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Somehow, while coming back from another try at the stuck key in the cellars, we’d taken a wrong turn— instead of the passage leading back to the Lower Hall, we were in a blind hallway, ending in a door. I pelted forward, Christopher on my heels, and nearly fell through it.
Unfortunately, it was the guests’ linen cupboard.
Footsteps sounded down the hall. I jumped and fell back into Christopher, who nearly cannoned over himself.
“They’re coming this way!” I said. “Hide!”
“Where, exactly?” Christopher said. The cupboard was lined with shelves too narrow to fit into, and crammed full with sheets besides. There was no other furniture.
“Then hide us! Do something with enchantment!”
“If it were that easy,” Christopher whispered fiercely, “I wouldn’t have needed to put a sleep spell on you in the first place, I’d’ve just made myself undetectable. Who’s coming? Can we get out?”
I listened. “They’re in the hall already,” I said. I didn’t think there was any way past.
Christopher listened intently himself. His face worked. “Two of ‘em— both women— a couple of maids, maybe? Oh, damn, damn. Grant, I can only think of one excuse for us to be down here. I think it won’t get us fired. It doesn’t make any sense at all, of course, but maybe they won’t think of that either.”
I couldn’t imagine what he was driving at.
“Do you trust me, Grant?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. I did, I thought, even if I hadn’t any other choice.
“And you’ve never been to school, either,” he said distantly.
That was far beyond the acceptable range for either Christopher’s snobbery or his forgetfulness. “I have too!”
“Public school, I mean,” he said. I had no idea what that meant. The Lower School was open to everyone in Stallchester.
“I— damn it,” he said. “Look, Grant, I don’t mean it, say you’ll forgive me,” he said, very rushed and low. Outside the footsteps were louder than ever, and I could hear voices, too.
“Just say what—” I said in a sort of furious whisper, and then he kissed me.
I had no idea what to do. I’d never kissed anyone before. I’d thought about it— at least, there had been a girl I desperately liked, last year, and I understood that to involve kissing. I had assumed I would understand the appeal once I got there. So far I hadn’t.
There were three very long seconds of Christopher pressing his mouth onto mine, his eyes wide open and distressed and very close up. I learned later that you’re supposed to close them, but I suppose neither of us thought of it. His mouth was a bit chapped. The key rattled vigorously in the lock, for what seemed a very long time— “and if she rings again you’re to come to me first,” a voice I recognized as one of the older parlormaids said from the other side— and then the door opened.
I wasn’t facing it, so the first I knew for sure was Fay’s squeal. “Oh! Oh, er—”
Christopher broke away instantly, looking red and unhappy. I looked away from him right away. I didn’t see how that could have helped at all.
“Dora—” Fay had turned back right away, trying to cover for us. “Dora, I think we’d better see if the silver’s all right, first— otherwise won’t we need the other napkins?”
“What on earth are you talking about,” Dora the parlormaid said.
“No, really—” Fay was quite tall, as tall as Christopher, and the other girl couldn’t see around her to where we were half-fallen on the floor. “I’m quite sure that Manfred told me that the Mahr flatware isn’t polished, yet, and so then we’d need the sprigged napkins for the Walker service, wouldn’t we?”
“Nonsense,” Dora said. “We’d need nothing of the kind.”
“Then I’ll just take both,” Fay said, and darted around the door and shut it behind her very fast. She widened her eyes at us dramatically. I stared back.
“Fay—!” Dora started to open the door again.
“No, no, I’ve got it!” she blurted. Christopher reached over to the shelf just behind me— his arm brushed my ear— and shoveled a load of napkins out and into her hands. She nodded and mouthed “you owe me” at us, and was back out the door in moments.
“Well we don’t need all of that,” Dora said, “but I suppose you can get started on the arrangements for the upper parlor when you’re done…”
They clicked back up the corridor and faded away.
Christopher was still horribly red, and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“They’re gone,” I said, eventually, and he nodded and said “After you, Grant,” and waved me out. We were both rather too tired and anxious to say anything else, and Christopher, to my secret relief, dismissed my suggestion that we make another try at the door. The next day Christopher went off to rescue Millie.
It took less than three days of living in Chrestomanci Castle to settle on convening in Millie’s room in our free time. Christopher, still in disgrace, was meant to be repairing Castle furnishing-spells and not entertaining guests, and my room was up in the north tower and far too much of a hike to visit between classes. The three of us were, at first, mostly just exhausted. After a while, though, I noticed Millie spending a lot of time glancing first at Christopher, then at me, very giggly, and looking as though she was just barely holding something in; it was behavior I would have expected out of quite a few of the Stallery housemaids, but not at all of Millie. Mentioning it, I thought, would have been asking for trouble, and I rather hoped that she’d keep suppressing whatever if it was until it stopped being funny.
Then came the day the Government inspector came to investigate our educational progress, and called Christopher’s work ‘nothing short of miraculous’, which he was so truly insufferable about that I eventually cornered him next to Millie’s armoire and beat him about the head with a couch cushion. When we emerged from this entirely earned punishment, it was to find that Millie finally seemed to have lost the battle. She was flushed, her eyes twinkling, her arms clasped rapturously about her knees.
“Have you two,” she said, “got anything to tell me?”
Christopher and I stared at her, identically bewildered.
“Oh,” she said, “you don’t know!” She fairly wiggled in delight. “I simply have to tell you then. Fay told me— when I was being a feather duster, you know,” Millie said, trying to sound serious, “that she caught you and Conrad in a tender embrace!” Her composure failed on the last couple of words. She nearly hooted with laughter.
“Oh, Lord,” Christopher said. “Was she spreading that all over the castle, or—”
“No, no, she promised complete secrecy,” Millie said, “only she felt she was honor bound to tell me, between girls, you know, in case I thought Conrad and I had an understanding. Since we’re special friends.” This part was clearly nearly as funny to her as the thought of me and Christopher embracing.
Christopher looked nettled. “Did you explain to her that she hadn’t seen anything of the kind?”
“She wouldn’t have believed that,” Millie said. “I tried to say it was just school stuff, but she didn’t understand me at all— I guess that’s not a Series Seven thing.” It annoyed me severely when they talked about completely normal parts of life as a “Series Seven thing”. They didn’t even have a proper government in Twelve!
“No,” Christopher said, “I think it’s that no one on the domestic staff would have been to boarding school.”
“Oh.” Millie frowned, and then brightened. She turned to me. “Conrad can tell us!”
“Conrad’s never been to boarding school either.”
“What on earth does school have to do with any of this?” I said. “People kiss at school in Seven, too, but we don’t make a special point of it.”
Christopher coughed. He was steadily turning even redder than when he’d kissed me in the first place.
Millie spoke up first. “It’s, er, boys going with boys. Or girls getting pashes on a particular girl, and kissing her all the time, and giving her flowers, and only going with her.” She’d sounded rushed and ashamed at the beginning, but grew more confident as she went on, I suppose because she knew more about girls. “In Series Twelve, you only do that at school— at boarding school, because it only is all girls, or all boys, so there’s nobody else to kiss or walk out with. But you don’t, you know, talk about it really, and no one does it anymore when they’re grown up. And in Series Five I don’t think anyone did it at all.”
She looked at me anxiously. Christopher stared off into the distance.
“The butcher in Stallchester has a husband,” I said eventually. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Christopher made a strangled sound.
“Oh,” Millie said. “Well, that explains it. I thought it was rather odd how Fay talked, like she thought Christopher were going to steal you. If you could get married, that’s different.”
“It’s not usual,” I said. “I mean, you’re supposed to try to find a woman to marry or you won’t have any heirs to look after you. But if you’re a widower it’s all right.” I was dimly aware it was more complicated than that, but I wasn’t sure how. My mother had tried to explain it to me, once, and had made a long speech about marriages between women as a patriarchal trick to keep properties in the family and partition off unwanted sisters. I’d looked up patriarchal and partition— I’d been eight— but it had all rather blurred and muddled together.
“Millie,” Christopher started in, “don’t you think Grant’s a bit young for all of this?”
“I don’t!” Millie said, clearly recognizing that Christopher was about to get overbearing. “I’m only just fourteen, he’s almost as old as me!”
“Infants, then,” he said, “both of you,” and then made a great show of remembering that he and I were due for Fabian’s class and chivvied me out the door.
“But you haven’t even said if you really did,” Millie wailed as we left.
“We didn’t,” he said, repressively, and the door shut.
We went on in silence. I made some effort at re-buttoning my cuffs, which had gone a bit crooked and grubby somehow and tended to make Fabian wince.
“We did, though,” I said eventually.
Christopher stopped and whirled to face me. He grabbed me by the shoulder. Then, just as fast, dropped it. He looked grave, and a bit scared, which, oddly, made him seem much younger than he did when he was being smug and lofty. Normally I thought of him as slightly remote and unreachable, being older, and confident and handsome, and an enchanter and all. But now he was just rather pale.
“We didn’t, Grant. You understand me? We didn’t. Even if it is different in Series Seven— and you’re far too young.” He sounded grave, too, more serious even than when he’d threatened me with church windows.
“You’re never even three years older than me,” I said indignantly.
“Bet I am,” he said, “but that’s not the point. It didn’t happen.”
“All right!” I said. He looked at me seriously and nodded. “And now we really will be late for class.”
We fairly pelted the rest of the way, and got scolded by Fabian for being obviously short of breath when we arrived; but we weren’t late.
I thought about what he’d said a bit more as we sat there, pretending to focus very deeply on divinations in water, but mainly making arcane gestures and trying not to get lint in it. But I couldn’t see the point in bringing the kiss up again, and I could humor Christopher, since he was obviously having some kind of fit about it. By the end of the week even Christopher’s oddly intense distress had mostly faded from my mind. The whole affair had, after all, happened only a day before I’d been abruptly first the nephew of a Count, and then a murderer, and then a fugitive, and then, suddenly, a trainee magician in Chrestomanci Castle. Something that hadn’t happened didn’t even enter into it.
❖
I didn’t actually expect to find anything in the storerooms of Wauchope. Christopher had insisted, though, that this was the epicenter of the incidents, and that as he and half the Castle staff were urgently needed in London, I’d have to go off to Scotland and investigate in his stead. I didn’t properly mind; it was only since I’d turned seventeen that I’d had my feet under me enough to carry out work as an agent of the Castle. But I couldn’t feel anything from the place at all, trans-universal or locally resident, and certainly nothing to explain wizards vanishing from nearby villages.
There were all sorts of variously magical relics there, mainly tribute to the clan chiefs that had been tidily dormant for several hundred years. But I’d waded through three stores of jeweled chalices without a flicker of anything, and presumed more of the same, when I opened the next door and found a person behind it.
I expected the short, well-dressed figure to be a member of the Earl’s family, or possibly part of the staff. But then the person turned, short dark hair swinging, and hit me at once with the impression of very obvious, very powerful, and very familiar magic.
“Conrad!” Millie exclaimed, and flung her arms around me. “Oh, this is nice. I’d no idea you were able to come after all!”
“After all?” I said, rather weakly; she was holding me quite tightly and took me very much by surprise.
“Well, yes,” she said, “oh, but are you staying here in the castle then? I had thought I was going to take rooms in the inn in town, when I was just here for research, but then Christopher wrote to the Earl and the Earl positively insisted, and then once I was already here, you know, Christopher wrote me that I might as well look around for anything odd.”
“I didn’t even know you were back in England!” I said. Millie had been on the Continent doing fellowships— one in enchanting in the French style, one in chemistry— for quite a while, staying with boarding school friends and sending back merrily scandalized letters about the savage traditions of Catholics and university students. I hadn’t known to expect her back for months.
“Oh,” she said when I asked, “it turns out there’s some rather interesting relics reputed to be here which were built to be difficult for Norman magic to oppose, and one of the faculty asked if I’d take a look at it. But then Christopher had his own ideas, so I don’t suppose I’ll start for a few days. I wouldn’t mind, only I really don’t think anything in this castle has had an idea of its own for years, let alone enough to do anything to anybody.”
“That’s just what I thought!” I said. We grinned at each other. I had missed Millie. Christopher was wonderful, of course, but being his friend involved rather more wild emotional swings than I really wanted every hour of every day. It wasn’t that Millie’s plans were any less outrageous than Christopher’s, but her mind worked far more like mine did, so she was much easier to talk out of any real nonsense and more fun after I did. Christopher had a tendency to sulk.
This particular storeroom, it turned out, held mostly tapestries; this was a nice change from all the chalices, which had begun to make me feel uncomfortably like I was trapped in the silver-cleaning room at Stallery. The tapestries, just as inert, were rather more varied, and I had someone to talk about them with now. We picked through them together, witch-sight wide open, remarking occasionally things like “Ooh, now that one’s just ghastly,”— an Annunciation with some particularly distorted donkeys— or “Now that’s nice”— a sixteenth-century floral border around a pair of lovers. There were, rather to my surprise, quite a few nice verdures, both very recent and very well-preserved, though when I said as much to Millie she hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about.
“I liked the art history books in the shop far more than the war ones,” I said, a bit embarrassed. “Better pictures.”
“And of course your art books wouldn’t have been nearly as far off Twelve Britain as ours,” Millie said, unearthing a massive roll of what proved to be a nude woman fending off a very faded and horrible figure. We dropped that one again rather quickly. “Sometimes I think I ought to have gone for History after school after all, instead of just picking it up piecemeal for magic, only then I’d have been even more obviously ignorant all the time and it’s just not fun.”
Millie’s concept of fun was very strange to me, since it had involved over a year of doing divinations over boiling pitchblende, but History admittedly didn’t seem much better.
“What did you mean,” I said, trying to take her mind off the gaps in her knowledge of Twelve, which was still a bit of a sore topic, “when you said I could come after all? Did Christopher say something?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “Weren’t you going to see family in Seven?”
“Not for weeks,” I said, mystified. “I’m here on Chrestomanci business, since the rest of them are off trying to find who’s been doing demon-summoning in Westminster. We settled it all ages ago. He didn’t even mention you’d be here, though I can’t imagine why he bothered to send me if you were.”
“It is nice having someone else to roll up the preservation spells,” Millie said. She did so with another one as we spoke, with a businesslike flicking motion. “I don’t know what he was about, then, because if you were going to be here then there wasn’t any need to send me. In fact, if he hadn’t suggested the Langholm sites in the first place I’d probably have gone on to Dumfries without—”
She stopped, and dropped the spell and her end of a tapestry both. I was distracted for some moments in sliding a sort of magic cushion under it to keep it from smashing to the floor. By the time I looked up she’d stomped quite to the other side of the room.
“Christopher is being chivalrous, I think,” she announced.
“It certainly seems like he’s scheming something,” I said. “Only I’m not sure why this one is chivalrous in particular, and not just overbearing.”
“Oh, it’s both. I’m sure he means well, but— but— augh!”
I would have agreed with the sentiment, only I hadn’t the faintest clue why Christopher wanted the two of us doing increasingly pointless tapestry-picking in the first place. I told her as much.
“Well,” Millie said, with an increasingly incoherent air, “after Paris he knows I— er— and I don’t think he realizes that it’s not just that—”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling rather unusually dim, “what?”
She sighed, very briefly, and sat on a sort of low bench thing, brushing dust off her tweeds as she did.
“Oh, I could kill him for making me do this. He’s gotten it into his head that I’m in love with you,” she said, “and appears to be trying to Do Something about it, which you’d think he’d have learned his lesson about by now.”
“Haven’t you told him it’s nonsense?” I said. It had been broadly understood for several years, though not by anyone actually saying any of it, that Millie and Christopher were quite obviously going to get married someday.
“That’s just it, I can’t.”
“You can. I won’t be offended or anything.” This was quite honest. Millie was my closest friend, possibly besides Christopher, and it wasn’t as though I hadn’t known what the two of them were about from more or less the first time we’d met. I’d had plenty of time to come to expect it.
There was a long pause. “You are being dense on purpose, Conrad,” she said eventually.
I really wasn’t. “Imagine I’m not and tell me anyway. You’ve never had trouble telling him he was an idiot before.”
Millie appeared to be escalating from brushing her jacket sleeve to slowly unraveling it with her mind.
“I can’t tell him,” she said, haltingly, “that it is nonsense. Because that wouldn’t. Be entirely true.”
I’m afraid I rather gaped at her. It was just so completely unlike anything I thought she might say.
“Really I ought to marry you, just to teach him not to do stupid little schemes like this anymore.”
“Er,” I managed.
“Sorry. I really do— like you enormously. But, you know. Christopher.”
I did know about Christopher.
“And of course you’re not interested in anything of the kind,” she said, “and I really am sorry I brought it up, but it’s hard not to feel a bit hurt when your— when Christopher tries to fob me off on you because he thinks it’s more respectful of my feelings or something.”
“He might have been respecting my feelings,” I said, because it really wasn’t fair anymore not to say anything.
“What?” Millie looked as though I’d hit her with something.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Only— he might have guessed. We read your letters together rather a lot. He can notice things, when he bothers to try.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I— oh.” She put her head down into her hands, half-raveled sleeve trailing thread bits. I was beginning to feel really worried, and also generally stupid. But when I went across to her she looked up smiling.
“Obviously we don’t have to do anything about it, only I didn’t want you to feel like you were just embarrassing me,” I said.
“No. No of course not,” she said, “we don’t have to do anything, only—” she put a hand to my face, and pulled me down to kiss me.
It was not, in fact, the first time I’d been kissed since Christopher. It was only the nicest.
“Only we can’t give him the chance,” Millie said when we broke apart, as though continuing the conversation, “because if he’ll never give up the opportunity to make a noble, high-handed dramatic sacrifice twice over. He might go off to Atlantis or something to ‘give us space’, and then we’d have to go haul him back.”
“Twice over?” I said.
“Ah,” Millie said. She looked guilty. “Perhaps I oughtn’t have said that. Christopher really ought to be doing this himself, only he won’t if he thinks he can just arrange everything so he never has to actually ask.” Not, in fact, being entirely dense, I could make a guess, only it wasn’t one I found particularly likely.
“People here don’t—” I said.
It had eventually become clear to me that Millie and Christopher’s initial, muddled explanation had rather left out the exact manner in which it was ensured that no adults did anything homosexual in Twelve, which is to say that it was an imprisonable offense. I had gathered from books and a very confused conversation with Mordecai Roberts, who was at least from Eleven and less likely to be scandalized by my immoral otherworldly ways, that in fact it only came up if someone already wanted you out of the way for entirely other reasons. This seemed very unlikely to be a problem for me, but did, now that I considered it, seem like it might well pose difficulties for Christopher. If, in fact, he were like that.
It hadn’t really borne contemplating, before. Most people weren’t. And Christopher was so horribly, infuriatingly charming and beautiful that I had been better off not even imagining it, if I could help it at all. Mostly I could help it.
She rolled her eyes. “People here do. I hope you haven’t been going around believing what Christopher and I told you when we were twelve.”
“I did figure that out, oddly enough,” I said. “Only— Christopher doesn’t—”
“Christopher is so flagrantly, obviously interested in men that only the fact that everyone thinks we’re getting married in a year has saved him from a very stern talking-to from Gabriel about his behavior. I think he was trying to hide it in case he had already corrupted you as a child.”
“Corrupted! I like that. I’m the one who told him men could marry!”
“Well, it is Christopher,” she said, which was incontrovertible. “You do want him, then, don’t you?”
I don’t know exactly what face I made, but she laughed. “All right, yes, I suppose you do. Are we all three going to make a go at it then?”
“I suppose we ought to. Do you think Seven will notice if he’s already married?”
“We can diddle the records. Would you like,” she said, very happily, “to yell at him with me?”
“Oh, definitely. There’s a train at half seven, it’ll hardly take us any time at all to finish the tapestries.”
“I’ll do you one better,” Millie said, drawing a napkin out of her sleeve wrapped around a quantity of yellow powder. “This trick isn’t meant to work until he’s properly Chrestomanci, but I am an enchanter.” She threw a pinch in the air, and called, in a clear, laughing, mocking voice:
“Christopher, Christopher, Christopher!”
I couldn’t help but kiss her again. I was rather frustrated with Christopher, after all, and I was determined not to let him forget it.