“Ninety,” Sophie said, that being the first high number that came into her head.
“So old?” Mrs. Pentstemmon said with what may have been slight, stately envy. “How lucky you are to move so nimbly still.”
“Oh, yes, she’s so wonderfully nimble,” Howl agreed, “that sometimes there’s no stopping her.”
Mrs. Pentstemmon gave him a look which told Sophie she had been a teacher at least as fierce as Miss Angorian. “I am talking to your mother,” she said. “I daresay she is as proud of you as I am. We are two old ladies who both had a hand in forming you. You are, one might say, our joint creation.”
“Don’t you think I did any of me myself, then?” Howl asked. “Put in just a few touches of my own?”
“A few, and those not altogether to my liking,” Mrs. Pentstemmon replied. “But you will not wish to sit here and hear yourself being discussed. You will go down and sit on the terrace, taking your page boy with you, where Hunch will bring you both a cool drink. Go along.”
If Sophie had not been so nervous herself, she might have laughed at the expression on Howl’s face. He had obviously not expected this to happen at all. But he got up, with only a slight shrug, made a slight warning face at Sophie, and shooed Michael out of the room ahead of him. Mrs. Pentstemmon turned her rigid body very slightly to watch them go. Then she nodded at the page boy, who scuttled out of the room too. After that, Mrs. Pentstemmon turned herself back toward Sophie, and Sophie felt more nervous than ever.
“I prefer him with black hair,” Mrs. Pentstemmon announced. “That boy is going to the bad.”
“Who? Michael?” Sophie said, bewildered.
“Not the servitor,” said Mrs. Pentstemmon. “I do not think he is clever enough to cause me concern. I am talking about Howell, Mrs. Pendragon.”
“Oh,” said Sophie, wondering why Mrs. Pentstemmon only said “going.” Howl had surely arrived at the bad long ago.
“Take his whole appearance,” Mrs. Pentstemmon said sweepingly. “Look at his clothes.”
“He is always very careful about his appearance,” Sophie agreed, and wondered why she was putting it so mildly.
“And always was. I am careful about my appearance too, and I see no harm in that,” said Mrs. Pentstemmon. “But what call has he to be walking around in a charmed suit? It is a dazzling attraction charm, directed at ladies—very well done, I admit, and barely detectable even to my trained eye, since it appears to have been darned into the seams—and one which will render him almost irresistible to ladies. This represents a downward trend into black arts which must surely cause you some motherly concern, Mrs. Pendragon.”
Sophie thought uneasily about the gray-and-scarlet suit. She had darned the seams without noticing it had anything particular about it. But Mrs. Pentstemmon was an expert on magic, and Sophie was only an expert on clothes.
Mrs. Pentstemmon put both gold mittens on top of her stick and canted her stiff body so that both her trained and piercing eyes stared into Sophie’s. Sophie felt more and more nervous and uneasy. “My life is nearly over,” Mrs. Pentstemmon announced. “I have felt death tiptoeing close for some time now.”
“Oh, I’m sure that isn’t so,” Sophie said, trying to sound soothing. It was hard to sound like anything with Mrs. Pentstemmon staring at her like that.
“I assure you it is so,” said Mrs. Pentstemmon. “This is why I was anxious to see you, Mrs. Pendragon. Howell, you see, was my last pupil and by far my best. I was about to retire when he came to me out of a foreign land. I thought my work was done when I trained Benjamin Sullivan—whom you probably know better as Wizard Suliman, rest his soul!—and procured him the post of Royal Magician. Oddly enough, he came from the same country as Howell. Then Howell came, and I saw at a glance that he had twice the imagination and twice the abilities, and, though I admit he had some faults of character, I knew he was a force for good. Good, Mrs. Pendragon. But what is he now?”
“What indeed?” Sophie said.
“Something has happened to him,” Mrs. Pentstemmon said, still staring piercingly at Sophie. “And I am determined to put that right before I die.”
“What do you think has happened?” Sophie asked uncomfortably.
“I must rely on you to tell me that,” said Mrs. Pentstemmon. “My feeling is that he has gone the same way as the Witch of the Waste. They tell me she was not wicked once—though I have this only on hearsay, since she is older than either of us and keeps herself young by her arts. Howell has gifts in the same order as hers. It seems as if those of high ability cannot resist some extra, dangerous stroke of cleverness, which results in a fatal flaw and begins a slow decline to evil. Do you, by any chance, have a clue what it might be?”
Calcifer’s voice came into Sophie’s mind, saying, “The contract isn’t doing either of us any good in the long run.” She felt a little chilly, in spite of the heat of the day blowing through the open windows of the shaded, elegant room. “Yes,” she said. “He’s made some sort of contract with his fire demon.”
Mrs. Pentstemmon’s hands shook a little on her stick. “That will be it. You must break that contract, Mrs. Pendragon.”
“I would if I knew how,” Sophie said.
“Surely your maternal feelings and your own strong magic gift will tell you how,” Mrs. Pentstemmon said. “I have been looking at you, Mrs. Pendragon, though you may not have noticed—”
“Oh, I noticed, Mrs. Pentstemmon,” Sophie said.
“—and I like your gift,” said Mrs. Pentstemmon. “It brings life to things, such as that stick in your hand, which you have evidently talked to, to the extent that it has become what the layman would call a magic wand. I think you would not find it too hard to break that contract.”
“Yes, but I need to know what the terms of it are,” Sophie said. “Did Howl tell you I was a witch, because if he did—”
“He did not. There is no need to be coy. You can rely on my experience to know these things,” said Mrs. Pentstemmon. Then, to Sophie’s relief, she shut her eyes. It was like a strong light being turned off. “I do not know, nor do I wish to know, about such contracts,” she said. Her cane wobbled again, as if she might be shuddering. Her mouth quirked into a line, suggesting she had unexpectedly bitten on a peppercorn. “But I now see,” she said, “what has happened to the Witch. She made a contract with a fire demon and, over the years, that demon has taken control of her. Demons do not understand good and evil. But they can be bribed into a contract, provided the human offers them something valuable, something only humans have. This prolongs the life of both human and demon, and the human gets the demon’s magic power to add to his or her own.” Mrs. Pentstemmon opened her eyes again. “That is all I can bear to say on the subject,” she said, “except to advise you to find out what that demon got. Now I must bid you farewell. I have to rest awhile.”
And like magic, which it probably was, the door opened and the page boy came in to usher Sophie out of the room. Sophie was extremely glad to go. She was all but squirming with embarrassment by then. She looked back at Mrs. Pentstemmon’s rigid, upright form as the door closed and wondered if Mrs. Pentstemmon would have made her feel this bad if she had really and truly been Howl’s old mother. Sophie rather thought she would. “I take my hat off to Howl for standing her as a teacher for more than a day!” she murmured to herself.
“Madam?” asked the page boy, thinking Sophie was talking to him.
“I said, go slowly down the stairs or I can’t keep up,” Sophie told him. Her knees were wobbling. “You young boys dash about so,” she said.
The page boy took her slowly and considerately down the shiny stairs. Halfway down, Sophie recovered enough from Mrs. Pentstemmon’s personality to think of some of the things Mrs. Pentstemmon had actually said. She had said Sophie was a witch. Oddly enough, Sophie accepted this without any trouble at all. That explained the popularity of certain hats, she thought. It explained Jane Farrier’s Count Whatsit. It possibly explained the jealousy of
the Witch of the Waste. It was as if Sophie had always known this. But she had thought it was not proper to have a magic gift because she was the eldest of three. Lettie had been far more sensible about such things.
Then she thought of the gray-and-scarlet suit and nearly fell downstairs with dismay. She was the one who had put the charm on that. She could hear herself now, murmuring to it. “Built to pull in the girls!” she had told it. And of course it did. It had charmed Lettie that day in the orchard. Yesterday, somewhat disguised, it must have had its secret effect on Miss Angorian too.
Oh, dear! Sophie thought. I’ve gone and doubled the number of hearts he’ll have broken! I must get that suit off him somehow!
Howl, in that same suit, was waiting in the cool black-and-white hall with Michael. Michael nudged Howl in a worried way as Sophie came slowly down the stairs behind the page boy. Howl looked saddened. “You seem a bit ragged,” he said. “I think we’d better skip seeing the King. I’ll go and blacken my own name when I make your excuses. I can say my wicked ways have made you ill. That could be true, from the look of you.”
Sophie certainly did not wish to see the King. But she thought of what Calcifer had said. If the King commanded Howl to go into the Waste and the Witch caught him, Sophie’s own chance of being young again would have gone too.
She shook her head. “After Mrs. Pentstemmon,” she said, “the King of Ingary will seem just like an ordinary person.”
Chapter 13
In which Sophie blackens Howl’s name.
Sophie was feeling decidedly queer again when they reached the Palace. Its many golden domes dazzled her. The way to the front entrance was up a huge flight of steps, with a soldier in scarlet standing guard every six steps. The poor boys must have been near fainting in the heat, Sophie thought as she puffed her way dizzily up past them. At the top of the steps were archways, halls, corridors, lobbies, one after another. Sophie lost count of how many. At every archway a splendidly dressed person wearing white gloves—still somehow white in spite of the heat—inquired their business and then led them on to the next personage in the next archway.
“Mrs. Pendragon to see the King!” the voice of each echoed down the halls.
About halfway, Howl was politely detached and told to wait. Michael and Sophie went on being handed from person to person. They were taken upstairs, after which the splendid persons were dressed in blue instead of red, and handed on again until they came to an anteroom paneled in a hundred different-colored woods. There Michael was peeled off and made to wait too. Sophie, who by this time was not at all sure whether she was not having some strange dream, was ushered through huge double doors, and this time the echoing voice said, “Your Majesty, here is Mrs. Pendragon to see you.”
And there was the King, not on a throne, but sitting in a rather square chair with only a little gold leaf on it, near the middle of a large room, and dressed much more modestly than the persons who waited on him. He was quite alone, like an ordinary person. True, he sat with one leg thrust out in a kingly sort of manner, and he was handsome in a plump, slightly vague way, but to Sophie he seemed quite youthful and just a touch too proud of being a king. She felt he ought, with that face, to have been more unsure of himself.
He said, “Well, what does Wizard Howl’s mother want to see me about?”
And Sophie was suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that she was standing talking to the King. It was, she thought dizzily, as if the man sitting there and the huge, important thing which was kingship were two separate things that just happened to occupy the same chair. And she found she had forgotten every word of the careful, delicate things Howl had told her to say. But she had to say something.
“He sent me to tell you he’s not going to look for your brother,” she said. “Your Majesty.”
She stared at the King. The King stared back. It was a disaster.
“Are you sure?” asked the King. “The Wizard seemed quite willing when I talked to him.”
The one thing Sophie had left in her head was that she was here to blacken Howl’s name, so she said, “He lied about that. He didn’t want to annoy you. He’s a slitherer-outer, if you know what I mean, Your Majesty.”
“And he hopes to slither out of finding my brother Justin,” said the King. “I see. Won’t you sit down, since I see you are not young, and tell me the Wizard’s reasons?”
There was another plain chair rather a long way from the King. Sophie creaked herself down into it and sat with her hands propped on her stick like Mrs. Pentstemmon, hoping that would make her feel better. But her mind was still simply a roaring white blank of stage fright. All she could think of to say was “Only a coward would send his old mother along to plead for him. You can see what he’s like just from that, Your Majesty.”
“It is an unusual step,” the King said gravely. “But I told him that I’d make it worth his while if he agreed.”
“Oh, he doesn’t care about money,” Sophie said. “But he’s scared stiff of the Witch of the Waste, you see. She put a curse on him and it’s just caught up with him.”
“Then he has every reason to be scared,” the King said with a slight shiver. “But tell me more, please, about the Wizard.”
More about Howl? Sophie thought desperately. I have to blacken his name! Her mind was such a blank that for a second it actually seemed to her that Howl had no faults at all. How stupid! “Well, he’s fickle, careless, selfish, and hysterical,” she said. “Half the time I think he doesn’t care what happens to anyone as long as he’s all right— but then I find out how awfully kind he’s been to someone. Then I think he’s kind just when it suits him—only then I find out he undercharges poor people. I don’t know, Your Majesty. He’s a mess.”
“My impression,” said the King, “was that Howl is an unprincipled, slippery rogue with a glib tongue and a clever mind. Would you agree?”
“How well you put it!” Sophie said heartily. “But you left out how vain he is and—” She looked suspiciously at the King across the yards of carpet. He seemed so surprisingly ready to help her blacken Howl’s name.
The King was smiling. It was the slightly uncertain smile that went with the person he was, rather than the king he ought to be. “Thank you, Mrs. Pendragon,” he said. “Your outspokenness has taken a weight off my mind. The Wizard agreed to look for my brother so readily that I thought I had picked the wrong man after all. I feared he was someone who was either unable to resist showing off or would do anything for money. But you have shown me he is just the man I need.”
“Oh, confound it!” Sophie cried out. “He sent me to tell you he wasn’t!”
“And so you did.” The King hitched his chair an inch toward Sophie’s. “Let me be equally outspoken now,” he said. “Mrs. Pendragon, I need my brother back badly. It is not just that I am fond of him and regret the quarrel we had. It is not even that certain people are whispering that I did away with him myself—which anyone who knows us both knows to be perfect nonsense. No, Mrs. Pendragon. The fact is, my brother Justin is a brilliant general and, with High Norland and Strangia about to declare war on us, I can’t do without him. The Witch has threatened me too, you know. Now that all reports agree that Justin did indeed go into the Waste, I am certain that the Witch meant me to be without him when I needed him most. I think she took Wizard Suliman as bait to fetch Justin. And it follows that I need a fairly clever and unscrupulous wizard to get him back.”
“Howl will just run away,” Sophie warned the King.
“No,” said the King. “I don’t think he will. The fact that he sent you tells me that. He did it to show me he was too much of a coward to care what I thought of him, isn’t that right, Mrs. Pendragon?”
Sophie nodded. She wished she could have remembered all Howl’s delicate remarks. The King would have understood them even if she did not.
“Not the act of a vain man,” the King said. “But no one would do that except as a last resort, which shows me that Wizard Howl will do what I want if I
make it clear to him that his last resort has failed.”
“I think you may be—er—taking delicate hints that aren’t there, Your Majesty,” Sophie said.
“I think not.” The King smiled. His slightly vague features had all firmed up. He was sure he was right. “Tell Wizard Howl, Mrs. Pendragon, that I am appointing him Royal Wizard as from now, with our Royal Command to find Prince Justin, alive or dead, before the year is out. You have our leave to go now.”
He held out his hand to Sophie, just like Mrs. Pentstemmon, but a little less royally. Sophie levered herself up, wondering if she was meant to kiss this hand or not. But since she felt more like raising her stick and beating the King over the head with it, she shook the King’s hand and gave a creaking little curtsy. It seemed to be the right thing to do. The King gave her a friendly smile as she hobbled away to the double doors.
“Oh, curses!” she muttered to herself. It was not only exactly what Howl did not want. Howl would now move the castle a thousand miles away. Lettie, Martha, and Michael would all be miserable, and no doubt there would be torrents of green slime into the bargain as well. “It comes of being the eldest,” she muttered while she was shoving the heavy doors open. “You just can’t win!”