Chapter Text
artwork by idliketobeatree
There was something on the moors. Or so said the farmers in the fields, who told their wives, who told their friends at market and spread the rumour through the lower town like a proliferant fungus. There was something approaching in the distance, they said. A shadow, a shade; a slouching, stalking beast. So vast it was visible from leagues away.
For the first couple of days as the rumour took hold, panicked whispers had spread of a monster, a hungry beast. A great slinking tiger, coming to crush the petty humans of their little town between its teeth like squeaking mice.
And then it drew closer, its edges consolidating in the fog, a rumour made flesh; and whispers spread of an altogether different monster on the prowl.
The Wizard King’s reputation preceded him wherever he went, wherever the roaming form of his impossible moving castle carried him. The most feared sorcerer in the twin kingdoms, second only to that life-leeching horror, the Witch of the Wastes. His was a reputation drenched in blood and carnality, in licentious desires and grisly ends. A reputation of dangerous beauty, intoxicating charm; of a smile sharp when it grinned into the bright young faces of hapless townspeople, and sharper still when it sank into their chests to taste their beating hearts.
A chilling little story, to be sure, and a concerning one to have slunk its way to their doorstep, but Edwin wasn’t overly worried about it.
After all, the Wizard King only ate the hearts of the pretty ones.
He was Edwin Payne of Payne & Sons Bespoke Tailoring; he was always and only of Payne & Sons. Such was his station in life, a role he himself was tailor-made for. A role he fit like a drab but finely-crafted glove.
Edwin lived, as he always had done, in the small, fit-for-purpose apartment above the shop where he'd been born and raised, learning his alterations alongside his alphabet. He worked, as he always would do, in the selfsame shop, five days a week – seven, if there was work still to complete, and the prospect of another planless weekend loomed too large over his head. He lived and breathed his work for, in truth, he had little else; he talked to the suits and gloves and fine silk ties he stitched for he had no one else to talk to. Not since his younger stepsister, Crystal, had gone away on apprenticeship. And especially not since his father passed and his stepmother, content with Edwin’s work in the shop, had left it in his care to fly away and begin again. Last he heard, she’d taken up with some artist or other, halfway across the country.
More fool her, in Edwin’s privately held opinion; art was subjective and fickle, but people would always be needing well-made clothes. Even Edwin, dour and unsociable as he was, believed in keeping up appearances – what little he possessed of them. His own clothes, though of a quality commensurate with those he made and sold, were drab things. He lived a life in greys and browns, perhaps a plain and simple blue if he was feeling bold. He lived a life in whatever would keep him perceived as little more than a fastidiously professional shadow in the back of the shop, solidifying only where advice or measurement was required. He lived quietly, conscientiously, and he did what he’d always been fashioned to do; which was to fashion the suits of those people cut from a more daring cloth than he.
He wrinkled his nose in the mirror at the garishly jarring sight before him, and shook his head. “Absolutely not…”
The jacket he shrugged out of was a lavish thing, indeed. With the May Day festival incoming, Market Chipping’s most ostentatious event of the calendar year, Payne & Sons’ more unusual and gregarious items were flying off the rack. But against Edwin’s stern expression and colourless demeanour, the vibrant and expensive purple velvet looked like it was trying to swallow him whole. The same could be said of the emerald green three-piece, and even the relatively plain-toned wool overcoat with the gold military-inspired epaulettes (all the rage at the moment, things between the twin kingdoms being as they were). Finely crafted pieces, all, pieces he’d personally worked his fingers to the bone to construct; and each and every one destined for greater things, greater people.
Edwin donned his own jacket, settling it with a shrug like a ruffle of dowdy grey feathers, and shared a brisk nod with the dreary thing in the mirror. Much better.
He’d grown used to the quiet in the shop since everyone else had flown the nest. Not even the small rotating cast of assistant seamsters and seamstresses helping to keep operations afloat during the busy times were particularly chatty. Not with Edwin, at least; though he often heard them gabbing away with one another, once he’d sat stationary long enough to have melted into the shadows of his own preferred sewing nook. Not that it bothered him overmuch. Quiet was familiar. He’d grown accustomed to filling it with his own voice, his soft, one-sided conversations with the fruits of his labours.
But it was a Sunday, a half day at the end of a riotously busy week, after the last assistant had vacated the shop and the silence settled heavy on Edwin’s shoulders like a foot of snow, when he decided that this quiet was too quiet.
“Right. Enough putting it off,” he muttered to himself – or perhaps to the purple jacket, draped invitingly on a mannequin that was carrying it off altogether better than he himself had managed. “You’ve been shirking your familial duties all too long.”
And, buttoning his sensible jacket over his soft underbelly like armour, he braced himself and stepped out of the safe and steady stillness of his shop.
Town was always quite insufferable in the run-up to a celebration, all loud and hectic and packed to the gills with obnoxious tourists. It was the same celebration that had kept the shop flush with work and Edwin's fingers busy with sewing, so he had no room to hold a grudge – though that didn’t mean he could not make room, if he put his mind to it.
Edwin wove his way through the colourful throng with the drably harried confidence of a battered city pigeon amongst peacocks. There were more packs of loud, brash young men in military uniforms than usual, and he kept a wary distance. He ducked under improbably large ladies’ hats and dodged skirts and canes with a hopscotcher’s quickstep, rolling his eyes at the occasional purse, fan or pram that was rude enough to impede him. A benefit of being plain as a pikestaff was he could, generally, go about his business unbothered. This boon hit a point of diminishing returns once he became so invisible that people started to smack into him like a glass door. And newcomers in town were especially bad for it, too preoccupied with the sights above their heads to pay attention to their feet. After his usual, efficient beeline across the diagonal of the square took him thrice as long as was standard, he was relieved to duck into the lesser-used backstreets for the last leg.
Or he was, until he realised with a dull thud of his weary heart that someone else—multiple someones, in fact—had had the same idea.
“Bloody hell, is that you, Payne?” sneered Simon Mould, propped insouciantly against the wall, the narrow bottleneck of the ginnel blocked by him, his hangers-on, and their cloud of noxious cigar fumes. Edwin did not recognise this particular collection of brown-nosing sidekicks, but Simon seemed to go through them at an extraordinary rate; he was too odious a personality for many to endure for long.
Edwin wrinkled his nose and avoided eye contact, marching on with all the limited self-assurance he could muster. “Good morning, Simon. Gentlemen,” was his clipped, polite response. Perhaps, with so many potential witnesses, they could exchange terse pleasantries and that would be that. But cronies number one and two swiftly blocked the path ahead; and number three cut off his retreat. Well. So much for that hope.
He clenched his jaw, keeping his eyes on a point past Simon’s ear. “My sister is expecting me,” he said, measured.
“The step-sister? Surprised you keep in touch – not your problem now she’s out from under your roof, eh? And over at… the bakery, wasn’t it? Think you’re going the wrong way, old chap. Oh, of course, how silly of me,” he corrected himself with an oily smile. “Absconded from that respectable little apprenticeship, didn’t she? Took up under the butcher, of all people. No sort of job for a lady, is it? Not that she ever was one, from what I’ve heard.”
Edwin’s jaw ticked. “I’ve no idea what you’ve heard, Simon, but you should—”
“Should what, Payne?”
Simon leaned in closer, managing despite his underwhelming stature to loom; and crony number three was practically breathing down Edwin’s neck. Edwin, reluctantly, bit his tongue.
“You should… take rumours with a grain of salt,” he suggested delicately. “They spread all sorts of spurious gossip down at the markets. Why, only yesterday the haberdasher told me the Witch of the Wastes is on the prowl. In Market Chipping. Utter rubbish. Idle minds seeking idle—” he noted, with dismay, that several of Simon's flunkies had taken a dangerous step closer, and his voice trailed off feebly. “Amusements…”
Simon sneered, took a slow drag on his cigar, and exhaled the pungent smoke in Edwin’s face, making him cough. “I see five years and a promotion hasn't been enough to make you grow a backbone, old boy.”
Edwin, feeling rather like a washed-up worm on the cobblestones, opened his mouth for another attempted excuse; perhaps, if he could only be blessedly boring enough to lose their interest—
But another voice sounded first. A voice from behind – a calm, condescending purr of a voice, right beside Edwin's ear.
“Sweetheart. So this is where you've been hiding.”
An arm wrapped, with galling overfamiliarity, around Edwin’s waist, and he snapped his head around to see if Simon’s third lackey had quite lost his mind. But what he saw wasn’t the slicked-down brunet style of the toadying lad, but an entirely different head of far blonder hair, long and loose and arranged in a manner some might consider artfully tousled. Edwin dropped his gaze to take in the face beneath and found a fine profile, straight-nosed and strong-browed. Late twenties at the very least, older even than Edwin himself, but really remarkably handsome despite it. Although the overall effect of his face was somewhat dwarfed by the ostentatiously hulking fur coat slung about his shoulders like a brace of freshly felled foxes. Tawny in colouring like the stranger himself, it seemed to fill him out beyond his stature, a claiming of space, a demand for attention; rather like the glimmer of gold and jewels at his throat, his ears, at the hand that clutched Edwin so impertinently. His mind-boggling array of rings dazzled almost blindingly against the drab backdrop of Edwin’s grey jacket.
Then the stranger flicked his gaze from Simon to Edwin, and Edwin gasped. His eyes. He’d never seen anything like them…
With a smile as bright as it was razor-sharp, the stranger jerked his head towards Simon. “This guy bothering you, babe?”
Edwin was, momentarily, speechless. “Ah.”
“I say, my good man,” said Simon, annoyance colouring his civil tone. “We were in the middle of—”
“Oh, shut up,” the stranger sighed, as his other hand sprang up like a snake before him and grabbed the air. His rings clicked as he drew his fingers together in a gold-studded fist; and Simon fell, immediately, silent. As if the very words had been snatched from his throat.
“Good boy,” the gold-studded man purred, shaking his fist a little as if he had dice in his palm and was preparing to roll them. “You can have this back when you’ve learned to quit barking at the other pups, ‘kay?”
Simon opened his mouth to retort – and out came a bug-eyed, undignified whimper. A similar chorus of pathetic sounds erupted from his hapless lackeys.
Edwin clapped a hand over his mouth to stop his startled laugh escaping.
“See? You’re improving!” the stranger praised. “Go on, boys; fetch!”
He jerked his hand towards his own shoulder and ‘threw’, fingers opening, empty palm laid bare as he sent whatever strange, voice-stealing magic he’d been holding bouncing away along the ginnel behind them. Edwin’s own eyes nearly popped out of his head as he watched the young men, without word or hesitation, drop to all fours and clatter noisily after it, jostling each other rudely in the narrow space until they skidded around the corner and out of sight – getting under the feet of a cluster of bewildered tourists and causing a ruckus as they went.
The stranger chuckled, a sound as rich and sumptuous as his attire, and squeezed Edwin’s waist with his impertinently perched hand. “Ah. I needed that. Now. The butcher shop, right?”
“How did—”
“Couldn’t help overhearing. That’s great, I was out of bacon, anyway. Walk with me.”
He took advantage of Edwin’s stunned silence to reaffirm his hold on his waist and steer him along, strolling him down the alley as if they were a pair of perambulating paramours in the park.
“Nice friends you’ve got there,” the stranger drawled. “Are they always that charming, or is that a special for the season?”
“They’re—” Edwin stopped himself before he could say ‘not my friends’. It was true, but if he said it then this impertinent—and unfortunately very handsome—man might ask him about his real friends, and Edwin felt far too off-kilter for the stressful business of making up a believable chum or two on the spot. Bullies or no, sadly, Simon and his interchangeable pack were the closest thing to peers Edwin could lay claim to. “...a handful. But, nothing I cannot manage myself, so there was really no need—”
The stranger snorted. “Please. They were playing cat and mouse. And you only play that game when you know you’re not the mouse.”
Edwin bristled. “Now, see here—”
“Get much fungus round here?”
What a baffling non-sequitur. Irksome man. “I—well, the lee of the hill is somewhat prone to damp—”
His breath hitched when a warm, strong hand gently took his chin, and turned it. “I’m thinking more like that.”
Edwin blinked at the strange little outburst of fungus on the brick wall his gaze had been directed to, spreading between the cracks in the old mortar. Something prominent and defined, something blaring from the plain red brick in a riot of acid yellow and fleshy, off-white the colour of old bone. Something, Edwin noted with horror, which seemed to be growing before his very eyes. “That’s… unusual.” He heard a heavy footstep behind them and tried to turn his head, but the stranger’s hand stilled him.
“Figured you’d say that.” Sighing, he at last released Edwin’s waist, but kept his arm banded across it to tuck his hand under Edwin’s elbow, instead. “Walk fast. And don’t look back.”
Edwin, of course, looked back at once – and almost shrieked. “What is that?!”
“Don’t even worry about it.”
The ‘it’ that Edwin wasn’t to worry about was two or three roughly man-sized beings; although the size marked the end of any resemblance to any man Edwin knew of. Cadaverous, bloated bundles of misshapen mycelium, lurching after Edwin and his new escort atop bowing, leglike stems. Well, two of them were lurching. The third appeared to still be in the process of dragging its twisted roots from between the crack in the cobbles it had seemingly sprung up from. A large, swollen polyp in its bulbous shoulder region burst abruptly into a cloud of rancid-smelling, cottony spores, and Edwin faced quickly forward and bit his tongue on the urge to gag.
The stranger hummed innocently. “See? Nothing to worry about.” He gripped Edwin’s elbow. “Maybe a liiittle faster.”
Edwin, for once, didn’t argue. He walked as fast as his long legs could take him, his shorter companion keeping pace with ease. His breath quickened at every glimpse of sickly beige and toxic yellow that poked from the bricks and cobbles, that oozed oil-thick and slimy from the moss-clogged guttering. This particular alley already had a squeezing quality, narrowing every few metres or so, and by the time it was nearly brushing their shoulders Edwin was breathing very, very fast, eyes darting wildly between fresh outcroppings of noxious fungus as they sprang up just in time to trail sickeningly across his sleeve.
It was when he saw four more monstrous shapes bulge and bubble into life ahead of them that his panic truly set in. “It’s a dead end!”
The stranger chuckled. He shored up his hold on Edwin’s elbow, and took Edwin's opposing hand for good measure; a brazen, self-possessed grip, as if he was about to sweep him up in a relaxed promenade. “Who ever said the only way out is through? Hold on.”
And then he coiled and he sprang, and Edwin yelped as the leap carried the both of them quickly, effortlessly, impossibly over the rooftops.
artwork by idliketobeatree
Edwin felt his heart drop through his feet with a sickening lurch, then smack back against his ribs like a slingshot. He also felt, distantly, the grapple of a mycelial hand at his ankle, but he was carried quickly out of reach of its gnarled, rubbery fingers. It was rather hard to focus on the brief, unpleasant sensation when it felt like he’d left his entire skeleton about fifty feet behind him
“What on earth—!” he exclaimed, clinging to the only thing within reach – which just so happened to be the stranger’s bracing hand under his.
“Don’t panic,” came the stranger’s cool, steady voice in his ear; loud and clear, despite being nary a whisper over the rushing wind. “Just walk with me.”
“Walk?!” Their momentum was slowing, their upward trajectory halting, and he felt gravity beginning to reassert itself, sinking an insistent hook into his chest. His stomach dropped, certain that this was the pinnacle of their arc – and the only way to go was down.
The stranger squeezed his hand, his elbow, tucked his arm tightly around Edwin’s waist. “Just walk,” he said, a smile in his voice. “C’mon. You got long legs. Use ‘em.”
Preposterously, the man began to walk; and Edwin fell, with a sort of dizzy resignation, into step.
His feet met nothing and yet they advanced, rooftops rolling by like flagstones beneath their shoes. A laugh of disbelief bubbled in Edwin’s throat as his stranger, with a spring in his step, braced a foot upon a passing chimney stack and pushed off from it to cover more ground—air—on their next stride. His little flourish set the clay chimney pot wobbling and he flashed Edwin an utterly unrepentant grin.
“They really ought to get that fixed,” he remarked.
Edwin shook his head, wide-eyed, as he watched the world go by. Soon enough their strides had carried them beyond the tightly packed suburban sprawl of the housing district and into the next square, a smaller plaza than that which he’d already traversed and smaller still from up high, clustered with the colourful canvas awnings of the market stalls. People crowded it in their hundreds, the vendors, the residents, the tourists in all their bright colours and finery. From up above, the wide hats and skirts of the ladies rendered them almost perfectly circular, bouncing back and forth with their purses and fans and prams like extravagant ping pong balls between the slim silhouettes of their husbands and chaperones. Edwin would surely have been thwapped by half a dozen canes and parasols by now at ground level; but instead he strolled merrily on, unimpeded, approaching the squat old structure of the Tongue & Tail butcher’s shop straight-on as the crow flies.
The arm around his waist squeezed impertinently, a tousled blonde head bumping into his shoulder. “Smooth action, kiddo,” its owner purred, his bejewelled thumb rubbing the back of Edwin’s hand. “Figured you’d be a natural.”
Edwin’s heart thumped; he pointedly ignored it. “It’s only walking,” he sniffed.
His stranger laughed, bright and brash. “I think your stop’s coming up.”
Sure enough, the balcony of the old building was drawing near, practically under their noses. His stranger extended his arms, twirling Edwin away from himself in a dancerly sweep and depositing him effortlessly, guiding him to a weightless descent. Edwin’s feet touched down so lightly he was scarcely aware he’d landed until he flexed his foot and found the resistance of solid wood boards beneath it.
His swaggering saviour followed suit in short order – although he chose to alight on the weathered railing instead, balanced on the balls of his feet, so inhumanly lightweight as to not elicit the merest creak from the splintered old wood. He released Edwin’s hands and crouched, elbows on knees. A fae and puckish creature of sunny mischief, he brought his face down to just above Edwin’s level and tipped it sideways, sending his tousled golden hair cascading about his impish features. His eyes were closed, fair lashes fluttering as he took a deep, exaggerated inhale of the less-than-fragrant butcher shop air.
“Great choice for a day out. Mmm. Can really smell the viscera.” The words were teasing; the tone far from disapproving.
“I’m visiting—someone,” said Edwin, defensive – and realising halfway through the sentence that he ought to be careful about the information he offered up. Whoever this man was, he had a sharp smile and a nose for blood in the water. Edwin narrowed his eyes. “Later, that is. I'm seeing them later. They require a grocery or two, so I'm shopping. I seem to recall you mentioning something about buying bacon. Before we were attacked, that is. By the horrifying mushroom monsters.” He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows. “That were after us. For reasons unknown…?”
“Trying to cut back on the red meat, actually,” he answered Edwin's first prod, smoothly skimming over the second. “For now, at least.”
His eyes flickered open and landed, hooded and not a little salacious, upon Edwin’s face. “But hey. Any excuse to pick you up, handsome.”
Edwin’s breath caught. He knew he’d seen something unusual, in the brief moments the stranger had glanced at him head-on, but he’d fooled himself into thinking it a trick of the light. No such luck. Plain as the nose on his face, there they were: yellow eyes, bright and bold, inhumanly piercing. Whiteless, fathomless, and bisected by dark, slitted pupils, reflecting Edwin’s terrified face back at him like black mirrors.
Edwin knew of only one wizard who boasted that particular feature.
He lurched back, aghast; and the Wizard King watched him like a cat eyeing a canary. A smile stretched his petal-pink lips, slow, indulgent, knowing – flashing a glimpse of a sharp and perfect white incisor.
“I’ll draw those hunks of slime off someplace,” he said, standing up straight and dusting off his ostentatious furs. “But cool your heels here a while before you step out again, alright?”
Edwin nodded, tongue-tied.
The Wizard King winked. “Atta boy.”
And then he flung his arms dramatically out to the sides, arched his chest to the sky and fell, backwards, a cascade of golden hair and furs and metals, plummeting over the railing and out of sight, bright and trailing like a meteor shower.
Despite his misgivings Edwin gasped and lurched forward, hands clasping the railing, leaning as far as he safely could to scan the sky and ground below, the masses of uninterrupted revelry. In all the acres and acres of riotous colour spread out before him, not once did he find the flash of daring, impetuous yellow he was looking for.
“I'm sorry, back up; you got a lift here from the fucking Wizard King?”
“It was not a lift, Crystal, it—hm. Well, no, I suppose in the very literal sense it was.”
Crystal stared at him like he'd lost his mind, quite understandably, and he took the opportunity to assess her in return. She looked well. He had been worried, when she abandoned her respectable post at the bakery to take up under the town's most… unorthodox butcher, but he had to concede that the job seemed to be treating her well. She looked bright eyed, strong, with a confident glow. Underneath all the blood, that is. She did, against all the odds, turn it into rather a fetching fashion statement.
“Oh my… you’re not kidding,” she said, in some sort of horrified awe. “How are you being so chill about this? You just got scooped up by a killer sorcerer, and you’re acting like it was a walk in the park.”
“Well, it was at least preferable to the alternative,” he said, shuddering. Being accosted by that presumptuous fellow had turned out to be a far more pleasant experience than being accosted by those hyenas from his old school – they seldom left any marks, preferring to needle Edwin in the verbal sense, but with the high spirits of the festivities in full swing, one could never be too sure when a moment’s playful roughhousing might get out of hand. And that was to say nothing of the almost-as-unpleasant mushroom creatures that followed. Although it was a suspicious coincidence, those monstrosities turning up at around the same time that the wizard did… “Hm. All told, I’m rather fortunate he appeared when he did. I think…”
“Fortunate? I’ll fucking say.” Crystal sat down heavily on the crate beside him. The backroom storage of a butchery was far from the most comfortable place to carry out a conversation, but that was where the balcony window Edwin had meekly tapped on to be granted entry resided. At least it had not been the pantry. “Edwin, you’re lucky you got out of there with your heart in one piece. He eats them. Everybody knows it.”
She was right, of course. Everybody knew it. Tales of roaming wizards were varied and often nebulous things; rumours bred rumours which mutated from place to place, the mysterious figures taking on a living legend status and a new mythos in every marketplace, no two tales of their misdeeds exactly the same. Travellers from across the twin kingdoms often passed through Market Chipping on their way through or from the Wastes, alighted in Edwin's shop and gabbed away about this and that as he set about them with a tape measure. The version of, for example, the Witch of Wastes, which rolled from the plummy tongue of a merchant from the posher end of Veuleroy, bore little resemblance to the one delivered in hushed tones by a superstitious fisherman from the distant coasts of Koningstraum.
But for all the variations upon the Wizard King’s tale, all the different local embellishments it garnered, there was but one consistency in his characterisation: he had a type. A taste for a certain sort of prey. He liked them young, he liked them fresh – and above all, he liked them beautiful. It was said that he could never resist a pretty young heart; that he’d pop it out of the chest as surely as a chocolate from a box.
But he’d resisted Edwin’s sure enough.
Crystal stared at him. “Tell me you’re not having a fucking crisis about not being eaten.”
“I am not having a crisis,” he said snippily. He was not. So what did it matter if his drab little heart was tough as old boots and difficult to chew? He was in his twenties, now, it was really only to be expected. He wasn't getting any younger.
“You’re having something. Fuck,” she muttered, rubbing her forehead. “You need to get out of that fucking shop, I’m so serious.”
He sniffed, folding his hands in his lap. “I am perfectly content, thank you.”
“Bullshit.”
“You seem to have grown more foul-mouthed since last I saw you.” He rallied his best tone of elder sibling disapproval for the comment; which she, in her tried and true younger sibling fashion, ignored.
“Jenny doesn’t check herself. Anyway, enough of the big brother schtick. So what if I work at a butcher shop and I swear the house down? So what if I’m the world’s biggest disappointment? Seriously—” she threw up her hands— “who’s even around to be disappointed anymore?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, no argument left to him.
She sighed, reaching out. Her hand stopped short of taking his, settling for a brief, brisk brush of the knuckles. They were not, nor had they ever been, a touchy-feely sort of family. “I got out,” she said, quietly. “I found something that fits. You don’t have to fill the shoes they left for you.”
He let the weight of his head pull his gaze to his staid and sensible soles. “I am… not sure what else would suit me.”
Edwin slammed the door behind the last customer of the day, a woman in a yellow dress laden with parcels and packages. May Day was one of the biggest days of the year for every shop in the valley, bringing in travellers from miles around, their pockets heavy with money to spend. But this was the first year that Edwin had had to handle the customer-facing side all on his own, without his stepmother to dazzle them or any of the shop girls to help. It had been a hard year, everyone tightening their belts, so many people convinced war was coming, no question about it, what with the missing prince. Edwin, privately, thought some prince having wandered off was an absurd thing for the twin kingdoms to be bumping chests over. But regardless of the whys and hows of it, the purse strings had tightened, and Edwin couldn’t afford to keep the extra help.
He could hear distant music, carried on the breeze from the band playing in the market square, punctuated by whoops and cheers and laughter and the shrieks and bangs of fireworks – the unmistakable sounds of merry-making. But he was alone, at last. The shelves and rails around him were bare, the mannequins stripped of the fine clothes he’d stayed up late to finish, working long into the night. There was relief, a sudden lifting of the ever-present millstone around his neck, but no satisfaction. Things would be quieter, for a while, but the late nights and the bleary eyes and the sore fingers would be back soon enough as midsummer crept closer, like the moving castle in the hills.
Still. He’d earned his bed, he thought – for tonight, at least. He was dead on his feet, and tomorrow’s problems were tomorrow’s problems. As he swept the floor, he thought about warming himself some milk to take up to his narrow little bed in the attic above the shop. Was it worth it, he wondered, or would he be asleep before he could drink more than a mouthful?
He would do it, he decided. It would be just the thing to send him off for a restful night, after the strange day he’d had. He was just setting the copper pan down on the stove in the little kitchen behind the shop when the bell above the door chimed, and he stopped dead, itchy all over with irritation. The shop was closed, the windows dark, the door locked – or so he’d thought, at least. May Day revellers, no doubt. With a cross little huff, he set down the milk and made his way back out and into the shop.
A woman in a magnificent cloak with an enormous fur collar was examining a jacket in drab grey twill – one of the only things left in the shop that hadn’t been sold in the May Day rush. It was beautifully made, but it was small and dull and quiet, and not a single customer had given it so much as a second glance. Edwin felt a pang of embarrassed sympathy every time he looked at it.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, in a voice that clanged with insincerity, “But we are closed. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
The woman straightened up. Her hair was fair, and she carried a heavy iron cane in one hand and a pipe in the other. There was something about her, something uneasy and strangely familiar, that bothered Edwin like a toothache.
“Is this it?” she said. She made a great show of looking around the empty shop, and laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. Edwin’s annoyance congealed into dislike. She sauntered unhurriedly over to a neatly-tailored but staid brown dress that had been passed over for flashier things again and again. She tugged on one of the sleeves, then let it go and wiped her hand on her own sumptuous cloak. She glanced back over at Edwin. “Sweetie. This is embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?” Edwin spluttered. He was quite accustomed to being ignored, but he drew the line at being condescended to. And in his own shop, no less!
“Mm. They told me you were good, so I thought I’d, you know, come for a little sniff around my competition.”
“Competition?” said Edwin, blankly. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I don’t… are you a tailor too?”
She seemed to find that terribly funny. She threw her head back and laughed again. “God, no, can you imagine? Ew.”
Edwin was feeling increasingly at sea, but he knew when he was being insulted. He drew himself up. This place, this business – he’d never loved it the way his father had and he never would, but it was his, and he’d kept it alive with his own two hands. “Well,” he said, with all the steel he could muster. “What we have to offer here clearly isn’t to Madam’s taste. Though they might appear plain to the untrained eye, perhaps our wares are a trifle… sophisticated for some. I think you ought to take your leave.”
The strange woman didn’t seem at all ruffled by his rudeness. She raised her pipe to her mouth and took a long drag, exhaling a plume of sulphurous, yellow-tinged smoke. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “You poor, stupid little mouse. I’m the goddamn Witch of the Wastes.”
The floor moved queasily under Edwin’s feet. The Witch of the Wastes! These witches and wizards were nothing but trouble, and he wanted nothing more to do with any of them. He swallowed. “Be—be that as it may,” he said, shakily. “I’m afraid we are closed, Madam, so if you’d like to…”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Instead of turning towards the door, she started towards Edwin. Her iron cane thumped on the floor with each step. He wanted to run—he thought, hysterically, of the milk he’d left by the stove—but he found, to his horror, that he couldn’t move his feet. The Witch of the Wastes stalked closer. “Now,” she murmured. She held the pipe between her teeth and grabbed him by the jaw, forcing him to face her. Her voice had dropped low, shedding its strange, girlish affectation. “Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to stay out of my way, you meddling little shit, or next time I won’t be so nice.” She let go of his jaw and took the pipe out of her mouth again, and blew the smoke directly into his face.
The smell assaulted his senses. His eyes watered and he coughed and hacked as it crawled up his nose and down his throat. He gasped for air, starbursts and dark spots popping behind his eyes. He couldn’t breathe—
And then, just when he could feel himself swaying like a tree about to fall, the smoke began to clear. He sucked in a greedy, rasping breath, his lungs burning, his eyes streaming, his throat stripped raw. He braced one hand on the wall and stood there, doubled over and wheezing, until the room stopped spinning. What in heaven’s name was in that pipe?
When he straightened up, she was watching him. “Oh, now,” she cooed. “Look at you. Oh, it’s just perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing, even if I could.” She walked a slow circle around him, putting Edwin in mind of a cat playing with its food. She leaned in to whisper conspiratorially in his ear. “You know what? I think it suits you.”
“What have you done to me?” Edwin croaked. His voice sounded strange, presumably from the smoke.
She laughed again – god, that horrible laugh, it scraped against whatever Edwin’s soul was made of like nails on a blackboard. “Moi? Nothing, babycakes. Your outside just matches your inside now, isn’t that nice? Very… chic. I am so glad we had this little heart to heart.” She turned to leave, then stopped abruptly in the doorway. “Shoot! I almost forgot, can you believe that? This is our little secret, okay?”
She banged the end of her cane once, twice against the floor, and, just for a moment, Edwin had the strangest feeling that there was something in his mouth, stilling his tongue. But it was gone almost as soon as it had arrived, and he opened and closed his mouth experimentally, raising one hand to his jaw.
“Kisses,” she said. “Mwah, mwah. Tell that old tomcat he can run but he can’t hide.”
And, with a swish of her cloak and another bright chime of the bell over the door, she disappeared into the night.
Edwin stumbled over to the door on shaky legs and locked it again. Everything sounded strangely muffled, as if he’d stood too close to the May Day fireworks, and he was stiff and sore all over, his heart galloping wildly in his chest. He stood there and wondered what, exactly, one was supposed to do after surviving the Witch of the Wastes.
After a long moment of contemplation, he stumped back into the kitchen, thinking of his bed and that cup of warm milk. What else was there to do?
He poured it carefully into a pan and set it on the stove. He’d certainly sleep well, after all this excitement. Two strange things occurred to him then, one after the other: firstly, that he’d be the talk of the town, for the first time in his life, and secondly, that that was a ridiculous notion – after all, who would ever believe him? He shook his head, profoundly glad that there was no one there for him to embarrass himself in front of—and then stopped dead when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in one of the polished copper pans hanging up on the wall.
The face that looked back at him was lined and spotted with age, the hair gone iron-grey, the eyes watery.
And it was, unmistakably, his own.
The following morning was bright and breezy, and Edwin arrived at it quite changed. He’d spent the night before pacing holes in the floor of the shop and his rooms upstairs, numb with shock. Every time he saw himself reflected—in the pretty silver mirror in the bathroom, in the surface of the water in the sink, in the full-length mirror in his workroom and the more flattering one for customers downstairs in the shop—it was a freshly horrible surprise. When he leaned in close, there could be no doubting that it was him. There were the familiar, heavy eyebrows, the grey-green eyes, the disapproving mouth, the nose he broke as a child that had been slightly crooked ever since. When he raised his lined, liver-spotted hands to pull and stretch at his face, he could feel the new valleys and furrows in his skin. This, then, was what the Witch of the Wastes had meant when she’d said that his outside matched his inside. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and was gripped instead by a peculiar feeling that his whole body was nothing more than a phantom limb.
Going to bed had seemed preposterous, and eventually the golden fingers of dawn began to creep in through the windows. He’d been sleepwalking through the motions of any other morning, and he was just about to unlock the shop for the day when he stopped abruptly. What was he doing? What did it matter, if the shop didn’t open on time like every other day? What did it matter if the shop didn’t open at all?
You don’t have to fill the shoes they left for you, murmured Crystal’s voice in the back of his head, and he almost dropped his keys. Crystal. She’d told him to stay away from witches and wizards, and, much though it pained him, it seemed like she’d been right. What in the world would she say, when she saw him? And how was he supposed to explain what had become of him? He thought about writing her a letter and almost immediately dismissed the idea. Dear Crystal, through an amusing series of misunderstandings I appear to have fallen foul of the Witch of the Wastes, and now I’m cursed – terribly careless of me, I know! Not to worry, though, I have it all in hand. Ridiculous. She’d be here before he could blink, beating down the door, and he swallowed painfully as it occurred to him that he couldn’t bear to see the look on her face.
No, he decided. That wouldn’t do at all. He was going to get this whole magical mess sorted out, and then maybe one day he’d tell her about it.
Maybe.
So, instead of opening the shop, he packed up some bread and cheese, and an apple, then put on his stoutest boots and slipped out through the back door. He paused in the doorway, struck by the curious certainty that it would be sometime before he came home. There was something rather exciting about that.
The morning after May Day was always quiet, as people slept off their sore heads, and the streets were empty as Edwin struck out for the hills. He didn’t know quite where he was going, only that there was nobody around here—the town where he’d lived his whole life, whose every corner was as familiar to him as his own heartbeat—who could help him now.
As he left the town behind him, Edwin’s spirits began to lift. He liked a walk of a spring day, especially in May, when March and April had blown through and left the scudding clouds and skipping lambs and clusters of white woolly hawthorn flowers all copying each other in the sunshine. Indeed, he used to make this trip quite regularly, climbing to the top of the smallest hill that overlooked the town and whiling away the hours with a book.
He’d never ventured further, however. Beyond that friendly hill was another range of hills, steeper and more treacherous underfoot, and beyond that, the forests and the Wastes; that wide and treacherous swathe of craggy, untamed land that not even the competitive rival kings saw fit to fight over, and where witches ran rampant in the wilderness. Edwin would never have dreamed of embarking on such an odyssey, let alone on foot, let alone by himself (see, for previous reference: witches.) And yet, here he was, toiling up the Tor, with nothing but the knapsack on his back.
Oh, it was hard going. It would have been hard going if he’d still had his old body, but now he had his old body, he creaked against the wind like a rusted hinge. The wind picked up the higher Edwin climbed, the picturebook meadows turning to thorny scrub underneath his sensible boots. If anything, it was worse on the other side of the peak, where the sun didn’t reach and the wind acquired a knife-like quality. The third time Edwin skidded on some loose scree and nearly fell, he stopped and sat himself on a large rock, huddling inside the neck of his jacket like a disconsolate tortoise.
“Ridiculous,” he muttered. “Absolute nonsense. What on Earth was I thinking? That I’d just sally forth, best foot forward, break the curse and return home triumphant? I couldn’t do that in my normal state of affairs, let alone like—“
He cut himself off, swallowing around the lump in his throat. A chilly little wind wrapped itself around Edwin’s ankles. He sniffed, and sniffed again, before squaring his shoulders and scowling at the hillside below.
“Ridiculous,” he said again. “This is clearly going to take more thought than simply setting off.”
His feet crunched in the gravel as he stood up. Edwin looked down at his boots and back up again.
“One thing is for certain,” he said to the empty landscape. “If I am to go any further, I will need a walking stick.”
The hillside, completely devoid of greenery but from some squat shrubby gorse bushes, offered nothing useful. Edwin sighed through his nose at the landscape, and then sighed again just for the ornery pleasure of it, and stood up, taking careful, measured steps sideways down the hill.
He’d taken perhaps twenty steps before he saw it: just off the path, a long, weatherbeaten stick, topped by a heap of discarded fabric, tossed into a gorse bush.
“Really!” Edwin said crossly. “People are dreadful. Fancy leaving all that rubbish out here to spoil the view! Someone ought to tidy it up.”
‘Someone’ meant Edwin, because ‘someone’ always meant Edwin. He stooped, groaning when his back complained, and grasped the stick, leaning back with all his meagre weight to try and lever it from the bush.
“Damn,” he gasped when splintery wood bit into his hands. “Damn and blast.”
The wind tugged playfully at the fabric stuck in the bush, setting it fluttering. It looked almost alive. Edwin scowled again. It was refreshing, to be able to look on the outside as annoyed as he felt on the inside.
“This is silly,” Edwin snapped. “Will you come on?”
He added a stomp of his foot to the Will, and clearly made some difference, because the stick suddenly jerked and slid free, tumbling out of Edwin’s hands and onto the ground with a sound of ripping fabric.
“Thank you,” Edwin said briskly. The stick was far too long to be a proper walking stick, but it would give him some much-needed stability. He bent down to pick it up—and then reeled backwards and almost fell when the heap of rubbish sprang to life.
Edwin squinted, dubiously, at the shabby thing teetering before him. The scarecrow had been dressed in a coat and trousers, so black and tattered they were almost feathered in appearance, and a threadbare and hole-riddled striped jumper in muted autumnal colours. The clothes were so understuffed it was enough to wonder if they’d just been draped over the pole with no attempt at padding whatsoever, but the ragged straw ends poking out between its long sleeves and dangling gloves hinted at a token attempt.
The poor skinny fellow was topped with a bright orange head hollowed out of a ripe pumpkin and carved with a face – although not by any great artisan. Edwin could well visualise the moment the carver put down the knife, having realised that he'd made the eyes so absurdly large as to leave little room for any other features.
“Hm. I can hardly blame him. I've always hated pumpkin carving.” Edwin shuddered in horror at the thought of sticky, stringy pumpkin innards trailing from his fingers. “And pumpkins in general. Although I commend you on your freshness, young man. You are rather out of season, you know.”
The scarecrow gave no response to the backhanded praise. Edwin sniffed.
“Well. That's gratitude for you.”
He briefly eyed up the scarecrow’s crossed poles, wondering if he might be able to fashion some sort of cane after all. But they both looked rather too thick for him to snap with his bare hands in his condition; and besides, it did feel a bit distasteful to disembowel a perfectly good scarecrow. Especially one with the wide, trusting eyes of a tottering calf. Eyes so wide and trusting it seemed to undermine the scarecrow's very reason for being; why, even as Edwin watched, a wild crow swooped down to land upon its shoulder and peck idly at the bugs that must be crawling in its coat. Sighing, Edwin gave it up as a bad job, and bid the spindly fellow farewell before setting off once more on his way.
He had walked exactly ten paces before he became aware of a strange, wooden-sounding thwacking sound coming from behind him. He turned his head and found the scarecrow, standing exactly as close behind him as it had been when he’d last looked, swaying dizzily in the wind.
He frowned at it. “Now I know I’m walking slowly, but surely not that slowly.”
On trembling ankles he turned, faced the scarecrow, and took a tentative step backwards; and the scarecrow took a short hop forward in turn.
It occurred to Edwin, distantly, that he should probably be alarmed. But it had already been a very, very long day.
“Right. So you’re alive, then, are you?” he asked, wearily.
Its pumpkin head did a sort of loose, back-and-forth waggle on its pole. A nod.
“Hm. Well, be that as it may, it is quite impolite to follow people around,” Edwin sniffed, waving the thing away like he was shooing off a pigeon. “So I would suggest you find your field, or wherever it is you’ve come from. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a very long walk still ahead of me.”
He turned briskly on his heel, and forged on; and noted with some relief that the hollow, stumpy hopping sound began to move in the opposite direction.
It was not to last. The sound of the hopping menace found him again not half an hour later and Edwin turned, red-faced and breathless, to give it what for.
His tirade dried on the tip of his tongue at the sight of what the scarecrow had brought him. Hooked over one ragged sleeve and wobbling, dangerously close to falling off on every hop, was a cane. It fell from the scarecrow’s arm and stuck in the ground at Edwin’s feet like a dart in a board.
He squinted at the scarecrow. “Did you… steal this from somewhere?”
The scarecrow, predictably, did not answer. Edwin sighed, and took up the cane.
“Well. I suppose what’s done is done. I just hope no little old ladies were mugged in your criminal endeavours.”
It was, unfortunately, an excellent cane. Just the right height and comfortable to hold. Already Edwin felt the relief in his aching old muscles of getting to sink some weight into it. He tapped his fingers upon the head and eyed the scarecrow, thoughtfully. It was certainly a strange thing, but it did not seem malicious. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I suppose you will have come across a witch or wizard in your time, won’t you?” Edwin mused. “Being a magic scarecrow.”
A pause, and then another wobbly nod. Edwin returned it tersely.
“Hm. Very well. If you really wish to help, you may go and seek out a handy magician for me. I have need of one. Though not the Witch of the Wastes, if you don’t mind. I do not much care for her. Now. Off you pop, there’s a good… pumpkin.”
It hesitated a moment, and though it was absurd to ascribe emotions to a gourd on a stick, Edwin fancied it looked rather sullen about its orders. But it hopped to it eventually, spinning about on its pole and bouncing away into the Wastes.
Edwin briefly considered waiting for it. But he had no idea how long it would be; and the only thing worse than feeling like he wasn’t getting anywhere was knowing he wasn’t. Grimly, he took up his new cane, and carried on into the darkening hills.
Though spring had arrived, the light still faded fast; before Edwin knew it, dusk had come and gone and he was standing in the midst of deepening blue shadows. All the old fairytales and fanciful stories he’d forgotten as a child came rushing back to him. Trolls lurking under bridges. Witches in gingerbread houses. Things with long claws and sharp teeth that ate travellers foolish enough to be out after dark.
“What nonsense,” Edwin said out loud, tightening his grip on his shivers. “Witches don’t live in gingerbread houses; it would be awfully sticky. And there hasn’t been a troll in these parts in over two hundred years. The biggest worry you have is a loose bit of gravel or a sudden burst of rain.”
As if it heard him, the wind picked up, snaking chilly fingers down inside his collar.
“Blast,” he said, clutching his coat tighter around him. “There’s no use for it. I’m going to have to find—“
He stopped, turning his ear to the wind. True, his hearing wasn’t what it was, but he could have sworn he heard a—
Clank-wheeze. Clank-wheeze. Clank-wheeze.
“What on Earth?” Edwin strained his ears further. It didn’t sound like any airship or automobile he’d heard before. And it was getting closer.
Clank-wheeze. Clank-WHEEZE. CLANK-WHEEZE. CLANK—
The first thing he saw was the tip-top of a towering mast, bobbing up from behind a nearby peak like a periscope, wreathed in billowing smoke. And that, as it happened, was the least of it. The rest of the thing followed in short order; though it didn’t so much crest the hillside as slink around the side. The weight of its body shifted between four jointed legs, forward into a bow on its great leonine forepaws (clank) and then backward into a crouch on its spindly, birdlike hindlegs (wheeze). It was a deafening racket in amongst the rough, purring creak of straining wood from what appeared to be a hodgepodge of masts and platforms and weathered, brightly-painted beach cabins clinging to its back like barnacles. Between the long shape of the rusted structure balanced on top of the legs and the way it appeared to slink over the ground, albeit noisily, it put Edwin in mind of a cat. A very lumpy, ramshackle cat.
And it was huge. It loomed in front of Edwin like a rolling storm of metal and timber and ropes and gears, a scrapyard monstrosity. Edwin was so poleaxed by fear and surprise that it didn’t occur to him to move away. So there he stayed, gaping, until he was but a speck under its hulking form and the creation sank to its haunches with a thunderously loud thunk in front of him, and a sound like a giant’s shovel cleaving the earth. Two enormous, mismatched brass portholes of eyes seemed to stare at him like he was a fascinating bug as it propped itself up on its chunky forelegs, lifting its ‘chest’ to reveal in the bulky, bellyish hull of its body—
A door. A simple door, with chipped purple paint and a tarnished brass knob, and a small porch light glimmering invitingly beside it.
The scarecrow bobbed triumphantly into position next to him. They stared at the machine together.
“Well,” Edwin said at last. “This was more than I was expecting. Where on Earth did you find it?”
The scarecrow twirled in a vague circle, pointing with its gloved hands across to the opposite valley. Edwin hmmphed through his nose.
“I suppose I had better apologise to whomever has been rerouted this evening.” He eyed the construction’s giant, geared paws; the two timber turrets like pricked ears at the top of its head; the long, articulated, tail-like appendage at its rear, tipped with an enormous iron anchor (now half-buried in the ground), and he froze as a number of clues fell into place. “This is the Wizard King’s castle,” he said, slowly and accusingly.
The scarecrow bobbed in place, apparently unperturbed. Edwin supposed it didn’t have a heart for the Wizard King to eat.
And it wasn’t as though Edwin held any charms for the notorious wizard anymore, was it? The sky above was a deep indigo, patches of threatening slate at the horizon where rain clouds were gathering. Edwin didn’t want to be out on the open hillside if the storm decided to strike.
He squared his shoulders, stuck out his chin and marched towards the door.
“Thank you, scarecrow,” he called behind him. “You’ve done very well.”
The scarecrow showed no signs of clearing off, but there was not much else Edwin could do for a sentient squash on a stick. He wouldn’t even be able to manoeuvre it through the bloody door.
The room beyond the door looked more like a mad scientist’s laboratory than the grand entrance hall Edwin had expected. It was far, far smaller than expected, for one thing. In the warm, dim light of the dying fire in the hearth, he could make out the flasks and tubes and jars crowded precariously on every surface and the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the low beams up above. Here and there, the light caught strange, spider-like devices and instruments that must have done things Edwin couldn’t even begin to guess at. He took a cautious step inside, then another. Something crunched unpleasantly under the sole of his boot. There were books and candlesticks and pieces of chalk strewn about, and bowls with strange residue caked inside them, and the black and white tiles on the floor bore the evidence of a thousand colourful spills and splatters. The tools of the Wizard King’s wicked magic, no doubt. Edwin ran his fingertips along the edge of a great wooden table, scorched and scarred and pitted by many years of misadventure, and they came away furred with dust.
Edwin sniffed. “What a mess,” he muttered.
Nevertheless, it was warm, and the night outside was cold and dark. He picked his way over to the chair in front of the hearth. He could sleep here tonight, he thought, then with any luck, he’d be able to slip away before morning and no one would ever know he’d been there at all. Someone had left a basket of logs by the side of the hearth, so he picked one up and added it to the embers of the fire before settling down in the chair. The day’s adventures had all caught up with him at once, and he could barely keep his eyes open. He watched drowsily as the fire crackled and caught at the log. The warmth was slowly soothing away the ache in his old bones. With his eyes half-closed like this, he fancied he could see a face in the flames. As he drifted, he mapped out the bright eyes, the long nose, the laughing mouth, a peculiar little glint that could have been an earring…
“Oi,” said the face in the fire, and Edwin almost fell out of his chair. He looked around, but there was no one else in sight, which surely meant—
“Are you… are you talking to me?” Edwin whispered.
There was a snap and a crackle of amusement from the fire. “Nah, I’m talking to the other silver fox who just blew in. What happened to you? Hell of a spell you’re under.”
If Edwin had been half asleep before, he was wide awake now. He leant forward in his chair. “You can see that I’m under a spell?” he said.
“And it’s a doozy.” The face in the fire tipped from one side to the other, studying him. Edwin could have sworn it was smiling. “Got on the wrong side of old Esther Finch, did you?”
“Who?”
“Witch of the Wastes. Used to be in and out of here all the time, stepping out with the boss. Know that handiwork anywhere. Right vindictive bint – loves to lob an aging spell around.” One of those eyes, coal-black and twinkling with mirth, disappeared briefly in what Edwin could only presume was a wink. “Shame. Bet you were even fitter before.”
The fire twinkled at Edwin, who was struck utterly dumb with outrage.
Not for long, though.
“I beg your pardon,” he spluttered. “You’re terribly forward, for a…”
“A fire demon, ta very much.” The fire blazed up brighter for a moment, little tongues of flame in strange, prismatic colours darting away up the chimney. “Name’s—well. You can call me Charles. Everyone else does.”
“Edwin,” said Edwin. He felt so wrong-footed he’d as good as forgotten what had so offended him just now. A fire demon, indeed! “Listen,” he said. “Do you think you could break my spell?”
“‘Course I could,” said the face in the fire, bracingly. “If you break mine first, that is. My bargain with the Wizard King. Keeps me trapped here in the castle. I want to get out, see the world! Fair’s fair, eh?”
Edwin’s heart sank. He was a tailor, for heaven’s sake, not a wizard. But then he remembered the look on the Witch’s face as she’d left his shop, and abruptly he was so angry he couldn’t speak for a moment. “Fine,” he said. “We have an accord. I shall break your spell. Just tell me what to do.”
Charles turned a mournful blue. “Ain’t that easy, I’m afraid. I can’t tell anyone the terms of my spell, same as you can’t tell anyone about yours.”
“What nonsense,” said Edwin, briskly. “I think you’ll find—”
But when he tried to describe what had happened that night, he found his tongue pushed down hard against the bottom of his mouth as if by invisible fingers. That blasted witch! I shall have the better of her if it’s the last thing I do, Edwin thought to himself. He pushed the knuckles of his knobbly old hands together, hard.
Charles was watching him knowingly from the hearth. “Don’t look so down in the dumps about it, eh?” he said. “There’ll be clues. You seem like a clever bloke. Hang around here for a while and you’ll work it out in no time.”
Edwin felt rather strongly that he’d been tricked, but he didn’t have the first idea what he was going to do about it. And in any case, he really was terribly tired. “Perhaps,” he murmured. He settled deeper into the chair, which creaked. “I think I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day now, though. I should like to go to sleep before I can experience any more.”
And, so saying, he did.