[Magic Kingdom of Landover 05] - Witches' Brew (14 page)

He paused, considering. “Elizabeth, didn't you say that Graum Wythe is still here?”

“Come look,” she offered, getting up from the table.

She took them from the kitchen through a curtained door and out into the backyard, a well-tended lawn that spread away through a scattering of spruce to a split-rail fence. She took them midway to the fence, to where the trees opened up, then stopped and pointed right. There, silhouetted against the skyline by the fading light of the sun, stood Graum Wythe. The castle sat alone on a rise, ringed by its walls and warded by its towers. It sat solitary and immutable, black and brooding as the night swept toward it.

Elizabeth lowered her arm. Specks of sunlight flashed in her curly hair. “Still there, right where you left it. Remember, Abernathy?”

Abernathy shivered. “I could do without the reminder. It is as forbidding as ever, I must say.” A sudden thought chilled him further. “Michel Ard Rhi hasn't come back by any chance, has he?”

“Oh, no, of course not.” Elizabeth laughed disarmingly. “He moved down to Oregon, several hundred miles away. He gave Graum Wythe to the state as a museum. A trust fund administers the estate. My father is the chief trustee. He oversees everything. No, don't worry. Michel is long gone.”

“My magic made certain of that,” Questor Thews added pointedly.

“I certainly hope so,” Abernathy muttered, thinking as he said it that Questor Thews's magic had never been very reliable.

They went back inside and resumed their places at the table. Darkness had fallen, and the last of the daylight had faded. Elizabeth poured them tall glasses of
cold milk and produced a plate of cookies. Questor helped himself eagerly, but Abernathy found that he had lost his appetite.

“So none of this is coincidence; all of it is part of some mysterious plan,” the scribe summed up doubtfully. “What plan?”

Questor regarded him as he might an inattentive child, eyebrows lifting. “Well, I don't know the answer to that, of course. If I did, we wouldn't need to have this discussion, now, would we?”

Abernathy ignored him. “An intervening magic saved us from Nightshade and sent us to the High Lord's old world, to Earth, but in particular to Graum Wythe and Elizabeth.” He looked at Elizabeth. Then he looked at Questor. “I still don't understand.”

“I'm not sure I do, either,” Questor Thews admitted. “But assume for a moment that whoever or whatever helped us did so to help Mistaya as well. As far as we know, no one is aware of what happened to the child except for us. We know Nightshade took her. We know that the witch intends to use the child to gain revenge against the High Lord and that Rydall of Marnhull is part of her scheme. If we can get word to Ben Holiday, then he might be able to do something to disrupt the witch's plans. Perhaps that is what we are meant to do. We are alive and here for a specific reason, Abernathy. What better reason than to discover a way to stop Nightshade before she carries out her scheme?”

“Saved to fight another day, is that it?” Abernathy asked, scratching his head with his fingers instead of his hind leg and not thinking twice about it. “Maybe we were sent here simply to get us out of the way. Maybe our rescuer then saved Mistaya as well.”

But Questor Thews shook his head emphatically. “No. No, I'm quite certain it didn't happen that way. In the first place, if our rescuer was there all along, keeping
watch for just this, as must have been the case given the quick response, why not save Mistaya early on? Why wait until the last moment? If our rescuer was looking simply to get us out of the way, as you put it, why send us all the way here? Why not send us back to Sterling Silver or some such? No, Abernathy, we are here for a reason, and it has something to do with saving Mistaya from the witch.”

“You think the answer to all this lies in Graum Wythe, don't you?” Elizabeth declared, making the jump in logic first.

“I do,” Questor Thews replied. “Graum Wythe is a vast repository for artifacts of magic, some quite powerful. One of those artifacts could provide a way back into Landover. Or provide us with a means to foil the witch. The fact remains that without magic of some sort, we are trapped here and helpless to aid the High Lord or Mistaya. We do not have a way to pass through the fairy mists. No one knows where we are. No one will come for us. I think we are meant to find our own way home. I think we
must
if Ben Holiday and Mistaya are to be saved.”

The three stared at each other, weighing the import of the wizard's words.

“Maybe,” Abernathy agreed finally.

“There is no ‘maybe' about it. Graum Wythe holds the answer to our dilemma,” Questor Thews continued solemnly. “But the key to Graum Wythe is you, Elizabeth. We were sent to you because your father is administrator of the castle and all its treasures. You have lived in the castle and are familiar with its holdings. You have access to places where others are not permitted. What we require is somewhere in that castle. I'm certain of it. We simply have to search it out.”

“We can start tomorrow morning when the castle opens,” Elizabeth promised. “That's the easy part. The
hard part will be finding what it is you need when you don't know what it is you're looking for.”

“True,” Questor Thews admitted with a slight shrug.

“But what does all this have to do with my being changed from a dog back into a man?” Abernathy asked once more.

He was still waiting for an answer to his question when there was the sound of a key turning in the front door lock and of the door opening. Three heads turned as one.

“Elizabeth, are you home?” a woman's voice called. “Mrs. Ambaum!” Elizabeth announced, making a face.

For the moment at least, Abernathy's question was left unanswered.

Mrs. Ambaum proved to be less formidable than anticipated. She was a large, straight-backed woman with graying hair, a bluff face, and a suspicious mind, but she was not a villainous sort. Elizabeth offered her explanation of how Abernathy and Questor had come to visit and had been invited to stay, and Mrs. Ambaum, after a few perfunctory questions and a general disclaimer of responsibility, accepted their presence without further argument, retiring to her room at the back of the house for some herbal tea and television. Questor and Abernathy went to bed much relieved.

They were up early the next morning and came down to breakfast to find Mrs. Ambaum already gone to her sister's for the day. They ate hurriedly, anxious to get under way with their search of Graum Wythe, then cleared off their dishes and, with Elizabeth leading the way, headed out the door.

It was a beautiful, cloudless, sun-filled day. Birds sang from the trees, and the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers and spruce. The company of three
smiled agreeably as they departed the house, came down the walkway to the edge of the yard, turned left, and began following the road toward the castle.

Elizabeth linked arms with Abernathy, grinning conspiratorially. Abernathy felt stiff and uncomfortable. “You look very nice in Dad's clothes,” she told him. “Very distinguished. You should dress like this all the time.”

“He should smile more, too,” Questor Thews added before he could think better of it.

“This is so incredible, Abernathy, you being here again,” the girl continued, hugging his arm affectionately. “Look at you, just look! Who would believe what's happened? Isn't it wonderful? Aren't you happy?”

“Very,” Abernathy acknowledged, putting on his best face, though in truth he was still wondering what the price would be for his remarkable but still unexplained transformation. There was always a price for those things. He thought back to the mind's eye crystals of Horris Kew. Always a price.

Elizabeth was wearing a powder-blue sweatshirt that said something about Seattle grunge, a pair of jeans, and worn sneakers. Her hair was tousled artfully, and she was wearing violet eye shadow and dark magenta lipstick. Abernathy thought she had grown up awfully fast, but he kept it to himself.

“Do you have family?” she asked him suddenly. “A wife and children?”

He shook his head, a tad downcast.

“Father and mother?”

“Not for many years.” He could barely remember them.

“Brothers and sisters?”

“No, I'm afraid not.”

“Hmmm. That's rather sad, don't you think? Maybe
I should adopt you!” She grinned brightly. “Just kidding. But you really could be part of my family, since it's rather small and could use another member or two. What do you say? An unofficial adoption, okay?”

“Thank you, Elizabeth,” he replied, and was really quite touched.

They strolled up the road, the older man with the electric white hair and beard, the younger man with the rimless glasses and the pensive face, and the curly-haired girl who seemed in charge of them both, closing on Graum Wythe like Dorothy and her companions at the Emerald City of Oz. Except, of course, that Graum Wythe, though castlelike and imposing, was in no other way anything at all like the Emerald City. It was not green or bright but stone-gray and dreary. No yellow brick road led to its entry, just blacktop. No fields of poppies surrounded its walls, although its working vineyards still showed touches of green. It was medieval and fortresslike with no pennants flying from its parapets, only the flags of the United States and the state of Washington to announce its entrance.

Not that either Abernathy or Questor Thews knew anything about Oz or the Emerald City. Had they given the matter any consideration, they probably would have contrasted the drabness of Graum Wythe to the brightness of Sterling Silver, for instance. They were thinking, in fact, of very different things entirely. Abernathy was trying to conceive of what his life would be like now that he was no longer a man in dog form but a man for real. He was trying to picture himself in his new role in various situations. Questor Thews, on the other hand, was recalling his friend's question of the previous night concerning what his change from dog back to man had to do with their coming to the High Lord's world and hoping that his suspicions, unvoiced as yet, would be proved wrong.

The little company came to the low stone wall that encircled the castle and passed through the open iron gates to the drawbridge. Graum Wythe loomed before them, a massive cluster of towers and parapets. The drawbridge was down and the portcullis up, so they moved into the shadow of the castle wall, through the gate entry, and out to the castle's parking lot. Graum Wythe seemed empty of life. A single car was parked in the rear of its visitors' lot. The souvenir stand, ensconced in what used to be a guardhouse, was closed and shuttered. Graum Wythe seemed deserted.

“It's all right,” Elizabeth assured her companions. “The museum hasn't opened to the public yet, but we can get in.”

She took them across the parking lot and up the steps to the iron-bound front doors. She rapped the heavy knocker on its plate and waited. A moment later the door opened, and a man she greeted as Harvey smiled in recognition and let them inside. They entered the same foyer where several years earlier Ben, Willow, and Miles Bennett—Ben's old law partner, pressed into service for the occasion—all three dressed for Halloween night, had engineered Abernathy's escape from Michel Ard Rhi's dungeons. Abernathy looked around with foreboding, but the menace of Michel and his guards was long absent and the foyer itself had been redecorated with bright tapestries, pamphlet stands, and an admission desk where Harvey held forth. After giving the same explanation about Questor and Abernathy that she had given Mrs. Ambaum, and exchanging a few pleasantries with Harvey, Elizabeth led the wizard and the scribe into the bowels of the castle.

They spent the rest of the day searching. Their search was confined at first to the corridors and rooms left open for the public and to the artifacts and collectibles on display. Most of the items Questor Thews recognized
for what they were. Almost all possessed no inherent magic. But a few did, and once or twice the wizard felt obliged to comment on an item that really had no business being exposed to the public, so dangerous was its potential for misuse.

Nowhere, however, did he find the elusive and still unidentified item he was looking for.

Midday passed without result. They ate lunch in the little sandwich shop situated in what used to be the castle kitchen. Visitors were arriving by the carload now, and there were buses filled with touring groups. Business was picking up. To avoid the crowds, Elizabeth took them into the back rooms and storage areas of the castle, those kept closed to the public, looking at the things either deemed unworthy or unready for display. Crates were stacked everywhere, but they managed to get most down for a look inside. Cabinets were filled with odd rocks and minerals, carvings and sculptures, paintings and crafts of all sorts, and none of them were of any recognizable use.

An hour after the castle closed Harvey advised them that they would have to leave and come back tomorrow. Reluctantly they trudged homeward with nothing to show for their efforts. Questor Thews was particularly frustrated.

“It's there, I know it,” he muttered, shaking his ragged white head. “I cannot be wrong about this. It's there, but I'm not seeing it, that's all. We'll just have to come back and try again tomorrow. Drat!”

Abernathy and Elizabeth exchanged a quick glance. Neither of them was bothered by the prospect of the hunt going on another day. If Questor had been paying attention, he would have noticed that Elizabeth was holding Abernathy's hand. If he had been paying attention, he would have noticed that Abernathy no longer seemed to mind.

The first of Rydall of Marnhull's champions appeared exactly as promised three days after Ben Holiday had accepted the King's challenge.

By the time the sun rose, it was waiting outside the gates of Sterling Silver, a strong, solitary figure standing at the far end of the causeway, looking over at the castle. It was a man of great size and obvious strength. In a land where warriors often reached seven feet, this man was easily eight. A giant of massive girth, broad shoulders, and tree trunk legs, he wore animal skins tied with leather thongs about his muscular body. Boots linked to greaves ran to midthigh, and iron-studded wrist guards laced into leather gloves. A black beard and coarse, thick hair obscured most of his face, but his eyes could be seen to glint brightly in the rise of the morning sun.