~A/N~

Hi again! Thanks for the positive reviews….you have no idea how long i spend agonizing over whether or not Howl & Sophie & everybody are in character, so it's good to know that you guys agree. Onward and outward and so on and so forth! ~AA-M

~Chapter Two~

Which contains several invitations

~S~

Mondays were not normally wretched days of the week. They could be rather busy, but Sophie generally liked being busy, especially Monday-busy, which tended to be a mad scramble of blossoms and customers and pruning shears and mild panic. In any case it was much more exciting than making hats.

But this Monday there was no denying that something was off. Sophie had a glancing suspicion that the something off about it was herself, but she had a go at blaming everything else just in case. Like usual, she had gotten up in the greying mists just after sunrise to cut swathes of flowers in the waste, and that had been nice enough. The sweaty heat of the summer was wavering in its decision to never let fall come again, and the last of the summer blooms were bravely struggling on; they hung in there, but only with a little extra talking-to. As a result their colors seemed a little deeper and more desperate, but Sophie generally thought they were the more beautiful for it.

"It works for you," she said to a bunch of bell-shaped flowers with petals like purple velvet. "Lucky."

"Morning, Sophie," Calcifer hissed from the grate when she came into the castle parlor, three buckets of flowers dangling from each hand, her boots tracking dewy mud.

"You're back," Sophie said, stomping through the parlor to the door on the stairs. "What took you so long?"

The fire demon poured himself up through the logs and zipped through the air to hover above Sophie's shoulder. He gave off a slight warmth and a singed smell seemed to follow behind him wherever he went, but he could stay mobile for quite a long time now without having to burn anything. It had taken him weeks of experimentation after the curse was broken to stay out for more than a day at a time. He still hated the rain, but it didn't seem to have the power to extinguish him anymore. Obviously Sophie's creative methods of curse-breaking had done a number on him; but everyone was still at a loss as to what that number was, exactly.

"Howl's had me out in Porthaven," Calcifer explained as the girl ranged through the flower shop, setting out buckets and boots and lilies and rushes and orchids and velvet-bellflowers. "Everyone over there keeps asking for Sorcerer Jenkin. Autumn is when the storms start over there, you know. It's already all murky and wet."

"Oh, you poor thing," Sophie muttered, without meaning it at all. "Could you go check the mail, Calcifer?"

"Another task! My favorite!" Calcifer hissed. He complied, but not before snatching one of the velvet-flowers out of a bouquet and munching it down in a burst of cinders. "Hmm," he said— "Musky, but with a subtle spice. Very nice—" and zipped off to the fireplace.

They opened the shop. It was a cooler day than yesterday, and the townspeople were about testing their long-shawled and tall-booted finery for fall. Sophie sat at the counter and tried her best to smile, but her smiles kept coming out wrong somehow, and people kept leaving without buying anything. Bother, Sophie thought. It is me. And this made her smiles fly even further from the mark. Flowers wilted in their buckets. "Stop cringing," Sophie growled at them. "It's not your fault."

Midmorning crowded up Market Street; the shop door opened and in walked Martha Hatter, slender and fair and completely spell-free. Sophie managed to turn the look of annoyance on her face to a look of shock and from there to a look of appreciation. She didn't feel much like a visit from Martha today; her conversation with Lettie yesterday had been bad enough. But it really wasn't Martha's fault any more than it had been the flowers'.

"Sophie!" Martha said with a grin.

"Hello, Martha," Sophie said. "If you're looking for Michael, he's in the backyard," she said. "I think he's working on a spell."

"Dear old Sophie," Martha said, cheerfully ignoring the attempt to pass her off to someone else, which only served to make Sophie feel more wretched. She came over to lean on the counter, twiddling her thumbs. "I came to talk to you too!"

"I'm not old anymore," Sophie grumped, miffed. "Anyway, how are you doing, Martha?"

Earlier in the week the shop had received an order of boutonnieres and corsages for this evening, and she was busy sewing mounds of cornflowers onto gold lace cuffs. Her sister peered at them curiously, but rather absently. "I'm on break from Cesari's and it just occurred to me: why not pop over to the shop for a few minutes? Imagine, I've never thought it before, and you've been living here for months now. And here I thought I was getting near as clever as you."

Sophie didn't know quite what to say to that. "Hmm," she said. Attempting to be mollified and kind had never been this difficult when she was living with her two sisters. Whereas Lettie and Martha got along marvelously now that they no longer had to see one another on a regular basis, Sophie seemed to have gotten worse and worse. Maybe it was the fact that there had always been people and things for Martha and Lettie to argue about; Sophie had had quite enough people and things to deal with from the two of them, so she had never bothered acquiring her own. And now?

"Boutonnieres," Martha observed dully after Sophie explained, in response to her sister's enquiries regarding how exactly she was doing (though she left out the wretched part.) "I can see that. I suppose it's just like cakes for me. Anyhow—"

"Sometimes I quite enjoy boutonnieres—" Sophie interjected, jabbing a delicate silver thread through the gold fabric.

Martha kept right on talking over the interruption. "What about your sweetheart, Sophie? Is he working right now?"

Sophie nearly stabbed her thumb right through with the sewing needle.

"Howl," she said fiercely, after a moment in which she felt her brain flopping around a bit in her head like a dead fish, "is not my sweetheart. Heavens, Martha."

Martha frowned. "But you're living…I mean, you're going to…you're like Michael and I, aren't you, Sophie? What else can you call it?"

"Yes," Sophie growled. She was going to ignore the rest of the question.

"Well…" Undistracted, Martha's brow furrowed in concentration; she was obviously putting her mind to the task, which was the last thing Sophie wanted. "He's not your betrothed, for you aren't engaged to be married… That doesn't mean he's your lover, does it?" She seemed mildly distressed by this phrasing. Then again, so was Sophie.

"Heavens, no," she said again. "He's not my anything, Martha. He's just Howl! And right now he's not even here, so don't bother asking." This was true, as far as Sophie knew, though that was never very far where Howl was concerned.

Martha narrowed her eyes at Sophie in a way that reminded her strangely of Lettie, though the spell that had swapped her sisters was really and truly gone by now. "You are an old grouch today," she said. "It's no use trying to hide it. You have that slump to your shoulders and you're smiling too much. But you're not going to tell me about it, are you, Sophie? One of those 'eldest' things again, I guess."

Sophie found that her fingers were putting the pin in and out of the cornflowers, but the thread had escaped some time ago and was lying across the counter in a listless pool. Martha's expression was a softness between resignation and pity that made Sophie's heart hurt faintly just looking at it.

"Bother," she said at last. "Run along, Martha. It's just a little thing and I'll be over it in no time."

A smile wavered onto Martha's face, but it was a kind one. "Yes, I thought so. I'm sure you've got it handled down to the last detail, anyway," she said, dusting her skirt off and preparing to go in search of Michael. Halfway across the room to the back door she added, a bit too cheerfully, "But if the problem is Wizard Howl, don't worry, he'll regret the day he ever laid his glass-marble eyes on you!"

"Howl's eyes look nothing like glass marbles!" Sophie protested. "At least now he's got his heart back."

Martha just laughed, a little pityingly, and disappeared out the back door.

Unfortunately the wretchedness didn't stop after that—which hadn't really been at all wretched, if one were to make a standard of wretchedness and place this morning on it—and the more wretched she felt the less things Sophie could find to blame it on. Three or four customers came into the shop, looked around, caught the waves of Sophie's smiles that were still scattered across the shelves, and hastily left. A short while later Michael came into the room smiling so blissfully that Sophie accidentally squashed an entire blue blob of cornflowers and had to get a whole new bunch for corsage number twenty-two. By that time the boy had caught a whiff of Sophie's mood too: he twitched nervously, gathered up several daffodils from one of the displays and took off without looking at her.

From the castle room came Calcifer's voice, transmitted and booming magically across to where Sophie could hear it: "Kingsbury Mail!"

That took long enough, Sophie thought. A moment later, a pile of letters appeared on the corner of the flower shop counter, trying very much to look like it had just been there all along, sitting quietly among the spools of thread and thimbles and discarded leaves.

"Porthaven Mail!" Calcifer cried next, and several more letters were added to the mess; by the time he called out "Mansion Mail!" it had lost all pretenses and was threatening to topple away into chaos.

There seemed to be seven letters, though a few were quite heavy and accounted for the threatening-to-topple. Sophie rescued them and sorted through the lot. Six of the letters were addressed to Wizard Pendragon or Sorcerer Jenkin, so she put them away for snooping through later and turned her attention to the seventh. Not only was it the seventh—one of those portentous numbers that always popped up in all the tales—it was a fine specimen of a letter, majestic and imposing. The square envelope was made of heavy, shimmer paper of a deep purple hue, with a subtle non-papery scent that might even have been perfume. And, to her surprise, it was addressed to Wizard Howl and Miss Sophie Hatter. That was new; for the first time today Sophie found her heart was beating a little rhythm of curiosity that bordered on excitement. She reached for a letter opener, found none around, and made do with a pair of garden shears.

She had made short work of the very fine envelope—it was rather saddening, cutting open such an elegant piece of paper with garden shears—when the bell over the shop door tinkled. In came a few customers; Calcifer called out, "Shop mail!" in his magically disembodied voice, and two of them jumped and left again, looking ruffled.

"I'll get it," Sophie grumped, hoping to preserve what order she had on the counter, and stumped her way over to the mailbox outside the shop door, which indeed contained mail. One of the things Sophie sometimes missed about the curse was that it was so much easier to stump and stomp sourly around when you were a dumpy old woman. Whereas before it had felt quite right, quite appropriate, now she felt somewhat like a little child who was having a bad day, scuffing her feet along the floor to bother her mother. "Ugh," she said again, making a tall dark-haired girl who was browsing through the shelves of flowers glance sideways at her in confusion.

In the mailbox she found two more letters: one addressed to H. Jenkins and the other to Sophie Hatter.

Sophie felt her eyes goggle straight out of her head. Who on earth would want to send her a letter? She was so curious that on her way back to the counter she forgot to stomp. There was a moment once she got there where she was really stuck, unable to decide whether the purple letter or the new one interested her more and whether she should open the most- or least-interesting one first, to draw it out. But the new one triumphed: Howl's name was on the other one, whereas this one was specifically directed at her, Sophie Hatter, written in a scrawling but ornate handwriting on speckled off-white paper. She reached for the garden shears again in a state of high anticipation.

It was an oddly-shaped envelope, wide and rather chunky, and when Sophie opened it (not without some difficulty) she found out why: there was no letter inside at all. Shears still clutched in her hand, she extracted what turned out to be a flower—and what a flower it was. A single magnificent rose blossom, flat white and plush among its glossy serrated leaves. It was only a little bit crushed, and Sophie figured that might possibly be because of the garden shears and not because of the mail at all. She was more perplexed than ever. She shook the mangled envelope out onto the counter, and a little white scrap of paper fell out after the rose. There were only two letters written on it, though they seemed to be written with exquisite care: ~A.T. They looked like someone's initials. Maybe they were someone's initials. They weren't the initials of anyone she knew. Were they?

This was too much for Sophie. Garden shears in one hand, rose and paper clutched in the other, she jumped up from the flower shop counter and ran up the stairs into the castle room, calling for Calcifer.

"Calcifer! Help! Look at this!"

Calcifer wasn't in the castle room, but Michael and Martha were. Sophie clattered into the doorway shouting, and then she felt herself go quiet again. They were standing right near the end of the workbench. Michael's arms were wrapped around Martha's waist. Martha had her hands wound about the base of Michael's neck and one of them was clutching a daffodil into his hair, and the two of them were connected at the lips quite effectively, or at least they were until Sophie barged in.

Sophie stared. Martha and Michael sprang apart like lightning. Martha's face flushed a violent chrysanthemum red, but she smiled a crooked smile at her sister without quite looking her in the eyes; on the other hand, all the color had drained out of Michael's face in a look of pure terror. "What—" he managed to say.

That was more than Sophie could muster. Her face felt like a star had crashed upon it. The garden shears, sensing her state of distraction, made a leap for the floor; and when Sophie's hand tried to stop the escape, a long line of pain dashed its way across her palm.

"Ow!" Sophie howled, doubling over. Everything in both hands clattered to the floor.

"Oh, no—" Martha began, and ran over to pick things up. Michael said, "I wasn't doing anything, I swear—are you alright?" And the worst thing, the most absolutely wretched thing about it, was there was nothing in the world that could bring Sophie to face either of them. She shrieked "I'm fine!" and flung herself into the bathroom as quickly as she could.

~M~

Monday had been a good day to Michael Fisher, which as far as Mondays go was unexpected, but unexpected in an entirely acceptable way. He could lay out the good things about this particular Monday in a list (because except for the ones that told you what chores you had to do, lists could be quite enjoyable.):

1. breakfast made by Sophie, i.e. not made by Howl, i.e. not not-made-at-all

2. Calcifer has come home

3. spells have not exploded or caught fire

4. Martha

5. nobody has ordered baby's-buttons in the flower shop for a week, i.e., it no longer reeks of cheap funerals, particularly the one for his parents

6. Martha

7. summer seems finally to be cooling off

8. specifically, Martha leaving work to come see him in the flower shop, which has never happened before!

After that thought, of course, the amount of items on the list began to dwindle down to basically one thing, and everyone knows a proper list has at least three different items on it which are not all one person's name, so Michael gave up. This was alright, though, because by that time he had the real thing to distract him.

And then of course Sophie did one of her usual numbers, and Monday started to be much more like its miserable old self. Once rational thought was again making its way fairly regularly through his head, Michael felt he should have known about it, guessed it somehow. Monday was going to have a good shot at ruining his day.

"Here, hold these," Martha said to him, coming over and holding the heavy garden shears out to Michael as though she thought they might bite her. Well, they'd already had a fair taste of Sophie. Michael took them with all due respect. "She's going to kill me," he told her.

Martha stared down at the other things Sophie had dropped, which were a flower and a piece of paper. "Why on earth would she do that? You haven't done anything wrong. In fact, I would say quite the opposite."

Michael couldn't quite stop himself from blushing. It wasn't as if this was the first time he'd kissed Martha, but it was nice to hear he was still alright in that department. Nevertheless, the situation at hand was dire. He tried to explain.

"I know, I know. It's just—it's just Sophie. She's in an awful mood today already and I can't even think of anything Howl's done to set her off! I have no idea what she's going to do next. She'll probably go and clean out my room again in revenge." The thought made him shudder.

Martha's brow furrowed. "What a queer idea you have of Sophie!" she said. "I can't imagine her having such a fit over it. Has living with you people got to her that much? " And then that look which Michael liked to consider her thinking face crossed her features. "Well… Oh! Michael, I just remembered. Lettie's invited me to tea on Friday and we thought you should come along too. At Mrs. Fairfax's."

Why on earth would I want to do that? Michael thought, a bit blindsided. He gulped a little, and Martha took the moment to apply her most warm and generous smile, accompanied by a judiciously innocent bat of her eyelashes. "Sounds nice," Michael said. "If I survive the rest of the week, that is. There's no guarantee."

"Come off it, it can't be all that bad!" Martha said, and then the bathroom door crashed open and Sophie crashed out of it with a bandage wrapped around her hand. "Michael!" she shouted.

"It's not what you think!" Michael shouted, instantly on the alert. (It was the first thing he could think of. Martha poked him in the ribs with a snort.) But Sophie seemed to have another type of revenge in mind, because she only said, "Mind the shop!" and stomped her way over to the back door.

"What?" Now Michael really found himself getting angry. Martha had actually come to the flower shop to see him and now they would have to sit at the counter in front of everyone. "Why?"

Sophie stopped in her tracks and breathed out hugely. Her face was absolutely terrifying: it looked like a snarl with a bit of a sob thrown in. "I'm planting a garden!" she cried.

"What?" This time Michael and Martha said it together.

"A garden," Sophie said. "You know, with plants and flowers and things. Give me that." And she marched over to Martha and plucked the white rose from her hands.

If this was Sophie's way of pretending she wasn't punishing him, it was the most awful failure that Michael had ever seen. He gaped at her, and when she attempted to stomp off out into the backyard again—Michael thought she might be going for a shovel or something—he gathered up his courage, plucked at her sleeve, and said, "Sophie, I don't think this is fair! Howl's just given me this incredibly complicated spell—"

"Well, why don't you concentrate on working on it, then?" Sophie snapped. Michael dropped the sleeve hastily and backed away in case she tried to throw something. He hadn't seen Sophie like this for ages, maybe not since she tried to douse them all in weed-killer, and it was more terrifying than he remembered. Maybe the memory had diluted with time.

"Sophie, what's got into you?" Martha said. Looking properly shocked and horrified, she tagged along behind Michael, who tagged warily along behind Sophie, who had apparently changed her mind and stomped off toward the shop, rose clutched in her fist. "Nothing!" she said. Michael's mind was reeling trying to keep up with her, but he couldn't just let this go. "I think—" he started.

Calcifer zipped out of the shop door as the three of them were trailing in. "Howl's home!" he sang. And he was indeed. He was reading something at the counter with a package tucked under one arm, looking quite relaxed in his blue velvet suit. Sophie stopped in the doorway so fast that Michael's feet nearly came out from under him trying to keep him from slamming into her. Martha wasn't so lucky—she knocked her nose straight into Michael's spine with an 'oof!'

"Sophie," said Howl in the ensuing quiet, "You've got to see the new suit I just bought, it's absolutely marvelous. What is this poor purple thing that you've torn to smithereens? It looks like you went at it with a pair of pruning shears. Wait, let me see—" here he stopped to peruse the piece of lavender paper in his hand more thoroughly. Michael jumped a little as Martha, already smashed up behind him, put her arms around his waist and squeezed her head past his shoulder to see better.

Howl was continuing, obviously totally unaware of the perilous state of affairs. "Gracious thanks…splendid defeat of…autumn festivities…Kingsbury… Look, Sophie, we've been invited to the royal ball next month! I shall have to get you something to wear right away, can't have you out and about in those beastly boring things you normally buy."

Sophie's continued silence put Michael in the way of getting out of the room as quickly as possible.

Howl threw the letter back down at the table and looked up at the three of them crammed into the shop doorway. He asked, "Is something the matter?"

~2~