Captive Magics

8 - The Manservant

Alarmingly, Leander was woken by his own body moving before his brain was awake very early the next morning, which he considered particularly cruel. Appalled by the coldness of the room, he watched his hands open the curtains and put on the cheap jacket (he had been forced to sleep in the shirt and trousers, which looked even worse for it) and went out. Lissy was leaving the hallway as he entered and didn't look around. Unable to call out, he was marched downstairs to the bathroom where he removed his clothes and walked around an exotic screen to a full, steaming copper bath. In a state of early morning shock he climbed in.

"Good morning, Leander!" he heard Lissy trill, and the door on the other side of the screen opened. Had he any control over his body he would have automatically curled up on himself. "Someone's just delivered some things I ordered for you. We'll have breakfast downstairs when you are finished." There was a crunch as something wrapped in paper landed on the chair and he saw the outline of her leaving through the translucent screen.

When he had bathed, shaved and dried off he took the brown paper away and found a black wool suit along with smallclothes and some other essentials. The suit was too small, as Lissy noticed immediately when she saw him.

"It's too tight," he told her unnecessarily. It stretched tauter than a drumskin and his shock was steadily being replaced by intense irritation. Astonishingly he had slept well, unsurprisingly he had woken cross, and if she was going to hold him hostage in such a barbaric way he didn't see why he had to put up with tight clothing along with everything else. She tsked and put her toast to one side.

"It's the top of it which looks funniest. Gosh, how amusing. Can you move your arms at all?" his arms swung like pendulums and there was a tearing sound. She giggled. "Oops!"

"Maybe before spending your money on new clothing you should have thought to take my measurements," Leander said in a voice of ice.

"I didn't realise your shoulders were so broad. You're quite tall, aren't you?" She was probably of average height for a woman, but when standing he towered over her. He had been quite wrong to describe her to his sister as 'rather tall'.

She smiled pertly up at him and grabbed his sleeves. They spooled out, growing longer and longer, and he watched in fascination, forgetting himself for a moment. "Better?" she asked, and flipped one of his sleeves, now six feet too long, over his opposite shoulder. He remained silent, refusing to rise to the bait, and she cackled again.

When his suit was finally adjusted to perfection they ate, and afterwards she handed him a pair of kid gloves with a smile far too innocent of any mockery. He cleared up their breakfast plates as she explained her plan for the day.

"Did you realise you'd hired that little gig and then it was left in the street? The poor horse."

"That was your-" his mouth snapped shut and she waved a finger impatiently.

"No interrupting! How dare you suggest it was my fault? Should I have let you cart me off just to spare the feelings of the unwanted pony? I had quite a deal of trouble with it yesterday. Horses won't let even a penny magician handle them, so I had to find out who it belonged to and ask them to take it back."

"It was hired out for a week..."

"So I discovered! The gentleman who owned it was very helpful. Guess what I intend to do with it," she prompted. He was silent. "Go on," she prompted again. "Have a guess. Talk to me." His hand, armed with a washing-up brush, swung around and waved it dangerously close to his face.

"Sorry! Sorry!" he cried hastily. "Er, you intend for me to drive you around."

"Rather!" She smiled and happily bounced her booted feet against the floor. "It looks like you're done. I shall see you outside."

The horse had water and a whole bale of hay which Leander had to hustle around to the garden before waiting for Lissy in the gig. She settled next to him and they moved off down the street.

"Where are we going?" Leander asked.

"Why do you care to know? You aren't really steering," she told him.

"I am curious. And concerned."

"We're going to work," said Lissy cheerfully. Leander tried to ask more questions but found his mouth had shut itself again. His resentment grew as they trotted onwards in enforced silence.

The royal courts loomed large and regal and their gig passed through two fortified outer walls before finally clattering into the vast front square. It seemed to take forever to get around the lawn on the circular drive and up to the sprawling front steps where a groom took the gig when Lissy showed him a medallion embossed with a coat of arms. Leander ground his teeth as she handed him her bag and umbrella with a smile all from her large blue eyes and not her mouth, and she marched off down a twisting maze of hallways with him trailing behind. There was no chance of him retracing their path. She bounced on happily ahead, the violet plume on her hat shivering with each step.

"How do you remember this?"

"What? The route?"

"Yes. It's confusing, to say the least."

"I've been working for this department since I left my apprenticeship," she said brightly, and he found himself opening a door for her.

The halls they had passed through had been stately and severe, blocks of stone and bare whitewashed plaster, but the room they entered now was anything but. In the corner loomed paper stacks, crammed right up to the beautiful vaulted ceiling, though it was the height of a small abbey. They looked perilously close to tumbling any moment towards where Leander and Lissy stood now, and his mind screamed at his unresponsive body to get out of danger. Imposing cherry-wood desks had been mercilessly piled with more heaps of paper, blueprints, bottles of who-knows-what and bits of inkpen and string until they vanished inconsequentially below the mess.

The room was filled with a loud clattering from a furiously working print press at the far end and facing this with stern dignity was a portrait of the king and queen, and next to them pictures of the imperial minister and the chancellor. The images had been respectfully afforded half a foot of clear wall space on each side, but beyond that books upon books were stacked, and planks rested on these books so books could sit above the portraits, stacked higher than any human could reach. With not a ladder in sight, Leander thought this rather pointless.

"How do you get to the ones at the top?" he asked Lissy over the noise of the press. She gave him a withering look and once again he felt rather stupid. "Oh. Magic."

She ducked under a large banner depicting the king of the country they were at war with which had a double chin painted on and a rather rude poem about bowel movements, and he followed her. Somehow he knew her desk immediately among the others by its tidiness, though it was in a sea of miscellanea, and the silver tea service sitting in the corner. No sooner had he realised she would probably expect tea than he found himself involuntarily wading through rubbish to get to it. When he returned with the teapot full of cold water she had only just removed her coat and hat and was angrily kicking a book out of the way of her desk chair.

"This is getting ridiculous. Also ridiculous is the lack of hot water to make tea."

"Can't you just-"

"Boil it ourselves? Obviously..." he put the pot on the table and steam erupted from its spout. She leaned over to scoop tea leaves in and resumed talking. "...but if we were more respected we would be brought tea every hour like the Grand Mage's offices. Would you believe it was barely a fortnight past that they finally granted us a storeroom, on the floor above, for all this paperwork! Nonsensical. They haven't even given us a clerk to file it. Well, I intend to show them..."

"Is that what you wish me to do?"

"Yes. Don't peek at any documents marked 'secret', please." He thought this was as stupid as her complaints about her obvious lack of seniority but refrained from saying so. She handed him back the tea tray with one of her dazzlingly cheerful smiles he was beginning to loathe and he stacked a huge pile of papers on it, his feet carrying him off and out of the room to deposit them wherever Lissy chose.