses and was threatening to topple away into chaos.

There seemed to be seven letters, though a few were quite heavy and accounted for the threatening-to-topple. Sophie rescued them and sorted through the lot. Six of the letters were addressed to Wizard Pendragon or Sorcerer Jenkin, so she put them away for snooping through later and turned her attention to the seventh. Not only was it the seventh—one of those portentous numbers that always popped up in all the tales—it was a fine specimen of a letter, majestic and imposing. The square envelope was made of heavy, shimmer paper of a deep purple hue, with a subtle non-papery scent that might even have been perfume. And, to her surprise, it was addressed to Wizard Howl and Miss Sophie Hatter. That was new; for the first time today Sophie found her heart was beating a little rhythm of curiosity that bordered on excitement. She reached for a letter opener, found none around, and made do with a pair of garden shears.

She had made short work of the very fine envelope—it was rather saddening, cutting open such an elegant piece of paper with garden shears—when the bell over the shop door tinkled. In came a few customers; Calcifer called out, "Shop mail!" in his magically disembodied voice, and two of them jumped and left again, looking ruffled.

"I'll get it," Sophie grumped, hoping to preserve what order she had on the counter, and stumped her way over to the mailbox outside the shop door, which indeed contained mail. One of the things Sophie sometimes missed about the curse was that it was so much easier to stump and stomp sourly around when you were a dumpy old woman. Whereas before it had felt quite right, quite appropriate, now she felt somewhat like a little child who was having a bad day, scuffing her feet along the floor to bother her mother. "Ugh," she said again, making a tall dark-haired girl who was browsing through the shelves of flowers glance sideways at her in confusion.

In the mailbox she found two more letters: one addressed to H. Jenkins and the other to Sophie Hatter.

Sophie felt her eyes goggle straight out of her head. Who on earth would want to send her a letter? She was so curious that on her way back to the counter she forgot to stomp. There was a moment once she got there where she was really stuck, unable to decide whether the purple letter or the new one interested her more and whether she should open the most- or least-interesting one first, to draw it out. But the new one triumphed: Howl's name was on the other one, whereas this one was specifically directed at her, Sophie Hatter, written in a scrawling but ornate handwriting on speckled off-white paper. She reached for the garden shears again in a state of high anticipation.

It was an oddly-shaped envelope, wide and rather chunky, and when Sophie opened it (not without some difficulty) she found out why: there was no letter inside at all. Shears still clutched in her hand, she extracted what turned out to be a flower—and what a flower it was. A single magnificent rose blossom, flat white and plush among its glossy serrated leaves. It was only a little bit crushed, and Sophie figured that might possibly be because of the garden shears and not because of the mail at all. She was more perplexed than ever. She shook the mangled envelope out onto the counter, and a little white scrap of paper fell out after the rose. There were only two letters written on it, though they seemed to be written with exquisite care: ~A.T. They looked like someone's initials. Maybe they were someone's initials. They weren't the initials of anyone she knew. Were they?

This was too much for Sophie. Garden shears in one hand, rose and paper clutched in the other, she jumped up from the flower shop counter and ran up the stairs into the castle room, calling for Calcifer.

"Calcifer! Help! Look at this!"

Calcifer wasn't in the castle room, but Michael and Martha were. Sophie clattered into the doorway shouting, and then she felt herself go quiet again. They were standing right near the end of the workbench. Michael's arms were wrapped around Martha's waist. Martha had her hands wound about the base of Michael's neck and one of them was clutching a daffodil into his hair, and the two of them were connected at the lips quite effectively, or at least they were until Sophie barged in.

Sophie stared. Martha and Michael sprang apart like lightning. Martha's face flushed a violent chrysanthemum red, but she smiled a crooked smile at her sister without quite looking her in the eyes; on the other hand, all the color had drained out of Michael's face in a look of pure terror. "What—" he managed to say.

That was more than Sophie could muster. Her face felt like a star had crashed upon it. The garden shears, sensing her state of distraction, made a leap for the floor; and when Sophie's hand tried to stop the escape, a long line of pain dashed its way across her palm.

"Ow!" Sophie howled, doubling over. Everything in both hands clattered to the floor.

"Oh, no—" Martha began, and ran over to pick things up. Michael said, "I wasn't doing anything, I swear—are you alright?" And the worst thing, the most absolutely wretched thing about it, was there was nothing in the world that could bring Sophie to face either of them. She shrieked "I'm fine!" and flung herself into the bathroom as quickly as she could.

~*~

Monday had been a good day to Michael Fisher, which as far as Mondays go was unexpected, but unexpected in an entirely acceptable way. He could lay out the good things about this particular Monday in a list (because except for the ones that told you what chores you had to do, lists could be quite enjoyable.):

1. breakfast made by Sophie, i.e. not made by Howl, i.e. not not-made-at-all
2. Calcifer has come home
3. spells have not exploded or caught fire
4. Martha
5. nobody has ordered baby's-buttons in the flower shop for a week, i.e., it no longer reeks of cheap funerals, particularly the one for his parents
6. Martha
7. summer seems finally to be cooling off
8. specifically, Martha leaving work to come see him in the flower shop, which has never happened before!

After that thought, of course, the amount of items on the list began to dwindle down to basically one thing, and everyone knows a proper list has at least three different items on it which are not all one person's name, so Michael gave up. This was alright, though, because by that time he had the real thing to distract him.

And then of course Sophie did one of her usual numbers, and Monday started to be much more like its miserable old self. Once rational thought was again making its way fairly regularly through his head, Michael felt he should have known about it, guessed it somehow. Monday was going to have a good shot at ruining his day.

"Here, hold these," Martha said to him, coming over and holding the heavy garden shears out to Michael as though she thought they might bite her. Well, they'd already had a fair taste of Sophie. Michael took them with all due respect. "She's going to kill me," he told her.

Martha stared down at the other things Sophie had dropped, which were a flower and a piece of paper. "Why on earth would she do that? You haven't done anything wrong. In fact, I would say quite the opposite."

Michael couldn't quite stop himself from blushing. It wasn't as if this was the first time he'd kissed Martha, but it was nice to hear he was still alright in that department. Nevertheless, the situation at hand was dire. He tried to explain.

"I know, I know. It's just—it's just Sophie. She's in an awful mood today already and I can't even think of anything Howl's done to set her off! I have no idea what she's going to do next. She'll probably go and clean out my room again in revenge." The thought made him shudder.

Martha's brow furrowed. "What a queer idea you have of Sophie!" she said. "I can't imagine her having such a fit over it. Has living with you people got to her that much? " And then that look which Michael liked to consider her thinking face crossed her features. "Well… Oh! Michael, I just remembered. Lettie's invited me to tea on Friday and we thought you should come along too. At Mrs. Fairfax's."

Why on earth would I want to do that? Michael thought, a bit blindsided. He gulped a little, and Martha took the moment to apply her most warm and generous smile, accompanied by a judiciously innocent bat of her eyelashes. "Sounds nice," Michael said. "If I survive the rest of the week, that is. There's no guarantee."

"Come off it, it can't be all that bad!" Martha said, and then the bathroom door crashed open and Sophie crashed out of it with a bandage wrapped around her hand. "Michael!" she shouted.

"It's not what you think!" Michael shouted, instantly on the alert. (It was the first thing he could think of. Martha poked him in the ribs with a snort.) But Sophie seemed to have another type of revenge in mind, because she only said, "Mind the shop!" and stomped her way over to the back door.

"What?" Now Michael really found himself getting angry. Martha had actually come to the flower shop to see him and now they would have to sit at the counter in front of everyone. "Why?"

Sophie stopped in her tracks and breathed out hugely. Her face was absolutely terrifying: it looked like a snarl with a bit of a sob thrown in. "I'm planting a garden!" she cried.

"What?" This time Michael and Martha said it together.

"A garden," Sophie said. "You know, with plants and flowers and things. Give me that." And she marched over to Martha and plucked the white rose from her hands.

If this was Sophie's way of pretending she wasn't punishing him, it was the most awful failure that Michael had ever seen. He gaped at her, and when she attempted to stomp off out into the backyard again—Michael thought she might be going for a shovel or something—he gathered up his courage, plucked at her sleeve, and said, "Sophie, I don't think this is fair! Howl's just given me this incredibly complicated spell—"

"Well, why don't you concentrate on working on it, then?" Sophie snapped. Michael dropped the sleeve hastily and backed away in case she tried to throw something. He hadn't seen Sophie like this for ages, maybe not since she tried to douse them all in weed-killer, and it was more terrifying than he remembered. Maybe the memory had diluted with time.

"Sophie, what's got into you?" Martha said. Looking properly shocked and horrified, she tagged along behind Michael, who tagged warily along behind Sophie, who had apparently changed her mind and stomped off toward the shop, rose clutched in her fist. "Nothing!" she said. Michael's mind was reeling trying to keep up with her, but he couldn't just let this go. "I think—" he started.

Calcifer zipped out of the shop door as the three of them were trailing in. "Howl's home!" he sang. And he was indeed. He was reading something at the counter with a package tucked under one arm, looking quite relaxed in his blue velvet suit. Sophie stopped in the doorway so fast that Michael's feet nearly came out from under him trying to keep him from slamming into her. Martha wasn't so lucky—she knocked her nose straight into Michael's spine with an 'oof!'

"Sophie," said Howl in the ensuing quiet, "You've got to see the new suit I just bought, it's absolutely marvelous. What is this poor purple thing that you've torn to smithereens? It looks like you went at it with a pair of pruning shears. Wait, let me see—" here he stopped to peruse the piece of lavender paper in his hand more thoroughly. Michael jumped a little as Martha, already smashed up behind him, put her arms around his waist and squeezed her head past his shoulder to see better.

Howl was continuing, obviously totally unaware of the perilous state of affairs. "Gracious thanks…splendid defeat of…autumn festivities…Kingsbury… Look, Sophie, we've been invited to the royal ball next month! I shall have to get you something to wear right away, can't have you out and about in those beastly boring things you normally buy."

Sophie's continued silence put Michael in the way of getting out of the room as quickly as possible.

Howl threw the letter back down at the table and looked up at the three of them crammed into the shop doorway. He asked, "Is something the matter?"

~2~

Chapter Text

~3~

 

~S~

There were times when Sophie really couldn't believe Howl. Her first impulse was to run at him, but whether to hit him with something or throw her arms around him was unclear. Nothing Howl had done had ever proved either of these were welcome ideas, in any case.

"Nothing!" she said. "Nothing's the matter!"

And that, she realized, was exactly it. That was the problem, laid out in a nutshell, simple as can be: absolutely nothing was the matter, nothing was going on at all, life had been fine and lovely and absolutely nothing had happened, nothing significant anyway, and she didn't think she could stand another minute of it.

"I might believe that if it were coming from somebody else," Howl asked, sounding more perplexed than angry. He set the parcel down next to the mess of boutonnieres on the shop counter. "What's happened?"

"I'm trying to tell you, nothing's happened!" Even Sophie couldn't help but hear the quaver hiding in her voice. Some sort of faraway logical bit of her cringed. "I was just heading outside to plant the garden, if you'd all get out of my way!"

Resolutely, Sophie turned back toward the castle-room for supplies. She was dimly aware of the fact that Michael and Martha were not crowded quite so close to her in the corridor anymore; she hoped they weren't getting any ideas. "You're not off the hook now that Howl's here!" she snapped, rounding back on Michael, who was indeed attempting to sneak back into the castle room with her little sister. "That shop needs minding!"

"Sophie—" Howl began from behind her. He seemed to have re-evaluated the situation, but Sophie was busy..

"But why do I have to mind the shop?!" Michael cried, despairingly.

Martha said, "I think I had better go."

Calcifer, who'd been watching the commotion with his orange coal eyes narrowed, said, "What garden?"

Howl started again. "Sophie, what in the name of all things holy—"

"The mansion needs so much work it's incredible we haven't been turned out by now," Sophie growled at the fire demon. Well, it was true. It was one of those things that she'd been trying to bring herself to do for ages, but she'd always been too busy with the shop.

" 'Bye then. Don't forget about Friday, Michael," Martha said, a little too loudly, and—stealing a glance at Sophie—planted a deliberate kiss on his lips before marching on past her sister and out the flower shop door, her flaming cheeks held high.

"Goodbye—" Michael cried after her, in what seemed to be utter despair. "I won't!"

Well, thought Sophie. That was bold. Howl was sputtering something behind her but in this state she didn't think she could bear his apologetic face—or any of his faces, really. Each and every one of them filled her with the stupidest thoughts, and it didn't seem to matter what her mood was at the time. At the moment she could barely even think straight, but the stupid thoughts had, if anything, increased. And now it occurred to her that this was probably the reason for her anger. It was a ridiculously unfair circular-logic spiral of rage.

Confound it, she was going to plant that garden!

~H~

"Damn it all, won't somebody tell me what's going on in my own house?" Howl asked after Sophie, but it was as good as asking the empty air. Sophie made lots of faces (most of them involuntary: not everyone had the Howl's superior facial malleability) and this was not a 'nothing is wrong' face.

If only there was a way to tell what kind of 'something is wrong' face it was, Howl thought, then he might have made some progress. "Help me out a little, Sophie," he muttered in confusion. The morning, which he'd spent in Kingsbury, had been lovely, but now a deep sense of what one might call impending doom had settled once more over the moving castle. It wasn't fair. He'd been so proud of himself yesterday for dodging it.

"Michael," Howl said now to his shaken-looking apprentice, "I think there ought to be a chart with all the faces everybody makes all lined up with the things that happen to make them make those faces."

Michael made a face in response. It was pretty easily traceable as a 'Howl-is-being-ridiculous-what-do-I-do' face, though, so the Wizard saw no need to elaborate. Instead he asked, "Do you know what's happened to her?"

The face the boy was wearing turned even redder and more deeply sorrowful than before. "Do I ever?" he asked. "What am I supposed to do, Howl?"

"Nothing to it," Howl said. "I guess you ought to mind the shop."

The blush on Michael's face blanched out to white again. "Not you too!" he wailed, and slumped to the counter looking utterly dejected. Howl left the flower shop before that look could burn itself more thoroughly into his brain. He had an inkling that some great injustice had been done, but Sophie wasn't coming back to do the job, and he really had an awful amount of work to do, too.

Besides, his experience with Sophie had convinced him that avoiding the subject was the best action one could possibly take. It was quite logical: regardless of how hard he tried to escape the moment, eventually Sophie would get fed up enough to tell him on her own. And actually trying to bring it up sooner usually had no tellable result except things being thrown at him; thus he was going to do everything in his power to put the incident out of his mind.

Howl went to the workbench humming. There's a reason they call him Horrible Howl, he thought, and felt cheered up already.

~S~

Sophie went into the mansion's backyard really intending to plant a truly magnificent garden. By the time she got there, though, as usual, she realized that she had no idea at all how to go about it. All her thoughts had devolved into a shuddering wreck at the forefront of her brain, and in the end she simply spent a lot of time digging. She dug until her arms hurt and then some. Dust and dirt clods flew everywhere. It was just as well that she'd been cut on her left hand; even though she favored it, she tended to forget it for long stretches of time until reminded by a new stab of pain. All the horrible things about this wretched, miserable, awful, really stupid mood went down through the wooden handle and out along with the earth.

And then, all of a sudden it seemed, what she had was a truly magnificent hole, and there was really nothing more she could do, and it was high time to start putting all the misbegotten tools she'd pulled out of the castle courtyard back where they belonged. This would have been a good deal more difficult if Howl were more orderly; as it was, Sophie could have paraded back and forth from mansion to castle room, strewing tools in utterly random places as she went, and no one else in the household would have batted an eyelash. Appreciating Howl's messiness came at the price of appreciating Howl himself, however, and that just added one more sore spot to Sophie's poor addled brain.

I'm so tired of being angry, Sophie thought, and clenched her twinging hand in desperation. Digging had given her a lot of time to think. It seemed in this case the alternative to being angry was being sad, and Sophie had lately been better at the former. Back at the hat shop, before the curse, she had been very sad for a long while: then she'd ended up in the moving castle and all of that into had been thrown such a colossal mess that she would have liked to imagine that kind of sadness was banished forever. But maybe it had been a hasty judgment.

There was an alternative to all this trouble, but it rested entirely in Howl's hands, and thinking about that just made Sophie so sad that she had to get angry again to stop herself, so there was that thought process gone full circle. Bother. She supposed she ought to just act normal and forget about the whole incident, or rather the whole feeling, since there had not really been an incident at all.

It's a far cry better than the hat shop, Sophie told herself. Perhaps in getting over her loneliness she had gotten greedier too. Now she wanted everything when maybe she should settle for what she had. Get used to it. Buck up, Sophie. Go in there and do it!

Acting normal was easier said than done. The first time she went through the castle Howl was at the workbench muttering lackadaisically over a spell, but he disappeared soon after. Sophie didn't think much of it until she heard rather ominous-sounding clunks coming from the bathroom. A short silence followed; and then a string of curses and what sounded like the word, "Ouch!"

Sophie was on her way to the shop when she heard it. It had occurred to her to use the beautiful white rose as a cutting for her new garden, and so it had languished in a pail on the mansion's patio the whole time she dug and thought and swore. Now, however, there was really no alternative but to find a proper vase for it. Unfortunately, the vases were in the shop, and Michael was minding the shop. And Sophie knew she'd been dreadfully unfair to Michael. An apology seemed in order.

Fine time for Howl to go into theatrics, Sophie thought. But then she realized it was a perfect opportunity to make things up to Michael. She went into the shop, filled a little vase with water from one of the pails, and stuck the white rose in it. Then she stood at the side of the counter, unsure of what to do next. A moment ago she'd had grand ideas of apologizing, but they got stuck in a nasty prickly bundle in her throat as soon as she opened her mouth. The cut on her hand twinged harder as if in sympathy. Eventually what she said was, "Howl's doing something in the bathroom. Maybe you ought to help him."

As if to prove this point, there was a furious CLUNK! from the other side of the castle and the wizard's voice called something out in the other room.

Sophie had intended to add, I'll hold things up in here, just to be clear that she was no longer on the war-path; but at once Michael turned and shot her a look that veritably blazed, all his face seeming to become one long pointed scowl. "I can't," he snapped. "I'm minding the shop."

Sophie's mouth dropped open in shock. From the other room Howl's voice came vaguely again. It could possibly have been saying "Help!" and then "Sophie!" —Which gave her all the excuse she needed.

"Alright then," she said sharply to Michael and fled back to the castle room, afraid she was going to do something drastic. One part of her rather felt she'd deserved the snide comment, but hadn't she been trying to make amends? "Gah!"

"Excuse me!" Howl's echoing voice was crying from behind the bathroom door. "What are you all doing out there, enjoying the sound of my suffering?"

"Enough, I'm right here!" Sophie growled. At least here was something she could be normally, rightfully annoyed about. She got to the bathroom door and tried it; it was locked. Honestly, the girl thought, and rattled the door in its frame a couple times, which had a predictable lack of effect but expressed her feelings perfectly.

"Hurry up! Please!" The voice from the bathroom door said, pleadingly. "You can't believe how inconvenient this is!"

"I would if you didn't have it locked!"

"You are useless, aren't you?" Howl cried. There followed a series of grunts, scrapes, and elongated pauses, and at long last there was a soft click from the doorknob and a titanic sigh from within. The girl let herself in. Things had better be dire.

They were, in a sense. "What on earth—!" Sophie said.

Howl looked patently ridiculous. He was sitting on the toilet lid, a completely miserable expression wilting across his face. This would doubtless have been more effective if one could see any more of his face than the bridge of his nose, one tragically-sloping eyebrow and half of one lost-looking green eye. The rest of his face, and seemingly-random portions of his arms and torso, were engulfed in sections of rumpled, scalloped, slatted, embroidered fabric. It seemed the wizard had had trouble getting the monstrosity over his shoulders, or had done so incorrectly at first and then had trouble getting it off again, for one of his arms was twisted up at an unnatural angle above his head and the other pinned up against his body at the elbow with its hand sticking limply out of what might or might not be the frilled end of a sleeve. Worst of all, the entire mess of it, from the high-waisted trousers (which he had put on successfully) to the tiniest little spiral design on the hem, was so awfully, frightfully yellow that it fairly made Sophie's eyes hurt to look at it.

"They made it look so easy in the shop," Howl's invisible mouth said mournfully from somewhere beneath gobs of yellow cloth. When Sophie did not reply, his single eyebrow knitted, as it were, and the green eye narrowed. "Are you going to keep on staring or help me? I'm not sitting like this because it's comfortable, you know. In fact I think I may be straining something, though I'm not sure what it is at the moment because I'm not sure what bit of me is where."

Sophie stared a little more. What the whole thing amounted to was Howl wanted her to take his clothes off. There was a word for this type of behavior somewhere in her vocabulary. The word was unfair. All the stupid thoughts she'd been having all week came flooding more strongly into her brain than ever—which was the last thing she wanted in her present mood. She clutched her hands tight against her skirt and said severely, "What a baby you are! I don't think I ought to help you! I think you're just going to have to sort all your bits out on your own. You got yourself into this whole thing and I'm sure you can get yourself out of it just as well." Finished, she backed herself into the bathroom door and tried to escape. Howl made a tragic strangled-sounding noise and leapt to his feet after her.

"Sophie, you can't—" he began; then the lump of cloth that made up his head looked down at the floor and seemed to take in the fact that he'd trodden on several inches of trailing fabric. "Oh—" He pulled up one of his arms to disentangle, but this seemed not to be connected to what he thought it was, for the next moment he had stumbled, cried out, "Damnation!" and toppled over backwards in a great flail of disastrous yellow.

~H~

It's dark, Wizard Howl thought from the floor, and groaned. He'd never heard of anyone going blind after falling down. "Village Heartthrob Trips over Toilet, Loses Vision" ? But it appeared that the lack of light was more the result of this dratted yellow suit, which had finally decided to get on with it and smother him entirely. His left knee and shoulder, the small of his back and various other uncategorizeable parts of his upper torso throbbed dully; they'd all hit the bathtub rather hard. Yes, the suit had definitely been a bad idea. He could admit that.

Then he heard the bathroom door bang shut, and grudging footsteps stomped back across the floor toward him. Apparently becoming completely helpless had won his case for him. He waved his freer hand feebly and tried to fend off the triumph. "Oh, you needn't bother," he said. "I'll manage to get out of this on my own somehow. Do go on, I'm sure you have other important things to do. I'll be fine. I think."

Sophie's voice came floating down on him grudgingly in the dark. "You can't just leave well enough alone, can you?" it said. "Be quiet—and sit still!" Howl, who had been trying to claw his way out of the fabric again, sat still quite gladly. Apparently the woman did have an ounce of human compassion after all. Anyway moving his limbs would only tear the suit. Somehow he had managed to fold his right arm in toward his chest as he fell, but his right was still hanging somewhere above his head.

He felt Sophie sit down quite near, and the light got a shade darker, which meant she was leaning over him. "You think you're in a bad way," her voice said. It was followed by her warm small hands plucking at his shoulders. "I'm going blind up here. What on earth possessed you to buy something so…so…horribly yellow? There, now try to sit up."

"It's gold," Howl said, and tried. "Don't you like it? It's all the rage in the capital this season." The fabric stretched alarmingly when he reached his free arm toward the ground, so wriggling his back up against the wall of the tub seemed the only other course of action. "You know," he said, wriggling. "For fall. Autumnal splendor and all that—"

Sophie did not appear convinced. "Whoever told you this was gold out to have their eyes gouged out," she said. "Or at least examined. Oh, for heaven's sake!" The last was in frustration at his attempts to sit up; there was a rustling of skirts, and the next thing Howl knew, he was being yanked up against Sophie with considerable force. "Careful!" he yelped through a mouthful of fabric. It was difficult because his face was smashed against something warm and moving. "You can't—oof—manhandle this kind of—ah—material!"

"Oh do tell," Sophie's voice said, annoyed, and as Howl found himself upright against the bathtub she sat down heavily between his legs. "Whyever are you so heavy?" The girl was obviously breathing quite hard. Her hands lingered on his shoulders for a moment, resting, and then and went on down to where his collarbones were, finding something to straighten there. Howl shivered.

"Habit, I suppose," he said, making an attempt to shrug. Sophie had ended up sitting effectively astride his left leg, and he wasn't sure how he felt about that. Or rather, he was quite sure, but this assurance only made the sensation more maddening. Blindly, the wizard felt her knee lining down the inside of his thigh and made a face to himself. He wondered exactly what part of Sophie his face had been smashed up against for a moment there. She was still trying to free him from the suit, her fingers teasing and tugging here and there at the mess. But it seemed he wasn't tangled as thickly as he'd thought, for he could feel every slight motion go right through the fabric to his skin. "Be careful!" Howl said again, though personally he was unsure whether he said it to himself or Sophie. He tried to think of something helpful to say. "I think there's some snaps around the back somewhere; I lost track of them right before my arm got stuck."

This was actually the truth. And obviously sometimes Megan was right: virtue was its own reward. This time he was quite sure that it was Sophie's breasts brushing his shoulder as she sat forward. Her hands went on searching through the folds thrown over his back and a rush of blood coursed through Howl's body, from his cheeks right down to his toes. If only he were free of this blasted suit! Then it would be quite simple to turn his head to the side, wrap his arms about her waist—What on earth are you doing? Sophie would say to him—and then—and then, well—

"Bother!" real Sophie said and her warmth slumped back away from him. "This isn't working at all!"

"Maybe you should start from the bottom," Howl suggested. He immediately wished he hadn't. It had been a very poorly phrased suggestion and it did nothing to keep his mind off the things he was attempting to keep his mind off.

Sophie didn't take it the wrong way though. Her knee shifted position against his leg and her voice snapped, "If you know that much about it, why don't you take it off yourself?"

"I've tried," Howl moaned, sitting back against the tub. The tangles of his suit felt more confining on his limbs than ever. "I'm beginning to believe I'll be stuck in here forever."

"Oh, nonsense," Sophie said. But she did take his suggestion. There was a last exasperated tug at the cloth on his elbow; then, quite abruptly, her hands slapped down against his belly and yanked the lowest fringe of the suit up from there.

"Ow!" Howl and Sophie said at once.

~S~

Howl said, "What did you have to do that for?" He was using his hurt voice. Sophie didn't reply because she was biting her lip against the pain in her palm: she'd caught the bandage against something in her haste to get Howl's suit off. And she'd been trying to get this part done quickly, too. The situation was positively going to undo her if she didn't. The bathroom felt airless somehow, as if all the atmosphere had been sucked right up into her lungs and was throbbing there in tempo with her cut.

Howl's stomach rose and fell sharply under her hands and he said in quite a different voice, "What's this on your hand?"

"Nothing," Sophie said. She concentrated on unclenching her fingers, one by one. They ran across Howl's skin in long arcs, and she tried not to imagine that he shivered in response. "Just…" she said— "Just a little attack by the garden shears."

"Let me see it."

"Well—" Sophie got ahold of himself. She jerked her hands away from Howl's body in a hurry. She didn't know why this was so difficult. Howl had never so much as kissed her on the cheek; obviously he didn't want her touching him. She was almost certain of it—except for times like these. "Well," she snapped, "I can't very well do that with you wrapped up in this hideous yellow thing, now can I?"

Howl's arms waved about furiously and pathetically in swathes of yellow. "Why do you have to make everything so difficult?" he cried, and then he spoke a word which made everything around them seem watery and wavy. There was a moment of confusion where the yellow suit seemed to become opague and slid backwards and Howl's face appeared from within patterned with the fabric's weave. Then the man leaned forward, barechested and completely suit-free, and snatched at her wrist with his right hand.

"No!" Sophie shouted, floored.

Howl shook dark hanks of his hair out of his green eyes impatiently. His fingers closed around her left arm. "Just let me look at it. I promise it won't hurt a bit," he cajoled, letting his concern slip sweetly out of his lips and run straight for her heart, but Sophie wasn't fooled. "Cheat! Liar!" she said. Her anger from earlier had returned twofold. "You could have done that all along! Why did you need me in here if you could just magic everything back to normal?"

"It wasn't important enough before," the wizard said smoothly, drawing her hand—and therefore the rest of Sophie—toward him quite inescapably. "Stop squirming! I'm trying to help!"

"I was doing just fine before!" Sophie protested, tugging at Howl's grip, but she was already losing her resolve. The long-fingered hand circling her wrist was quite gentle, honestly concerned, and this seemed to the girl the most unfair of all. "Really! I've already used a bandage on it and everything!"

"Shhh," Howl said. He solved her argument by peeling the bandage off and tossing it over his shoulder into the bathtub with his left hand. Then he used that hand to support her palm while he ran his other thumb along the edge of the cut ever so lightly. It was no use; Sophie's palm gave big staccatto bursts of pain at the pressure. Howl's face had lost its smooth look and was wearing an expression of deep concentration; he was holding her hand so close to it that for a bizarre moment Sophie fancied he was going to press it to his lips.

"Hmmph," Sophie said, failing to stop her imagination soon enough. She scowled and looked away, but this turned out to be a bad idea too. Without all the layers of clothes he usually wore it was clear that Wizard Howl was quite a slender man, almost skinny, but the angles and curves of his chest were just as well-structured as the elegant bones of his jaw and cheekbone. The whole expanse of pale skin on his bare torso seemed flawless. And it all was so close that Sophie had only to lean forward a bit more and she would be kissing the junction between his shoulder and collarbone.

As soon as she thought that, the urge to actually do so was almost unbearable. An ache started up in Sophie's chest and carved its way down her belly through her thighs. Her wounded hand throbbed. Unfair, unfair, unfair!—she thought desperately.

Howl was speaking. "This quite nasty for such a little thing," he said without so much as letting her hand go. "I can't believe that even you could do this to yourself cutting flowers. What were you doing with the shears, juggling them?"
"I was just holding them!" Sophie said. She looked up again to find Howl's green gaze fixed bemusedly on her face. Her response did nothing to avoid this new method of torment; if anything Howl looked delighted to hear it.

"Obviously," he said, "your Sophie-ish powers of destruction are far greater than even I had imagined. I'm surprised you haven't had the castle down around our ears by now. I don't know why I ever thought it was a good idea letting you near sharp objects. Who are you going to do in next, Michael?"

The mention of Michael just reminded Sophie of her bad behavior earlier. "I wasn't just standing there!" she snapped, giving her wrist a yank. "I was distracted!" Getting angry hadn't helped the stupid thoughts; the next best option was to get away. The last place she wanted to be at the moment was sitting here, helplessly near to Howl being his most horrible and charming.

"Distracted by what," Howl said gleefully, "an earthquake?"

"Michael and Martha!" Sophie said, and felt her face go crimson on the spot. "They were—" she yanked again on her
hand— "they were—"

"Wait, I'm almost finished! What's got into you? Hold still!" Howl cried. He muttered something under his breath and the room got all wavy again for a moment.

"—kissing!" Sophie finished and gave her wrist another good tug just as Howl let her go. She tumbled backwards across the floor onto her bottom. Howl failed to look properly horrified at the news. "And…?" he asked, leaning forward after her. "Are you alright?"

Sophie tried to convey the seriousness of the situation. "But—they were—I mean, kissing! Right in the castle room!" she cried, struggling upright again. "Right—right over by the workbench!"

Howl untangled himself from Sophie's legs and the pile of yellow suit and attempted to stand up. "I hope they didn't knock anything over," he said, and his brow furrowed. Then something like comprehension seemed to dawn on him. "Is that what you were so upset about earlier?" He leaned down and took both Sophie's hands to pull her to her feet. "Sophie, I had no idea you were such an old prude! You're going to have to get used to it sometime! That's what lovers do, you know—they kiss!"

~H~

In Howl's defense, he was babbling, and probably had been for some time. Things had proceeded from one situation to the next rather quickly. He rather wished Sophie was still sitting on him, so he'd still have time to get things in proper order in his brain. But that had effectively stopped him thinking anyway, so why bother?

Sophie's reply to the last comment was long in coming. In fact it didn't seem to be coming at all. She just stood there with her hands inside his and her face turning redder and redder by the moment. That was when Howl realized that while babbling he must have said something extremely important without knowing it. Panic set in, but his mouth kept on going. "Honestly," he found himself saying, "What did you expect from them? If I'm not mistaken they've been sweethearts for a while now. And they're not so young. You Ingary people get married so early anyway. It can't be so much of a shock."

Sophie stared at him. Howl's brain stopped giving his mouth things to say, but his mouth hadn't got the message yet and was hanging half-open stupidly. Oh, shit, he thought. He could feel Sophie's pulse fluttering like a trapped bird against his fingers, and for a moment it felt like all the warmth in their two bodies was stuck there in between them where their hands came together. Howl's heart was hammering. He didn't think it could take the strain for another moment. Oh, shit. I'm supposed to do something, aren't I? I'm supposed to kiss her, aren't I? Am I?

"Sophie," he said.

"Yes," Sophie said, tonelessly, but her jaw set just slightly and her eyes got wider, as though bracing for something. A tremor passed through her hands.

"I've—" Howl said. He forced the words out. "Did you notice? I've fixed your hand."

Sophie looked down at their hands. Howl relaxed his fingers to let her see and a wave of cold despair washed through him.

"Oh," the girl said, and slid her hands out of his grip. "Oh." And then she took two big steps away from him, until she was standing in the bathroom door. "Well, isn't that lovely!" she cried without a bit fake smile blooming across her face. It was more teeth than smile. "And look, you're out of the suit too! It's just one big happy ending around here, isn't it?"

Howl's heart plunged into his stomach. That wasn't fair! Another moment and he'd have been ready! How was he supposed to know what she wanted of him? He wasn't used to doing things, dammit!

"Wait—Sophie," he plead and took a step toward her. "What are you on about?"

The girl retreated. "Nothing!" she snarled. "Nothing! I'm leaving now!"

~3~

Chapter Text

~C~
“Nonsense,” Calcifer said.

Howl turned a piteous green gaze to the ceiling, which presumably would be more helpful than the fire demon, and made titanically despairing gestures. “Exactly!” he wailed. “I can’t make heads or tails of it either! Calcifer, I’m doomed!”

“Oh, spare me,” Calcifer crackled. “That’s not what I said.” He was feeling quite put out with Sophie and Howl. Put out was just the word for it too. He no longer held Howl’s heart in his belly, but he figured having it there for such a long time had given him a pretty good notion of what was going on inside the poor little thing. Right now what was going on was rubbish which ought to have been dealt with months ago, if Howl’s heart had behaved like Calcifer figured a proper human heart with an ounce of courage would. But then perhaps Howl’s heart had never been a proper human heart to begin with. Or was there even such a thing?

Howl was looking at him expectantly; Calcifer returned to the point. Sophie had stomped off into the flower shop fifteen minutes before; the wizard had trailed into the castle room five minutes later and draped himself onto the chair in front of the hearth in the manner of a yellow throw rug, exuding an aura of palpable defeat. The remaining ten minutes he had spent uttering what amounted in Calcifer’s point of view to large amounts of effusive gibberish.

“You,” he said in his most severe manner, “are not doomed. You’re just nervous.”

“What’s the difference?” Howl covered his eyes with one hand and thumped the other into the ripples of yellow suit at the left side of his chest to indicate his heart. “I’m a wreck. I don’t think this thing works right.”

This was so similar to Calcifer’s previous conclusion that he could not help letting out a burst of wet-sounding steam in laughter. Howl glared at him in a way the fire demon figured was supposed to look genuinely hurt. “Look, even you can’t take me seriously,” he muttered. “I’m good for nothing. Sophie obviously hates me.”

“If she did, she would have left long ago,” Calcifer said. Restating the obvious was a skill he had developed when dealing with humans, particularly Howl. Then a worrisome thought struck him, and he could not help but add: “Well, what have you done? You didn’t do something so horrible she really is leaving, did you? I for one will miss her!”

Howl’s green eyes went wide; he jammed his hands into his dark hair and yanked at great tufts of it with his fingers. “You’re telling me!” he cried. “Did you see where she went?”

“That’s none of my business,” Calcifer said, immediately wary. If Howl had made Sophie cross it would be upon him to go find her; otherwise there was the risk of him trying to get Calcifer to solve all his problems. This happened with alarming frequency.

Howl made a strangled noise and began to pace across the hearth-rug in long nervous strides. “Whose side are you on, anyway?” he cried; and then, having gotten off the point, continued to deviate. “What am I supposed to do? Does she expect me to guess her every thought? Calcifer, you’ve got to help me! You’ve SEEN what happens to me around girls!”

That was a particularly distressing timbre and Calcifer had to interrupt it rather hastily. “This,” he hissed, “is not girls. It’s Sophie.”

“That’s even worse,” Howl said despairingly. “All the others I could just leave.”

“I remember,” Calcifer said. “And look how that ended up: either Aunts or dripping.” And another worry, or perhaps a suspicion, shot through him; the very idea of it made his insides feel cold and clammy. “Howl, if you ever do anything to make Sophie drip on me, you’ll be very, very sorry.”

In response to this Howl shot him a look of such utter misery that Calcifer could almost feel his heart contorting. “Good heavens,” he said. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“It looks as though you’re well on your way there,” said Calcifer.

“That’s an unfair accusation!” Howl said. He was apparently so shocked that he dropped back into the chair in front of the hearth. His yellow suit flapped as he waved his hands helplessly. “This isn’t like that at all! Sophie isn’t like that at all!”

“Maybe,” Calcifer said, “You’re not looking at it the right way. Sophie isn’t drippy, but she’s been yelling an awful lot lately. They seem to mean much the same to her.”

Howl sat yellowly on the chair like a peeled banana and stared at Calcifer wide-eyed. The fire demon was almost tempted to laugh again; a whiff of smoke tickled through him. He tamped it down with some success; Howl actually seemed to be listening to him, which might be a first.

“Shit,” the wizard said after a long moment, in which the dusty and cluttered shelves peered down disapprovingly and Calcifer flickered back and forth a few times for good measure. “I’ve got to do something.”

“Really,” said Calcifer. He did not stop himself from using his dryest crackle. This behavior needed to end as soon as possible. As a whole he thought he preferred green slime.

~S~

The seven-league boots weren’t in the cupboard. Sophie looked for them among the flowerpots in the shop, but she could not discover them anywhere; hopefully Michael hadn’t sold them. She was disappointed. Going any multiple of seven leagues away from Howl would have been a mercy at the moment.

At a loss, the girl threw the door handle purple-side down and stumbled out among the flowerbeds in the waste. The sun was on its way down out of the sky by now, sending shafts of flickering golden light sheeting down among the late-summer blossoms. Dust motes and insects floated through the air in little glowing specks. It was going to be an absolutely gorgeous sunset.

“Bother!” shouted Sophie as loud as she could. She tried out a few of Howl’s words too. “Blast! Damnation!” It gave her a savage sort of pleasure to imagine what the flowers were thinking of her.

“Don’t you go judging me,” she told a large bush of blushing roses. “You can’t even decide whether you’re going to be red or pink. Oh, you look really pleased with yourself, but I’ll bet you’ve got a nasty streak in the center.”

There were an awful lot of roses in the wastes, after all. Pink ones and purple ones and big white ones and trailing red ones and orangey-red ones and magenta ones and a green one here or there. Sophie got distracted from her rage for a moment imagining a gigantic rose garden in the mansion’s backyard.

“It’ll have to be full of thorns,” she said aloud to the sunset. “That way Howl will get stuck every time he tries to slither out of things.” The thought made her smile, and then the smile made her sigh. She was rapidly running out of anger, and the idea was, frankly, worrisome. She hoped she was not going back to being hat-shop Sophie. Speaking her mind about things had been nice for a change.

“Sophie!” a crackling voice hissed, quite near. Sophie jumped and pricked her thumb on the rose she had been looking at. “Calcifer!” she said. “What is it?”

The fire demon came zipping up to her in a zigzag, forming a gauzy halo around the flower heads as he hopped from blossom to blossom. He looked odd with the late sun beaming through his orange flames, dimmed and smoky somehow. “Help!” he said.

“What is it?” Sophie asked, alarmed. Calcifer sounded truly upset, but it was often difficult to tell. The castle could be falling down; on the other hand, Michael may have just forgotten the new temperament of the mop and sent another water-spell dousing through the castle room.

“Howl’s in one of his moods,” Calcifer said, and Sophie felt her alarm turn hot and dangerous in her stomach.

“Good. He can rot in it for all I care,” she said. She sucked a bead of blood off her thumb in irritation and determined not to listen to another word on the subject.

~C~

Calcifer sputtered dully.

“Oh, no,” he said. “This has gone on long enough. You can’t just leave him alone in there. This is at least half your fault, you know!”

Sophie seemed as though she did not want respond, but after a moment she was apparently unable to help it. She compensated by throwing Calcifer a glare full of daggers. “How can it be my fault?” she asked. “Howl doesn’t even want me around!”

The fire demon stopped flickering for a full thirty seconds and gaped at her. He knew his blue flame teeth were hanging out, but this was really ridiculous. “Nonsense!” he finally said.

Sophie snorted at him and studiously avoided the point. “What do you mean, nonsense?”

“Exactly what I said, nonsense,” Calcifer crackled. He leapt rapidly from rose to rose on the bush in front of Sophie, trying to channel his frustration. Some of the blooms were begginning to smolder nicely, but he could not be bothered with them at the moment. He didn’t know which was worse—getting through Howl’s pathetic whining or Sophie’s abject denial. Why on earth the two most pigheaded human beings in all of Ingary had turned out to be his humans was beyond him.

He said, “Nobody here wants you to leave—least of all Howl! He’s just too much of a coward to say anything about it! Do you realize what it’s like living with the two of you? It’s felt like something is going to explode all week! You’d better go in there and fix it, or we’ll all be miserable forever!”

Sophie’s large hazel eyes were filtered with waning sunlight; at last she fixed her gaze on Calcifer instead of the flowers. “You think it’s making you miserable,” she said thickly. “You can’t just fix people, Calcifer. Believe me, there is nothing I can do about Howl’s feelings.”

Calcifer’s whole being flamed up in irritation. The level of denial in which these two lived was astounding. “Humans!” he said, and heard his own voice snap like a log in a hot fireplace. “Howl’s feelings are the last thing you need to be worrying about!”

“What makes you so sure of yourself?” Sophie said, folding her arms across her chest as though she were desperately trying to hold something in. But she had played straight into his hands.

“I,” Calcifer crackled, rising up off the rosebushes until he was level with her face, “was in charge of Howl’s heart far before you came along! I know all about it! All about it,” he added, disgustedly. There were some points he did not feel like going into for their sheer human silliness.

“Oh,” Sophie said, and fell silent for a time. Her face did a number of very strange contortions that Calcifer, whose range of expertise in human emotions was limited to a long list of Howl’s dramatic faces, could not entirely decipher. They appeared to be along the lines of irritation; unless it were joy, or perhaps anger. “Oh,” the girl said, and then once more, “Oh, this is silly!”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Calcifer said in a low hiss, fluttering among the blossoms, miffed. Maybe he ought to just sulk until the two of them fixed things. Then he said, “Hey! Wait up! What are you doing? Don’t do anything stupid!” For Sophie had stomped off in the direction of the moving castle as fast as her furious legs could carry her.

 

~4~

Chapter Text

~S~

Things were getting rather dire as far as Sophie was concerned. Calcifer was right—she didn’t think she could take another minute of this nonsense. A large number of things had just driven through her brain at once. Now there was a prudent, cautious, sensible part of her mind protesting the hopeful reckless half’s sudden delight; the two were battling it out wildly up there.

She didn’t get much time to think it over, either, because soon she realized there were other problems afoot. Today felt like she had been in and out of the castle all day, slamming doors back and forth and left and right; and perhaps the castle had gotten tired of it. Resolving herself to go in and deal with the situation, Sophie rushed up to the door and yanked stoutly on the brass handle—only to have it slide brassily and resolutely out of her fingers.

This had never happened before. Sophie stared at it for a moment. In the intervening time the castle churned very slowly a foot away down the wastes, so she had to shuffle after it a little ways to reach the door again.

“This is ridiculous. Door, open up!” Sophie said, and tried the handle again. It held fast as before. If this was some new spell on the castle, it had to have been enacted between this afternoon, when she was out in the garden, and the time she left the castle—unless of course it only worked on the waste door. Both scenarios seemed highly unlikely. This left only one very unpleasant option: Howl had purposefully locked her out.

Any intentions Sophie might have had of leaving the castle for good evaporated in a blast of rage. How dare he, she thought, and yanked once more at the door handle. “Hey!” she shouted, and began pounding on the wood, shuffling to keep up with the castle as she did so. “Hey, door! Open up! You’d better listen to me, or I’ll—I’ll chop you up and throw you in the fire!”

Even this threat, however, seemed to do nothing to the castle door. Sophie got a bit of an idea when Calcifer zipped up behind her, trailing a scatter of anxious-looking sparks. “What are you doing now? What’s going on?” he asked. Sophie shuffled a few steps further after the castle and asked him, “Open up this door, will you?”

“Are you going to fix things up with Howl?” Calcifer asked, innocently.

“Oh, for crying out loud!” Sophie said.

“Are you?” Calcifer asked. The castle drifted a few inches further away.

“Yes!” Sophie said. It was more an oversimplification than a lie. “Just open this door!”

“You don’t have to be mean about it,” the fire demon grumped, and appeared to apply himself.

There was a moment of silence in which the sun peacefully sank a bit lower on the horizon, the castle lazily ground its way over the swaying bushes of the waste, and Sophie shuffled after it muttering curses under her breath. Then:

“Huh,” Calcifer said, sounding more worried than ever. “I can’t.”

“You can’t or you won’t?” Sophie asked, before she could help it.

The fire demon sputtered at her indignantly. “I can’t!” he said. “You’re welcome for trying!” And with a flash of orange flame he shot up into the sky above the moving castle and threw himself down one of the various chimneys sticking out of the roof at odd angles. It wasn’t the chimney Sophie would have expected to lead to the fireplace, but she probably ought to have stop being surprised by things like that by now. Anyway she refused to let herself be distracted.

“Door!” She howled, hop-stepping after the castle in awkward strides. “Open up, you beastly pile of planks! Howl Jenkins, I know you can hear me, open this door!” She yanked again on the handle, but the brass held quite resolutely.

Furious, Sophie hop-stepped faster and began surveying the clutter of dark walls and chimneys and odd angles bulging through the castle’s seamed sides. There were a goodly number of doors there that she knew did not fit the castle’s interior even remotely. A ridiculous idea had ocurred to her, and as she’d rushed over intending to go through with an idea even more ridiculous, it seemed like a good time to get it out of the way.

“Sophie,” Sophie said to herself, “up and at’em.”

~H~

“HOWL!” Calcifer’s voice shrieked from the chimney.

“I’m busy!” wizard Howl shouted. It might not be the truest thing he’d said all day, but it was getting there. He grabbed something from the workbench, realized that it was not at all what he was looking for, and picked up something that was even less what he was looking for. Come on, now, Howell, he thought. Think!

“Howl, Sophie’s on the war-path!” The fire-demon flooded down into the grate and grabbed onto some logs for dear life.

“What did you say to her?” Howl cried, and dropped the flask of not-what-he-was-looking-for, which spilled along his workbench, running straight through his carefully-constructed collection of runes and fizzing up into clouds of opaque green steam. “Damnation!”

“I told her you don’t want her to leave!” Calcifer said.

“Why would you do that?” Howl cried, trying to concentrate on the magic. Calcifer of all beings ought to know that he was not responsible for what was coming out of his mouth at the moment. This was what you got for being slapdash. It was a good thing Michael was in the shop and not here to see what a mess Howl was making of things. And just when he’d made up his mind to actually do something, too!

He half-turned to the grate in bewildered exasperation, and caught a glimpse of Calcifer leaning out of the grate as if he wanted to get up in Howl’s face and sizzle at him. But the fire demon seemed to figure out that this was not a good idea, for his voice was no closer when Howl turned away. “Would you rather I told her something different?”

“I would rather,” Howl said, finding chalk and using it to write a rune on the workbench where the green steam wasn’t, “you came and helped me clean this spell up! It was almost done, if I could just get some peace around here—” It felt like the right rune, and that would have to do for the moment. A pressure let up somewhere inside his ears: Sophie had stopped threatening the back door. This was not as reassuring as it sounded. God only knew what she was doing instead.

Calcifer did not come and help either. He said, as though Howl had not just slithered away from the conversation, “I was just telling her the truth.”

Damnation of all damnations! The green vapor was beginning to cloud his vision; it had a strong damp-leaves sort of smell and felt moist somehow. That would have to go on the list of things to attend to. “The truth!” Howl cried, attempting to wave it away with his hand. “The truth is always the worst! Couldn’t you at least have told her the truth in a way that…I don’t know, gave me a little more time?”

“Time for what?” Calcifer sizzled, and then they were interrupted by a screechy squeal of a sound that rent through all the smoke and cut right to Howl’s eardrums. The ceiling beyond the workbench shook and a dozen things fell off the shelves at once.

“Sophie!” Howl and Calcifer shouted, turning as one toward the noise; but by then the only sensible thing to do was duck, which Howl considered and then promptly forgot to do.
The sound had swelled from a raspy keen to a painful wrenching and rumbling. Howl could barely see the other side of the room with the loamy-smelling smoke swirling about, but the floor danced beneath his feet. And, with a shudder, an entire portion of the back wall before him seemed to crash out of existence, revealing a brilliant blue hole through which Sophie’s voice came into the castle, shouting, “Howl Jenkins!”

Sophie herself came stumbling forward out of this blue gap and made straight for Howl through the haze of wet-smelling steam. The stumble did not make the entrance any less impressive: even green and blurry, the rage flew off her in sparks. Her body was torqued like a wire and her reddish hair seemed to float about her shoulders. The green smoke got the idea immediately: it fled to the corners of the room in billows.

“Sophie!” Howl cried, retreating hurriedly. This was not how he had imagined this scene at all. His heart, for one, had sent a charge through his entire body at once, and it was deeply unsettling. With fury and magic steaming off her almost tangibly, Sophie looked magnificent. Her hazel eyes were hard as gemstones. Her teeth were gritted under flushed lips. It would all be truly amazing if only it was directed at someone other than himself.

“Don’t you Sophie me!” the girl shouted, slowing in her stride but still coming toward him quite deliberately. A part of Howl tried desperately not to get dizzy. “What on earth is going on in here?”

“Oh, no,” The wizard said, regaining his senses enough to dodge. He certainly wasn’t falling for this kind of treatment. “I think I ought to be asking you what’s going on. Am I imagining things, or did you just blow a hole in our wall?”

Something caught Sophie up in her charge, but only for a moment. Then she made a half-strangled sound and lunged at Howl again as if to grab him by the collar and shake him. “What was I supposed to do?” she said. “You locked me out!”

Howl backed up. “Honestly, Sophie, I can explain—” he began, and Sophie seemed to get a grip on herself: at least, she stopped advancing. She flung her shoulders forward and placed her hands on her hips as if freed from this constraint they would attempt to do terrible, terrible things. And she glared such a tremendous, smoldering, smothering kind of glare that Howl though his skin was veritably catching fire. He felt like a small boy being told off by a fierce aunt or maybe a babysitter, except that there were parts of him that at the moment felt neither small nor at all apologetic.

“You’d better start explaining, Howl Jenkins,” Sophie said. There was something in her voice that made his stomach twist even harder than before. “Here I am coming in to make amends, and—”

“Amends?” Howl said. He had to jump on the first opportunity to divert the subject or he would be completely outmatched. “Is that what you call this?”

Unfazed, Sophie kept right on topic. “Don’t you try to slither out of this!” she said. “I know I’m just sort of living here as the housekeeper but I have as much right to come in that door as anyone!”

And that was it. That was exactly where he understood everything—and understanding made Howl just as mad as Sophie. The unfairness of it punctured deep somewhere in his lungs, no matter what was going on in the lower regions of his body.

“Housekeeper?” he found himself crying, moving forward so he could say it right to the stupid girl’s face. “Whoever said anything about you being the housekeeper?”

“You—” Sophie began, but the anger was on Howl’s side now. It was about time, too. He cut her off before any more such tripe could come out of her mouth.

“I do not need a housekeeper! I never asked you to come poke your nosy nose into all my dust! In fact I rather liked all the mess!”

Sophie, whose mouth was open to berate him and whose eyebrows were doing scandalous things to her forehead, seemed to pause with her entire being. A dart of horror punched into Howl’s gut, but the rest of him was too seized up with the anger to stop.

“If it were up to me,” he continued, “you wouldn’t have to work another day in your life!”

Sophie goggled at him. This sort of reaction from him did not seem to have ocurred to her at all. There was something strange and whirly in her eyes that made Howl’s steam ran out abruptly; his mouth did that odd moving thing that it could not stop doing.

“But I know what that would do to you,” he said, and his finger jabbed into Sophie’s face and made a waggling motion that Howl had never wanted to live to see it perform. “You wouldn’t stand being spoiled and pampered and taken care of. You wouldn’t have anything to stick your nose into. Don’t deny it. You love being able to tell us all what horrible, awful slobs we are. You—”

He was forced to stop mid-sentence when Sophie lunged forward clapped her hand over Howl’s mouth. The rage that had been soughing off her in waves seemed to have changed tenor; and as she stared up at him there was something frighteningly like tears brimming in the depths of her eyes. “And you—” she began. “Do you ever shut up?”

Howl felt his shoulders hit the castle wall behind him and his understanding of the situation go straight to hell at the same moment. Sophie was much closer to him that before, and before she could possibly realize this and escape, he opened his mouth and lolled his tongue against the warm and rather shaky fingers pressed against his lips.

Sophie jumped; her eyes widened almost comically, and she cried out “Gah! Oh, Howl!” and kissed him right then and there.

 

 

 

 

~5~

Chapter Text

~6~ ~S~

“Really, now?” Calcifer said from the fireplace. “That’s disgusting. Oh, I can’t look.” And he went sputtering off down the hallway toward the shop.

Sophie did not notice. She was too busy trying to decide between being awestruck and being mortified.

Looking back on the moment Sophie was sure that it could not properly be called a kiss. Her nose knocked into Howl’s, and then their lips sort of mashed against each other in a wet muddle. Howl gasped and just about tumbled over backwards, leaning on the door. Then his mouth caught again on hers and, for a moment, things became quite interesting.

It was only for a moment, however, because mortification had taken just that moment to win the battle for Sophie’s body completely. She tore herself hastily away from Howl’s lips, said, “Oh, no!” and clapped both hands across her mouth in horror. Surely she had botched that somehow.

Howl stared luridly down at her with his shoulders braced against the castle door, looking two shades redder than normal. His face could not have been more unreadable if he had made Michael write a particularly complicated spell across it. One one hand, his eyebrows were pulled up as though something had wounded him. On the other, as Sophie watched, he took superb care in making his lower lip re-connect with the upper, only to decide that this was an unsuitable expression and bite it instead.

“Oh, no, indeed,” he said at length. His eyes peered into Sophie’s like beams of green light, as though he was seeing her for the first time in several months. “I think I’ve made a mess of things.” And his left hand reached behind him and began fumbling with the castle door.

Sophie didn’t know what to say to that. The moment before she kissed Howl something between rage and triumph had been burning in her insides; now it had burst into a jolt of uncertainty greater than any she’d experienced yet. “No, no,” she said, “It’s I’ve made a mess of things, isn’t it?” She realized she was thoroughly out of breath, and could not remember when it had gotten lost.

Howl’s face did more strange contortions and he let out a loud breath of rueful laughter. “Heavens, Sophie,” he said. His left hand seemed to be having trouble with the door; it was making useless scrabbles against the knob. “It can’t be more of a mess than what I’ve already made, can it? That is—I suppose it depends on the kind of mess you’re talking about. That is—please, please, please, don’t be angry with me—I was only waiting for the right moment—”

Sophie was listening to strings of words come out of Howl’s mouth, but, although she knew each individual one, they were not making sense put together. Maybe being mortified was inhibiting her thought process. It was all she could do to not curl up in a little ball and die—or at least go throw herself on her bed under the stairs and lock the door for all eternity.

“Anyway, now you’ve had to go and make me look like a complete fool,” Howl finished up. “As usual. Dammit, Howell,” (this seemed to be to himself) “I think it’s about time you stopped running your mouth.” And he threw the castle door open, orange-side down, and disappeared outside.

What little of Sophie that wasn’t being mortified felt like it had just been crushed into a cinder. She forced herself to remove her clasped hands from just beneath her mouth, but this only resulted in her wringing them half to death in front of her, which was just as bad, anyhow. Now you’ve gone and done it, the loudest voice in her head was saying. Now you’ve ruined everything.

A smaller voice was saying, But Howl said—Howl said I wasn’t just—anyway, I’m sure that he likes me just as much as—

And how are you sure of anything? You’re stupid, the louder voice said miserably. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Sophie thought, and she had just about turned around to go lock herself in her room for all eternity when Howl’s voice came into the castle room again.

“Sophie! Are you coming or not?”

Coming where? Sophie thought; but there was a swoop of hope in her chest that had her across the room before the loud miserable voice in her head could stop her. She hesitated in the doorway, which had opened on the mansion’s gravely driveway, and looked out. The sky’s blue was thickening out there to the east; the sun must be just above the horizon now.

“What are you doing standing there?” Howl leaned into the doorway, grabbed Sophie’s hand, dropped it again hastily, and somehow managed to propel her out the door, which he proceeded to shut firmly behind them. Then he re-opened it on the actual inside of the mansion. “Come on,” he said. “I was trying to surprise you but you’ve ruined that anyway by blasting up our walls—”

Here he stopped, slammed the door closed again, opened it on the castle room, and poked his head in as if to confirm the hole’s existence— “Heavens, it’s still there, isn’t it? How on earth did you do it, Sophie?”

“I’m not sure really,” Sophie said. The part of her not busy being mortified was beginning to suspect that the wizard was not completely recovered from the kiss yet either. He was moving about so quickly that it was making her dizzy just to look at him; and his face could still have given the blushing roses in the wastes a run for their money.

Howl gave the castle room one last flabbergasted look, shut the door again and opened it on the mansion. “Rubbish,” he said, going in. “No one puts together a spell like that who isn’t sure really.”

Feeling as though she were trying to keep up with a freight train, Sophie followed Howl into the mansion, down the wide, polished, and slightly empty front hall. She said, “Well, I thought maybe if the front door wouldn’t let me into the castle, one of those extra ones up in the battlements might. What was supposed to be a surprise?”

Howl looked keenly backwards at Sophie. “I see the wonders will never cease,” he said, seemingly in complete earnesty, and completely without answering Sophie’s question.

Sophie hoped this meant she was about to find out the answer anyway. Instead of arguing she spent the time it took to cross the mansion puzzling over Howl’s last statement. She felt it could be taken as both a compliment and an insult. Obviously even this dazed, red-faced version of Howl could be suffocatingly obtuse when it suited him. That, Sophie thought, was the least surprising thing about the whole afternoon.

And then, in almost no time at all, they were out of the creamy arches and sumptuous (though empty) architecture of the mansion and onto the back porch, which was more of a cobbles-and-dirt patio enclosed by two adjacent wings of the building.

“Ah,” said Howl, “Here we go.” And he looked out at the landscape, and then back at Sophie, with an eager expectancy.

It took a moment for Sophie to figure out where they were. She looked back at Howl and felt a kick go through her stomach. Surely he didn’t mean to—she had to stop her thought by realizing that he wanted her to see something about her attempted garden. Her no-longer-injured hand gave a sympathetic little jolt at the memory.

Howl seemed fidgety. “Well?” he said. It took Sophie another moment to figure out what was different about the place. At first it seemed to be just the same as before: a long rectangular dirt space, meandering slightly down a hill after the mansion’s wings ended, with the hole she had dug still there close to the porch, looking dejected and somewhat off-center. Then she began to see, in the golden light of dusk, a series of lines and chunks of freshly-turned earth, distributed across the courtyard in an orderly fashion.

“Oh,” Sophie said, and went unthinkingly down from the raised patio into the dirt, unsure what she was looking at. “This is…”

“Irrigation lines,” Howl said grandly. “For your garden. I’m sorry if they’re a bit crooked. I had to put them together rather quickly, as you were dead set on breaking the castle down before I could finish.” There was a note of long-suffering in his voice that Sophie resented a bit, but she could not bring herself to be fully angry about it. It felt as if she had spent the whole day being angry with Howl, and obviously this was his way of trying to make things better. It was probably second nature to him to try and use it to make her guilty too.

“Well, you needn’t have locked me out to do it,” she said matter-of-factly.

This did not exactly convey her sentiments about the magic irrigation lines. She immediately felt a little bad about it; it was dawning on her that this was something really nice of Howl, really useful, and she couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. Howl’s face got a deliberate—and yet quite sincere—hangdog look. He said rather too jovially, “I suppose I’ll remember that next time, then?”

He does so like to be praised, Sophie thought in a bit of a panic, and cast about desperately for ways to fix her last sentence before the wizard started pouting in earnest. “Oh, for heaven’s sake…I suppose…oh, it really is nice, you really didn’t have to!”

“You’re just saying that,” Howl said petulantly, and turned away to gaze moodily at the criss-crossed dirt, heaving an exaggerated sigh. But Sophie had already seen the side of his lip quirk up as soon as she showed signs of caving. Silly man, she thought, and a rush of warmth stole through her: What a silly, ridiculous, atrociously wonderful man. Quite unbidden, the memory came into her head of Howl’s breath catching under her hands as he stumbled back into the door, the sensation of his lower lip moving across the edge of hers, soft and warm and quite deliberate. All of a sudden it was a monstrous effort just to keep herself from throwing her arms around Howl right then and there.

“ I don’t just say things,” Sophie said hurriedly, and put the thoughts out of her head. “You ought to know that by now. It’s lovely, Howl. I’ll have to get started on the garden right away.”

~H~

“I would rather you cooked dinner first,” Howl said. “It’s getting a bit dark out for gardening.”
Then Sophie calling herself a housemaid re-manifested in his brain and he cringed a little. He knew that, under ordinary circumstances, Sophie enjoyed cooking dinner and cleaning house more than anyone, except perhaps Megan: it gave her something to be cross at. But perhaps in light of the situation…He’d rid her of that notion, though. Hadn’t he?

Sophie solved this problem (as she solved many of them) by not seeming to notice it at all. “I didn’t mean right away right away,” she said staunchly, and Howl could feel a smile trying to slip out onto his face no matter how he tried to stop it.

“Excellent,” he said. He felt a little giddy. “As you may know, working these amounts of magic leaves one with quite an appetite.” No, that was not quite it—he felt enormously giddy, like he was hopping on one foot through a minefield of moments and knocking deliriously into each one of them.

“I’ve never noticed,” Sophie said distractedly, and now he could make out a bit of a smile on her face if he looked at it the right way. It was one of those clever smiles she used when she thought no one was looking, though this was a very tired version. Perhaps being on the war-path all day had finally worn her out.

“You haven’t, have you?” Howl told her. “You ought to help me patch up that hole in the castle room. Then you might begin to feel it.”

“Oh—leave off,” Sophie huffed, and a brush of color rose in her cheeks. “It seemed my only option at the time.”

It was all so very like Sophie, the wizard thought. He would bet anything that she would go up against the Witch of the Waste again rather than apologize for anything. But then again, perhaps he ought to cut her some slack. Earlier circumstances had been rather extenuating. Perhaps she was still in shock from…from the kiss.

Howl could understand that. He was sure he himself was still in shock. Sophie, in true Sophie fashion, had escaped just when things were getting interesting. He’d had to show her the garden for fear of what she would do if left to her own devices: the look on her face had gone from intense he-didn’t-know-what to intense horror in the space of a second. Trying to figure that out was impossible. Having given up, the wizard simply let his mouth go with a mild curiosity as to it where it would take him.

Apparently, this was to give Sophie a look and say “Ah! Then you admit that the whole crashing our living room to bits wasn’t your only option.”

“I said nothing of the sort,” Sophie said, coloring further. It was flattering on her. “I said it seemed the only option at the time.”

Howl said, “Unless I am very much mistaken, seemed and was mean two different things. Or is that some other language you’re speaking?”

Sophie’s hands flew to her skirts and gave them a done-with-this sort of twist. She half-turned to go back into the house, but her eyes, interestingly enough, remained fixed on Howl. “Do shut up,” she said in the arch tone reserved for pretending not to lose arguments. “If you keep making so much sense I’ll have to un-forgive you.”

“I remember the last time you told me to shut up,” Howl said, and smirked. “It didn’t work for very long.” He was getting that dizzy minefield feeling worse than ever: he could feel another moment hovering very near, ready to be crashed into. He took a deep breath and crashed. “Maybe you ought to be more forceful this time.”

This finally seemed to derail Sophie’s resistence altogether. She turned properly crimson and sputtered at him like a firework—which was not the most attractive expression she could have managed, but it was marvelous just the same. Now I’ve done it, Howl thought with glee, and realized that, more than his mind, his entire body was waiting for her response. It was giving him a perspective on what being a tuning fork must feel like.

And then of course Calcifer came flying in and ruined everything.

“Sophie!” the fire demon was crackling. “Shop!”

The both of them jumped a little and whirled. Sophie managed to answer without sputtering very much. “What’s happening?”

“Boutonnieres,” Calcifer snapped.

“Boutonnieres?” Howl asked, caught completely off-guard.

“Boutonnieres—!” Sophie shouted. She seemed to know exactly what this meant. Apparently it was horror of the worst kind. “Oh, drat it all!”

“Drat is a good word for it,” Calcifer said. He was in a huff about something, but Howl did not find himself in the least bit sympathetic. “Michael seems to be so busy fending off customers that he thinks he can send me on out here like an errand-boy. I thought that boy had an ounce of politeness. Anyway, it’s like aunts in there, Sophie. Go do something! This kind of treatment is really beyond me.”

“Is that the only reason you’ve interrupted us?” Howl asked wildly. “Boutonnieres? Calcifer! Go and tell them we don’t have time for such nonsense. Say they’ve gotten the order wrong or something. Sophie is clearly busy.” He felt stubbornly that this was not the time to be bothered with business. Hadn’t they almost had a breakthrough here? But Sophie had already bolted for the shop with a yelp.

Calcifer, since Sophie had listened to him, chose to flicker at Howl disgustedly rather than do what he’d asked. “Everyone here does nothing but use me,” he said. “You’re the worst of the lot.”

“I know,” Howl said. He didn’t feel like commiserating with Calcifer. “But I don’t let it bother me.”

After that there was nothing for it but to follow. Howl made sure to be his most dejected on the way back in—the universe was not playing fair today. It had obviously decided to have some fun by teasing him, and then, when he managed to get a jump on it, gotten sore and stopped playing at all. He even kicked a few things on the ground for good measure, but it was no use. Today had not been the day, either.

~6~

Chapter Text

 

~S~

Sophie woke up on Tuesday morning with an ineffable feeling of dread.  She was not quite conviced that life outside of her closet-room would be arranged in the same way at all.  But when she opened her door and peered rather cautiously out, nothing seemed to be amiss.  Whereupon Sophie resolved to pretend that nothing in the moving castle would be any different than it had been…before.  All her anger was quite gone.  The state she’d been in yesterday was obviously mad.  Trying to fix things had apparently been the exact remedy for all her feelings—she now felt quite content to sit and let things be fine and lovely and normal for as long as they pleased.

And for once here was a resolution that was easier to do than to say. Sophie, who had been expecting a fight, was almost disappointed.  But everybody behaved completely normally at breakfast, and by the afternoon it was almost as if nothing had happened at all.  For his part, Howl did not seem to object to this state of affairs.  He got a rash of new orders from Kingsbury and became exceedingly busy.  He did fix the hole in the castle wall, though.  He made more a fuss about it than Sophie thought it warranted—even, she thought, for a hole in a castle wall.  But then that was just Howl for you.  He found a way to make a fuss out of everything.

The hole seemed to perplex Howl.  It let through a lot of dusty white light and a chunk of blue sky and did not seem connected to anywhere it ought to be.  The wizard apparently determined that this was Michael’s room, and he sent Michael up and down the stairs six times in rapid succession while he himself stood on a chair waving his arm and various sticks and wands and broomsticks up into the blueness, trying to find his way through to the rightful top floor of the castle. “How about this?  Is it coming through?” he would cry, and Michael, out of breath and shrill, kept shouting, “No!  Not yet!  I think—wait—no, that’s just…oh, that’s where that pair of hose went!”

“Blast it,” Howl would mutter, and shoot a glance at Sophie: “Only you could create such a disaster.”

 “It does make the living room brighter,” Sophie told him.  She was determined not to be remorseful in the slightest.

 “If I had wanted a bright, cheery living room, I would be living down in Market Chipping,” Howl said, with the air that he would rather swallow crushed glass.  He called Calcifer irritably and tried to send him up the hole.  Calcifer did not want to go.  Sophie sat on the table with her feet dangling off (since Howl had told her the floor was off-limits) and watched them go back and forth and enjoyed herself.  Giant hole in the castle notwithstanding, it seemed such an ordinary thing to be witnessing after all that had transpired the day before.

The strange thing was she could barely remember making the hole.  Or rather, she could clearly recall being nearly out of her mind with anger, and climbing into the battlements and searching for a door, and then finding one and going in; what she could not remember was putting in nearly as much effort as a hole of such impressive size warranted.  With this in mind, Sophie found herself watching Howl’s efforts to fix the hole as though she had not been a participant in its creation at all.  Surely it could not have been her fault really.  She even felt ordinary enough to offer helpful suggestions when the situation called for it.

“I don’t think that sconce went exactly there,” she said, after a period of much shaking and grinding in which the blue light disappeared once more behind stones.  It was true.  It looked as though Howl had put the same piece of wall back where it had been, but in the wrong direction somehow.  One couldn’t tell the exact places that it touched the edges of the hole, but it was clear that something was different about that patch of the wall.  “Don’t you think it ought to be a little to the left?”

Howl turned and flashed Sophie the briefest of superbly offended glares.  “Frankly, I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said.  “Most of us can’t go about rearranging the castle on a whim.”

“I wasn’t intending to rearrange it,” Sophie said.  “Anyway, if even you can’t tell the difference, it doesn’t really matter anyway, right?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Howl said without vehemence, turning back to examine the wall again, and Sophie knew by that that he was not thinking about the argument much at all.  The wall was still distracting him.  He went knocking about on the new section and making disguntled faces as though he was not sure it was entirely fixed.  “Is something wrong?” Sophie asked.

“Of course something’s wrong,” Howl said.  “I’m having to fix a difficult hole in my own living room and no one’s giving me a lick of peace in which to work.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Sophie said, but Howl pretended not to hear her by pounding especially hard on the wall with something that looked like a dried apple but was obviously much harder, given the amount of noise it could make.  Finally Sophie gave up, feeling sour, and went out to work on her garden.  She consoled herself with the fact that they had managed to have a good old-fashioned argument without any mention of yesterday’s events.  This at least was a point of pride—she and Howl could be reasonable people after all, apparently.

After that the week passed without so much as a tiff—which in itself might have seemed rather odd, if Sophie had not taken it upon herself to be as rational as possible.  She worked in the flower shop, made dinner, did not have to rescue Howl from any more suits, and even found a moment or two to dig up cuttings of her favorite roses from the waste and put them in pots of water on the patio along with the white rose she’d gotten in the mail.  She was beginning to like it rather a lot, and made sure to say a few words to it every time she passed through to encourage it to grow roots.  Sophie did not know much about taking cuttings from roses, but had got the impression from somewhere that it was difficult, and so she figured she’d better not take any chances with this one.  “You’re going to grow up big and strong and lovely,” she told it.  “None of this nonsense about the proper way to take cuttings.  I think you must be a little more sensible than that.”  She began to plan where they all would go in the garden, if she could coax them to grow.  Which she thought she could.  Despite once having been part of the curse that nearly killed Howl—and a second time becoming toxic enough to kill off the brunt of the mansion’s weed population—Sophie’s gardening efforts had been mainly successful.

She sought Howl’s opinion on the matter with no luck.  Whenever Sophie entered a room, the wizard seemed just to be leaving it, muttering and fluttering to himself about something or the other.  Once or twice, when he seemed to be idle, Sophie mustered the foolhardiness to say, “Howl, do you think—?”

“Can’t think now,” Howl said the first time.  “Busy.”  And he whisked himself off to go crash about in the courtyard with some metal tubes.  The second time he started, shouted, “That was it!  Thanks, Sophie!” and began scribbling arcane-looking symbols on a scrap of parchment in front of him.  “Go ask Michael,” he said to her, after Sophie had dogged his elbow silently for a few long moments.  “I’m sure he can tell you whatever it is.”

At this Sophie’s normal sense twitched a little bit.  It seemed to think something was not quite right.  Sophie quashed it immediately—she must be the only one unrecovered from yesterday’s hysterics, and as long as she did not mention that, everything was surely unchanged.  She went and asked Michael about the garden, not in the least because she was disappointed that she hadn’t found the heart to argue with Howl’s brushing her off.

Michael did not have any opinion about the flowers.  “As long as they’re not baby’s-buttons,” was all he could say.  He was hard at work at spells Howl had set him, hunched at his cramped desk in a cluttered corner of his room.  For a moment he reminded her uncannily of the wizard himself, and Sophie had a brief moment of alienation.  Michael had been living with Howl since he was quite young; she knew that Howl had shaped his life considerably.  She couldn’t decide whether this made her jealous of Howl or proud of him.

“Michael,” Sophie asked, “do you think Howl is avoiding me?”

Michael stopped frowning at his parchment long enough to give Sophie a quizzical look.  He said, “Howl’s not avoiding you.  He’s really just incredibly, extremely busy.  And so am I.  This new spell is driving me nuts.  It’s written in all sorts of circles and squares and things.  What do you think it could mean, Sophie?”

Oh goodness, Sophie thought.  Apparently he’s been learning how to slither out of questions, too!

But he seemed to be telling the truth, because, despite being mostly a brightly-colored blur popping in and out of rooms all Wednesday, Howl seemed to have no qualms showing up in Sophie’s room under the stairs on Thursday morning to wake her up.

“What are you doing awake?” Sophie asked him groggily.  She’d been having a dream, but she couldn’t remember what it involved, except whatever it was much more pleasant than her creaky little room before sunrise.  And it was before sunrise, which was odd, because Howl was almost never fully dressed this early.

“Sophie, you need to get up right now!” Howl said, ignoring what had been rather a rhetorical question anyway.  “We’re going to the market!”

“Market is on Tuesdays,” Sophie managed to say.

“Not this market,” the man said, putting his yellow sleeves on his yellow hips.  “Come on, if you aren’t out of bed in about, oh, twenty-two seconds, we won’t have enough time to get there before everything good is gone.  I fear it would absolutely ruin me.”

Sophie rolled out of bed, blinking in the glare of Howl’s fiercest and most stunning grin.
“Twenty-three,” she groaned.  “Give me twenty-three seconds.”

~H~

 It took considerably more than twenty-three seconds for Sophie to get out of bed and dressed, though a dizzily-excited Michael reminded an impatient Howl that she took much shorter in the bathroom than Howl himself ever had.  It was terrible; today was the Wizards’ Market and every moment not expressly spent getting there felt like the waste of a lifetime. 

Perhaps it only seemed that Sophie was taking a long time, Howl considered, because of his own state of mind.  Michael had been getting more and more excited over the past few days, until it seemed as though every time Howl looked he was ricocheting off a new surface of the castle in a bounce of repressed nerves.  It had been bad enough that he hadn’t been allowed to tell Sophie; and Sophie was going, and it would be the first time Calcifer would be seeing the market with free eyes as well…! All these things had gotten to Howl as well—as he knew they would.  He had barely even managed to sleep the night before.  This was mostly useful, since he’d gotten up at three-thirty to get dressed. 

And now there were preparations to make, because he’d been pretending to be busy so well that he’d actually got busy as a result.  Howl managed to distract himself so thoroughly that he didn’t even try to imagine Sophie changing.  This involved rounding up a bag of spells and oddities (lighter than it looked), checking on his suit (still yellow), losing a magic carpet (he could have sworn it was in one of his dressers), reasurring Calcifer that they were going soon (“You know me, old blueface, wouldn’t miss it for the world!”) checking his hair (in poor condition), offering encouragement at the bathroom door (“Won’t you please hurry up, we’re going to be late!”), ordering Michael to stop twitching (fruitless,) finding a magic carpet (rolled up in the depths of his walk-in closet), stopping to worry about the hole in the wall (still not quite right), eating a chunk of raw potato (not as good an idea as it had first appeared), and checking his hair again before Sophie announced she was ready to go by coming of the bathroom in a matching horrible grey shawl and horrible grey dress.

“Egads,” Howl said when he saw her.  His first impression was of some sort of lumpy brown vegetable, possibly a potato; then it resolved to Sophie’s neck and head perched atop a truly shapeless outfit that looked as though she had worn it as an old lady.  Howl was sure it had not looked good on her then either.  “Are you leaving the castle in that?”

Sophie gave him a perplexed look and glanced down at the garment as though just becoming aware of its existence.  “I was planning on it,” she said. “Why?”

Howl couldn’t look.  He flopped face-first against the shop doorway, throwing his hands in the air.  “Why?” he moaned.  “They’re not going to let us into the Wizards’ Market because one of our party looks like a mushroom.”

“Mushrooms?” Calcifer said, swooping into the castle room through the chimney.  He was trying to be mysterious and demon-y and clever, but the prospect of market was infecting him too. “Oh, she appears!  Meet you outside!”  And he swooped back out again.  Howl focused on the current argument.

“Wizards’ Market?  Is that where we’re going?” Sophie asked, and squared her jaw in the way that could only mean she was going to go steamrolling along on her own path regardless of what Howl said. “I’m sure they don’t have anything against mushrooms there.”

“No, they don’t,” Howl said.  “They grind them up and put them in really nasty spells.”

This seemed to give Sophie pause for a moment, but only a moment.  “Well,” she said,  “If I’m a mushroom then I’m a very practical one.  I’ll be so practical that nobody would even dream of using me in a nasty spell.”

Howl looked up from his doorpost of despair and heaved a sigh.  “Yes, that outfit very practical,” he said.  The woman was clearly a lost cause.  “I think that’s about all it has going for it.  I daresay you could wear that thing to rugby practice.  Don’t you have anything…anything of any other color?”

“What’s wrong with this color?” Sophie asked, with a particularly self-righteous look.  Howl was certain she had not understood the rugby comment and that this was her way of pretending that she had.  If he hadn’t been in the deepest pits of despair it would have been endearing.

“Yes, what’s wrong with that color?” Calcifer crackled, swooping in again before Howl could answer. “You vain wizard! Stop wasting time!” And he

Michael came crashing down the stairs then, a misshapen lump of a knapsack towering on his back.  “Are we going yet?” he asked with a jumpy, perplexed kind of look.  “What’s wrong with the color?”

“Everything!” Howl said.  Blast it, this was not how he wanted to spend his morning!  Obviously Sophie should just accept that the color grey did not look good on her.  No one in the castle had any sense of fashion whatsoever, or else they would have immediately seen what he meant.  Grey took all the bright warm things about Sophie’s features—her red-gold hair, the pink glow of her cheeks, the scintillating bits of green and brown in her eyes—and washed them out like laundry.  And Howl knew (or suspected, since she went around so often in clothes like this) that she had a lovely figure, trim and energetic.  It was all going to waste in that dress. 

But Sophie was deaf to all pleas, and Calcifer and Michael did not give a hoot about Howl’s opinions except that they were slowing everything down.  They finally won the argument when Howl, pleading and making preparations at once, rolled the magic carpet out with a flourish onto the air in front of the castle door, where it hovered obediently level with the front step.  Sophie’s winning strategy was to look so apprehensive about travel by carpet that the wizard had to switch from harranguing to coaxing just to ensure that they would get out of the castle at all.  “I’m just a little nervous,” she said when Howl began trying to coax her, but she wasn’t very convincing about it.  Howl could admit this carpet was a bit threadbare in patches, and not as large as some of the more luxurious models, but hadn’t she once flown back from the Waste with him on only a wind?

“That was different,” Sophie said when Howl (quite gently, in his opinion) brought this up, but she could not elaborate on how.  They were at last ready to leave.  Calcifer had disappeared in the clouds above out of frustration; Howl was sure he would meet them again when they were off.  Michael, who had run up and down the stairs twice more getting things he had forgotten, was finally on the carpet, seated at the left corner nearest the castle: “Come on, Sophie, it’s really easy once you get used to it,” he was saying, as Sophie stood on the castle steps looking mulish and afraid.  “Howl can sit up front and I’ll sit in the back, so you won’t be near any of the edges!”

Michael’s logic seemed a bit off to Howl, since that left only two of the carpet’s edges covered, but he did not think it prudent to point out at this point.  Perhaps it would work with whatever strange reasoning went on in Sophie-think.  “I’ve been on many journeys with this old girl,” he said to her encouragingly, handing Michael several large packages of spells and notebooks while he did so.  “She’s never failed me.”

“Oh, so it’s a lady carpet,” Sophie said in a way that Howl thought was trying for jaunty.  “That makes it all better, of course.  Hello, carpet!  Please don’t drop me!”  And she took a few tentative steps across the carpet’s surface.  It held its shape, of course, as magic carpets are supposed to do, and Sophie managed to seat herself shakily in the dead center, her fingers clutching rather vainly about her for something to hold onto.  Howl felt a little bit bad for her then.  Was this one of those times he was supposed to be gallant and help her or something?  But if he did he was sure his help would be thoroughly rejected.  If only she would stop being so stubborn! 

Before Sophie could catch him thinking about her, Howl went back to secure the castle door and collect another parcel of magics, seething with excitement.  All the arguments and opinions went flying around in his head then out again.  They were going to Wizard’s Market!

“Once we get started you won’t really feel much at all.” Michael was explaining when Howl came out again and threw himself onto the space left at the front of the carpet (if carpets could be said to have fronts.)  “The flying is very smooth when Howl and Calcifer control the carpet.  I haven’t got it all right yet, but I’m not going to be flying it, so you don’t have to worry about that!”

“I thought they magic carpets were all supposed to be…sort of automatic?” Sophie asked, sounding more nervous than ever.

Howl could hear Michael’s voice frantically backtracking.  “Well it really is, mostly,” he said hurriedly.  “This one just has a few quirks is all.  It’s nothing to worry about, really.”

“I’m not worried,” Sophie said behind Howl, and at that Howl could not stop himself from laughing.  Sophie’s grump of protest was drowned by the nervous gurgling noise she made when the carpet began to move out across the Waste-garden, gaining altitude very smoothly but at great speeds.

“This is quite alright,” Sophie said again.  “You’re a very nice carpet.”  Howl hoped she was not going to do anything silly like faint or throw up. Sophie was made of stronger stuff, wasn’t she? Then Calcifer shot past them through the still-dark in a blaze, trailing green and gold and blue sparks, cackling wildly to himself.  “Slow!” The fire-demon was screeching on a piercing, gleeful laugh.  “You’re all so very slow on that thing! Sloooow!” And he dove forward into a bank of fog, disappearing from view for a few moments before popping up and soaring straight upwards until he was nothing but a bright spot in the grey morning.

His joy was infectuous.  “Hahaha!” Howl found himself crying, as the winds rose around them and the ground rapidly dwindled.  The wastes were wreathed in early-morning mists and things seemed to twinkle from within them; far to the east there was a greeny lightening that would probably soon be morning, but was certainly not there yet.  “It’s lovely out!  Isn’t it lovely out, Sophie?”  And he turned around to look at she and Michael sitting there on the threadbare carpet.  Calcifer was a speck of of flame shooting about somewhere above them.

“Watch where we’re going!” Sophie squeaked.  Her hands were grasping at folds in the carpet in front of her as if she could secure herself by them and she did look a little queasy; but she relented at last and looked out at the landscape.  Just a tiny look, but Howl would accept it for now.  “It is lovely out,” she conceded.  “Just a little chilly.”

“Are you sure you’ll be fine?” Howl asked.  He was trying not to sound pleading, but he could hear it in his voice, all the same.

“Yes,” Sophie said.  “Now do watch ahead of us, please!”

“Look over there!” Michael called. “Howl, is that Kingsbury?”

And all things considered, Howl thought, he could not have felt better.  Today was going to be a day.  Maybe even the day.  But even if not—a day would certainly be good enough for now.

~(I)~

Chapter Text

~S~

Sophie did not want to admit it to herself when she got there, and she certainly was not going to to admit it to Howl, but the ride to the Wizards’ market was amply made up for by the market itself.  Michael and Howl had had a lively discussion of the landscape and where everything was on the way there, but looking over the carpet’s questionable edges made Sophie feel just a bit queasy, so she spent most of the time trying to think of different plants that she could put in her garden.  

She could not imagine how Howl and Michael were so cavalier about the whole sailing-so-far-up-in-the-air-that-the-landscape-looked-like-it-was-made-of-postage-stamps thing.  It was true, she had not been nearly the same kind of frightened when she had been flying with Howl before, but she thought that amounted to her being so frightened by other things that she had not even noticed her fear of heights.  How things change! Sophie thought suddenly.  The first time she had been in the air it had been Howl she was afraid of; by the second time she had been much more afraid of his being offed by the witch of the waste!

Or maybe, some mischievous voice within her said, what made it worse now was that this time Howl was not actually touching her.

After that, of course, Sophie kept much closer guard of her thoughts—which were clearly prone to wandering. Once they arrived at the market it became much easier—there was no shortage of distractions there.

When Sophie thought Wizards’ Market, she had pictured someplace rather dark, full of a lot of smoke and cobwebs and shiny things, and in other words rather similar to the insides of Howl’s walk-in closet.  She was almost disappointed when they arrived and found the market laid out in a very peaceful-looking meadow. There were stalls and tents and tables and stands set up seemingly at random, some huge and gaudy enough to match Howl’s suit, but most rather small and blown about in the brisk wind which was cutting across the plateau. And where there were not stalls and tents and tables and stands, there were a lot of blankets thrown out over the ground.

“Why, it’s sort of like a rummage sale,” Sophie said to Howl. She was surprised when Howl did not immediately look dejected—he’d been so eager for her to come here and see things.

But all he said was “Are you sure?” with such a bland expression on his face that Sophie was at a loss to decipher it.  

She cast her eyes about at the surrounding blankets, finding some playing cards, a few bowls of herbs, and a human skull much like the one that Howl had owned before he found out it belonged to Wizard Suliman. “Well, those are much like the things I’ve seen in the castle,” she said. “And that”—pointing to another blanket—“looks just like an old brass teakettle that my father used to own.”

“Does it?” said Howl, again very mildly. It was making Sophie suspicious.

“Tea-set?” Michael interjected. “Where?”

“On the paisley carpet,” Sophie said.

“That paisley carpet?” Michael asked, pointing at the same carpet Sophie was staring at. “All I see is a pile of baby’s buttons. I think I can smell them. Ugh.”

The witch sitting behind the carpet spoke for the first time. She was swathed from head to toe in russet robes that left only her eyes exposed, but her voice seemed quite young to Sophie. She laughed quietly to herself and said, “I don’t have any baby’s-buttons here. And no teapots either. That man—”and she pointed to Howl—“knows what is here on this blanket.”

Howl’s face shed its bland look instantly and a wide flabbergasted smile appeared upon it. “That’s a very fine spell you’ve got there,” he said, shaking his head and stepping closer.

“Do you know how to break it?” The witch asked him.

“Not at all,” Howl said, still shaking his head in a delighted, bewildered manner. “But at least I can see what this thing thinks of all of you.”

The witch on the carpet closed her eyes and murmured something that Sophie’s ears could not pick up.  She caught Michael looking again at the blanket, and turned with him to see what was on it: neither a tea set nor baby’s-buttons, but a small, quiet book with a cover of blue leather. Michael’s eyes looked like they were a mirror of her own face: a large amount of confusion and shock was whirling around in there.

“Alright,” Sophie admitted to Howl. “That’s a lovely trick.”

Howl did not have to argue with Sophie this time because Michael did it for him. “Trick?” he cried. “That kind of spell borrows something different from each of us. They’re really rare and difficult to do, right, Howl?”

“Indeed,” Howl said, and Sophie thought the eyes of the witch behind the carpet smiled knowingly. She didn’t even seem phased by Sophie’s skepticism.  Sophie was suitably humbled. While Howl struck up conversation with the spell’s maker, she looked around more carefully and discovered that magic things at the wizard’s market were like ants: once you noticed one, you saw them all.

And they were everywhere! Certain corners seemed to slide out of her view when she looked closely at him; a blanket down the lane held clay pots with steam of all colors coiling out in ribbons from inside them; a child in a ragged dress was herding about a group of seven fat orange cats; and under a parasol held open by an old man, a very small storm cloud was hovering obediently, thundering occasionally and pelting the ground with peevish hail.

Presently Michael began nagging at Sophie’s sleeve that they should be going. “Howl looks like he’s going to buy something,” he explained with a nervous look at the sleeve where Howl usually kept his money. He and Sophie managed to steer Howl away together into the further reaches of the market.

Howl was now behaving according to Sophie’s expectations and acting very smug and cool about it all. He swept through the rows of carpets and tables, giving a cursory glance here and there; Sophie followed at his elbow, feeling as though her eyes would pop out of her head from goggling.  She gave up trying to hide it because Howl caught her almost immediately. “I can see you goggling,” he said in a very satisfied manner.

“I’m not goggling,” Sophie protested. “I was just watching that…fish…that bird…that fish-bird thing …flying around in its cage.  It has very lovely scales.”

The fish-bird-thing shrieked “Lovely!” at her, and Sophie gave a shocked little jump at the sound. Howl laughed at her, which did not surprise Sophie; then he gave a pensive look at the stand, which did. “That’s Lady Amkin’s for you. She brings those sorts of things every time. Last market it was some sort of pig with butterfly wings, and the year before last it was even worse. I feel sorry for the poor things.”

“Really?” Sophie asked. Howl did not usually like to admit pitying anything except for himself. “Why?”

Howl blinked at her for a moment. Then he said, “You would feel very sorry for yourself, too, if your scales didn’t even match your beak.  Now if you’re quite done dawdling, there’s some other things I’d like you to see. We can’t miss a moment here!”  

Sophie, who had a feeling that this wasn’t what Howl had first thought to say at all, let him stride purposefully away toward the next stall without comment.  She could not think of a way to make him tell her what he had almost said, and was surprised by how badly she wanted to know.  She watched the fish-bird-thing swimming twitchily back and forth in its hanging cage and gazing at them all out of large, mournful, orange eyes.

Michael came up from behind them with his knapsack teetering upon his back.  “Is Howl inside there?” he asked. He seemed a little jumpy.

“He just went to the next stall,” Sophie told him. The fish-thing burbled at them. “Next stall, next stall!” it repeated sadly, and she thought she began to see why Howl had been so eager to get away.

“Oh, good,” Michael said, and relief passed over his face. “I have to chase him away from Lady Amkin’s every year. The year before last he spent all our money on some horrible dog-pigeon thing. Then he spent days trying to make it into a dog and a pigeon again.”

Sophie found that she was clutching her hands to her heart. She put them down again. “What happened to it?” she asked Michael.

Michael looked sad. “I think he let it go,” he said. “He wouldn’t come out of his room for ages, anyway.  I thought I’d have to go to Wales and fetch his sister, but luckily he started eating again in a few days.”

Oh, Howl! Sophie thought. And that was back when you didn’t even have a heart! She had the sudden urge to go find the wizard and throw her arms about him.  But perhaps that would just lead to more mortification.

“I’ve been trying to tell you all for ages,” Calcifer said, coming up behind them. “Howl’s just a big baby in a wizard suit.”  His flame eyes looked from Sophie to Michael sharply. “Oh, cheer up! We haven’t got all day here, you know! Boo!” he said to the fish-bird (which squawked angrily at him), and flew off after Howl in a shower of sparks.

Sophie and Michael moved on too, the better not to get lost. The jumble of stands, tables and stalls seemed to twist at odd angles. Michael and Calcifer came and went back and forth down the aisle, but Sophie felt better sticking with Howl. She dogged his elbow from stall to incredible stall until it seemed her head was almost spinning with things.

“What do you think, Sophie?” Howl asked finally. He sprung the question on her with a carefree, melting kind of smile that seemed to come out on his face like the sun from behind a cloud. All the traces of his former haughtiness seemed quite gone. Sophie wondered at the change.

She fished for something to say.  Howl had already seen her ogling; wasn’t that enough? “It is rather cluttered here,” she managed at last. “At least I have a better sense of organization than these people.”

Howl narrowed his eyes at Sophie. “That is one thing I will give you credit on. But don’t think it’s much of a feat.”

“You don’t think I’m organized?” Sophie asked, in some indignation.

“You’re certainly more organized than most bearable human beings,” Howl said with a thoughtful look on his face. “But you do do most things in a rush. And then you have to do them over again. Ah, you thought I hadn’t noticed, didn’t you?—” at Sophie’s opened mouth to protest— “You always clean half of the castle twice.”

“Not quite half,” Sophie said, and then she got distracted by a stand with a display of the most enormous flowers she’d seen in her life. “Good grief,” she said to Howl. “Look at them! It’s as if they’ve used Michael’s enlargement spell on roses!”

“They are ridiculous, aren’t they?” Howl said, studying the burgeoning plants as though he could burn their imprint into his green eyes.

Sophie thought this was a bit rich coming from a man wearing a suit of yellow embroidery. She said as much to Howl.

“I told you, it’s gold,” Howl said. But his wizarding curiosity seemed to get the better of him, for he went closer to the flower stand and peered at it pensively. “And I doubt the enlargement spell I taught Michael would work on living things. It’s not designed to. It’d make them go all wonky on the inside, do you know what I mean?”

“Wonky?” Sophie asked. “I’m not sure.” She gazed at the huge blooms in a thoughtful hush. It struck her in rather a rush that she and Howl were having a real, civilized conversation. And at a wizards’ market, too. The sensation was strange but not at all unpleasant, and Sophie began looking back through her mind, trying to remember if this had happened before. Dinner conversations counted, didn’t they? When were she and Howl together and not fighting?  The concept was rather intriguing. Yes, she could definitely enjoy this.

And then, of course, someone called out, “Howl? Wizard Howl, if it isn’t you? How are you, you old scoundrel?”

Howl turned around from the flowers with his pompous face firmly back on. “If it isn’t Ighast!” he said. “Why haven’t you gotten swallowed by a quarlebeast yet? I was hoping we’d be rid of you by now.”

“I’m sure you were. And you know, I tried my hardest, but no luck!” The person, apparently called Ighast, who was slender and wearing a suit that was more horrible than Howl’s, seemed to take it in stride that Howl had insulted him; it certainly did not shorten his grin. Perhaps it was a wizard thing, because the insults did not stop there: by the end of their conversation, Sophie was almost sure that Howl had been told to grow himself a new face because his own was inadequate, and Ighast must certainly have some new ideas about what his mother did for a living.

“Are all wizards so like children?” Sophie said when Ighast had finally vanished again into the crowd and Howl had his regular face on—or at least his not-pompous face (was there such a thing as Howl’s regular face?)  “I don’t think I’ve heard such rudeness since Martha and Lettie shared a bedroom.”

Howl looked askance at her. “It’s bad manners to be polite to anyone at Wizard’s Market. You need to make sure everyone thinks you’re as wicked as possible.”

Sophie felt her eyebrows raise a little. “Oh yes. You’re the wickedest wizard I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Howl looked down at her. It looked like he was enjoying himself immensely. “Well, they don’t really believe I’m wicked.  It would just be such a bother if everyone went around thinking I was good.”

Sophie opened her mouth to disagree, but she was interrupted again by someone calling out “Sorcerer Jenkins! What is your ugly face doing in these parts?”

After that it seemed that Howl’s friends multiplied. Not a stall went by without new faces popping up out of the crowd to exchange pleasant insults with Howl, Pendragon, or Jenkins. Sophie felt a little gypped. Howl was in fine form; he was throwing pompous glares left and right, and, worse, introducing Sophie to everyone. This was the last thing Sophie wanted.

After she got introduced to four (or possibly five) people in the span of ten minutes, she started planning ways to escape.  No one had told her not to explore the Wizards’ Market on her own, had they? She could certainly do it without Howl’s guidance.

They were nearing the center of the market; the stalls and stands and so forth had begun to cluster in sorts of circles and rows that might even have a pattern, if one squinted.  So there was some sort of order to the whole thing after all! Sophie thought.  She awaited the opportunity to creep off at the nearest corner. Sorcerer Jenkins was already engaged in a discussion with several aged witches when someone hailed Howl from a blanket:  “Wizard Pendragon?”

Howl was not in the least bit shaken. “Pendragon…? Oh no, I’m sorry, you must have mistaken me for someone else.” The aged witches tutted disapprovingly.

The other wizard looked confused. “Why, I could have sworn…”

“Wizard Pendragon,” Howl said with great dignity, “is in fact a distant cousin of mine. We do share a godfather or something, and we have been compared once or twice, now that you mention it. Something about having similar good tastes.” No one was looking at Sophie. “Howl,” she muttered, wondering whether she should let him know where she was going. “I’ll be just a moment.” She started edging toward an adjacent aisle of tents.

“But we’re really quite easy to tell apart.” Howl said to sandy-whiskers. “Wizard Pendragon isn’t nearly as handsome as me.”

Confound that man! Sophie thought, and she crept her way around the corner without looking back.

Thankfully, what started as vindictiveness soon became honest-to-goodness exploration. Sophie discovered that, except for the wares themselves, going among the carpets was no different than an ordinary rummage sale after all. She forgot her earlier shyness and began to poke around things at the market in earnest. She was a witch, too, after all. It was high time she began learning about witch-ly things. She couldn’t spend all her career talking life into garden plants, could she? She went about from stall to blanket to table to stand, peering furtively at each one and doing her best not to goggle. “No, thank you,” she said, when people asked if she wanted to look closer. She wouldn’t get in anyone’s way, least of all Howl’s.

But there were such amazing things to be seen! Sophie saw a toad that made its nest out of gold flakes and a flute that played bees to sleep. She found out the five ingredients that were most-used in common household spells.  And she learned which shop made the safest type of gnome repellent, which love potion wouldn’t induce strange boils, and what to avoid when you are looking for a key to unlock every door. If Fanny could see me now, she thought.

She was having a rather good time of it, actually, when she made it to what seemed the center of the gathering. The cluttered aisles of elegant tables and pavilions dropped away to a large clear space of no definable shape which teemed with wizards and witches. They were all standing there in knots and groups chatting (likely insultingly) for all the world like the market down in the village, except for some overall thing that felt different somehow which Sophie could not put her finger on.

“Excuse me, my dear. Would you happen to know where I could find Wizard Pendragon?”

Sophie looked up. Looking up was apt in this case, because the person asking her was very tall, much taller than Howl or even Wizard Suliman. He had shoulder-length brown hair, and was wearing long pale robes with some kind of subtle design on them.  “No, I don’t know where he is,” Sophie said.

“Ah, but you do know him?” The tall wizard said.

He said it very mildly, yet Sophie got the impression that she had made some sort of conversational error, which the man was savoring. It was a little unsettling. “Whether or not I know him, I certainly don’t know where he is,” she said tartly, and made to move off into the crowd. But the man stuck out his hand at her and she found herself shaking it instead.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m Freeyle. I’m an old friend of Wizard Pendragon’s. And you must be Sophie?”

Sophie was sure that she had never seen this man before in her life, so this was more than a little unsettling. “Where do you know How—Wizard Pendragon from?” she asked, extracting her hand from the man’s large one in a hurry. Yes, he was very polite—but his face seemed awfully far away, even for someone so tall, and she could have sworn that the subtle little designs on his robes were actually making her queasy. As soon as she thought she’d pinned them with her eyes, they would seem to squirm a little, or when she looked back they were somehow different.

“Here and there,” said the man. “We’ve dabbled in the same circles before, as I’m sure you’re thoroughly aware.”

Sophie was not, in fact, thoroughly aware. “What Wizard Pendragon does with his time is a mystery to me,” Sophie said, doing her best to imitate Howl’s arch, pompous tone. “Well, perhaps you two will be in a circle together sometime later. Pardon me, I have to go attend to my carpet.”

The tall, tall man gave a deep chuckle and began to say something, but Sophie hurried off before he could. She was definitely shaken. She had to veritably tear her eyes off of the squirmy, swirly patterns on Freeyle’s robes, and she was positive she felt a twinge of nausea as she turned away—but at last she managed it, and dove at a brisk walk down the first twisty lane of tents she came to.  In a wild fit of nerves, she plunged up and down aisles quite at random until she felt she’d put enough distance between herself and the market center. Then she stopped to catch her breath, thinking, that was downright odd!

This part of the Wizard’s market did not look any different—any more magical or more menacing—than the parts Sophie had been marveling at earlier. Everything seemed to be going on as normal. A child was chasing little floating golden bubbles around with a butterfly net, and two old men sat on a blanket piling dozens of cast-iron pots and pans atop one another at impossible angles.

“Bother,” Sophie said aloud. She was getting a funny niggling feeling that she had behaved abominably. And the stranger had been so polite! What a fool she must have looked! Then and there she determined to be friendlier and more personable to whomever she might meet next.

Her chance came sooner than she expected. When Sophie tried to figure out where she might find Howl again—he ought to be well done with introductions by now—she realized immediately that she was lost. If she had had ever had a clear idea where she was going, the twists and turns she had taken in her escape from Freeyle had left it all behind. She kept walking, but all the tents and the booths and the innumerable blankets were beginning to look the same. And hadn’t she just seen that sign reading FROG LEG HALF OFF in large white letters? Was she going in circles?

Sophie shook her head to try and get her bearings. Howl would think she was an inutterable fool—she could already imagine the smugness coming off him in waves. She resolved that he mustn’t find out she had been lost at all. It would be simple to see if she was going in circles: FROG LEG HALF OFF was certainly recognizable enough. But it seemed she had scarcely struck out for a different lane of blankets when she was accosted by another stranger, this time a woman. She was tall and bland-looking and came up beside Sophie in the little path, falling into step with her. Sophie did not pay her much mind at first; she was busy being cross with herself.

“Hello there,” said the woman in a pleasant voice that sounded so similar in tone to the Wizard Freeyle’s that Sophie’s heartbeat performed an odd little tremor. Then she recovered herself a little—Friendly and personable! she thought.

“Yes?” she said, and, remembering the flower shop, added, “How may I help you?” for good measure.

The bland-faced woman smiled a little smile, like a cat that is dreaming in its sleep of playing with a mouse before it eats it. Don’t be so suspicious, Sophie! Sophie chided herself, but she walked a little faster, all the same. Trying to be pleasant was obviously a difficult task.

“Oh, well, in that case,” the not-bland woman said, “do you think you can help me find Wizard Howl?” She kept pace with Sophie easily.

Be polite! Sophie thought desperately to herself. “Well,” she began, turning a corner. After all, why shouldn’t she help this stranger find Howl?

And then she noticed two things at once. One was a familiar sign saying FROG LEG HALF OFF in big white letters. The other was that the woman’s long dress was inscribed with patterns that seemed to squirm and twitch just as you looked the other way.

The coincidence was too much. Something inside Sophie’s chest seemed to fall into the pit of her stomach. It took all of her strength not to jump right behind the table of a stall they were passing.

“Well?” said the woman, with the tiny catlike smile still perched on the end of her face.  

Politeness be damned! Sophie thought. “Well, I don’t know any Wizard Howl!” she lied, and walked even faster. Perhaps she could  “Isn’t he that…that heart-eating fool from Market Chipp…er, Market Chipper?  I don’t see why anyone would want to eat hearts. They’re awfully gooey.” Go away, go away! she thought. Leave me alone!

“Oh no,” said the woman sharply, and now all the pleasantness was gone from her voice. “None of that now. We’re going to stay right here until you tell me how you know Wizard Pendragon. I don’t believe your little spiel one bit. You’ve got a liar’s nose if I ever saw one.”

Sophie did not know what the woman meant by ‘right here’—she was walking so fast now that it seemed her legs had a mind of their own. But they were still going in circles—she was sure now she’d just seen that carpet stall, and there was FROG LEG HALF OFF going by in a blur of big white letters. It was a good thing she was no longer an old woman. Her old joints would never have sustained this pace.

“Nobody has ever said that about my nose, not even the Witch of the Waste,” she said, panting a little. The awful woman kept beside her effortlessly, as though they were strolling down main street on a Sunday. “And she didn’t last very long, did she?”

“The Witch of the Waste? Peh. She was an old hag,” the woman said. “Where is Wizard Pendragon?”

Sophie was getting tired and irritated—and most of all, really frightened. “I already told you I don’t know any Wizard Pendragon!” she snapped—and then she stopped. A big horrid smile had slid its way across the other witch’s features, and Sophie knew she had made a mistake. But in what?   Oh, where was Howl? Or even Michael or Calcifer? Come on, feet, get us out of here! Sophie thought.

But however fast she walked, she could not lose the other woman. In fact, she pursed her painted lips and tutted at Sophie in a way which would have been infuriating, if Sophie hadn’t already been so frightened. “Oh, I can see it’s no use talking to you. Stop trying to use your petty, childish magic and tell me where Wizard Howl is,” the witch said.  

“What magic?” Sophie protested. Her brain was whirling every which way. “And Wizard Howl—who’s Wizard—”Was it Howl she was pretending not to know, or Pendragon? Drat!

“You do know that even if you won’t tell me how you know Wizard Howl, he will certainly come find you when he learns I’m here,” the woman said in what she must have thought were tones of perfect reason. “You might as well just tell me, and get it over with.”  

“I will do no such thing!” Sophie said. The thought had occurred to her just the moment before. What if Howl came across her and ended up blowing the whole story? Stay away, Howl! she thought frantically, and tried to walk faster than ever before. There went FROG LEG HALF OFF again, barely legible for the speed. The woman beside her tutted again in a sad, sympathetic, nasty way. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” she said. “I’m sure your wizard is already on his way.”

Whatever happens, Howl can’t be allowed to come near you, you beastly bullying hag! Sophie thought viciously. She wanted to say it out loud, but she was having trouble finding enough breath to make words. It was all this spinning, blurring walking-in-circles! It would certainly not do. She struggled to say something and managed to gasp “—Leave—me—alone—!” —which even by her own standards was a very poor escape attempt; and then she walked straight into a pair of hands and everything changed pace quite abruptly.

~H~

Wizard Howl had a general habit of not saying what he meant.  He was not sure whether this was because it was nobody’s business but his, or because even he never knew exactly what that was.  A conversation, he figured, was usually some kind of placeholder while whatever he was actually concerned with thought itself through in his brain.  Sometimes a conversation could be a bit of a battle: for instance, when you were out accosting girls, everyone knew what you were getting at and chose to talk in circles around it because it was more fun that way.  Those conversations were games.  Howl was rather proud of being able to play them without having to get away from what he was really thinking for more than a few moments.  (Calcifer had once told him that this was why he never won girls’ hearts for very long.  But every other method looked like far too much work, so he had pretended not to notice.)

Once in a while there would be a moment in a conversation that actually made him stop to think about what was going on.  He was never sure when this would happen—only that it felt very like being pinned to the wall while he stopped and actually thought about the conversation.  Generally he tried to avoid these moments whenever possible. He had noticed, though, that when he was talking to Sophie, these sorts of moments became more frequent. It had taken some getting used to. Occasionally it was even nice.

His market conversation with Sir Rethe, whom Howl had been seeing if he could despise less for today, was either the worst kind of conversation or the best kind, in that it was pretty much utter drivel all the way through. In fact, Howl was pleased that his face could perform its part in the conversation so admirably with almost no help from his brain whatsoever. Hopefully Sophie would have something to say to shut Sir Rethe up. He would just have to introduce her.

In his mouth’s typical fashion, it was halfway through the introduction when Howl’s brain realized that Sophie wasn’t here, blast her. She’d probably found somebody’s stall to go clean up—he’d seen her eyeing the jumble with her things-need-to-be-cleaned face. And of course, she hadn’t thought to tell him where she was going. No, it would be just like her, in fact, to deliberately not-tell him where she was going.  She could be anywhere at this point.

“This is…?” Sir Rethe asked with a slow inquisitive glance, twirling his long moustache around one finger.

“This was Sophie,” Howl said. “She seems to have gone off somewhere.”

“Oh,” Sir Rethe said. “How unfortunate. Well, as I was saying, following the trouble with the pig remains cropping up in the vegetable gardens—I mean it quite literally, they were cropping up, like ears of corn, so you see—”

“How gruesome,” Howl muttered, smiling. He let the words drone into and out of his ears and made a few more faces for effect. Surely Sophie couldn’t have got into that much trouble at the wizard’s market, could she?  

Now that was a question to which Howl suddenly did not want to know the answer. In fact, out of the many questions to which Howl did not want to know the answers, this one was pretty far up there, somewhere between “What does it feel like to be eaten by a dragon?” and “What if Megan finds out about magic?”

When his mouth got tired of this particular game, Howl disengaged himself from Sir Rethe, who would surely keep going on about about his troubles with entrails for days, and went looking around for Michael and Calcifer. Let Sophie stick her nosy nose anywhere she liked. Surely she was enjoying herself.

How long had she been gone, anyway? The day was getting later and later. Howl did not like to think of himself as a worrywart—but alright, he could admit that he was the tiniest bit worried. There was no shame in that. It was just the everyday tragedy of having his kind of wild imagination.

“Calcifer,” Howl asked of the air. Or rather, he asked of the strange humming space around his heart where Calcifer’s flame had once taken root; it was still quite a solid link between them, although the bond now was dimmer, obscured by his real heart’s beating. It took some work to get ahold of the fire demon when, as now, he was not in immediate sight. “Calcifer!” Howl said aloud again, “Where is that blasted woman?”

The faraway feeling that came into Howl’s heart at this point could potentially be decipherable as busy busy nosy nosy—Calcifer was being obstinate. “Not now, old blueface, you’ve got to come through,” Howl said. “Help me find Sophie. There’s no telling what she’s up to out there.”

There was a long, resigned, drawn-out whisper of woe and weariness, which Howl ignored. Yes, he was worried. Yes, he already knew that Calcifer was doing this only for Sophie’s sake, not for Howl’s dreadful, cowardly, spying person. He waited impatiently, until at last he felt the long surge of power which opened up that sense where he and Calcifer were both zipping and flittering about in the atmosphere and securely in their places at once.

Howl almost felt the tiniest twinge of guilt about his surveillance—just the tiniest little nudge—but then he sensed the problem, and immediately everything seemed justified and right and eerily fast-forwarded because someone was after Sophie.

Almost at the same time Howl felt it, Michael came shooting out from one of the nearby aisles between blankets. He was actually running so fast that he nearly plowed into Howl, skidding the last few feet sliding and scrabbling for purchase in the grass. “Howl!” he was shouting, windmilling his arms to stop his momentum. “Howl! I think there’s a problem!”

“Do tell,” Howl said, his mind only half in the present moment. The other half was still circling with Calcifer, trying to feel out Sophie from the rest of the spells and enchantments that thickened the ground at Wizard’s market, and to see which of those enchantments he ought to be worried about.

Michael’s face was flushed from running and he wrung his hands nervously against his tunic. “I was just in the gathering space and think I saw one of those people—you know, the ones that you told me not to get involved with!”

“There were several of those,” Howl said. Wasting words was not his priority right now. “Do you remember which of them it was? Have you seen Sophie?”

Michael answered the first question. “I don’t know…There was a man and a woman. They have those robes of spell-silk that make you dizzy?” He seemed calmer now—perhaps he thought (for some reason) that Howl had the situation under control. “I almost remember one of their names. It had to do with some kind of wood.”

Howl’s brain made sense of what was going on. “Curses! Damnation and hellfire!” he shouted.

It was clear to him that he must be at Sophie’s side this moment—or before this moment, if possible. He had the ingredients and thoughts for the transportation spell in his mind in an instant, and another instant after that—slapdash, slapdash, but there was no time to kill in being thorough—Howl was moving across the market in a rush. He ended up leaving Michael behind him shouting something about balsa. Things seemed to be crashing around him as he went—tents and tables and stands, perhaps—but the important thing was that he get to Sophie, now (or sooner than now, preferably).

One good thing was that finding Sophie was soon made easier Sophie herself, who began shouting out in a very clear, precise spell: Stay away, Howl! Don’t come over here! Howl thought that was a load of tripe, although he did feel the magic tugging at his sleeves ineffectively from time to time, the way a small child might.  “There we are,” he said to himself, and followed the whole thread of it right exactly to her, nevermind all the troublesome scree of blankets and pots and pans and a sign with large white letters that flew up in his face at the last moment with a hideous jarring clanging sound—

There she was. And in the grip of a particularly cunning bit of magic. Howl did not think so much as stick his hands out into the spell before he had lost momentum and pray that what he got was Sophie and not something else entirely.  There was the briefest of flashes and he spooled runes frantically through his head and then he had her by the shoulders—“Oh, no, let me go!” she cried, and it was Sophie alright—and everything was going to be alright.

The momentum of the spell she’d been in plastered her face-first against his chest. By some trick she had figured out his identity without even a glance—“Howl!” she said. “Oh, it’s no good, you need to stay away!”

The irritation in her voice had Howl’s innards going gooey with relief. “Garbage,” he said.

“Wizard Howl! Or should I say, Wizard Pendragon?” A low, slinky, familiar voice interrupted. Howl got his bearings and realized that they were in one of the trampled-grass lanes of the Wizard’s Market, standing amongst a wreckage of tent-poles and table-legs and magical knick-knacks, with a crowd gathering round whispering. Just in front of him stood a middle-sized woman with a round, forgettable face, dressed in a grandiose fashion which Howl knew was supposed to distract from her decidedly ordinary appearance. Her hands were on her hips and her richly-patterned green dress crawled with spelled runes and designs of an arcane nature.

“I do prefer Pendragon, it rings much nicer on the tongue, don’t you think?” Howl said. He had Sophie, and now he was determined to get out of here as quickly as he could. “Belsin,” he added pleasantly, “Isn’t it?”

“Oh, so you admit to your own treachery!” The woman did not react to the name, but Howl was almost sure he was correct.  Careful, he heard Calcifer’s voice ring out in his heart. Don’t forget about the other half.

I haven’t!  “I am the most treacherous scoundrel of them all, I’m afraid,” said Howl. “No denying it. My reputation ought to be suitably impoverished.  Lovely chatting with you. And now, I think Sophie and I are going to be on our way.”

The witch’s brown eyes went from Howl’s face back to Sophie’s red-gold head tucked under Howl’s chin. “Ah, does this one belong to you, then?” she sneered. It was an impressive sneer for such a mild face.

Howl’s heart beat a few times errantly in his chest. “Heavens, no!” he said. “Sophie belongs to no one but Sophie. If she puts up with my nonsense, it’s only out of the goodness of her nosy old heart.”

“What a pity,” the witch said; Howl felt Sophie squirm and scrabble around in his arms to face her attacker. Her breath sucked in and she started forward as if to speak, but the woman cut her off, still addressing Howl: “She’s such a drab little peahen. Not like the ones you usually go for. She won’t last longer than any of the others.”

Then she seemed to see something in Sophie’s face that Howl could not, for she quirked her round, bland face to the side and added, “Hold onto him while you can, my dear. Or don’t you know what Pendragon is doing while Wizard Howl isn’t at home?”

Sophie’s body was taut with fury, and Howl had to admire the affected haughtiness in her voice when she snapped, “What Howl does is none of your business. You’re being dreadful and rude.”

Howl, Calcifer was whispering into his heart, I’ve got my eye right on Freeyle now, but let’s not get caught up if we can. It’ll be nasty all around.

Howl could not agree more. He had no idea what the woman was talking about, and no desire whatsoever to let Sophie provoke her into a real fight. He looked around them for arrangements and saw his opportunity.

Cutting Sophie off as she took a breath before what certainly would’ve been a truly impressive retort, Howl said aloud, “Alas! I can’t stay to hear more about my wicked, evil-drenched soul. We really must skedaddle. Right, Sophie?” And he whispered into her ear, out of the other witch’s earshot: “Hold on.”

The tent he’d barged through to get here was a shambles; no sense in leaving a trail of broken bits and hard feelings in his wake. Before the bland-faced woman could speak, Howl leapt up on a convenient little gust and returned. It was simple: like pulling a zipper together, he shot backwards the way he had come, and blankets and stands and jewels and pestles and a twice-surprised tomcat came spilling back up into their rightful places in a confusion of jarring and clanging. Things whirred past over their heads and crashed and flew around them in a waving colorful maelstrom. But this time Howl’s arms were fastened tight around Sophie’s middle and his head was bent over the back of hers, so that he was quite sure of where she was.

And in a moment they were back by Michael, who was still standing bewildered in a wide, meandering aisle of the market, peering at a blanket covered in heaps and heaps of little white shells. Howl stumbled onto solid ground with Sophie in his arms and said, winded for a moment, “Whew!”

Michael turned toward them in a “Oh, good you’re back! What just happened?” he asked. “Howl, I remembered the name of the man I saw. I think it was Belsin—”

“She’s not following!” Calcifer shouted, shooting into view above their heads in a sparkler of purple and gold and orange.

“I know,” Howl said. Relief was already making him silly. Michael asked “Who’s not following?” but Howl had some words for Sophie first.

“You confounded woman!” he said, turning her around by the arms to face him. His arms were weak with relief and he felt like shaking her right out of her skin. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s just like you to slink off when I’m not looking and cause trouble!”

~S~

“Did something bad happen—?” Sophie heard Michael say. She had been about to apologize for getting into the whole mess: now she felt attacked by Howl too. “I wasn’t causing trouble! I was completely fine,” she said, pulling back from the wizard a little.  She felt fine, too. There was no need for Howl to hold onto her shoulders as though he thought she might fall down at the slightest breath of wind.

“Doing alright!” Howl said. “Is that what you call that? That witch had you marching all around the market like a marionette!”

“She—I’m sure she would have gotten out of breath any moment there,” Sophie said. The stammer surprised her. Her breathing was still a little touchy, perhaps. Howl had hurled them through the market so suddenly and her heart was still jumping from such close contact.

Howl did not believe her. He leaned down right to Sophie’s eye level and fixed her with a piercing green glare. “And you knew all about the spell she was using, I expect?” he asked.

The thought that she had been under a spell had not even occurred to Sophie. She felt the heat flushing up her face. “Of course I did,” she said. “Anyone could see that it was a spell.”

Howl threw up his arms. “What an unbelievable creature you are!” he shouted, but Sophie had a hard time listening. It was as if she had only now realized that her legs were made of jelly and the world was swinging gaily around and around beyond her head like a maypole dancer. She swayed, said squeakily, “Oh! Don’t let go!”

Howl grabbed her again in an instant. The panic flooding his face would have been funny if Sophie had been in a fit state to appreciate it. “Steady!” he said, and his arm went around her shoulders this time.

Sophie shut her eyes against the world spinning and leaned into Howl’s arm. It was solid and helped with the spinning in her brain. She thought: Howl isn’t shouting at me because he’s angry. He’s just worried, like the coward that he is. And she had been really, truly in a pickle back there with the woman whom Howl had called Belsin. It was only her pride that was keeping her from saying so. Howl was running his mouth in the general sense: “I suppose it would be too much to ask for you to acknowledge I’ve got us out of a scrape.”

Perhaps it was the shock that had tired her brain out. Sophie tried something new.

“I’m..sorry,” she muttered. It was a wretched little murmur and felt wrong, but she could not stop now, could she?  “I’m still a bit shaky. I...thank you.”

If Howl’s face had been funny earlier, now it was hilarious.  Half an incredulous frown sunk one side of his mouth down, and his green eyes were so wide that it seemed they would burst any moment. It was almost insulting. “Did I hear that correctly?” he said after a moment of what seemed to be flabbergasted silence. “Sophie Hatter, is that you? Are you still under a spell? Surely you’re not apologizing to me. You must be in shock. I think I might just die of surprise.”

“You see why I don’t want to!” Sophie said weakly, but Howl was shaking his head, with a smile growing on his lips. It was a handsome, real, bewildered smile and for a moment Sophie felt her stomach get loopy in a way that had nothing to do with behind frightened earlier. She was glad again of Howl’s arm wrapped around her shoulders. “You rely too much on never showing weakness. It’s really baffling,” he said.

Sophie had never thought of herself like this. “It’s not that,” she found herself saying. “It’s just that if you pretend to know what you’re talking about, people are likely to believe you. I would think you would know all about that!” This had worked particularly well with Martha and Lettie when they were small.

Howl raised his eyebrows. “It seemed to be working well for you back there,” he said.

Sophie glared at him, though she was in no way tempted to shake off the supporting arm. “What am I to do, then, run away from everything?”

“I don’t see what’s the problem with that.” Howl said, and smiled a smile of great nobleness and dignity. “I do it all the time.”

“Hmmph,” Sophie said. She felt a little better than before. All this had taken place in only a few minutes, for Michael was still trying to figure out what had just happened. He had given up on she and Howl and was trying to get it out of Calcifer now.

“Howl was just being flashy,” Calcifer crackled, hovering at the boy’s eye level.

“Of course he was,” Michael said. He looked aptly frustrated. “But then who was that man I saw? Did Howl hear me at all? Are they going to come find us here? Howl—Howl, listen to me, what’s going on? I think this is really important!”

And then of course the whole thing had to come out at last.  Everyone began asking questions; Howl dodged answers left and right like a bullfighter scrambling about the ring. Sophie’s body began functioning normally again. She realized she had the same question as Michael: “But what do Belsin and Freeyle want with you, Howl?” he kept asking very seriously. “It’s not as if we’ve been out picking fights. Have we?”

In the midst of the explaining, they found their way back to their magic carpet and started for home. “We’ve had enough excitement for the day, Mrs. Nose,” Howl explained, and packed them all onto the carpet so quickly that Sophie half-expected this was magic too. She had not noticed it earlier, but Howl seemed to have purchased at least one or two large items, because the carpet was altogether more crowded coming back than it had been going to the market.  She did not inspect them closely, partly because Calcifer and Howl’s loud discussion on Howl’s enemies continued, and partly because soon they were off the ground again with the whole landscape of Ingary (or wherever they were) spread out like a very faraway green quilt underneath them.

Sophie still felt very justifiably nervous about the edges of the carpet—they were so awfully close! But the events of earlier had emboldened her somewhat. So this time she decided to do what she had wanted to do the whole trip to the market: she put her arms around Howl’s waist and did not let go until the carpet was quite safely near the ground.  She waited until they were going and he looked settled and secure in front of her, but only just; then she scooted forward and slid her arms about Howl quite prepared to defend herself against anything he might say to dislodge her.  She was almost disappointed when all the wizard did was jump a bit, and suck his breath in perhaps a little harder than usual.  She consoled herself to this lack of reaction by asking Howl if anything was wrong.  The coyness in her voice surprised even Sophie herself.

“You startled me,” the wizard said, and then chuckled. “All I ask is you don’t squeeze me too hard.  As you know I’m incredibly fragile.”  An unexpected benefit to having her face pressed against Howl’s shoulder blade was being able to feel his every word vibrating against her cheek.

“I would never dream of such a thing,” Sophie said into what amounted to Howl’s armpit.  “Someone’s got to steer this carpet.  Michael said so.”

“Oho, I see how it is!” Howl barked. His stomach moved in and out under Sophie’s arms.  Then she felt a warmth across her entwined hands as Howl’s long-fingered hand crept up to cover them. The hand seemed a little guilty at first, but soon it settled itself around hers and became restful and comforting. A giddy calm spread across Sophie’s chest, seeming to come from somewhere in between her ribcage and her stomach.  She closed her eyes and felt perfectly content.

Of course, if there was one thing that did not last in Howl’s moving castle, it was content.  The ride to the market had seemed ages long to Sophie; the ride home seemed so short in comparison that she wondered if she had fallen asleep and missed half of it.  But she knew it was not really possible: who could sleep in such close proximity to Howl?  If this was how married people were supposed to feel it was a wonder anyone ever slept at all.  Her body certainly seemed twice as awake as usual: it noted, and made appropriate responses to, every minute shift in Howl’s position as he steered the carpet home, sometimes muttering things to himself under his breath.  Surely this kind of excitement was not something that Sophie alone experienced.  

She tried not to let this thought process continue for too long. Squashing that kind of thought was a skill she had been honing lately.

But if that was necessary, that mischeivous part of her mind said, what was she doing right now anyway?  It certainly wasn’t just keeping from falling off the carpet.

Ooh, drat! Sophie thought at herself, and tried her hardest not to think anymore.

~H~

And they were home at long last.

It hadn’t really been that terrifying a day, Howl figured, all things said and done. There had been moments of terror, sure, but overall, the day had been good. It could certainly not compare to anything served up during the Witch of the Waste’s days. Then again, it was rather a different kind of terror. Ish.

It was barely even late afternoon, but Michael was yawning by the time they had shuttled all the old things and new things back up from the carpet into the castle room. Perhaps the day had exhausted him. Howl wasn’t sure whether to be exhausted or exhilarated—it depended on who was watching, he supposed.  The trip home had been nothing short of perilous—how did Sophie expect him to steer the unreliable old carpet with her arms about him? That wasn’t fair of her at all. Horrible grey dress or no, being soft and warm and Sophie all over him and expecting him to keep a clear head was in his humble opinion a deep and tragic injustice.

It occurred to Howl that he hadn’t been in such a tizzy over a girl simply putting her arms around him since prep school, or perhaps earlier. The thought was just as terrifying as the incident with Belsin and Freeyle, if not more so.  

It became more terrifying when they got back to the castle, although in a different sort of way. Howl had not in fact thought the day could get more terrifying, but it obviously had a different idea in mind. One thing he was certain about: all the speculation about Belsin and Freeyle was going to ruin his nerves if it didn’t stop instantly—they’d survived, hadn’t they, and wasn’t that enough? Calcifer was sulking over Howl’s intervention with Sophie, so it wasn’t hard to get him to stop; Howl set Michael some tasks about the castle to distract him, and that seemed to work well enough. As for himself, he went about sorting his purchases from the market into the jumble of spells and magical objects already crowding his workbench. That spelled blue leather book, plain as it was, would be very good friends with his collection of scrawling chalk. He had to work hard to keep the rest of his spell-stuff arranged just messily enough that he could find everything again, but he did manage eventually.

Evening came on in its slow steady way. Soon after dinner (no-longer-raw potatoes, to Howl’s delight) Michael yawned widely and slouched upstairs to bed. Calcifer was sulking in the upper levels of the chimneys—Howl could feel him there, as always—but could not be reached; which suited Howl just fine. The afternoon had taken it out of all of them, alright.

And then the strange thing happened, which was that neither Howl nor Sophie seemed to be able to go to bed. Surely Sophie was tired and wanted to sleep off today’s adventure; but no, she was putzing about the castle room as always, tidying things here and there, without speaking to him. This was not in itself remarkable—but tonight there was something mysteriously portentious about it, or at least it seemed so to Howl.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She swept the hearth but Howl got the impression she was not really looking at it. She picked up things off the large table—some spell papers, scissors, a cabbage—and rearranged them. She looked through the pantry. It was as though there were something she wanted to do, but she did not know what that was.

Worse, the mood seemed to be infectious. Watching Sophie, and pretending not to watch her, Howl caught himself juggling bits of spells about on his workbench, walking to the wall to check on the patch which was still not right at all, looking halfheartedly at some notes he had written on a tricky new spell-book. Eventually, after two powders which were not meant to touch accidentally brushed in his restlessness and sparks flew across the workbench, he settled for trying to read.

Soon he felt almost sure that this was somehow some kind of contest—who would leave the room first ? Howl determined it would not be him. He wanted to see what Sophie was planning. She had put her arms around him on the carpet that afternoon without so much as stopping to ask his permission; was there more of that in store?

Howl thought about how this part of the day usually worked: sometimes there were pleasant little discussions that pretended to be arguments, and then whoever was going to bed first usually finished up whatever they were doing, said goodnight, left the room. The goodnight bit caught his imagination up—maybe it was the goodnight she was waiting for. He could just picture it: Sophie tapping at his shoulder in her bare feet, red gold hair curling about the nape of her neck, her small hands framed by her nightgown’s trailing sleeves, bending down to his lips to whisper goodnight to him—No, this was Sophie he was thinking about. She would most likely roll up the sleeves of her nightgown as though she was about to get a job done, stomp toward him, and pull him up demanding that he kiss her goodnight. Howl had to chuckle at this, or at least he had to chuckle to ignore the fierce tingle that skated across his lips at the thought.

At long last, after what seemed to be years of waffling, Sophie went about getting ready for bed. Howl turned a page in his book, but the words seemed to scroll by without his comprehension. Fantasies kept shuttling through his body in a tightening kind of hope. Without really looking he noticed her go into the bathroom to wash, go into her cupboard room under the stairs, come out again wearing her familiar long shapeless nightgown, and look around the room as though for something else to stall.

At last she stood and faced him. Was she waiting for a signal? Howl was sure he was not completely wrong in her intentions. By now the castle room seemed almost to resonate with the buzzing of the unsaid thing. It was far worse than their argument a few days ago. Howl’s heart was putting up a pumping drumming racket in there.

“Goodnight, Howl,” Sophie said. And paused. Howl felt the pause go all through his bones.  Here he had the evening’s most terrifying thought yet: Heavens, she didn’t expect him to do something? Hadn’t she already figured out that he was hopeless at that kind of endeavor?

Howl’s mouth realized that something must be done about the occasion; and, perhaps because it was so good at playing those meaningless conversations, it came out with something that he was not thinking at all. “Goodnight, Sophie,” it said.

And then Howl went upstairs to bed, thinking, dammit, what a pair of fools we are!

~*~