His Royal Whiskers Read online

  “Pieter,” Teresa interrupted sternly. “For once in your life, stop being a genius and just use your imagination.”

  “All right,” he said uncertainly. “Maybe we could ask Amnabushka to sing a spell to a bird, so it brings me one?”

  But Amna wasn’t bringing them dinner for another nine hours, and they both got bored of waiting.

  In the end, they trained a mouse.16

  After a few hours, the mouse (he was white with red eyes. Teresa wanted to call him Nuttikins) had collected a little pile of acorn-cauldrons on their table. It sat beside them, nibbling one, watching the alchemists work and listening to every word.

  “What next?”

  “A strand of hair—ouch!”

  “There we are. Got a whole handful!”

  “Now what?”

  “A bamboo shoot . . .”

  “Any in the Winter Gardens?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Ah-ha, look at this!”

  “Wow. That suit of pockets really has got everything.”

  Carefully, they halved an acorn’s shell and poured the ingredients in. The strand of hair, they coiled up. The bamboo shoot, they ground to sawdust. It took them longer to figure out how to take a smile from their lips, but Teresa worked it out eventually. When Amna came up with dinner, they sent her to fetch the Czar’s copy of the Mona Lisa (plundered from Prais) and carefully cut out her canvas mouth. They extracted the paint into a spirit solution and poured it carefully into their tiny cauldron.

  “There might be a slim chance this could actually work,” Pieter said, heart racing. He glued the acorn back together, and shook it to mix the ingredients. “It hasn’t blown up yet, at least.”

  “That can only be a good sign.” Teresa looked around. “What do we test it on?”

  At one and the same time, their gaze fell on Nuttikins.

  “Here, squirrel-squirrel-squirrel,” said Teresa, holding out the acorn to the mouse with the fluffy sock tail. “Time for dessert.”

  Nuttikins sniffed at the acorn, then snatched it and nibbled it up.

  Pieter and Teresa took a step back, held their breath . . .

  And then.

  Nothing.

  Happened.

  “Oh well.” Pieter turned away. “Unlike the last ten cauldrons, Nuttikins didn’t blow up. At least we’ve learned how to not make things explode.”

  The anticipation lighting up Teresa’s face snuffed out like a swatted tinderfly. She stomped off to sulk.

  “Grimaldi the Not So Wise, more like,” she muttered at the book, slamming the cover shut and sending Nuttikins scurrying away in fright. “He’s another fraud, just like Blüstav! Are there any alchemists who aren’t liars? How do they get away with it? I suppose you can get away with almost anything once you’ve been dead for long enough.”

  And that was it.

  Yesterday, before he’d seen Eureka, Pieter’s brain would have let Teresa’s remark go. But not now. Now he shouted out suddenly.

  Teresa looked up. “Either you’ve stubbed your toe,” she said, “or you’ve realized something extremely important.”

  “Extremely important!” he cried. “Teresa, you’re right!”

  “I am?”

  Pieter went straight back to the book and opened it up. “Grimaldi wrote this recipe years and years ago—but what’s it done since his death?” 17

  “Got dusty?” Teresa suggested.

  “Got bigger!” he said. “That’s what a growth potion does, isn’t it? And doesn’t it make sense that the recipe would grow bigger too? It’s simple mathemagics: the list of ingredients is increasing. It might have worked back in the time of Grimaldi, but now . . .”

  Teresa let out an excited shriek. “Pieter, you’re right! I’m running the list of instructions through my head right now, and I can’t help adding more and more ingredients. Quick, write this all down!”

  Pieter grabbed a quill, and underneath Grimaldi’s recipe he scrawled the following:

  A Recipe for Size

  1. Take the shell of an acorn, this will be your cauldron

  2. Into the acorn shell put:

  • a strand of hair (for hair grows long)

  • a shoot of bamboo (for bamboo grows tall)

  • and a smile (for smiles grow wide)

  3. Mix together

  THEN . . .

  4. Extract the grow from a growl, the must from a mustache, the you from a layout, and the big from a bridge.

  5. Add to the acorn in the correct order: You, Must, Grow, Big.

  6. When drinking, take six sips, wait for six seconds, then stand on your head (for 6 gets bigger when you turn it upside down).

  “Hurry!” Teresa said breathlessly. “We have to make it before the list gets even longer!”

  They worked through the night. Crack the acorn shell and peel. Curl, poke, and prod. Chop that bamboo stalk to dust. Just a sprinkle. Growl, don’t wheeze! Just one moment, Amna, please! Would you mind . . . ? Could you find . . . ? Stir it slowly—do it clockwise—hours turn from small to big. Keep it steady. Almost ready. Nuttikins? Come take a swig!

  But Nuttikins was sleeping somewhere, in his nest behind the wall. Nowhere to be seen at all.

  So sometime after dawn, Teresa fetched a pair of tiny tweezers and searched for something really small.

  A bit of dirt? A speck of dust? An itty-bitty fleck of rust? Or what about this grain of sand? Perfect! Keep it in your hand.

  Grip steady now . . .

  Don’t let it slip . . .

  Tip out the potion . . .

  Just a drip . . .

  Dab it in, nice and slow . . .

  Turn it over . . .

  Watch it GROW!

  First double-sized, and now it’s treble! Now the grain’s become a pebble! It works, it works just as we planned! It really made the sand expand!

  Gargantua works—just in time! Come morn, it is the Czar’s deadline. . . .

  That last night of Dismember they lay in their beds, made from stacked books and blankets, and whispered in the light of the tinderfly, too excited to sleep.

  “No turning back now,” Teresa whispered. “By the end of winter, the palace will either have a new ruler, or three more heads spiked on the gatehouse walls.”

  Pieter smiled. He knew which outcome was the most probable. They had done it. Their alchemy was finished, and it worked.

  “In one way, I can’t wait for tomorrow,” Teresa said, her eyes shining green in the light. “But I also wish we could do this, and stay in this laboratory, forever.”

  “We can,” said Pieter. “After the Czar is gone, you’ll be Royal Alchemaster to Alexander, won’t you? And we’ll work on a way to turn him back to a boy that doesn’t involve waiting decades for the Catastrophica to wear off, and then we’ll make other potions. Potions to turn sick people well, and sad people happy. And then, when we grow up, we’ll go to Eureka and rebuild the city. I’ll teach mathemagics, you’ll teach alchemy.”

  Teresa smiled sleepily. “What about Amnabushka?”

  “She can teach magic. As long as she stops calling you her Patra all the time. Why does she do that, anyway?”

  Teresa gave him a snooty look and balanced a cup upside down on her head as if it were the Iron Crown. “Because I’m a princess,” she said in a posh voice, and yawned. “Now close your eyes and go to sleep! Hurry, serf! Your Royal Highness demands it!”

  Pieter grinned as he settled down in his bed. “You swore you’d stop fibbing to me,” he muttered, just before she started to snore.

  It wasn’t until the month of Yule, when Pieter lay in the most dreadful of the Czar’s dungeons, that he realized that Teresa had kept her promise.

  * * *

  15. A fartsichord is a type of piano with brass horns that instead of producing musical notes makes the most dreadful smells.

  16. This was easier than it sounds. Pieter just stuck a fluffy sock onto its tail, and Teresa convinced the mouse that it was a squirr
el. Fetching acorns then became second nature to it.

  17. Actually, Grimaldi wasn’t dead. Six hundred years ago, he had discovered the elixir of eternal life. Unfortunately, after he drank the potion that would make him live for ever, the alchemist realized that although he couldn’t die, he could still grow older. Frantically, Grimaldi tried to discover the elixir of eternal youth, but by the time he invented that, he was already three hundred years old, and his body was so ancient it was nothing but a skeleton.

  8

  Wompf!

  At seven of the morn on the last day of Dismember, Pieter kicked off his blankets and helped Teresa shrug on her Alchemaster robes, heavy as curtains. Ugor came to take them from the laboratory. With the acorn tight in his fist, Pieter came down from the North Spire with Teresa by his side.

  “Ow,” she whispered next to him. “Ow. Ow.”

  He looked sideways at her. “Why are you pinching yourself?”

  “Because I can hardly believe I’m awake.”

  There beside her, Pieter felt the same. He supposed he should have been terrified, but instead he drifted down the stairs as if in a dream. Through the windows, the dim swirly sky outside was on the cusp of both autumn and winter, night and day, stormy and calm.

  This was the moment when everything would change forever. Pieter knew it was. And he was sure it was a change for the better too.

  The plan was set. The potion was ready.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Ugor marched them down the corridors (“Good luck!” Amna mouthed as they passed her dusting the windows), and together they entered the Royal Chamber.

  “Time’s up, Tallymaster.” The Czar sat at his breakfast table, scalping the tops off his ostrich eggs with Viktor. “Are you sure this will work?”

  Pieter had not seen the Czar since before Amna’s spell had shown him the ruins of Eureka. He bowed low, to hide his anger.

  “One hundred percent,” he said, fighting hard to keep the hatred from his voice. “I’m certain the potion will succeed.” Just not in the way you think it will, you murderous thug, he added in his head.

  “I hope,” said the Czar, with a mouthful of ostrich egg, “that you don’t disappoint yourself. Because that would mean disappointing me.”

  The butler brought Prince Alexander in from his newly furnished bedroom, where all the wallpaper was scratch proof, and the floor was covered with the white gravel of cat litter. He jumped off his velvet cushion as soon as he saw Pieter and Teresa, and bounded over.

  “Alexander! We missed you!” They both rushed forward to give him a cuddle.

  “No stroking His Royal Fluffiness,” growled Ugor, stepping in front of them.

  Teresa scowled and backed away, but Pieter wasn’t feeling so timid anymore.

  Tired? Perhaps.

  Terrified? A little.

  But one way or the other, he was through with being told what to do. So he simply ducked under Ugor’s legs, scooped up the purring prince, and said to the butler: “Bring His Young Majesty a saucer of milk!”

  The command raced through the servants, fast as lightning, until finally in came the butler and there it was on the blood-red carpet: a cool, white saucer of milk.

  The Czar narrowed his eyes. He was accustomed to giving the orders around here. But he let his irritation go. He was desperate to solve the problem of his son, and these alchemists might just have the solution.

  “Do it,” he ordered.

  Pieter handed the acorn to Teresa. “It should be you,” he said. “It’s your alchemy.”

  Fingers trembling, she took the Gargantua and went over to the milk. She cracked the shell between two breakfast spoons, shaking a single drop of the Gargantua potion into the saucer. Then she stepped back and nodded to Pieter, who put Prince Alexander down by the dish.

  He sniffed it with his little pink nose, and then, with his little pink tongue, he began to lap up the milk.

  For a long time, that was the only sound: the splish-splash-splosh of Prince Alexander drinking his saucer of milk. Teresa and Pieter looked on, hoping and praying. The Czar narrowed his eyes. Ugor held his breath.

  And then.

  Nothing.

  Happened.

  “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!” roared the Czar, hurling his breakfast fork at Pieter. It whizzed just past his nose and jammed in the door, quivering.

  “Wait!” cried Teresa, and before Ugor could grab her, she darted forward and seized the prince by the scruff of the neck.

  “GET HER!” roared Ugor, and from various hiding places leaped the Czar’s famous and rarely seen bodyguards.

  The Slinjas.

  The Slinjas were the Czar’s deadliest and most secret of soldiers. Through years of agonizing training under the heaviest of weights, they squashed themselves down until they were flattened completely. The most dedicated were as thin as sheets of paper. Being so thin, they carried no weapons, but instead dipped their hands in cobra venom. A wound from a Slinja could be as slight as a papercut but far deadlier.18

  At Ugor’s command, the Slinjas emerged, brandishing their poisoned fingertips. There was one hiding behind the curtains, one beneath the floorboards, and one who had hidden amongst the breakfast things by squeezing into the pepperpot.

  “Put down the fluffy-wuffy-kitty-witty!” they called out. Their voices were like the whisper of willow rushes by the banks of the Ossia.

  “I won’t hurt him,” said Teresa. “I just forgot something.”

  And then, just as the recipe advised, she finished counting to six, and stood the prince on his head.

  WOMPF!

  That was the sound in the room when it happened: everyone said so afterward. The prince grew bigger in every which way: he went tall and wide and long. He sort of exploded, whilst staying in one piece. And then he stopped exploding out, and just stayed the same size. Which, at the end of it all, was roughly the size of a lion.

  Everyone in the room stepped back a little, especially Bloodbath, who was now just a paw swipe away from a kitten ten times his size.

  “UNBELIEVABLE!” cried the Czar. “IT WORKS! LET ME TRY!”

  Seizing the open acorn from Teresa’s grasp, he sprinkled Gargantua all over the table and gave it a sharp kick, turning bits of his breakfast upside down.

  WOMPF! WOMPF! WOMPF!

  The ostrich eggs became enormous speckled boulders.

  A silver fork sprang up to the size of a trident.

  A banana wobbled back and forth, big as a curved yellow canoe.

  Finally, the table legs couldn’t take any more weight and collapsed with a crash.

  With a laugh so loud it made the buckling table legs sound like twigs breaking, the Czar bounded toward his son.

  “MY BOY!” he roared with approval. “JUST LOOK AT HOW YOU’VE GROWN!”

  Alexander raised a paw at his father. Out slid claws, each as long and deadly as a dagger.

  “Finally,” said the Czar proudly, tousling his fingers through Alexander’s fur. “You’re a conqueror fit to be my heir. I’m proud of you.”

  It was perhaps the nicest thing the Czar had ever said to his son. Alexander’s tail swished, his ears twitched, and from his throat there came a deep purr, like marbles rattling in a jar.

  “Well done, my Alchemaster and Tallymaster,” the Czar boomed. He stood in his gleaming armor, with his lion-kitten son beside him. His eyes were full of plans—plans of conquest and dominion.

  “Take them back to the laboratory!” he said to Ugor. “Get them everything they need.” He grinned at Pieter and Teresa. “You will repeat your alchemy. You will make him even bigger. I want Alexander to conquer giants, titans . . . even gods! I will not stop until my son plays with elephants as if they were mice!”

  Across the empire, the news spread. All Hail Alexander, the All-Conquering Kitten! There were celebrations throughout Petrossia, from Muscov to Xanderberg. Ginger confetti rained in the streets, men groomed their mustaches into whiskers, and ladies sewed little triang
les of felt onto their bonnets, as if they had cat ears.

  In the Winter Palace laboratory, Pieter and Teresa celebrated too. Amna brought them up three mugs from the kitchens, and sang a spell to make the sugar cubes dance across the table and plop themselves in the tea. The three of them toasted the imminent success of Operation: His Royal Whiskers.

  “Many and many a time I had my doubts about you, Pieter Abadabacus,” Amna said. “But where would my manners be now if I didn’t sing your praises?”

  Pieter blushed. “Thank you,” he said. “We did it together. You plus me plus Teresa.”

  She nudged him. “Don’t forget Nuttikins.”

  They clonked their mugs together. “To Nuttikins!”

  “When do we tell Alexander the plan?” Pieter asked. He was already thinking ahead to when the Czar would be overthrown and cast down into his own dungeons. He was going to enjoy sentencing the bloodthirsty tyrant to the most terrible torture imaginable.19

  “I can sweep my way into his room tonight,” said Amna, “and tell him to pounce.”

  “Do it,” Teresa said. “But tell him to hold off until we give the signal. He needs to be bigger, just like the Czar told us.”

  Amna touched the reindeer’s tooth in her hair. “Careful, my Patra. The bigger the prince, the bigger the consequences.”

  “I know that. But I won’t allow Alexander to fight unless there’s absolutely no way he could possibly be hurt. We only get one chance at this—we have to be certain he can win.”

  Pieter shrugged. Teresa was right: another few doses of Gargantua couldn’t do any harm. They might as well enlarge Alexander until he could knock away Viktor with one flick and trap the Czar under his paw.

  “Pass another acorn, then,” he said. “Let’s get brewing.”

  * * *

  18. Slinjas also underwent considerable training to resist the urge to pick their noses.

  19. It involved lots of apologizing, and giving up all his armies and crowns, and having Viktor melted down into something harmless like a kettle.

  PART THREE

  Empurrer