Knight's Castle (13 page)

Ann blushed and felt ashamed of herself but Eliza was scornful. "I certainly didn't," she said. "I wouldn't stoop to it."

"Very well," said the mother giant. "Very well. That's your privilege. But when it comes"—and her voice swelled with righteous wrath—"to invading our privacy and spoiling our interior decoration and cutting up the very clothes off our back, why
then
I say it's time to draw the line, and it's no wonder we're striking back! And don't pretend you didn't do it," she went on, pointing at Ann's hand with the birthstone ring with the tiny agate, "because I'd know that hand anywhere! And
that
"—she pointed at Eliza's hand with the bitten fingernails—"is the hand that helps it!"

"Only now they've got little," said the child giant.

"And now," said the father, snatching up Jack's sword from the floor, "they're in our power."

The giant family glowered down at Ann and Eliza.

"What have you done with my red velvet train?" said the mother giant.

"My coattails?" said the father giant.

"My side-curls?" said the little girl giant.

"My fur coat? The best bath mat? The drawing room armchair? The kitchen curtains? The roses from the quilt?" said all three.

Ann blushed guiltily. "I'm sorry," she said.

"We didn't think you'd mind," said Eliza.

"Mind?" said the mother giant. "Mind? Have we no feelings? Have we no hearts? Are we things of wood and china?"

"Give us back what you stole," said the father giant. "Then maybe we can talk of truces."

"We can't," said Ann, unhappily.

"We don't have them anymore," said Eliza.

"Then bid your friends good-bye forever," said the giant. And again he raised Ivanhoe and Rebecca and Bois-Guilbert in the air, to dash them to pieces on the floor.

"Wait!" cried Ann. "We'll find them for you! We'll bring them back!"

"We'll go on a quest!" said Eliza.

But there was an interruption. "Ah, what does it matter?" said Jack, forgetting for a moment that he had shrunk to toy-soldier size and remembering only his boyish scorn for girls' playthings. "They're just a lot of dolls, anyway!"

"Don't!" cried Roger and Ann and Eliza in one voice, gripped by the same horrid fear. But they were too late.

For these words proved just as powerful as others that shall be nameless, and the mist rolled down, and the giants and Ivanhoe and Rebecca and Bois-Guilbert started growing transparent, and the last thing Roger and Ann and Jack and Eliza saw before everything disappeared completely was the whole wall of the Giant's Lair sort of swinging out and away from them, as though they were in an earthquake.

The next they knew, they were standing in Roger's room looking down at an open dollhouse. Inside the dollhouse were a father doll and a mother doll and a little girl doll and the small figures of Ivanhoe and Rebecca and Bois-Guilbert, lying where the children's mother had put them when she picked up, three days ago.

"Oh!" cried Ann, looking at Jack with a face of utter displeasure. "You might know some
boy
would spoil everything!"

"How was I to know?" said Jack. He turned to Roger. "That's not what you said the Words of Power were."

"It's the same principle," said Roger. "You might have guessed. I did."

"I don't see how," said Jack.

"Maybe he used his head," snapped Eliza. "And this was supposed to be my adventure and you spoiled it before I got to be leader at all, hardly."

There was a silence.

"Robin Hood was keen, though," said Jack.

The others looked at him coldly. "And now he's still waiting at the edge of the wood for us to come back, and maybe we never will!" said Ann.

"Ivanhoe and Rebecca and that Brian'll be killed, of course," said Eliza, joining in in that spirit of making everything as gloomy as possible that can be such a pleasure at such times.

"And the Normans'll win the siege, and the whole thing'll be ruined," said Roger.

"I don't see that it's my fault at all," said Jack. "You can't expect an experiment to come out right if people don't give you the right facts."

"Oh, leave him alone," said Eliza, pityingly. "He's too old to know better."

And they did.

"Now then," said Eliza. "What'll we do?"

It was the next day, and hope reigned again in the hearts of the four children.

"Well, the first thing," said Ann, "is to remember all the things we took out of the dollhouse, and find them and put them back."

Eliza shook her head. "That's too easy. Better wait till the magic starts again and go on a quest, like I said."

"But we'll never find all the things when we're small," Ann wailed.

Roger was firm. "Eliza's right. Any other way would be just sissy and cheating."

"But Ann's partly right, too," said Jack. "We can't move all that furniture if we're soldier-size."

"We'll have to compromise," said Roger.

"What's that?" said Ann.

The other three proceeded to show her what it was by taking Prince John's throne from behind the sliding fire screen and putting it back in the dollhouse, where it became the best parlor armchair once more. And all the other furniture that would be too heavy to move, later, they put back now, but the smaller things they left where they were, to be quested for when the magic began.

"I get to plan the quest," said Eliza. "Last time doesn't count as my turn at all. The door stood open for Ann, and Jack nearly was a giant killer, and Roger was the great Roger. I hardly did anything."

And the others all saw that to agree would be the way of much less resistance.

"We ought to make a list," Eliza went on, "of all the things we have to find, and take it along, to prod our sluggish brains."

"I'll get my notebook," said Ann.

"
Can
we take things?" Roger wondered. "We never have."

"We take the clothes we're wearing," said Eliza, "if that signifies."

"And I took my camera," said Jack.

"You did? I never noticed," said Eliza.

"I forgot about it myself," said Jack. "I only took that one picture of Robin Hood, and then I forgot all about developing that."

"Let's go do it now," said Roger. And the two boys departed for the darkroom while Ann and Eliza worked on the list.

"What did we use the father giant's coattails for?" Eliza tried to remember.

"I can't think," said Ann. "I know where the child giant's side-curls went, though." She giggled at the thought of where they had gone. Then she ran to get her notebook, but she couldn't find a pencil (as who ever can?) and the talk turned to other matters.

Pretty soon Roger and Jack came back and reported that the picture of Robin Hood hadn't turned out.

"It must have been overexposed," said Jack, but Roger thought there might be more to it than that.

And so the rest of that day and all the next one passed in fun and games and harmless ploys, and always the fateful third night drew ever nearer. And as to what it might bring, Eliza decreed that they should try not to even think about it. Because planning had never paid in the past, nor meddling, either.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that the telephone call came. Roger and Ann's mother answered it, and after the first few words she turned perfectly white. "Yes," she said. "Yes. Of course." Something about the way she said it made everybody in the room stop talking in mid-word and look at her. Then she hung up.

Aunt Katharine went to her quickly and they left the room together, and could be heard murmuring in low voices in the hall. The four children sat in silence in the living room, where they'd all been playing rummy when the call came, and Ann and Roger remembered other low voices that had gone on and on, that day back at home, and they were worried.

And then Aunt Katharine came back in and told them that it had been the hospital calling, and that the doctors had decided their father had to have an operation right away, today.

"Your mother's going straight out there now," she said. "I'm going with her." And she went to the phone to see about getting a room at the hospital where she and the children's mother could stay tonight till the worry was over.

Roger and Ann went upstairs to find their mother. The three of them didn't talk very much, but each one knew how the other two felt, and Roger and Ann were quiet and helpful about such things as packing their mother's bag for her and remembering what she ought to put in.

Their mother didn't even say good-bye, just kissed them both hard. And then she was gone. And pretty soon Jack and Eliza came upstairs, and the four of them drifted into Roger's room and sat, and nobody said anything much, but you could tell that Jack and Eliza were feeling friendly and sympathetic and wondering what they could do to help, and yet there didn't seem to be anything.

After a while Eliza got red and stared at the floor and said, "Look. Does the magic
have
to happen tonight? Maybe you'd rather it didn't. Maybe it could be indefinitely postponed."

"No," said Roger, unhappily. "Even if it could, it can't," he went on, not very clearly.

"Don't worry about us," said Jack quickly. "We'll understand."

"Sure," said Eliza. "Maybe I could have my adventure next week. Maybe we can fix it with the Old One."

"No, don't do that!" said Roger. "It's
got
to be tonight!"

"Why?" said Eliza.

But Roger looked so desperate that Jack gave his sister a surreptitious kick, and she did not repeat her question. Instead she asked if Roger and Ann would like to take a walk, but Roger said he thought they ought to stay, in case there were a message. And guessing that maybe they wanted to be alone, Eliza and Jack went away.

And when they'd gone, Roger told Ann a thing he'd been keeping to himself all this time. He told her about the wish he'd made that their father would get well in Baltimore, Maryland.

"And the Old One said wishes have to be earned," he told her anxiously. "And you see I
haven't
earned it, and this is my last chance. This is a warning."

Ann's eyes grew solemn. "Let's talk to him," she said. And she went and found the Old One and held him in her hands and stroked him lovingly, and after a while he rather reluctantly warmed up and began to speak.

"Ods fish," he said. "Degenerate times, generation of vipers, posterity is just around the corner and welcome to it! Canst thou not decide a single thing for thyself any more? Have courage and steadfast hearts gone down the drain, pardie?"

"It isn't that," said Ann. "We try. And we mean well, but something always happens."

"Ah yes," said the Old One. "Good intentions. Forsooth we all know what road paveth itself with
them!
On the other hand, if at first thou succeedeth not, try subsequently. And never forget the good old rule that magic goeth by threes."

"Can't you tell us any more, sir?" said Roger. "We
know
that."

The Old One gave him rather a sharp look. "Dost thou?" he said. "Art thou sure?" Then his eyes grew dreamy and his voice seemed to come from farther away. "Meseemeth I remember an ancient rune for just such cases as thine," he murmured. "How didst it run? Ah yes." And he recited slowly:

"Sword from stone the hero taketh—
Then the snowbound sleepers waketh!
Wisdom then the hero learneth!
Wishes then the hero earneth!"

And after that he wouldn't say another word, and he grew cold and heavy as lead (which he was) in Ann's hand.

"What did all that mean?" said Roger, as Ann put the Old One back in the castle. "Swords in the stone? That's the wrong story."

"And snowbound sleepers," said Ann, "only there aren't any. We didn't put any snow in. Did we?" But she wrote the ancient rune down in her notebook, anyway.

It was a few minutes after that that the phone rang. It was their mother. She said the operation was over and everything was fine so far. Roger sent a silent look of gratitude in the direction of the castle and the Old One. So far, so good.

And then Jack and Eliza came in' from their walk, and Roger and Ann showed them the ancient rune, and they couldn't figure it out, either, though they all tried till dinnertime and all through dinner and after dinner, and Jack even consulted his book on secret codes, to no avail.

"Maybe there's more in it than meets the eye," said Eliza. "Maybe it doesn't mean what it says. Maybe it's kind of symbolic. Maybe it's something else we're supposed to quest for. Something that looks like a sword or a stone."

"What looks like a stone besides a stone?" said Ann.

Nobody knew. And then all of a sudden the hours, which usually moved on laggard feet on magic nights, decided to cooperate for once, and it was bedtime.

Roger stayed awake for a while after the others, in case the telephone should ring again, but it didn't. All was still, save for the breathing of Jack on his couch. The gentle rhythm lulled Roger, and soon he knew no more. And soon after that the magic began.

The four cousins met on the usual greensward. Four pairs of eyes shone with eagerness and four hearts beat faster with the excitement of the quest. Where to begin was the question of the hour.