His Royal Whiskers Read online

“And Hostage,” Teresa reminded him.

  “And Hostage,” Pieter agreed.

  He really ought to have worked it out sooner. Pieter had been predicting a kidnapper, a black sack, and a snatching in the dead of night for some time now. As the best Tallymaster on the continent, he was constantly being told—often by Lord Xin during War Council meetings—that the Czar’s enemies would one day try to capture him and use his mathemagical abilities for their own ends.

  “Are you going to ransom me?” he asked Teresa, trying to work it out. “Did the Duke of Madri send you? Is this revenge for his poodle?”

  “No, no, and no,” Teresa said. “You ask a lot of stupid questions for a genius. Maybe you’ll be smarter if I wake you up a bit.” She thrust a mug of something hot and earthy into his hand. “Sip this. Three teaspoons of khave, half a nib of sugarcane, and a smidge of blazing pip.”

  Pieter sipped it experimentally. The khave was sweet and smoky. It tingled on his tongue, and behind his eyes. He instantly felt more awake. And then more confused.

  “Why have you carried me down here, then?” he asked.

  “Carrying is what I do.” The girl pointed to her suit.

  It was covered with grappling hooks and color-coded patchwork pockets with little labels: peppercorn, parsley, and blazing pip chili.

  It took Pieter a moment to understand. “Oh!” he said suddenly. His kidnapper was the kitchen’s Spice Monkey—a serf who had the job of climbing around the kitchen walls like a mountaineer, gathering up and tossing down whatever ingredients the cooks needed from the shelves to sprinkle in their dishes.

  “Want to play a game of hide-and-seek?” Teresa asked.

  Pieter’s bewilderment multiplied by a factor of ten. The mug of khave had been odd. Hide-and-seek was even odder. (What a stupid phrase, he thought. How could something be both even and odd?)

  “Well?” Teresa said. “Do you?”

  Pieter hesitated. This really wasn’t what he’d imagined when Lord Xin and Ugor had warned him about kidnappers. Perhaps it was a dreadful trick. Maybe he should just scream and struggle until he was rescued.

  On the other hand, hide-and-seek was his favorite game. It was the only one the mathemagicians in Eureka had allowed him to play, because it involved counting.3

  “You geniuses sure need a lot of thinking time,” Teresa said loudly. “You playing or not?”

  Since he was Teresa’s hostage, and since it wouldn’t be clever to refuse his kidnapper’s demands, and since Pieter always made the smart choice, he agreed.

  (It had nothing to do with the fact that no one had asked him to play a game for years, or that his mug of khave was delicious, or that he was having rather a nice time being kidnapped. And it certainly had nothing to do with Teresa’s uncountable freckles, or the way that even her scowls made Pieter’s head giddy but not with numbers, and his heart start beating faster than he could count.)

  “All right,” he said, hoping the moonlight was too weak for her to see his blushes. “Let’s play.”

  Teresa led Pieter from shelf to shelf. She harnessed him to the climbing ropes that dangled down in front of each ledge like jungle vines. Each one was color-coded for where it would take you: yellow for the bread shelf, red for the cured meats, purple for the wine racks.

  Teresa hooked them both to the green rope. Pieter barely had time to shut his eyes before she had tipped them both over the edge. Together they swung like monkeys across the kitchen. Pieter’s stomach soared into his chest and his feet kicked in the empty air, while Teresa held him tight and laughed into the wind.

  Their feet touched down on the next shelf, they skidded to a stop and unclipped the harness, and Pieter opened his eyes to see where the green rope had led them.

  It was the part of the kitchen where the herbs were kept. Lush swishing plants sprouted out of rows of crates like green jack-in-the-boxes. Dill, sage, and mint filled the moonlit air with their crisp sweet smells. Pieter took a deep breath and sighed. He hadn’t known that such a beautiful place could exist in the cold, regal splendor of the Winter Palace. The herb garden was as peaceful and secluded as a mountain meadow. It was wonderful.

  “You seek and I’ll hide,” Teresa told him, then ran off with a rustle into the leaves.

  Closing his eyes, Pieter counted: “Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, threnty! You asked for time, and I’ve given you plenty!”

  He called out the start-searching rhyme, then listened hard for any sounds in reply. He couldn’t hear anything but the herbs whispering to one another, and the echoing drips of the kitchen taps far below.

  He started sifting through the sage and dill. Then he went to the spice boxes, opening them up like presents, and letting out a disappointed huff when he peeked inside each one.

  Biscuit crates. Old plates. Barrels of hazelnuts and wrinkly dates. He searched stacks and racks and behind the backs of piled-up sacks. He saw rats the size of cats and glittering emerald roaches as big as broaches, munching on food forgotten or gone rotten . . .

  But no Teresa Gust.

  Not a rustle nor a giggle nor a scamper of footsteps.

  Where was she?

  He was about to call out the give-up rhyme (“Count from threnty back to one, come out now because you’ve won!”) when Pieter realized that he could just run away. He could climb down the shelf, find Ugor or Lord Xin, and get his kidnapper thrown into the dungeons.

  He ought to do just that. It was what a loyal servant of Petrossia would do. (And he was a loyal servant. It would not be a smart choice to make the Czar start to question that. . . .)

  Pieter looked over at the color-coded rope he’d been winched up on. Maybe he’d just have one last look.

  He crept back to the herb garden and went over to the rosemary. It was wildly overgrown—as thick as a hedgerow. He had to bend several branches back like catapults and squeeze through quick, before they went twang and sent him flying.

  He crawled in farther. It was so dark, he almost head-butted the basement wall. It rose up like a sheer cliff, and there in the bricks . . .

  “What are they?” he murmured to himself.

  If Pieter hadn’t been playing hide-and-seek, he would have missed the handholds completely. They were cut roughly into the wall—a trail of divots that small hands could grip onto and climb up. When Pieter saw what they were leading up to, he gave a triumphant grin.

  There was a sliding trapdoor in the shelf above.

  On it, someone with very bad handwriting had chalked the words:

  FORBIDDEN DOOR—

  DO NOT ENTER

  * * *

  3. Most children in hide-and-seek only count to threnty, but when Pieter played it with his tutors, he would have to count out his fifty-seven times table, or pi to a million decimal places.

  (A NOTE ON FORBIDDEN DOORS)

  Forbidden doors are subject to the same universal law that governs envelopes stamped with the words TOP SECRET, or boxes entrusted to little girls called Pandora. It is not a question of if they get opened, but how much trouble comes out when they are.

  Looking up at the trap door, Pieter could imagine Teresa crouched behind it, giggling to herself in her secret hiding hole. What he could not imagine was the trouble that was also behind it—trouble beyond all measure and counting—just waiting for some stupid genius to let it out.

  3

  The Alchemist’s Assistant

  Quickly, Pieter climbed from handhold to handhold until he reached the trap door. He counted a silent one, two, three—then wrenched it open.

  “Found you!” he cried, sticking his head inside.

  His triumph quickly faded. He had found something, all right—and not just his kidnapper. Teresa stood in the middle of a narrow room, waiting for him. She had built a little hidden den by stacking boxes away from the wall, making a hollow space between the crates and bricks.

  A secret shelf.

  “Come on up,” she said, her face serious.

  Teresa’s secret
shelf was stuffy and dark. A few tinderflies sat tied to the stumps of sugarsticks, wings glimmering with golden light as they snoozed. Dim as it was, Pieter could still make out the mess. There were stoppered bottles everywhere—bundled, piled, stacked, clustered, and clumped together. He’d never seen such strange-looking herbs and spices.

  Stranger still were the walls: they were chalked from floor to ceiling with words, as if they were gigantic pages. The writing had been scribbled out, rubbed off, and rewritten. It was linked together with arrows; emphasized with circles; ridiculed with question marks.

  Then he saw the cauldron.

  Suddenly Pieter realized the secret shelf was a laboratory of some sort. The bottles around him were ingredients, and the writing was instructions. He had discovered Teresa (or she had let him find her) in the middle of cooking up something. And it wasn’t a cake.

  “I wasn’t totally honest with you before,” Teresa told him. “I’m a Spice Monkey, a serf, your kidnapper . . . But I want to be something else too. Something special. Something more. I dream about it every night and think about it every day, the way you must dream about numbers.” She took a deep breath. “I’m learning to be an alchemist.”

  Alchemy. A shiver ran up Pieter’s spine and set his brain trembling in his skull. He didn’t know much about alchemy: only that it was forbidden, dangerous, and even more unpredictable than Teresa was. It was the science of change. The magic of metamorphosis. The theory of transformation. Alchemical potions changed things. (In Pieter’s experience, usually for the worse.)

  “I’m learning to be an alchemist,” she said again. “I want to make a potion. And I need you to help me brew it, Pieter. That’s why I brought you here. That’s why I showed you all this.”

  Pieter took a step backwards. In a small voice, he said: “I think I’d like to go back in that garbage bag now, please.”

  “Pieter—”

  “Alchemy is forbidden, unless by royal decree! And even then, it’s too dangerous! Do you know how many laboratories we have in the Winter Palace?”

  Teresa nodded. “One. At the top of the North Spire. With the roof that looks like a wizard’s hat. Right?”

  “Wrong!” said Pieter. “That’s only half a laboratory. The last Royal Alchemaster we had blew it up. He was on the War Council with me. His name was Blüstav. It was his job to invent potions that would turn lead into gold and tin into silver, to pay for all the Czar’s armies. But now Blüstav’s been banished—all five hundred and sixty-three pieces of him.”

  Teresa turned a little pale in the gloom. “He blew himself to bits?”

  “Almost as bad: he accidentally turned himself into a pile of coins. Fourteen roubles and ninety-eight kopeks he came to altogether, once I’d added him up. The Czar piled him up in a sack and used him to buy a siege cannon.”

  “So . . . there’s a job opening?” Teresa said brightly.

  Pieter groaned. “You don’t understand. . . .”

  “Neither do you!” she suddenly thundered. “You think I want to be a Spice Monkey all my life? Just fetching and carrying, until I’m old and stooped? No! It’s wrong. Why should I be a serf? Why should anyone?”

  “Because the Czar only gives you two choices,” Pieter said. “You can be a serf, or a head on a spike.”

  “But I’m not asking him, Pieter. I’m asking you!”

  All at once the anger drained out of her. Teresa Gust was just like the weather in spring, Pieter was beginning to realize. She could thunder—she could howl and spit hail. But her black moods never lasted, and before long she’d be bright and sunny again.

  “I can do alchemy,” Teresa explained. “I can. I just haven’t got it out of my imagination and into real life yet. That’s why I need you. How can I put it into words . . .” She tugged at her white plait, like it was a bell pull to her brain, and she was requesting an explanation from it. “It’s like I’m trying to bake a cake,” she said. “I know I need flour, and I know I need butter, but I don’t know the amounts. You can tell me, Pieter. You’ll know how much—that’s what you mathemagicians are good at, isn’t it? So I can say ‘flour,’ and you can tell me ‘three bags full.’ I’ll say ‘butter,’ and you’ll say ‘half that block.’ It’ll be just like that. You see?”

  “But if the Czar finds out you’re doing alchemy . . .” Pieter didn’t finish. It didn’t matter. They both knew how it would end: with the subtraction of heads from shoulders.

  “We’ll work at night,” Teresa said. “Here on the secret shelf. I’ll grapple up the chimney. Fetch you like I did tonight. You’ll be back in your bunk before sunrise, and no one will know. Not the cooks, not the Czar . . . no one but us.” She caught hold of his hand. “It’ll be a secret.”

  Pieter’s heart beat faster. He was already hooked on sharing things with Teresa: games of hide-and-seek, cups of khave . . . now she was offering him a secret. A secret that held the promise of more sharing. Of midnight meet-ups, and yawning at dawn, and next to no sleep, standing side by side.

  “But what potion would we make?” Pieter’s head filled with a near infinite list of problems. “How long would it take? Why . . .” He trailed off. “Why are you smiling?”

  Teresa clapped her hands together in delight. “You’re asking questions, Pieter. That means you want answers. And that means you’re going to help me find them.”

  Pieter blushed. It was true. Teresa was an enigma, but she’d solved him like the simplest of sums. Just give him a problem—what else could he do but solve it?

  “You’re not going to use our alchemy on anyone, are you?” he asked suddenly. “You don’t want to commit murder, or . . . or do anything traitorous, or forbidden, or anything like that?”

  For just a moment, a strange green light flashed in her eyes. But then she blinked, and fixed him with her widest, starriest stare. “Hand on heart, Pieter—I don’t want to murder anyone.”

  (It occurred to Pieter much later that this wasn’t a full answer to everything he’d asked. But at the time, he just sighed.)

  “Do you have a recipe?” he said. “You do have a recipe?”

  Teresa shrugged. “Got a million.” She tapped her head. “All made up on my own. Let me tell you some, and you can work out which one is the least likely to explode.”

  They stayed up on the secret shelf until the grandpapa clock chimed five, nibbling sugar lumps and chewing pepperleaf, putting their heads together for the first time and finding that they fit each other perfectly, like long-lost bits of the same jigsaw. When Teresa took him back to his tallychamber at dawn, Pieter searched for his list, nine hundred items long, of all the things in Petrossia that were simply better when put together. Below the nine hundredth entry (“Peace conferences and arsenic”), Pieter took up his quill and wrote in his tiny, careful handwriting:

  901. Pieter Abadabacus and Teresa Gust.

  “We’re more when you add us up, and less when we’re divided,” he whispered to himself. “It’s just basic mathemagics, really.”

  He was exhausted, but too exhilarated to sleep, so Pieter put down his quill and went to the Groansday Book—a thick encyclopedia chained up with lead that contained a list of every slave in Petrossia.

  He wanted to find out everything he could about Teresa—where was she from? How old was she? How long had she been here at the Winter Palace? Would she respond well to flowers and chocolate?

  He jabbed his finger on the page and scrolled down the list. He passed his own entry (1137: Pieter Abadabacus, Royal Tallymaster. Born and conquered in Eureka. Age: 11), got to the last name and frowned.

  He checked again.

  And a third time, just to be sure.

  There she was! Sixteen entries ahead of him in the Groansday Book. He’d skipped over her because her record was incomplete. 1121: Teresa Gust, Kitchen Spice Monkey. Age: 12.

  Pieter chained up the book again, and heaved it back onto its shelf. Teresa had no place of birth or conquering. Perhaps she had been born amongst the wildfolk
, who lived in little painted trundle-wagons out in the Western Woodn’t.4 Sleeping beneath the sky turned their hair moon white and their eyes the color of starlight, just like Teresa’s. Some of them even had power to change things too, or so the stories said.

  “Like in Cindestrella,” he murmured to himself. “Where the fairy folkmother turns nine brides into a horse-drawn carriage, so they can ride away from the wicked prince who wants to marry them all.”

  But the wildfolk were roamers—just one of the many peoples that traveled across the continent. If Teresa was truly one of them, why was she here? Where had she come from?

  Pieter would ask Teresa that question many times. From spring to summer, as Bloom became Swoon, and on into Sway, she would always answer the same way: cryptically.

  “Where was I born? Bloom and Swoon and many a moon ago, in a land beyond the first and last.”

  Sometimes, he’d pressed her for more. “Where is that, though? Madri? The Western Woodn’t?”

  “I’m from the moon, Pieter. I’m a lunar baby.”

  “You’re a lunatic, more like. Are you one of the wildfolk? Is that why your hair is white?”

  “All right,” she’d say. “This is the truth—I’m an old bald monkey born up the top of a palm tree. A big gale blew me down the chimney.”

  “That explains why you’re so good at climbing. And the smell.”

  She’d laugh and give him a playful punch. “Enough natter, Pieter. We need to get to work!”

  And Pieter would work, thinking all the while, but not about the potion. He’d think about Teresa, and how she was not only a genius at asking questions, but avoiding them too.

  There was so much to do. First, Pieter and Teresa had to decide what potion to make. They did this by a process of elimination. Teresa began by examining her collection of alchemical ingredients—pilfered from the kitchen shelves over years and years.5

  Then she would begin: drawing idea after idea from her mind, the way magicians can draw rabbits from their hats, or eggs from behind ears, or pocket watches from handkerchiefs they have just whacked with a hammer only moments before.