Lucky Rabbit

By the time Lian and the others finally left, Pandy only had a bit over an hour and a half left on Shifting Faces. The moment the door shut behind the boys, she turned to the other residents of the house. “I need to fix the sitting room,” she told them. “People keep coming over, and one of the chairs is going to hurt someone.”

Isidor and Eleanor exchanged glances. They both looked much more relaxed than they had the day before, as did their elementals. Like his mistress, Lord Winston had gotten a bit of a makeover, with his fur now a solid brown color, rather than brown and white, and mud caught between the claws of his big paws. Rather than sitting or lying by Eleanor’s feet, he circled the room, sniffing and nosing at things, as if he, too, had always been told to be on his best behavior, but now felt he could relax.

Isidor looked almost as different as the princess. Besides the fact that he was six years older than Pandy was used to, he’d also gotten a haircut, cropping his black, wild curls close while leaving the front a bit longer to draw attention to his large, dark eyes. He was also wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a pair of simple brown slacks. The front pocket of his shirt sagged beneath the weight of his tortoise, who was peering out of it with curious orange eyes, her flat, scaly feet clinging to the edge of the fabric.

“We know where there are some better chairs,” Eleanor offered. “We’ve been exploring.” She looked momentarily uncertain. “If that’s okay?”

Pandy crouched down so she was at the girl’s eye level. “This is your home for as long as you want,” she told her seriously. “You can go anywhere and do anything that’s not dangerous. Just don’t go into my office when I’m not here, all right?”

“We can’t anyway. The door’s locked and Nox gets mad if we try,” Eleanor said, relaxing again, her eyes bright and innocent.

Setting aside the fact that someone must have tried it in order to find that out, it was probably good that no one could enter the office without Pandy, and apparently Nox being ‘mad’ hadn’t scared the princess, so Pandy wasn’t going to worry about it. Straightening, she said, “All right then. Everyone go, um, back into the servant’s quarters? Unless there’s something there I need to fix?”

“Just the water,” Glory muttered, but shrugged, stepping to the side so the children could go ahead of her. As she started to close the door behind them, though, she stopped and pinned Pandy with a look. “Seriously. We need water. Isidor found a well out back, but we need baths, and we can’t keep hauling water around and boiling it for everything.”

Pandy grimaced but nodded. She wasn’t certain where she was going to get enough metal to fix the plumbing system, but Glory was right. That needed to be her next-to-first priority. First, of course, was a sitting room for all the people who kept randomly showing up.

Racing upstairs, Pandy almost ran into a Dragon. Not just any Dragon, of course, but Hazel, who was, for some reason, flying down the hall carrying her duck in one back claw, and a ragged dandelion in the other, complete with long, dirty taproot dangling below it. Nyssa was floating along behind the other elemental, and brightened visibly when she saw Pandy.

“She says plants belong in the atrium, my lady, but I’m not certain…” The elemental maid trailed off, gesturing at the Dragon, who was now halfway down the hall and clearly not at all interested in waiting to hear Pandy’s opinion on her activities.

Pandy, for her part, wasn’t certain she wanted to offer one, at least not yet. She did, however, follow along, watching as Hazel dropped the dandelion onto a mound of similar plants, all in varying stages of wilt, then circled back to the hall, presumably to do it again. Pandy had no idea how the Dragon was getting in and out of the house – or maybe out and in? – but she said, “You know the plants won’t grow if they don’t have dirt, right?”

Hazel actually bobbled in midair, fumbling Gus, who went down while the Dragon went up in response to the loss of his weight. Pandy put some of her Agility points to good use, managing to catch the wooden toy before it clattered against her newly refurbished floor. She held the duck out, and Hazel landed, shifting to her human shape so she could grab it and say, “I get.”

Get what? Gus? Dirt? More dandelions? Pandy honestly had no idea, so it was very helpful when the tiny pseudo-child added, “Dirt. I growth.” ‘Growth’ was less helpful, especially since Hazel had a distinct lisp. That could be ‘grows’, ‘gross’, or just what it sounded like.

“You want to grow plants?” Pandy ventured, rewarded by a nod of the shining head. She added yet another thing to her to-do list. “I can get some pots, and maybe some, um, flowers?”

“Eat!” Hazel said, chomping down on Gus’s head to demonstrate.

“You want plants to… eat?” Pandy ventured, and Hazel nodded without removing the duck from her mouth. Okay, well, that kind of made sense. Hazel wanted to cook, and if she had the atrium confused with a greenhouse type thing, then growing plants to cook in it was going from point A to Z without passing through B to Y in order to get there.

With a small sigh, Pandy cast a glance back at the surprisingly large pile of weeds. How long had Hazel been at this? “Let’s pick the plants together after we get some pots, all right? I think people can eat dandelions, or maybe part of a dandelion, but I’m not sure about the rest of those.” She cast a dubious eye over some particularly red berries she was almost certain were holly, or some this-world version of holly, which, actually, might or might not be safe to ingest.

Hazel scowled around her duck, but gave a reluctant nod. Professor Beeswick must have told his protege to listen to Pandy, so she had that going for her at least. “I’m going to work on the house a bit more,” Pandy said, “so I need you to go… somewhere.”

Where was Hazel sleeping, anyway? Pandy was certain at least some elementals could and did sleep, because Miss Cupcakes spent ninety percent of her time unconscious, and Professor Beeswick certainly acted like he’d been sleeping if you disturbed him at night.

Scowl only deepening, the Dragon gave her duck a particularly vicious chomp, then licked its head as if in apology. She turned and toddled down the hall, however, opening the door to the master bedroom and entering with the kind of familiarity that said at least one of Pandy’s questions had probably been answered.

With a quick, worried glance at her Shifting Faces timer, Pandy ducked into the office, which was not, in fact, locked, at least as far as she could tell. More magical security, yay! She sat down, grabbed the book, stood up, and threw open the once-again-closed office door. More magical security, grr!

Two dark, stretched figures waited for Pandy in the hall. Both were flat, vaguely humanoid sheets of blackness, rather than anything that seemed like it could be alive. Pandy froze, almost dropping the book and shifting back to her rabbit shape before she realized they were Apparitions, inside the house, and must, therefore, be Nox and Nyssa.

The slightly smaller Apparition was twisting its upper appendages, while the larger, darker version opened a yawning pit of blackness in its general facial area and said, “You have guests,” in a close approximation of Nox’s voice.

Pandy closed her eyes. Of course she did. But she hadn’t finished the sitting room. She hadn’t even started it! “They’ll have to wait,” she told him, and if her voice sounded a bit testy, well, that’s what happened when people kept turning up unexpectedly when she only had four and a half hours a day with thumbs and a voicebox!

Paper dolls made of Dark magic couldn’t smile, but Pandy had a feeling Nox would have struggled to keep his expression calm if he currently looked like a human. Wait, did he look like a human? Were the book and its strange monochrome overlay allowing her to see his real shape? What would she see if she looked at Hazel right now?

Nope, questions for another time, because at the moment, Nox’s bendy-wendy arm was holding something white out to her. Pandy accepted automatically, and the elemental butler gave a bow before literally sinking through the floor, back down to the first floor, shortly followed by Nyssa.

Looking down, Pandy found that she was holding two little white cards made of some kind of semi-gloss cardstock, with neat black script in the center of each. The first read Lady Frances Brewer, while the second said Lady Arabelle Durchville – Augustus’s aunts. He’d told her the day before that they would probably come by today, but she’d just seen them that morning. Hadn’t that been good enough?

Well, she wasn’t welcoming one more person into the house with the sitting room looking like it had recently been uncovered during an archaeological dig. Down the stairs she went, ignoring the faint and oddly echoey sounds of voices coming from inside the servants’ quarters. Entering the sitting room, she pulled up the overlay, discovering that she needed eighteen Wood for the physical repairs, as well as one hundred and thirty-eight Mana to fix the usual Shelter enchantment.

Since she had full Mana again, she went ahead and repaired the magic, then fed every piece of furniture in the room into the book. Yes, some of it might have been all right if she sent it to be reupholstered and respringed, or whatever it was called when someone made sure a chair was no longer a deadly weapon, or at least an acupressure device, but if Eleanor and Isidor really had found some better furniture, she didn’t want to have to clear out these battered remnants first. Besides, she had to get the Wood from somewhere.

Once that was done, and the room looked as perfect as it could – other than the dust that still coated the floor – Pandy dropped the book, drew in a long breath, and headed for the front door. There, she found Nyssa floating nervously while Nox stood in the doorway, blocking the two ladies from entering, in spite of Lady Frances’s insistent voice.

“My wife needs to sit down,” the lady said sharply, and Pandy winced. She’d forgotten about Lady Arabelle’s leg. But where should she have put them?

Pausing next to Nyssa, Pandy murmured, “Help Isidor and Glory put different chairs in the sitting room please, and maybe sweep in there?” Was there even a broom in the old house? If there was, it was probably in the same condition as everything else – that is, half-rotten and falling apart.

Whether Nox sensed or heard her coming, he stepped aside as Pandy approached, allowing her to see the two women on her crumbling doorstep. She really needed to fix that, too. Did the book work on anything outside the walls of the house?

Offering what she hoped was a suave smile, Pandy said, “I’m sorry about the wait. The house isn’t really ready for guests yet.” Was that too sharp? It was true, though.

Lady Arabelle gave her wife a chastising look and said, “That’s what I told Frances. She’s quite stubborn, however. We can come back another time.”

“No we can’t,” Lady Frances said, her lips pinched. “You’re about to fall down.”

“Then perhaps you shouldn’t have insisted we go somewhere without an appointment,” Arabelle said gently.

“Nonsense,” Frances replied, looking down her patrician nose at Pandy. “I told Augustus to let Lady Avington know we would come by. I assume he did so.”

Pandy felt her head start aching as she nodded. Now she knew why Augustus looked vaguely horrified whenever someone mentioned his aunt. She was like a living steamroller, and she clearly wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Stepping to the side, Pandy said, “Come in. But things really are-” She turned, and as if on cue, Glory and Eleanor – still in the guise of Evan – backed into the hall from the dining room, carrying a surprisingly nice chair between them. Isidor followed with two more chairs, one on each arm.

Gesturing to them, Pandy said, “Lady Frances Brewer, Lady Arabelle, um, Durber… Ditzler…”

“Durchville,” Arabelle said, with a distinct twinkle in her eyes.

“Yes,” Pandy said gratefully. “Please meet my brother, Isidor, the, uh, kitchen boy, Evan, and-” Wait, who was Glory? She couldn’t be Evan’s tutor, could she? Did servants get tutors? Pandy was pretty sure the answer was no.

“Isidor’s tutor, Miss Gloria Empresse,” Empress Glory said, somehow managing to offer a small curtsey even as she took a turn into the sitting room with her chair. Eleanor kept her head down and her eyes on the ground, barely even acknowledging the two guests, but that was all right, because they were focused on Isidor.

“Another Avington?” Lady Frances asked, looking from Pandy to the boy advancing toward them with his burden. He managed a small bow, but the chairs were large and solid wood, so it was probably acceptable that he didn’t pause to agree or disagree with what was probably a hypothetical question anyway.

“Well, Augustus didn’t mention you brought more of your family with you,” Frances said, sailing forward with her wife on her arm. Lady Arabelle’s mouth was growing pinched at the corners, and when Frances gently ushered her into the closest seat, she let out a soft sigh of relief.

The others bustled back out of the room as quickly as they’d arrived, leaving Pandy alone with the two women. Lady Frances edged a haphazardly placed chair next to Arabelle and sat down, then waited for Pandy to do the same. These were dining chairs, not sitting chairs – the hard wooden seats had no cushions, and there were no arms – but neither of the old ladies offered a word of complaint.

“Well,” Lady Frances said briskly, once everyone was seated in a very awkward ring in the center of the empty room, “we might as well get right to it. I would like you to heal my wife, Eurydice, and I am willing to pay you well if you can do it.”