Wh
ile Isadora was saying this, Ilsabil was looking from me to Grundo and then at Roddy, with a sweet, helpless smile, waiting for one of us to come and make toast for her. None of us took any notice.
“It sounded like quite a lot of horses,” Isadora said, “but not for very long. We couldn’t understand it. Then we got hungry and came in for supper, and Judith and Heppy weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere in the house and supper was still raw. We got so hungry! When it was dark and they still hadn’t come back …”
Toby came into the kitchen. Ilsabil was still gently waving the bread knife above the loaf. Toby pushed her aside and packed the grill with doorsteps of bread with cheese on them. “The goat’s almost eaten through her stake,” he said as he worked.
“I’ll go and look in a moment,” I said. “Go on, Izzy.”
“We sort of knew they weren’t going to come back,” Isadora said. “And we were so hungry by then that we found Heppy’s purse and went down to the shop with the money, and on the way we remembered that Mrs. Simpson always goes to London Airport over Friday night to collect the new tea when it’s fresh …”
“See how resourceful we are,” Ilsabil murmured.
“Except about making toast,” Grundo said. “So you went off and just left the dog, didn’t you?”
“No, promise,” Isadora said. “We changed our clothes and went to the vicar and told her what had happened and said we had to go to Grandad because he’s a Magid …”
“And left Jackson with her, so there!” said Ilsabil. “She wanted to keep us, too, but we told her Mrs. Simpson was giving us a lift to London—”
“Then we had to run, and we just caught Mrs. Simpson before she drove away,” Isadora said. “And she sighed and said, ‘Jump aboard, then,’ and we did.”
“But we never had any supper because it was such a rush,” Ilsabil said, with a wistful eye on the cheesy toast.
To do them justice, both twins were looking quite upset, though it may have had more to do with missing supper than losing their mother, to my mind. “What do you make of it?” I asked Roddy.
“Every magic user who might have been able to stop Sybil seems to have gone,” she said. “I’m willing to bet that all the other hereditary witches have been taken, too.”
“You think we should check?” Grundo asked.
“What’s the point? We should be doing something!” she said, twisting her hands together. “Only what should we do?”
“Find Romanov,” I said.
She rounded on me. “You keep bleating that!”
Allow for personality, I told myself, but I thought if I had to do much more allowing, I might run out of patience. “For one thing,” I said, “I was told Romanov has more magic than anyone in several universes—he’s a sort of magics Czar—and for another thing, he knows your grandfather quite well....”
Her annoyance faded down into surprise. “You never said that before!”
I didn’t say that she had never given me a chance. I took a long breath and said, “That’s why I think he’ll help.”
“So how do we find him?” she demanded.
I’m so glad you asked me that question, I thought. “Um,” I said. “He doesn’t live in a particular world. He has this strange island that’s made out of bits of several different universes, and I sort of know the direction....”
She sighed. “In other words, you can’t find him.”
“I didn’t say—” I began.
Toby interrupted in his quiet way. “The goat,” he said. “You said she was Romanov’s goat.”
“That’s it!” I shouted. I jumped up, and chairs crashed on the tiles all round me. The only wonder was that even this didn’t wake Dora up. “Let’s go!”
11
RODDY AND NICK
ONE RODDY