Between Madame Suliman's Heartless and their complete lack of information leading to the recovery of Prince Stephen, they were trapped. Another day passed, with the sunset bringing more Heartless winging into Market Chipping, drunk with the concentration of strong hearts in the sturdy house but unable to reach them. They gnawed on gables, burrowed into the foundation, and threw themselves at the windows, but Calcifer's spells of concealment held and they couldn't find their way inside. They appeared only after dark, perhaps compelled by their mistress to hide their presence from the townspeople, but nevertheless Riku felt obligated to escort Sophie to and from the market on her grocery shopping trips. He didn't think for a moment Madame Suliman's agents were above using her as a line to reel them in, or do the same to Howl, who hadn't yet returned.
Riku found sketches of Sora and Kairi had appeared on lampposts with 'WANTED-CASH REWARD" emblazoned in bold letters beneath their portraits. The likenesses were poorly done; their faces looked older and leaner, and their blue eyes flat and dark with malice, but they were recognizable. Market Chipping wasn't a large town. Riku forbid the two of them to wander outside and avoided anyone he thought he recognized from their first day on the world.
The air had gained a palpable edge of panic to it. Soldiers had begun to trickle back into town, not the freshfaced boys bursting with patriotic fervor but the hollow, harrowing men of the secret police. The people, in turn, began to trickle out. The streets filled with carts piled high with anything families couldn't bear to part with, taking their chances in the farmlands at the very edges of civilization, almost within the boundaries of the Waste. Market Chipping was slowly bleeding to death by every road out of town. Madame Suliman's human agents supervised the evacuation and tried not to appear as if they were looking for something.
The atmosphere in the house was as thick and stuffy as it was outside. Calcifer and Sophie were short with each other, Sora and Kairi were short with each other, and Riku was short with everyone. Markl spent most of his time not sleeping or eating carefully avoiding the house.
Sophie watched it all from beneath the brim of her hat and refused the well-meaning entreaties from the townsfolk to get out before it was too late. A bubbly young woman of seventeen or so, with piles of blonde curls and full lips done up ripe-apple red, pounced on her nearly in tears one morning at the bakery. She claimed to be Sophie's sister, but even allowing for the weight of the curse there wasn't much family resemblance. Sophie hugged her, wished her well, and politely refused her tearful pleas to leave together.
In between playing escort Riku kept to the town itself, sifting through gossip and hearsay and piles of old newspapers in the town's library, hoping for a flash of insight, some miniscule clue the other hunters had missed. The librarian seemed perturbed by his intense interest in the topic of Prince Stephen, odd hair, and foreign mannerisms. When he spotted her conversing in clipped tones with one of the local sherrifs, he put a hasty stop to the fruitless research.
Kairi and Sora had spent a good portion of the days hiking through the Waste loaded down with as many luck charms as Markl could pull out of every nook and cranny of the house. Even with their luck, they found no clues, no sign, not even the barest whisper of the Prince and his party. There were tens of thousands of square miles to comb through, of beautiful but rugged forest, bare stone peaks, and snowdrifts that clung tenaciously to the mountainsides well into summer. The Heartless that had been let loose when the Witch of the Waste lost her heart to Madame Suliman's scheming thronged in the wilderness, masterless and unrestrained in their hunger. Concentrating on the search was impossible when Sora and Kairi's hearts shone like beacon fires to every Heartless within fifty miles. They returned every night looking more battered and less hopeful with every day that passed.
Even Sora's relentless optimism was being chipped away in coarse flecks by the knowledge their search may have been doomed from the beginning. The Strangian diviners could have been mistaken, in denial, or simply lying to provide their king with a convenient excuse to invade his neighbors. Their definition of 'alive' was also troublesome, since Prince Stephen may have fallen victim to the thousands of Heartless prowling the wilderness, and his heart was now cloaked in an inhuman skin that was very much alive but lost beyond his father's reach forever.
-ooo-
On the third day after the confrontation in the palace, Sora and Kairi returned early from their hunt in the Waste, without explanation. They quietly disappeared to spend the remainder of the day helping Markl box up the junk still left in the storefront, as a way to keep their hands and minds occupied and crowd out the sting of failure. Riku had declined their invitation to join in, and was sprawled on the couch watching the top of Calicifer's head dance over the logs as he slept. It was driving him slowly insane, being trapped here on a pea-green couch in a small town when he didn't know how long the world had, but he had no leads and a very canny sorceress on his trail. Riku formulated plan after plan, but all he could come up with he filed under "damn stupid", "would take more time than they've got", or "requires Radiant Garden Self-Defense Force members be both available and armed with flamethrowers", and discarded all of them.
The clock struck four in sonorous tones, and a distant, constant wailing began beneath the sound. "What's that noise?" Sophie asked from her place at the table. Her question didn't sound directed at anyone in particular, although Riku was the only one in the room likely to answer.
Riku sat up and turned around so he could rest his forearms on the sofa back. He'd heard a similar sound before, a distant mechanical cry, back on the Islands. His sleepy hometown had been at peace for fifty years, and the local fire department only used the sirens for tsunami warnings. This time they were undoubtedly being put to their original use, however. "Air raid siren, I think," he answered, glancing quickly out the darkening window.
Sophie curled up her knitting tighter in her gnarled hands. "I thought it would be louder."
"Sounds pretty far off. I don't think we're in trouble yet. If we were, you'd know," Riku said.
Sophie snorted. "I can't speak for you, but I've been in trouble since the Witch of the Waste…since we met. That's where this all started." She flexed the fingers of one hand, exploring the knots and ridges with her fingertips. "Do you ever feel like the body you've got isn't your own anymore?" Sophie mused, half to herself. It was an invitation for commiseration, and something more.
"Actually…yes. I know exactly what you mean," Riku said. "Nobody recognizes you, looking in a mirror is unbelievably creepy, and you keep banging your head on things because your legs are a different length than you're used to. Annoying as he—heck," he covered quickly, when Sophie glared. He'd gotten long out of the habit of watching his language, but Sophie reminded him strongly of maternal grandmother who had no reservations about giving her grandchildren a hearty smack when she caught them cussing. He was about twice as tall as he was then and she long since passed away, but it was a reflexive action.
"You do?" she asked, pleased by his unexpected display of manners. "What did you do? Annoy a witch?"
"Not quite. I listened to one, which is even worse. Sora left that part out while he was reciting the recent history of Radiant Garden. He was being charitable. It wasn't my proudest moment."
Sophie put aside her knitting, which didn't seem to be progressing much at all for all the time she spent staring at the embryonic scarf. "What happened to you?"
"I could ask the same of you, although I gather you wouldn't be able to tell me."
"Mmmpphh!" she answered.
"Right. Exactly. Kairi figured it out. The Witch of the Waste cursed you with the body of a ninety year old woman instead of a nineteen year old one for pi—getting her mad." Sophie seemed to flow out into the chair with relief. "But we don't know how to break it."
"I figured as much. Calcifer said he would help me, though," she said, and glanced over at the hearth.
"In exchange for what?" Riku prodded. "He's not really the giving type."
Sophie pinched her lips between her teeth and mulled over how much truth to add to the answer, and went for all of it. "He's under a curse, too."
"He hinted at as much," Riku agreed.
"I'm not much of a witch, really," Sophie explained. "I haven't the faintest idea how to break my curse, so I don't know how much use I could possibly be on his. I'm only a milliner, or I was, but he seems to think I can do whatever it is that needs to be done.
"Of all of us I think I got off the easiest. I still have all my teeth and my mind intact, and you young whippersnappers are much more polite to me than I'd wager you'd be otherwise," she said, and winked. Riku laughed, despite himself. "Madame Suliman said Howl was cursed, too, and somehow I think he's the worst off, even though he's still walking around in his own body." Sophie sighed. "I wish he wouldn't hide it from me. It can't be doing him any good."
Riku's mouth curdled on own unpleasant memories. "It's hard to show people a side of yourself you're ashamed of, even if you've known them your whole life. Part of you knows they want to help you despite everything…and another part is afraid to face them because they could just turn their backs to you after all."
"You sound an awful lot like you're speaking from experience, and you never answered me from before," Sophie said, her tone sharpening with interest. "What happened between you and this witch of yours?"
Riku didn't like dragging his mistakes back into the spotlight, but Sophie had been very kind to her houseguests, cooking for them, tidying their room, washing and mending their battlestained clothes—all without a word of complaint. Calcifer was fast asleep. Riku couldn't think of a good excuse to withhold the answer, and besides, he got the feeling she wasn't asking only out of simple curiosity. "Her name was Malificent," he admitted. "And I wanted the power to fix everything. I let her teach me how to control the Heartless, because I thought it would help me find out how to wake Kairi up when her heart was stolen. Except even she didn't know that you can't control them, not really. If you stick around them long enough they start controlling you. Darkness has a way of doing that to you. It ate Malificent alive, and almost did me in, too." He stopped, mustering the resolve to continue the confession. "I let Ansem's first Apprentice take over my body, because I was so sure I was in control of the Darkness. He was the one that pushed Radiant Garden over the edge, into oblivion.
"It took almost a year for me to fight my way back into myself. Sora and Kairi went looking for me, and I didn't want to be found. They told you I shut the door to Kingdom Hearts—saved existance as we know it and everything? That was only most of the truth. It was me giving in in the first place that gave him the opening he needed. People died because of me. I didn't want my friends to see what I'd done and what I'd become."
Sophie's hawkish features softened in sympathy, and she seemed to relax into her chair as if the hesitant monologue was, in a way, reassuring. "But you came back. If someone gives in to Darkness, they can come back?"
"Yeah," he said, "up until the very end. But the farther out you go the harder it is to find your way back to shore. I had help—a lot of help. And even then, it was the hardest thing I've ever done."
"So it isn't something that can be done alone," she said quietly, half to herself. Riku shook his head. "I see. Thank you, Riku. I ought to get started on dinner now, I suppose. Why don't you ask your friends what they might have a taste for?"