~A/N~
Hi again! I have a huge plan for this chapter, but it's large (HUGE!), so I'm going to do a fully reprehensible thing: splitting my chapters up into parts. I did it before in Five-Day Weekend, and nobody seemed to mind too much, so, why not, right? This means you have more suspense AND more frequent chapters, right guys? Right?
You'll notice I had to abbreviate Sophie's name in the chapter title, and I've been mildly editing chapter titles because, well, they don't fit in the boxes. This is a shame, and I felt it was better to abbreviate than to change the chapter's title if possible. FF.n, why?
On a less silly note, your responses to my legitimate authory questions last chapter were overwhelmingly positive, well-thought-out, and helpful. I'm so glad I have such talented reviewers. And thanks for all the favorites! Each one is a little writing reminder for me. It makes me think my dream of becoming an author is possible. Love you guys! Here goes!
~Chapter Seven~
~(I)~
In which Sophie is compared to a mushroom
~S~
Sophie woke up on Tuesday morning with an ineffable feeling of dread. She was not quite conviced that life outside of her closet-room would be arranged in the same way at all. But when she opened her door and peered rather cautiously out, nothing seemed to be amiss. Whereupon Sophie resolved to pretend that nothing in the moving castle would be any different than it had been…before. All her anger was quite gone. The state she'd been in yesterday was obviously mad. Trying to fix things had apparently been the exact remedy for all her feelings—she now felt quite content to sit and let things be fine and lovely and normal for as long as they pleased.
And for once here was a resolution that was easier to do than to say. Sophie, who had been expecting a fight, was almost disappointed. But everybody behaved completely normally at breakfast, and by the afternoon it was almost as if nothing had happened at all. For his part, Howl did not seem to object to this state of affairs. He got a rash of new orders from Kingsbury and became exceedingly busy. He did fix the hole in the castle wall, though. He made more a fuss about it than Sophie thought it warranted—even, she thought, for a hole in a castle wall. But then that was just Howl for you. He found a way to make a fuss out of everything.
The hole seemed to perplex Howl. It let through a lot of dusty white light and a chunk of blue sky and did not seem connected to anywhere it ought to be. The wizard apparently determined that this was Michael's room, and he sent Michael up and down the stairs six times in rapid succession while he himself stood on a chair waving his arm and various sticks and wands and broomsticks up into the blueness, trying to find his way through to the rightful top floor of the castle. "How about this? Is it coming through?" he would cry, and Michael, out of breath and shrill, kept shouting, "No! Not yet! I think—wait—no, that's just…oh, that's where that pair of hose went!"
"Blast it," Howl would mutter, and shoot a glance at Sophie: "Only you could create such a disaster."
"It does make the living room brighter," Sophie told him. She was determined not to be remorseful in the slightest.
"If I had wanted a bright, cheery living room, I would be living down in Market Chipping," Howl said, with the air that he would rather swallow crushed glass. He called Calcifer irritably and tried to send him up the hole. Calcifer did not want to go. Sophie sat on the table with her feet dangling off (since Howl had told her the floor was off-limits) and watched them go back and forth and enjoyed herself. Giant hole in the castle notwithstanding, it seemed such an ordinary thing to be witnessing after all that had transpired the day before.
The strange thing was she could barely remember making the hole. Or rather, she could clearly recall being nearly out of her mind with anger, and climbing into the battlements and searching for a door, and then finding one and going in; what she could not remember was putting in nearly as much effort as a hole of such impressive size warranted. With this in mind, Sophie found herself watching Howl's efforts to fix the hole as though she had not been a participant in its creation at all. Surely it could not have been her fault really. She even felt ordinary enough to offer helpful suggestions when the situation called for it.
"I don't think that sconce went exactly there," she said, after a period of much shaking and grinding in which the blue light disappeared once more behind stones. It was true. It looked as though Howl had put the same piece of wall back where it had been, but in the wrong direction somehow. One couldn't tell the exact places that it touched the edges of the hole, but it was clear that something was different about that patch of the wall. "Don't you think it ought to be a little to the left?"
Howl turned and flashed Sophie the briefest of superbly offended glares. "Frankly, I haven't the faintest idea," he said. "Most of us can't go about rearranging the castle on a whim."
"I wasn't intending to rearrange it," Sophie said. "Anyway, if even you can't tell the difference, it doesn't really matter anyway, right?"
"It's the principle of the thing," Howl said without vehemence, turning back to examine the wall again, and Sophie knew by that that he was not thinking about the argument much at all. The wall was still distracting him. He went knocking about on the new section and making disguntled faces as though he was not sure it was entirely fixed. "Is something wrong?" Sophie asked.
"Of course something's wrong," Howl said. "I'm having to fix a difficult hole in my own living room and no one's giving me a lick of peace in which to work."
"That's not what I meant," Sophie said, but Howl pretended not to hear her by pounding especially hard on the wall with something that looked like a dried apple but was obviously much harder, given the amount of noise it could make. Finally Sophie gave up, feeling sour, and went out to work on her garden. She consoled herself with the fact that they had managed to have a good old-fashioned argument without any mention of yesterday's events. This at least was a point of pride—she and Howl could be reasonable people after all, apparently.
After that the week passed without so much as a tiff—which in itself might have seemed rather odd, if Sophie had not taken it upon herself to be as rational as possible. She worked in the flower shop, made dinner, did not have to rescue Howl from any more suits, and even found a moment or two to dig up cuttings of her favorite roses from the waste and put them in pots of water on the patio along with the white rose she'd gotten in the mail. She was beginning to like it rather a lot, and made sure to say a few words to it every time she passed through to encourage it to grow roots. Sophie did not know much about taking cuttings from roses, but had got the impression from somewhere that it was difficult, and so she figured she'd better not take any chances with this one. "You're going to grow up big and strong and lovely," she told it. "None of this nonsense about the proper way to take cuttings. I think you must be a little more sensible than that." She began to plan where they all would go in the garden, if she could coax them to grow. Which she thought she could. Despite once having been part of the curse that nearly killed Howl—and a second time becoming toxic enough to kill off the brunt of the mansion's weed population—Sophie's gardening efforts had been mainly successful.
She sought Howl's opinion on the matter with no luck. Whenever Sophie entered a room, the wizard seemed just to be leaving it, muttering and fluttering to himself about something or the other. Once or twice, when he seemed to be idle, Sophie mustered the foolhardiness to say, "Howl, do you think—?"
"Can't think now," Howl said the first time. "Busy." And he whisked himself off to go crash about in the courtyard with some metal tubes. The second time he started, shouted, "That was it! Thanks, Sophie!" and began scribbling arcane-looking symbols on a scrap of parchment in front of him. "Go ask Michael," he said to her, after Sophie had dogged his elbow silently for a few long moments. "I'm sure he can tell you whatever it is."
At this Sophie's normal sense twitched a little bit. It seemed to think something was not quite right. Sophie quashed it immediately—she must be the only one unrecovered from yesterday's hysterics, and as long as she did not mention that, everything was surely unchanged. She went and asked Michael about the garden, not in the least because she was disappointed that she hadn't found the heart to argue with Howl's brushing her off.
Michael did not have any opinion about the flowers. "As long as they're not baby's-buttons," was all he could say. He was hard at work at spells Howl had set him, hunched at his cramped desk in a cluttered corner of his room. For a moment he reminded her uncannily of the wizard himself, and Sophie had a brief moment of alienation. Michael had been living with Howl since he was quite young; she knew that Howl had shaped his life considerably. She couldn't decide whether this made her jealous of Howl or proud of him.
"Michael," Sophie asked, "do you think Howl is avoiding me?"
Michael stopped frowning at his parchment long enough to give Sophie a quizzical look. He said, "Howl's not avoiding you. He's really just incredibly, extremely busy. And so am I. This new spell is driving me nuts. It's written in all sorts of circles and squares and things. What do you think it could mean, Sophie?"
Oh goodness, Sophie thought. Apparently he's been learning how to slither out of questions, too!
But he seemed to be telling the truth, because, despite being mostly a brightly-colored blur popping in and out of rooms all Wednesday, Howl seemed to have no qualms showing up in Sophie's room under the stairs on Thursday morning to wake her up.
"Sophie!" he cried. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was an amount of yellow entirely inappropriate for any time before noon.
"What are you doing awake?" Sophie asked him groggily. She'd been having a dream, but she couldn't remember what it involved, except whatever it was much more pleasant than her creaky little room before sunrise. And it wasbefore sunrise, which was odd, because Howl was almost never fully dressed this early.
"Sophie, you need to get up right now!" Howl said, ignoring what had been rather a rhetorical question anyway. "We're going to the market!"
"Market is on Tuesdays," Sophie managed to say.
"Not this market," the man said, putting his yellow sleeves on his yellow hips. "Come on, if you aren't out of bed in about, oh, twenty-two seconds, we won't have enough time to get there before everything good is gone. I fear it would absolutely ruinme."
Sophie rolled out of bed, blinking in the glare of Howl's fiercest and most stunning grin.
"Twenty-three," she groaned. "Give me twenty-three seconds."
~H~
It took considerably more than twenty-three seconds for Sophie to get out of bed and dressed, though a dizzily-excited Michael reminded an impatient Howl that she took much shorter in the bathroom than Howl himself ever had. It was terrible; today was the Wizards' Market and every moment not expressly spent getting there felt like the waste of a lifetime.
Perhaps it only seemed that Sophie was taking a long time, Howl considered, because of his own state of mind. Michael had been getting more and more excited over the past few days, until it seemed as though every time Howl looked he was ricocheting off a new surface of the castle in a bounce of repressed nerves. It had been bad enough that he hadn't been allowed to tell Sophie; and Sophie was going, and it would be the first time Calcifer would be seeing the market with free eyes as well…! All these things had gotten to Howl as well—as he knew they would. He had barely even managed to sleep the night before. This was mostly useful, since he'd gotten up at three-thirty to get dressed.
And now there were preparations to make, because he'd been pretending to be busy so well that he'd actually got busy as a result. Howl managed to distract himself so thoroughly that he didn't even try to imagine Sophie changing. This involved rounding up a bag of spells and oddities (lighter than it looked), checking on his suit (still yellow), losing a magic carpet (he could have sworn it was in one of his dressers), reasurring Calcifer that they were going soon ("You know me, old blueface, wouldn't miss it for the world!") checking his hair (in poor condition), offering encouragement at the bathroom door ("Won't you please hurry up, we're going to be late!"), ordering Michael to stop twitching (fruitless,) finding a magic carpet (rolled up in the depths of his walk-in closet), stopping to worry about the hole in the wall (still not quite right), eating a chunk of raw potato (not as good an idea as it had first appeared), and checking his hair again before Sophie announced she was ready to go by coming of the bathroom in a matching horrible grey shawl and horrible grey dress.
"Egads," Howl said when he saw her. His first impression was of some sort of lumpy brown vegetable, possibly a potato; then it resolved to Sophie's neck and head perched atop a truly shapeless outfit that looked as though she had worn it as an old lady. Howl was sure it had not looked good on her then either. "Are you leaving the castle in that?"
Sophie gave him a perplexed look and glanced down at the garment as though just becoming aware of its existence. "I was planning on it," she said. "Why?"
Howl couldn't look. He flopped face-first against the shop doorway, throwing his hands in the air. "Why?" he moaned. "They're not going to let us into the Wizards' Market because one of our party looks like a mushroom."
"Mushrooms?" Calcifer said, swooping into the castle room through the chimney. He was trying to be mysterious and demon-y and clever, but the prospect of market was infecting him too. "Oh, she appears! Meet you outside!" And he swooped back out again. Howl focused on the current argument.
"Wizards' Market? Is that where we're going?" Sophie asked, and squared her jaw in the way that could only mean she was going to go steamrolling along on her own path regardless of what Howl said. "I'm sure they don't have anything against mushrooms there."
"No, they don't," Howl said. "They grind them up and put them in really nasty spells."
This seemed to give Sophie pause for a moment, but only a moment. "Well," she said, "If I'm a mushroom then I'm a very practical one. I'll be so practical that nobody would even dream of using me in a nasty spell."
Howl looked up from his doorpost of despair and heaved a sigh. "Yes, that outfit very practical," he said. The woman was clearly a lost cause. "I think that's about all it has going for it. I daresay you could wear that thing to rugby practice. Don't you have anything…anything of any other color?"
"What's wrong with this color?" Sophie asked, with a particularly self-righteous look. Howl was certain she had not understood the rugby comment and that this was her way of pretending that she had. If he hadn't been in the deepest pits of despair it would have been endearing.
"Yes, what's wrong with that color?" Calcifer crackled, swooping in again before Howl could answer. "You vain wizard! Stop wasting time!" And he swooped out again without waiting for a reply.
Then Michael came crashing down the stairs, a misshapen lump of a knapsack towering on his back. "Are we going yet?" he asked with a jumpy, perplexed kind of look. "What's wrong with the color now?"
"Everything!" Howl said. Blast it, this was not how he wanted to spend his morning! Obviously Sophie should just accept that the color grey did not look good on her. No one in the castle had any sense of fashion whatsoever, or else they would have immediately seen what he meant. Grey took all the bright warm things about Sophie's features—her red-gold hair, the pink glow of her cheeks, the scintillating bits of green and brown in her eyes—and washed them out like laundry. And Howl knew (or suspected, since she went around so often in clothes like this) that she had a lovely figure, trim and energetic. It was all going to waste in that dress.
But Sophie was deaf to all pleas, and Calcifer and Michael did not give a hoot about Howl's opinions except that they were slowing everything down. They finally won the argument when Howl, pleading and making preparations at once, rolled the magic carpet out with a flourish onto the air in front of the castle door, where it hovered obediently level with the front step. Sophie's winning strategy was to look so apprehensive about travel by carpet that the wizard had to switch from harranguing to coaxing just to ensure that they would get out of the castle at all. "I'm just a little nervous," she said when Howl began trying to coax her, but she wasn't very convincing about it. Howl could admit this carpet was a bit threadbare in patches, and not as large as some of the more luxurious models, but hadn't she once flown back from the Waste with him on only a wind?
"That was different," Sophie said when Howl (quite gently, in his opinion) brought this up, but she could not elaborate on how. They were at last ready to leave. Calcifer had disappeared in the clouds above out of frustration; Howl was sure he would meet them again when they were off. Michael, who had run up and down the stairs twice more getting things he had forgotten, was finally on the carpet, seated at the left corner nearest the castle: "Come on, Sophie, it's really easy once you get used to it," he was saying, as Sophie stood on the castle steps looking mulish and afraid. "Howl can sit up front and I'll sit in the back, so you won't be near any of the edges!"
Michael's logic seemed a bit off to Howl, since that left only two of the carpet's edges covered, but he did not think it prudent to point out at this point. Perhaps it would work with whatever strange reasoning went on in Sophie-think. "I've been on many journeys with this old girl," he said to her encouragingly, handing Michael several large packages of spells and notebooks while he did so. "She's never failed me."
"Oh, so it's a lady carpet," Sophie said in a way that Howl thought was trying for jaunty. "That makes it all better, of course. Hello, carpet! Please don't drop me!" And she took a few tentative steps across the carpet's surface. It held its shape, of course, as magic carpets are supposed to do, and Sophie managed to seat herself shakily in the dead center, her fingers clutching rather vainly about her for something to hold onto. Howl felt a little bit bad for her then. Was this one of those times he was supposed to be gallant and help her or something? But if he did he was sure his help would be thoroughly rejected. If only she would stop being so stubborn!
Before Sophie could catch him thinking about her, Howl went back to secure the castle door and collect another parcel of magics, seething with excitement. All the arguments and opinions went flying around in his head then out again. They were going to Wizard's Market!
"Once we get started you won't really feel much at all." Michael was explaining when Howl came out again and threw himself onto the space left at the front of the carpet (if carpets could be said to have fronts.) "The flying is very smooth when Howl and Calcifer control the carpet. I haven't got it all right yet, but I'm not going to be flying it, so you don't have to worry about that!"
"I thought they magic carpets were all supposed to be…sort of automatic?" Sophie asked, sounding more nervous than ever.
Howl could hear Michael's voice frantically backtracking. "Well it really is, mostly," he said hurriedly. "This one just has a few quirks is all. It's nothing to worry about, really."
"I'm not worried," Sophie said behind Howl, and at that Howl could not stop himself from laughing. Sophie's grump of protest was drowned by the nervous gurgling noise she made when the carpet began to move out across the Waste-garden, gaining altitude very smoothly but at great speeds.
"This is quite alright," Sophie said again. "You're a very nice carpet." Howl hoped she was not going to do anything silly like faint or throw up. Sophie was made of stronger stuff, wasn't she? Then Calcifer shot past them through the still-dark in a blaze, trailing green and gold and blue sparks, cackling wildly to himself. "Slow!" The fire-demon was screeching on a piercing, gleeful laugh. "You're all so very slow on that thing! Sloooow!" And he dove forward into a bank of fog, disappearing from view for a few moments before popping up and soaring straight upwards until he was nothing but a bright spot in the grey morning.
His joy was infectuous. "Hahaha!" Howl found himself crying, as the winds rose around them and the ground rapidly dwindled. The wastes were wreathed in early-morning mists and things seemed to twinkle from within them; far to the east there was a greeny lightening that would probably soon be morning, but was certainly not there yet. "It's lovely out! Isn't it lovely out, Sophie?" And he turned around to look at she and Michael sitting there on the threadbare carpet. Calcifer was a speck of of flame shooting about somewhere above them.
"Watch where we're going!" Sophie squeaked. Her hands were grasping at folds in the carpet in front of her as if she could secure herself by them and she did look a little queasy; but she relented at last and looked out at the landscape. Just a tiny look, but Howl would accept it for now. "It is lovely out," she conceded. "Just a little chilly."
"Are you sure you'll be fine?" Howl asked. He was trying not to sound pleading, but he could hear it in his voice, all the same.
"Yes," Sophie said. "Now do watch ahead of us, please!"
"Look over there!" Michael called. "Howl, is that Kingsbury?"
And all things considered, Howl thought, he could not have felt better. Today was going to be a day. Maybe even the day. But even if not—a day would certainly be good enough for now.
~(I)~
