“We have to get to somewhere where people know where the King is for certain,” Grundo said.
“That’s not so easy,” I said. “He changes his mind all the time. And they change the far-speaker codes every day. The only ones we’ve got are long out of date. We can’t even call them up and ask.”
“Your other grandfather found the Progress easily enough,” Grundo said.
“That’s because he’s a Magid,” I said. “I wish we could go to Grandad in London, but that’s almost as far away as the port cities. We could call my grandmother up, though. Let’s go back to the castle and ask to use their far-speaker.”
We trudged all the way back up the winding drive, where we rang at the shiny brass bellpull again. We rang several times. After that Grundo heaved up the huge iron knocker and knocked. No one came. It was obvious no one was going to come.
“It stands to reason,” Grundo said miserably as we trudged down to the gate again. “A nasty man like Sir James is bound to have nasty servants. They don’t want to know, do they?”
It was a horrible feeling. We sat limply in the shade of the gate once more, completely at a loss.
Eventually Grundo said wistfully, “I wish I had relations we could go to. Have you got any who might be nearer than London?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do have the Dimbers, but I’ve never met them. They’re Dad’s family, you see, and Grandad is divorced from my grandmother. They may not want us.”
“How near do they live?” Grundo asked.
“How far is Gloucestershire from here?” I said.
Grundo was galvanized. “You’re hopeless!” he said. He dived for his bag and brought out a map book. “Gloucestershire’s practically next door. We may even be in it here!” He leafed furiously through the book. “Whereabouts in Gloucestershire?”
It was my turn to dive for my bag. I fetched out my address book and found Hyde. That was wrong, because my grandmother had refused to change her name from Dimber. I turned to the D’s and discovered that I really knew the address quite well. Mum made me send them a letter every New Year and cards on their birthdays. “Dimber House, Sutton Dimber,” I read. There was even a far-speaker code, for what good that did us.
Grundo searched the pages of his map book with a slow, studious finger. The maps didn’t bother him, but the writing on them did. “Got it!” he said at last. “And this castle’s on the same page. Roddy, it’s only about forty miles away! We could walk there, if we had to.”
“It would take days!” I said. “Walking’s slow.”
“Then let’s go out on the road and find a car to give us a lift,” said Grundo.
We repacked our bags and set off. I was still dubious. “I warn you,” I told Grundo as we came out into the blazing road, “they may be very peculiar, if my aunt Dora is anything to go by.”
“Your father’s not peculiar,” he said.
“That’s because Grandad brought him up,” I explained. “They wouldn’t let anyone male stay with them beyond seven years. That’s why Dad and Grandad had to leave. But Grandad once said that he’d had as much as he could take by then. The Dimbers are hereditary witches, you see. And that’s all I really know.”
Grundo sighed enviously. “When I grow up,” he pronounced, “I shall take care to have three really peculiar families at least. I want crowds of mad relatives.”
We toiled on between hot hedges, arguing how Grundo could possibly achieve this. As we came to the junction with the main road, I remember I was saying, “Three peculiar wives mean three bigamies or three divorces. Can you stand that?” Then I said, “Hang on.”
On the shady corner where the roads met, my eye was caught by a blue drift of speedwell flowers. Instantly my mind was full of a wood in winter and of a hanging swath of creeper crowded with gray puffs of seed. Old-Man’s-Beard, I found myself thinking, or Traveler’s-Joy, and I could feel another of the hurt woman’s flower files opening. Journeys and expeditions, this one said, cross-refer to spirit traveling and shape shifting. I didn’t think we needed that reference, but speedwell flowers were in there, under ordinary journeys, and I realized they were not called speedwell without a reason. It was a simple spell for a safe and lucky journey, and I knew we needed that. Best performed where three ways meet, it said, and we had that, because the main road went off hot and shimmering in two directions and the castle road met it to make the third way.
Grundo put his bag down and waited expressionlessly while I picked seven of the juicy little flowers. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on the flower file in my head, I might have noticed a few danger signals from Grundo then. Grundo was trying to be civilized, but he was deeply jealous by now. From his point of view, I had had all the luck—all the magics, all the interesting relatives—and he had had nothing but being allowed to tag along. It wouldn’t take much more to make Grundo dangerously annoyed. And when Grundo was annoyed, he was liable to do strange things with his back-to-front magic.
But I was far too hot, blinking sweat out of my eyes while I concentrated on translating the rhyme into modern language, and I didn’t think of Grundo. I carefully threw one small flower in each of the three roads. Then I threw three more while I said, “Journey flower, speedwell fair, keep us safe and speed us there.” Finally, I threw the seventh flower down the road we ha
d to take.
Then I did look at Grundo, but all I saw was that he was white in the heat. His face was freckled on top of his freckles with transparent beads of sweat. “Do we have to walk?” he said.
“I think so,” I said.
Grundo grunted, and we started walking.
The spell took awhile to work. Our feet got hot and sore. Heat came blasting up off the road. Everything shimmered: green shimmers from the humpy green hills on one side and gray quiverings above the long stretches of green-gold wheat on the other. The near-black trees beyond the fields were hazed and motionless in the heat, and unreal puddles glimmered in the distance up the road.
Grundo gave up at the next crossroads. He said he was probably going to die before my spell worked and sat down in the whippy dry grass by the signpost. I got out the last of the griddle cakes and waved them at him enticingly, but he said he wasn’t hungry. I was just putting the packet away again when the first cars we had seen came howling and clicking between the dusty hedges, three of them, one after another. We jumped up and waved.