The Master of Misrule (7 page)

“Ah, but not before the Spinners had tied the last knot. That’s when I woke up here, you see.… Such a lovely party …”

“No—don’t you dare go to sleep.
Grace!
”

“Mmm?”

To her shame, Flora found she was crying again. She was now too weak to push, let alone carry, her sister, and the longer she stayed, and the more layers of thread the Spinners bound around the wire manikin, the worse it would become. “How do I get you out of this place?”

“You take the dolly, of course,” Grace replied serenely. “Over the threshold in the park. I have to stay at the party.
Don’t worry, it’s quite nice here—except when I’m back among the briars, of course. And sometimes I’m asleep in a strange bed and can hear all sorts of people talking.… Even you, occasionally.” She stretched a little and looked at Flora with hazy, heavy-lidded eyes. “You know the trick, don’t you, Flo?”

“The trick with the doll?” Flora gave her sister’s shoulders another shake. “GRACE! What trick?”

“The trick … The trick with the maze.”

A brief struggle showed in her face, and suddenly Grace was staring at Flora with wakeful and desperate eyes. It was like watching somebody come out of water after being submerged almost to the point of drowning.
“Every turn is left,”
Grace gasped. Her face was white and taut, and her voice hoarse with effort.
“Remember that. Remember.”

“I—I will. I promise. Grace, you must— NO! Don’t go to sleep—no—please—”

But Grace was already closing her eyes and sinking down on the floor of the hall. “There’s no more time, Flo-Flo,” she mumbled. “The binding’s half done. You have to … you have to … run.…”

Flora hesitated for one long, agonizing moment, then clambered to her feet. Her tongue felt hard and clumsy but she managed to speak through her tears.

“This isn’t over. Next time you wake up, you’re going to be home. I swear it.”

“Such a lovely party,” Grace murmured, lost to dream.

Somehow, Flora made it out of the main entrance of the house, lurched across the lawn, down the avenue and into the open countryside beyond. There was no doubt that her body was slowing down, its intricate mesh of nerves and muscles starting to stiffen.

Thank God—the clump of trees that marked the beginning of the park was in sight. It had stopped snowing while she was in the house and the sky was clear. A minute or so later, she could even see the dome of the summerhouse glinting in the moonlight.

Breathing hard, Flora tottered toward its steps. It was then that the smooth white expanse immediately in front of her became oddly speckled. Something was rising up from under the snow—little black shoots and buds.…

The briars were growing.

At first the shoots were so small that they looked like flecks of soot on the snow. But quickly, very quickly, they knotted themselves into spreading snarls of spikes. Sharp black spikes that thrust wickedly against the soft white—dark tangles that grew so thickly and so fast that in moments there was an impenetrable circular hedge, nearly seven feet high, around the threshold.

Flora’s first instinct was to push her way through the thicket, but she was immediately forced back, her arms and wrists scored with dozens of bloody scratch marks. With horror, she saw that each thorn was in fact a tiny, glinting sword.

In her desperation she began casting about for a fallen
branch, or even a stone, to fight her way through. It was then that she spotted a small gap in the hedge a few yards to the right. There was an increasing time delay in moving her limbs, as if the signals from her brain were slowing to a crawl, but she managed to squeeze clumsily past. “Oh God,” she said aloud as she found herself in a narrow, winding lane between the hedge and another wall of briar-swords. “It’s the maze.”

The snow on the ground gnawed icily into her wet feet. Her eyes watered. The scratches on her arms stung. But she welcomed the pain and the cold: they were signs of life. It’s not over till it’s over, she told herself grimly as she dragged her body along the twisting path.
Every turn is left
, Grace had said. Her sister had given her the key to the maze, and her only hope of reaching the threshold.

It was a simple trick, really. One of those things that should be easy when you know how. But as Flora’s progress became limited to a cramped hobble, even her thought processes started to stultify. There were moments when she began to forget what she was supposed to be doing, what the point of all this wearisome movement was. It seemed as if she had been wandering in the web of briars forever—that this was the only world there was, and all that she had ever known. She didn’t care even when the thorns caught her clothes and tore her skin. They had stopped hurting now. When she couldn’t recall if she had gone left at the last turning or not, it didn’t seem to particularly matter. Nor did the little bundle of wire and thread that she was for some reason cradling to her chest.

White snow, black thorn, red blood. Turn and turn again. Except that sometimes it was the ground that was powdered black, the sky a scalding white, with black blood on the red thorns. Was she in a maze of briars or a cage of swords? Turn and turn again.…

It was when Flora rounded the last corner out of the maze that disaster struck. At the sight of the threshold, her senses recovered a little, and she was able to lurch forward on a brief energy surge. But her balance was gone and she fell stiffly to the ground. She tried to put out her hands to steady herself, and the doll tumbled from her weak grasp, becoming snagged on the briars at the base of the thicket. When she tugged at it, the wool only became more deeply ensnared.

Her fingers were too clumsy to untangle the thread, her hands too feeble to free the doll from the piercings of countless tiny black swords. She knew that this was a dreadful thing, a calamity, but as the swaddling lethargy increased its hold on her, she could barely remember why. And the more she plucked at the doll, the more hopelessly snarled its threads became, until it no longer resembled a manikin, just an untidy nest of black wool in a bramble hedge.

Flora tried to call out to her sister, but she couldn’t open her mouth properly and the words emerged as a whimper. More than anything, she wanted to lie down in the white softness, let darkness and stillness bind themselves into every fiber of her being, cocooning her in peace. But the thought of Grace pushed her onward, even though she had only the faintest memory of her now. And so, just as her sister had
done five years before, Flora began to crawl toward the summerhouse, inch by hopeless inch.

And when her nearly rigid fingers traced the sign of the threshold, and the Arcanum coin emerged from her palm, she could no longer remember her own name, let alone Grace’s, or why, with the last spark of sense left in her, she felt compelled to jerk the coin into the freezing air.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, C
AT
, Blaine and Toby met by the stump of the apple tree in Mercury Square. It was hard to reconcile their drab surroundings with the transformations they had witnessed three nights ago. For the apple tree that used to grow in the neglected garden was also Yggdrasil, a double of the tree on which the Hanged Man had been imprisoned, deep in the catacombs below Temple House. The chancers had used four aces to fell it, unleashing the forces of earth, air, fire and water, and toppling the power of the kings and queens.…

Their victory already seemed long ago.

To her surprise, Toby greeted Cat with a hug. Even more to her surprise, she found that she didn’t mind. Blaine got a hearty handshake. Afterward, they stood around feeling uncomfortable. This was not the kind of reunion anyone had expected. There was no good news to celebrate, no nostalgia to indulge in. And where was Flora?

While they were waiting, Toby told them, again, about his encounter with Mia. He’d phoned Cat as soon as he left the Arcanum but his excited ramblings had been almost too much to take in. It was not a whole lot easier now.

Spread on the bench in front of them was an article from London’s tabloid newspaper.

A LOTTERY FOR LUCK?
CITY GRIPPED BY MYSTERIOUS
SCRATCHCARD CRAZE

“A Game of Triumphs marketing blitz.” Cat shook her head in disbelief. “This is insane.”

“Yeah, right. One big mass-hysterical joke,” said Blaine sardonically.

“But what does it
mean
?”

The three of them had already talked this over at length without reaching any conclusion. They found it was easier to focus on the mysterious scratchcards than what might have gone wrong in the Game, and what it had cost them. A part of Cat still refused to believe in their failure. Toby kept banging on about how the Arcanum was “broken.” What did that mean anyway? Broken things could be mended. There must be a way of putting things right. There
must
.

“I wonder where Flora’s got to,” Toby said impatiently. “Did she mention anything about her card or her prize, Cat, when she texted you last night?”

“No. All she said was that she’d got my messages and would be here.”

“Then she’s already been in the Arcanum?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know.”

“But—”

“Toby.”

They relapsed into silence, except for the rasping of Blaine’s cough. Cat tried not to let it get to her, but the sound grated on her nerves. It had got worse since yesterday.

Twenty minutes after the agreed meeting time, Flora walked through the gap in the railings on the garden’s north side. The others were shocked by her appearance. It wasn’t just the scratches on her face and the crisscrossing cuts all over her hands. Her skin was pallid and she wore a fixed, glassy stare. None of them had ever seen her outside the Arcanum looking less than immaculately groomed, but today her long hair was straggly and unbrushed, and her shirt
appeared to have been pulled straight from the laundry basket.

“You’ve played your card,” Blaine stated.

Flora nodded. She didn’t volunteer any further information. Cat, who was the only one who knew the full story of Flora’s sister, found she couldn’t work up the courage to mention Grace, and shifted awkwardly on her feet.

“Like I said in my voice mail last night, we think … we think something’s wrong with our prizes. That we were cheated,” she said.

“Why’s that?” Flora asked dully.