Cover
Contents
Also by Sam Gayton
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
– (A Note on Names)
Chapter One
– (A Note on Time)
Chapter 2
– (A Note on Forbidden Doors)
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
– (A Note on the War Council)
Chapter 6
– (A Note on What If)
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
– (A Note on Gossip)
Chapter 3
– (A Note on Traitors)
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
– (A Note on Stupidity)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Four
Chapter 1
– (A Note on Loyalty)
Chapter 2
– (A Note on Gruesomeness)
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
– (A Note on Death)
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Endnotes
Acknowledgements
The Snow Merchant
Lilliput
The Snow Merchant
Lilliput
Hercufleas
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First published in 2016 by
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Text copyright © Sam Gayton, 2015
Illustrations copyright © Peter Cottrill, 2015
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978 1 78344 382 6
For Pops,
who is Tops
I came, I saw, I conquered.
– Julius Caesar
Anything that can go wrong,
will go wrong.
– Sod’s Law
This is a tale from Petrossia, a land far from where you or I sit now. The king there is called the Czar, which is pronounced ‘zar’. The stories say it was actually spelled zar once too, but that was before he decided to wage war on the letter C and force it to join his name. After a long and ferocious battle, C was eventually defeated, and the victorious zar told it to march as a herald at the front of his name for ever.
The letter C had to obey.
But it wasn’t going to cheer about it.
So now you know why, when you say the Czar’s name, the C is silent.
Bloom and Swoon and many a moon ago, in the lands beyond the Boreal sea, there lived a mighty king who loved conquering. He conquered crowns and cities and countries. His name was the Czar.
Conquering was the Czar’s favourite hobby. He practised all the time, so he was really rather good at it. He could conquer a whole kingdom guarded by ten thousand soldiers using nothing but a tin whistle, a fishing rod and a herd of reindeer.1
He was a terrifying beast of a man – broad as a bear, strong as an ox, clever as a pig, and hairy as a goat. His burgundy boots shone, his midnight cloak swished, and his Iron Crown sat slowly rusting on his head. He could crush coconuts with his hands and do press-ups with his moustache. He was simply the mightiest conqueror of all time. Everyone agreed. And if you didn’t, the Czar would fight you until you changed your mind.
*
One bleak morn at the end of Dismember, the Czar woke late and sat down to conquer his huge breakfast of twelve ostrich eggs. He cracked the shells first, one by one. It was his favourite part. He liked imagining they were skulls.
He dipped all his buttered soldiers, gobbled them up, then called the butler and demanded reinforcements.
The butler left to inform the cooks. After a while, the doors to the chamber crashed open. On a velvet cushion by his elbow, the Winter Palace poodle wagged his tail and sat up, as the maids marched up from the kitchens with silver platters of salami, dumplings and borscht.
‘Down, Bloodbath,’ growled the Czar, jabbing the poodle with his fork. ‘My breakfast.’
But the Czar and his poodle were surprised by another visitor along with the maids. It was one of the Czar’s War Council. And he was carrying bad news.
The Czar’s War Council was made up of five of his most powerful soldiers – and surely the bravest and toughest of them all was his Warmaster, the barbarian warrior Ugor, who stood before him now. Ugor had fought in every single one of the Czar’s conquests. He had been slashed with swords, stabbed with spears, and recently poked in the eye with a chopstick.2 But the Czar had never seen him look so afraid before. Ugor’s one unbandaged eye was filled with fear as he announced that a terrible catastrophe had befallen the Czar’s six-year-old son and only heir – Alexander, the Prince of Petrossia.
‘What do you mean, “a terrible catastrophe”?’ scoffed the Czar, catapulting breadcrumbs out of his mouth and across the breakfast table. ‘Has my son been kidnapped? Ha! Kidnapping doesn’t worry me in the slightest, Ugor! I will simply invade any kingdom holding him to ransom.’
‘No, Majesty,’ grunted Warmaster Ugor, turning pale. ‘Badder than kidnap.’
‘Worse than kidnapping?’ cried the Czar. ‘You mean my son has been murdered? Then I must try to fulfil my ultimate ambition: conquer the land of the dead, and bring Alexander back from the afterlife!’
‘No, Majesty.’ Ugor’s knees were knocking together. ‘Badder than murder too.’
‘Worse than murder?’ cried the Czar, and even he began to feel a little afraid. ‘What has happened?’
But Ugor was so overcome with terror, he fainted and toppled with a thud to the floor.
With a scowl, the Czar booted Bloodbath out from under his ankles. The poodle scampered over to the Warmaster, licking and slobbering all over Ugor’s face until the barbarian regained consciousness. Finally, the Warmaster sat up and managed to inform the Czar that Prince Alexander, his only son and heir to the mighty Petrossian Empire, had somehow been transformed into a fluffy-wuffy kitten.
The blood of the Czar himself ran cold. ‘You mean to say that the heir to my great empire is now a... a...’
‘Kitten,’ confirmed Ugor with a groan. ‘And, Majesty?’
‘What?’ said the Czar in the barest whisper.
‘He’s got fleas too.’
Even Ugor – Warmaster, and bravest of the Czar’s War Council – could not meet His Majesty’s smouldering stare of rage.
‘How?’ growled the Czar. ‘How did this happen?’
‘A potion, Majesty,’ Ugor said whilst hiding behind his beard.
‘Alchemy?’ The Czar clenched his fist until his knuckles cracked. ‘Who brewed and bottled it?’
‘Two children,’ said Ugor. ‘Boy and girl. Lord Xin catch them. Got them in dungeons now.’
‘Assassins, no doubt. The Duke of Madri must have sent them on a revenge mission.’ The Czar glared down at Bloodbath, who whimpered and hid under the table. ‘I never should have kidnapped his poodle.’
‘Not assassins,’ Ugor explained. ‘Just children. Living here in Winter Palace. Prince Alexander’s two best friends.’
The Czar made the sort of face – half surprised, half disgusted – that ramblers usually make when they fail to see the cowpat.
‘My son has friends?’ said the Czar. This was getting worse and worse.
‘Best friends,’ corrected Ugor.
‘He has best friends?’
Ugor nodded. ‘Two of them.’
‘TWO?!’
The Czar stood up and thumped the breakfast table with his fist. He thumped it so hard that his twelve ostrich eggs bounced up from their eggcups and cracked on the floor like guillotined heads. He swept the stacks of buttered soldiers off their silver tray. All fifty of them fell face down on the blood-red carpet. In all the Czar’s life there had never been a greater proof of Sod’s Law.
‘This is a disaster!’ he roared. ‘Not only is my son a kitten, but a friendly kitten too? This is a CATASTROPHE. How can I have a fluffy-wuffy furball for an heir? How can he command an army when he can only meow? How can he hold a sword with paws? How can he be a conqueror? HOW??!’
The Czar roared that last question so loud, his voice echoed through the entire Winter Palace, as if searching for an answer.
‘How?
How?
How?
HOW?’
It echoed off walls painted eggshell blue and windows fringed with white cornices, like icing on a cake...
It was heard across the courtyard, in the ears of all the marble statues that made up the Fountain of Sobs: a pyramid of kings and queens conquered by the Czar, whose chiselled effigies had been plumbed up to weep an endless splish of tears...
It went all the way up to the gilded chimneys on the rooftop, and all the way down to the kitchens in the basement, and even further below that, to the dungeons...
Where, behind a great many locked doors, down a great many torch-lit tunnels, and in a great deal of trouble, a boy and girl sat together, trying to think of a way out.
‘We’re getting our heads cut off,’ Pieter Abadabacus said when he heard the Czar’s cry echo down to them.
There in the gloom beside him, Teresa Gust shook her head. ‘You don’t know that for sure. The Czar might have been yelling angrily for a completely different reason. Maybe he stubbed his big toe.’
A second roar of rage echoed down to them.
‘Both big toes,’ Teresa corrected.
Pieter gave her a look.
She shrugged. ‘It happens.’
‘We never should have made that potion, Teresa!’ Pieter slumped his shoulders, letting his heavy lead chains clonk onto the floor. ‘Poor Alexander. Poor us. What was I thinking?’
That was a question Pieter would never find the answer to. He was an Abadabacus; the thirteenth in a long line of master mathemagicians; a genius who had trained in Eureka and had (at the age of four and a half) single-handedly saved that city from being destroyed by the Czar.
He had lived in the Winter Palace ever since, serving in the War Council as Petrossia’s Royal Tallymaster. The Czar entrusted him with working out the most important of sums. Not only did Pieter know exactly how many men it would take to conquer North Hertzenberg (three legions, give or take a battalion), but he knew how many steps they would have to march to get there (two million) and the shoe size of every soldier in the company. He knew his fifty-seven times table, for infinity’s sake...
So why, in the name of everything odd and even, had he been so stupid as to go along with Teresa’s idea?
‘I’ve got some new escape plans!’ she suddenly announced.
Pieter sighed. ‘Have any got a better chance of working than the eleven you’ve already suggested?’
Teresa gave him one of her looks (the one with the narrowed eyes and the scorn). ‘They had potential.’
‘Infinitesimal potential.’
‘I don’t see you coming up with any ideas.’
That was true. But then Pieter often left the brainstorming to Teresa. She was a completely different type of genius to him. His brain was all about answers – working them out, choosing one that was right, checking it over twice...
But Teresa Gust had Imagination. And Imagination was all about knowing what questions to ask in the first place.
‘All right,’ he told her. ‘Let’s hear your escape plans.’
‘What if we brew another potion that turns iron into chocolate? Use it on the bars of this cell, nibble through them, and make a run for it?’
‘We don’t have a cauldron,’ Pieter pointed out. ‘Also, you hate chocolate.’
‘We’ll dig, then,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Find an underground river, and doggy paddle to freedom.’
Pieter gestured at his uniform. Unlike Teresa, whose suit was covered with grappling hooks and colour-coded patchwork pockets, his Tallymaster uniform was a plain grey suit and cloak. It included a gold T for Tallymaster, embroidered on his lapels, and a left sleeve made out of paper, so he could jot down equations. It did not include a shovel. Or inflatable arm-bands.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘We befriend a mouse and ask it to steal the keys to the cell – like the old folkmother does in the Hansa and Greta story, when those two horrible children lock her up and start gobbling her home.’
Teresa looked expectantly over at a rat skulking round the corners of her cell. She gave it a friendly wave, and held out her hand for it to shake.
‘I’m in the wrong fairy tale,’ she huffed a moment later, sucking her bitten thumb.
Pieter had to agree. But despite everything, he laughed. How did Teresa come up with so many ideas? Where did they come from? And why did they never fail to make him smile? She was like a conjurer, drawing a never-ending rainbow scarf of notions from out of her sleeve. Even now, he could not help but shake his head in wonder.
That was the reason he was in this mess, Pieter worked out suddenly. That was why he’d started secretly brewing potions in the basement, and ended up turning Prince Alexander into a kitten. The answer was very simple:
Numbers were predictable.
Teresa Gust was not.
For example: they first became friends after she had kidnapped him.
We’re going back in time now, to the month when Pieter and Teresa first met. Perhaps it would have been simpler to start at the start, but this is a tale about two geniuses, and Pieter and Teresa have never in their lives done anything the easy way.
So, in your mind, see the days going backwards. Imagine the brown Dismember leaves drifting upwards, fixing themselves back onto the bare branches of the trees, growing green again and scrunching up into buds. Imagine the salmon of Swoon swimming north again, up the River Ossia, fish tails first, like silver needles unstitching the water. Imagine the smell of spring blossom, and the kitchen shelves creaking with the weight of apricots, artichokes and chives.
Stop there. Don’t go back any further than Bloom. Calendars in Petrossia are only seven months long. Spring and summer stick around for a month each, and autumn lingers for two, before a long winter comes howling down from the Waste in the north to swallow up the rest of the year. There is a rhyme the Petrossia-folk tell their children, and here it is:
Springtime is Bloom,
Summer is Swoon,
Autumn is Sway and Dismember,
Winter is Welkin and Worsen and Yule –
I’ve told you, so now you’ll remember.
One night in Bloom, three months past, before Dismember turned the leaves brown and the geese south and the Prince of Petrossia furry, Pieter woke up in the middle of the night and found he was not in his bed but in a large black sack.
‘What’s going on?’ he mumbled. ‘Where am I?’
His genius brain answered him at once with a few possibilities. Pieter chose the most statistically probable option.
‘Somebody help!’ he yelled. ‘I think I’ve sleepwalked into a bin bag!’
(This happened more often than you might think. Pieter had a habit of pacing back and forth – both while he worked, and while he dreamed.)
From somewhere, he heard the creak of pulleys. The bag was winching slowly upwards. Hopefully this wasn’t the conveyer belt to the Winter Palace’s rubbish incinerator.
‘Help!’ he called again.
‘Quiet!’ hissed a voice. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a genius?’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be helping me out of this bin bag?’ Pieter answered.
There was a sigh from outside. ‘Are you really a mathemagician? Because you sound like an idiot.’
(Like many of the finest mathemagical geniuses, Pieter could be either, depending on the subject.)
‘Of course I’m a mathemagician,’ he said indignantly. ‘Test me if you want.’
There was a pause. ‘What’s the square root of ninety one thousand, two hundred and four?’
‘Three hundred and two,’ Pieter answered.
‘Umm... correct,’ decided the voice. ‘Probably.’
Before Pieter could reply, the sack opened, and he was falling. He clonked onto a wooden floor and looked around with bleary eyes.
He was not in his tallychamber, with its dust and tinderlamp and endlessly multiplying spiders. There were no censuses, no records, no surveys around him. No stack of Tallymaster tasks, no stove where Pieter threw scrunched-up paper all scribbled with sums, no list detailing how many horseshoes the Czar had in total (both lucky and unlucky).
Pieter was down in the palace kitchens, on one of the enormous shelves that rose up and criss-crossed each basement wall, like tree branches. It was a jungle down here. The air was a hot damp fog of spicy aromas and steam. Down on the floor below, orange fires purred in their stoves like sleeping tigers, while great swamps of porridge bubbled and burped in pans, ready for tomorrow’s breakfast.
But the cooks and the maids were all in bed. Pieter glanced down at the grandpapa clock tick-tocking by the double doors. Its hands pointed at three of the morn.
‘Took you down the chimney, in case you’re wondering,’ said the voice. ‘All the fireplaces connect together. Hidden passages, if you think about it. Quick and secret. Not very clean though. Sorry about the soot, by the way.’
Pieter looked down at his filthy pyjamas.
Then round at the girl standing behind him.
Being a genius, Pieter was used to figuring people out within a matter of moments. They were like puzzles he could solve. The Czar, for example, was clearly an evil tyrant with ambitions for world-domination (it was the moustache that gave him away).
The girl Pieter found himself face to face with, though, confounded him – like a sum that didn’t add up right. She was a short, plait-tailed serf in a coat made of pockets, yet somehow she equalled more than that. Pieter couldn’t solve the proud angle of her chin, or measure the length of her moon-white hair, or the depth of her eyes, the colour of morn stars. Her smile was an enigma. It had suddenly appeared on her face, and he had no idea why. Nor did he understand why he found himself grinning along with her, as if she was an equation he had to balance out.
‘Teresa Gust,’ she said, thrusting her hand out. ‘Spice Monkey. Serf. And right now, I suppose, Kidnapper.’
‘Pieter Abadabacus.’ He took her hand and she yanked him to his feet. ‘Royal Tallymaster and Mathemagician.’
‘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 colour-coded patchwork pockets with little labels on: peppercorn, parsley and blazing pip chilli.
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-go-seek?’ Teresa asked.
Pieter’s bewilderment multiplied by a factor of ten. The mug of khave had been odd. Hide-go-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-go-seek was his favourite 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 colour-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 splendour 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 each other, 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 cobnuts 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 brooches, 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 realised 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 colour-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 further. It was so dark, he almost headbutted 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-go-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 trap door in the shelf above.
On it, someone with very bad handwriting had chalked the words:
Forbidden Door –
DO NOT ENTER
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.
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 strangelooking 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; emphasised with circles; ridiculed with question marks.
Then he saw the cauldron.
Suddenly Pieter realised 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 it about 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 bin 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 realise. 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.’
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