Grundo’s lips seemed to stick together for a moment. He worked them loose and said in a gluey sort of grunt, “I—I will.”
“Go on, then,” Romanov said, flat and unfriendly.
“I—I—” Grundo went.
“He’s not doing anything,” Roddy interrupted. “Don’t pick on him.”
Grundo shot her a wretched look. “Yes, I am,” he admitted. “I’ve done it ever since I was three years old. I—I put a glamour on you to make you—you love me and—and look after me above everyone else.”
“But that was just because you were little and lonely then,” Roddy protested quickly.
Grundo shook his head. “Not now. I do it all the time now, because—well, it’s easier. You can read for me and help me with lessons and do magic for me that isn’t back to front. And then I don’t have to try.”
“Laziness, in fact,” Romanov said flatly.
Grundo nodded, looking so
dismal that I swear even his nose drooped. “I’d better take it off now, hadn’t I?” he grunted. Groaned, really.
“Yes,” said Romanov. “If it’s any comfort to you, I had back-to-front problems, too, as a boy. It only takes a month or so of real effort to learn to work with it. After that you find you can do things rather better than most other people because they haven’t had to try and you have.”
Roddy by this time was so pale that she was sort of dough-colored. “No!” she more or less screamed. “This isn’t true! You’re taking away the foundation of my life!”
Romanov shrugged. Grundo stuck his bottom lip out and said, “It is true. Sorry.”
At this Roddy shouted out a great yell of despair and went rushing out of the kitchen and out of the house. As the front door banged, Romanov gave me a curt nod and jerked his head at the door, meaning go after her. I stared at him for a second. It seemed to me that when someone’s just discovered they’ve been living a lie, the last thing they want is me on top of it. But Romanov gave me an even fiercer jerk of the head, and I went.
Roddy was standing with her back to me, halfway up the slope to the garden. Mini was beyond her, beside the garden wall, with her trunk drifting wistfully toward the fruit trees inside. She was doing her embarrassed leg rubbing. “This girl seems awfully unhappy,” she said to me.
“She is,” I said.
Roddy spun round and saw me. “Go away!”
“In a bit,” I said. “Tell me about it first.”
“I can’t!” Roddy stood with her face up. Her hands were clenched, and her eyes were shut and oozing tears. Then she told me anyway. She obviously just had to tell someone. “Most of the time I’ve been alive,” she said, “it’s been a—an established fact that I cared for Grundo and looked after him … and defended him from his awful mother and sister as well. That made me better than Sybil and Alicia, you see. I’ve always thought of myself as a nice, loving, kind person. But now it turns out that Grundo was making me care for him, this means I’m not like that at all. I don’t know what I’m like. I could be as vile and selfish as everyone else at Court for all I know! Don’t you see? It’s as if the world I thought I knew has suddenly turned out to be make-believe. Nothing seems to be valuable anymore!”
“Yes, I see,” I said. “And I’m almost impressed with that kid Grundo. He must be the only person in the multiverse who’s more selfish than I am. But don’t you think you might have liked him anyhow?”
She said, in a creaking, hysterical voice, “I don’t know!”
“Well, look at it this way,” I said. I was a bit flurried because she looked to me as if she was about to go really off the deep end. “It can’t have been necessarily a bad thing, you being made to care about Grundo. Like symbiosis—you know, cats and dogs and humans—”
“And elephants,” Mini put in.
“And elephants,” I said. “You and Grundo both sound to have been pretty lonely and miserable at Court, but if you were looking after him, okay, he was all right, but you had someone to be fond of, too. And you strike me as being a pretty nice person. So maybe you’d have looked after him anyway. It’s a shame he didn’t trust you to try it on your own, that’s all.”
Roddy put her fists up to her face. “Oh, go away, Nick! I really do need to be alone. Anyway, you have to go back inside and explain to Romanov about the conspiracy. I can’t trust Grundo to explain properly.” There was a slightly horrible silence, then she said angrily, “I can’t trust Grundo for anything now!” and burst into hard, hacking sobs, more like coughing than crying.
I put my arms round her. For just a mere, single instant I had a real, heavy body in my arms and a moist face against my cheek, with a real, difficult personality to go with them. It was a fairly astonishing feeling. Then Roddy fiercely shook me off and went running away to the other side of the island.
I said to Mini, “You keep an eye on her,” and went back into the house, hoping Romanov wouldn’t think I’d given up too easily. But I was blowed if I was going to run after Roddy all over the island. That would really have irritated her.
Actually, when I went into the kitchen, Grundo was making a pretty good job of explaining the part he knew. As I came through the door, Romanov turned the razor edge of his profile against my soul and asked, “What do you know about the Merlin’s part in all this?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I never met him. Maxwell Hyde might know. All I know is that there’s a lot of nasty types in Blest collecting salamanders for some sort of power push. And I saw Gwyn ap Nud carry Maxwell Hyde off. Roddy thinks he did that on the Merlin’s orders. Or this woman Sybil’s.”
Romanov’s razor profile raised an eyebrow at me, and he said, “This woman who kidnaps a Magid, using the Merlin and the Lord of the Dead—there are going to be disturbances in a lot of worlds over this.” He turned to Grundo. “Who did you say your mother is?”