Endless Knot, Chapter 5

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Endless Knot

Chapter 5: Henrietta

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 | Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Fandom: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci

Pairings: Henrietta/Bernard, Conrad/Christopher

Rating: PG-13

Word count: 3200

Summary: "I advise you to make yourself useful regardless," said Gabriel. "I wouldn't even have to get a court order to take away your magic, would I? One night under a roof will do it, more thoroughly and permanently than my usual methods."

Meg bared her teeth. "Is it war with the Order you want, Chrestomanci? There are more of us than there are of you, and we go where we will."

Christopher and the young enchanters go to the circus. Conrad and Flavian go for a walk in the forest. Things go very wrong.

Thanks to: morganna_le, still awesome.

"You don't owe me a thing, enchanter," said Meg, folding her arms across her broad chest and glowering. It was a good glower. All of the Travelers' magic darkened like stormclouds. "And it isn't a subject for jokes."

Bernard opened his mouth. I'm not a fast talker, but this time I spoke first. "What have you done with Christopher?" I said. And hadn't Bernard seen enough to know that owing a favor to the Order was a bad idea?

"Nothing," said Meg. "Nor did I ask anything of him that he didn't give freely. I have my vows. Do you know what it would cost me to break them?"

I didn't, but I hoped it was awful. "He didn't know what would happen," I said. "But you did, didn't you? You set him up!"

"I knew little enough," said Meg. "I didn't even know what Master Dodd was until you told me—for which I thank you. But I knew he wouldn't move on until he'd taken five lives, for he'd done it before. And your friend has nine."

Bernard snorted a laugh. "He was so sure you didn't know that," he said. "Always thinks he knows more than anyone else. But, listen—"

"Three," I interrupted him. I was trying very hard not to throw a lightning bolt at Meg, or anything like that. The magic of a thousand people, I told myself. Bad idea. "He has three, you—you—he would have told you if you'd asked!"

"That can't—" Meg looked shaken, for the first time. I'd have liked to shake her. "How could he have lost so many? And how could it have worked—I felt Master Dodd go, clear out of the worlds—how, if he didn't take five?"

"He did," said Bernard. He counted off on his fingers. "Christopher, Christopher, Christopher, Flavian, Conrad."

"Who?" said Meg.

"Our tutor," I said, "and another friend. They didn't owe you any favors, did they? And you can't say they went freely. What do your vows have to say about that?"

Meg went white. She was old, and suddenly she looked old and frail. "There's time. There must be, or I'd know." She strode up the path we'd come down on. A few people in the camp watched her go without comment. "You wanted my help, didn't you? Well, you have it. Come along!"

We hurried after her. "Where are we going?" said Bernard.

"Wherever we need to be," said Meg.

Following Meg was different than following Bernard. Less deliberate, more dizzying. But there was the same sense of movement-and-stillness, and then we were where we needed to be. Bad luck, where we needed to be was the conservatory back at the castle.

Elizabeth gasped, and her fingers faltered for a moment, then she began playing a different tune. A simple scale, up and down, which meant abort, abort, abort. On his couch, Mordecai began to stir and become more solid.

From the hallway beyond, I heard Jason's voice: "I don't know where they went, sir, honestly—"

Gabriel stalked in, actually dragging Jason by the ear. He let go quickly when he saw us. "Miss Reilly, I presume?" he said.

"Meg," said Meg. Behind Gabriel's back, Jason mouthed, Sorry. Mordecai sat up and wrapped his blanket around himself. Elizabeth put her hands in her lap. They were shaking.

"Well done, Mordecai," said Gabriel.

"Not my doing," said Mordecai. "I was asking fruitlessly around in Series Six when Elizabeth called me back, and there she was."

"Indeed," said Gabriel. "Why?"

"I don't know," retorted Meg. "I thought I'd be going somewhere I could be of use."

"I advise you to make yourself useful regardless," said Gabriel. "I wouldn't even have to get a court order to take away your magic, would I? One night under a roof will do it, more thoroughly and permanently than my usual methods."

Meg bared her teeth. "Is it war with the Order you want, Chrestomanci? There are more of us than there are of you, and we go where we will."

"Enough," I said. "You said you'd help us, Meg."

"And so I will," she said. "But I'm not sure how. I thought we'd find them when we walked, but we ended up here instead."

"Do you mean to say," said Gabriel, "that you spirited my employee and two of my wards away, and you don't even know where?"

"It looks like that, doesn't it?" said Meg. "I find it helps, when looking for something you've lost, to think of where you saw it last."

Gabriel scowled. But even he must have seen that Meg wasn't going to be able to produce Christopher, Conrad, and Flavian from her pocket. "It was on a mountain," he said. "There was snow on the ground. The faces of the mountain seemed to be different colors, and there was a great tree on the summit."

"Gang Rinpoche," I said. "But they couldn't—to set foot on it is death."

"I did think," said Meg, "that I felt them go out of the worlds altogether."

"They were alive when I saw them," said Gabriel.

"Not dead," I said. "The world—all the worlds—they're in three parts, right? The upper part where the—you call them the Lords of Karma—where they live, and our part, that's the middle, and the lower part. If I sent them where the demons belong, that's the lower part. But Gang Rinpoche joins them all together."

"Ah," said Gabriel. If he'd made sense of what I'd said, I couldn't see how. More priest's work! "This Gang Rinpoche is an omphalos, then."

"A what?" I said.

"An omphalos," repeated Gabriel. "What has Flavian been teaching you? An axis mundi, a world-tree, a foundation stone. A center of the world."

"Gang Rinpoche is the center of the world," I said. "There's only one."

"Naturally," said Gabriel. "But it happens to exist in several places at once. Fortunately, one of them is quite near." He looked around at us. "I'm going to have to ask you all to accompany me," he added, "as it seems that I cannot take my eye off you for a moment."

And no Well done finding Meg, Bernard; I ought to have told you where I saw Christopher, Conrad, and Flavian earlier, Henrietta, it would have saved us all time and effort; Elizabeth, thank you for wrecking your hands in my service. Typical! But at least we weren't going to be left out of things again.

Those of us who weren't already wearing coats conjured them—except for Meg, who didn't seem to mind the cold, and Mordecai, who honestly can't conjure and grabbed his from a coatrack in the hall. We also picked up Miss Rosalie and Frederick Parkinson, who'd come back from the circus, and Gabriel said, "You'd better have your surgery ready," to Dr. Simonson in passing. Then we set out across the lawn.

"We must be going to the ruin!" Jason whispered. "I don't think even Christopher's been there!"

Gabriel is old, but his hearing is quite sharp, and even if he were deaf he probably would have heard Jason's whisper. "It would go without saying—were it not for the fact that very little goes without saying where all of you are concerned, and even saying doesn't often have much effect—that the part of the grounds where we are going is strictly forbidden to children, or to anyone who is not accompanied by me. I devoutly hope that circumstances which would compel me to bring any of you there are unlikely to arise again, so make the most of it while you can," he added.

This speech did nothing to dampen Jason's excitement, or the rest of ours. It wasn't often that any of us at the castle got to do something that Christopher hadn't done first. We'd tried to get into the ruin before, of course, but there's a powerful misdirection on it and it moves about. It held still for Gabriel then, though. I don't think it would have dared not.

Soon we came to a high wall, damp with autumn mist. There was a staircase set into it, and we began to climb, and climb, and after a while Bernard was puffing and my legs ached and Mordecai had to help Gabriel along. But there was a feeling, of magic and something that wasn't quite magic, and I started to believe that this place might in some way be the same as Gang Rinpoche after all.

"But look, we can't climb Gang Rinpoche," I said. "Death, remember?" If Gabriel was going to go all not-paying-any-mind again—well, he had lives to spare, but the rest of us didn't.

"Isn't it fortunate," Gabriel panted, "that I have no intention of climbing mountains after this. The garden should take us to the summit."

"I'm not sure that's better," I said. They say a saint could fly up to the peak of Gang Rinpoche and take no harm, but we were none of us saints.

Bernard leaned against the wall and looked out over the shifting landscape below. I could almost see mathematical spirals in his eyes. "If we arrived out of phase . . . we wouldn't exactly be setting foot on holy ground, would we?"

"Out of phase?" said Meg, speaking for the rest of us.

I didn't quite catch Bernard's dark mutter about people who worked by intuition. "There and not there, if you see what I mean. We wouldn't be able to touch things, but do we need to?"

"Huh," said Meg. Then it was more climbing, and none of us had any breath for speech. It was a relief when we got to the narrow entrance at the top of the stairs, and all filed in. There was a cool breeze, very welcome after the hot climb, and a riot of flowers. Bernard started sneezing.

"I wonder if you would lead, Meg," said Gabriel, "as you seem to have a talent for going places when you have no idea what you're doing, which I sadly lack. I warn you, to find anything in this garden you must go anticlockwise."

"I can see that," snapped Meg, and I thought, just like the priests! The lamas do it clockwise. For a moment I felt as smug as Christopher. We followed Meg, stillness and motion, but now I could see the world moving around us, and feel it, too, very hot, full of summer flowers and fruit. Then cold, and then nothing. Out of phase, like Bernard had said.

We stood—or not exactly stood—on the summit of a mountain, next to a tree so enormous that if all of us linked hands and stood around it, we wouldn't be able to close the circle. The top of the tree was lost in the sky, and the faces of the mountain were gold and lapis, ruby and crystal. I found I was whispering a prayer again, and my cheeks were wet. I remembered my grandfather, who had died in England, far from the holy mountain, and here I was—here and not-here—where I had never particularly wanted to be.

"This is the place," said Gabriel. "They're not here."

"Nor anywhere nearby," said Elizabeth. All of us—all of us who were enchanters, anyway—felt that too. You can't miss Christopher's presence, and Conrad's and Flavian's are nearly as strong.

Gabriel put a hand into the tree, and faded until I could barely see him. Just for a moment, then he was back. "Nor in the lower world," he said. "They were there, but they're not anymore."

"They must be caught between," said Meg. I could hear she was frightened. Gabriel wouldn't need to remove her magic, he'd said. One night under a roof, one breach of her vows, if she didn't get Conrad and Flavian back—that would do it. She'd done this to Christopher on purpose; I shouldn't have felt sorry for her. But I did.

I knelt by the foot of the tree. "As I was wandering in the Bardo . . ." I muttered to myself. I was annoyed to hear tears in my voice, and that I seemed to have switched over to Tibetan without meaning to.

"What was that?" said Bernard. He was crouched beside me. I couldn't look at him. The concern in his voice was bad enough; I didn't want to see it in his face.

"A Bardo," I said. "It's a place that isn't a place, between two different types of existence."

"A liminal state," Gabriel suggested.

"Like the World's Edge," said Mordecai.

"Like and not like," I said. The endless knot was in my pocket again, and I took it out and started unwinding, one color after another. "If someone is lost in the Bardo, they can find their way out. If they have a path, and a guide." I lowered the cord as I unwound it, down into the roots of the tree, and beyond. My grandfather always said, you don't choose priest's work, it calls you.

When my cord was all played out, I felt it catch on something. "Remember the world of men?" I said. "Here we are. Come back." I began reeling the cord back in. It was a cord, it was a tree, it was a ladder—and Conrad was climbing up it one-handed, pulling Flavian along with his other hand. I've said he could barely do any magic, and he couldn't, up till then, but that was a better job of levitation than I could have done.

"Oh," he said, "g-good." Then he dragged himself and Flavian the rest of the way up to stand next to us on the mountain. Conrad was unsteady, but Flavian was limp, blue, and staring. Mordecai came forward to catch him.

"God, you're a mess, Flavian," he said. "Just like that time with the mad skald in Vinland, remember? Dr. Simonson will see you right, don't worry."

It was Mordecai's face that was gray and drawn; Flavian was beyond worry, I'd have thought. But his eyes focused, and he said, "Mmm . . . mmm . . ."

And Conrad's eyes went from Flavian to Mordecai and back, and his mouth went Oh.

Look, I'm just telling this story; don't ask me to explain it.

Then Conrad saw Gabriel, and he went startled and guilty, the way you do when you see Gabriel suddenly. "S-s-sir," he said, "I c-c-can—"

"You can go home," said Gabriel gruffly. "See Dr. Simonson. We'll talk afterwards."

Conrad looked over his shoulder, and back at Gabriel, and followed Mordecai off of the mountain and back through the garden. I felt another footfall on the ladder, and I reeled it in some more, but it wasn't Christopher. It was a scowling girl in a broad straw hat and plaits. She scrambled up and dusted snow of her sailor dress.

Meg laughed. "Emily Stoll!" she said. "Your ma's been having kittens."

"Yah? Now tell me some news," said Emily. "Come along, Robin!"

A small boy with ten thousand freckles came up the ladder next. His teeth were chattering. Elizabeth ran up to him, shrugging out of her coat. "You poor thing, you're frozen!" she said, wrapping it around his shoulders.

"It's them, the kids Master Dodd made off with," said Jason. "Christopher and Conrad and Flavian got them all out!"

And what am I doing, I would have grumbled, but I was busy pulling one child after another out of the Bardo. They clustered around Elizabeth as she conjured jumpers, blankets, mufflers, and whatever else she could think of. Gabriel stood looking more and more like someone had carved him out of wood, like a cigar-store Atlantean.

"Rosalie, take all these children away and see that they're returned to . . . wherever they belong," he said finally.

"Yes, sir," she said. I'm not sure if Gabriel thought that being a woman, Miss Rosalie would naturally know what to do with twenty runny-nosed, bewildered children—or if he just thought, rather her than me. I know which one I was thinking. But Jason and Elizabeth were not so easily dismayed. Jason lifted a tiny girl onto his shoulders, and said something I couldn't hear, but made all the kids laugh. Elizabeth actually had them singing a walking song as they marched back towards the castle. Miss Rosalie brought up the rear, clearly relieved.

"End of the line," I said.

And then Christopher was coming up the ladder, shaking and nearly as blue as Flavian, but climbing all the same. He staggered as he reached the middle world, and Frederick Parkinson caught him. "Let's get you to Dr. Simonson," he said.

"W-w-wait," said Christopher, and stood straighter, though he had to keep leaning on Frederick. "M-meg. H-h-have I r-repaid the f-f-favor?"

"Handsomely," Meg acknowledged. "If anything, the Order owes—"

"D-d-don't say it," said Christopher. "I'd r-rather we were j-just qu-qu-quit."

Meg laughed, and folded her arms, and nodded, and Christopher let Frederick lead him away.

"Well," said Gabriel. "I believe our work here is done." I didn't miss that our, when all the people who were actually employed by Gabriel had already gone. I thought that was all the thanks I was going to get—and it was a lot, from Gabriel—but I was wrong. "Henrietta, Bernard," he went on. "I despair of ever teaching you discipline, or curing your impetuousness. But your devotion to your friends does you credit, and I doubt I could have retrieved them without your help. Thank you." We were still being gobsmacked by this when he turned to Meg. "And Meg, thank you for your assistance as well."

I was really proud of Gabriel just then. That must have hurt like hell for him to say.

Meg grinned. "No trouble. I have my vows." Then she went sober. "And I wouldn't have, any more, if we'd not got your young men back. For which I thank you. In particular, enchantress."

Elizabeth was gone, so she must have meant me.

"The Order generally recruits from travelling peoples," she went on, "but not always. You have a quick hand and a cool head in a crisis, and some feeling, I think, for what we are. Will you travel with us, and call me sister?"

I gaped at her. I couldn't do anything else, for a moment. I should have thought of more magic than I'd ever dreamed of at my fingertips. I should have thought about how carefully I'd have to use it, or lose it all. Maybe I should even have thought about preserving the balance of the worlds. But all I could think about was the purr of a fiddle and the rhythm of drums, and the smell of something meaty and spicy cooking on a campfire.

I knew whatever I told Meg then, yes or no, would be forever. So I didn't say anything. She nodded, understanding.

Gabriel didn't. "Might I remind you," he said coldly, "that Miss Gelek is under my protection."

"Peace, Chrestomanci," said Meg. "Do you think I mean to pop her in a sack and carry her off? But you cannot keep her caged forever. Enchantress, if you should ever want us, you know where to find us. Go with God." And she turned, or the world turned around her, and she was gone.