It was never any good commanding Dora. Maxwell Hyde had always been pretty careful not to, not if he wanted anything done, that was. She stared at Roddy and then went into wet mode, sinking onto the sofa and wringing her hands. “But I couldn’t think of anything to go with the potatoes!” she moaned.

“Oh, God!” Roddy said. “Grundo has to eat something!”

I saw she was going to start snapping commands at Toby next, and Toby had already had a pretty tough day. He was looking wiped. “Through here,” I said, and led the way to the dining room where the cheese and the potatoes were still on the table. I fetched out more plates and knives and found the pickle.

Grundo stared a bit and said in a strange grunty voice, “I’m not sure I can manage cold potatoes after all that cake with Mrs. Candace.”

“There’s plenty of cheese, though,” Roddy said coaxingly, pulling out a chair for him. “Sit down and try to eat a bit anyway.”

She was like that all the time with this Grundo. To other people, she was all “Grundo must have this, Grundo mustn’t go without that,” and with Grundo himself she was as if she was his caring elder sister—or his very fussy mother, more like. You’d think Grundo was the only person in her world. It annoyed me. I wanted to tell her to forget Grundo and get a life. Anyway, the sight of food had its usual effect on me. I sat down, scooped up pickle, and began a second supper. Toby came and sat beside me and started eating, too.

“What are you doing?” Roddy demanded.

“Eating,” I said.

“But you’re supposed to be divining for where Grandad is!” she said.

“I will when I’ve got my strength up,” I said soothingly.

Roddy was disgusted. “I asked you for help. You’re—you’re obstructionist!”

“And you,” I said, “would get on a bit better if you stopped being so uptight and domineering.” I’d never seen anyone look so outraged. She was too angry to speak. Toby shot me a look that said he was going to laugh any minute and probably choke on a potato. So I said to Roddy, “Oh, come on, sit down and get something to eat yourself.”

She stared at me like a queen on a particularly haughty day. “I tell you,” she said, “there’s a conspiracy.”

“I agree,” I said. “I believe you. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop eating. And while you eat, we can work out what we ought to do about it. That make sense?”

She dragged a chair out reluctantly. “Sit down, Grundo. The most important thing is to find out where the King’s Progress is at the moment.”

“They’re still in Norfolk,” Toby said. “It was on the morning media.”

“Oh,” said Roddy. She seemed a bit daunted for a moment. “I must get in touch with my parents!” she said. “I know! Grandad’s bound to have Dad’s latest speaker code, isn’t he?” She was pushing her chair back again to go to the far-speaker as she said it.

Grundo settled that. “Sit down,” he said. “Nick’s right. No one in the Progress knows we know anything, so you need to be careful what you say. You could get your parents into trouble. We need to decide what to do first. You’re not the only one who’s had a shock, you know.”

The power of the Grundo! She listened to his quiet, growly voice, and she sat down again at once. Actually, he was quite a nice kid. I discovered that as soon as we got talking. Not that this helped when it came to us deciding what to do. I was pretty stumped, to tell the truth. With Kings and politics in it, and powerful people like the Merlin, and Maxwell Hyde pretty probably dead, I didn’t see what kids like us could do.

“I wish we could ask Romanov,” I said.

THREE RODDY

Nick is the most maddening person I ever knew. If you try to make him do anything, he just goes kind of heavy at you. But perfectly polite. He gets a sweet look on his altogether too handsome face and refuses to budge. What made it worse was the way I seemed to feel him pushing at me all the time, in a warm, moist, eager way that I didn’t understand and didn’t want at all. I nearly threw one of Aunt Dora’s vile, bruised-looking potatoes at him several times.

We did get things talked through in the end, though Nick didn’t help by bleatin

g every so often that we ought to talk to Romanov. I’d never heard of this Romanov, so I took no notice, and we did get our priorities straight at last. We had to find where Grandfather Gwyn had taken Grandad and let my parents know what was going on.

After we cleared the food away, Nick finally got down to some serious divination magic. I didn’t feel too hopeful of it. His method seemed to be to spread a whole lot of books and maps on the living room floor and surround these with bowls of ink and water and different sorts of weights on strings—all of it in danger from twenty inquisitive salamanders—and sit hunched over it with Toby and Grundo squatting beside him and a crowd of the transparent folk hovering over their heads. The boys kept giving him advice. Aunt Dora put in her bit by sitting on the sofa and calling out things like “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” and “Is that how they do this in the Orient, dear?” and “Daddy won’t be pleased if you spill that ink!”

I couldn’t have worked like that, but Nick seemed quite placid. No doubt it helped that he was also basking in admiration. Grundo was in a fair way to thinking that Nick was the most marvelous person he’d ever met. I don’t think any boys Nick’s age had ever treated him like a human being before. Boys at Court were always too lofty, or else nervous because Grundo was a magic user, or both. As for Toby, I could see he had been Nick’s worshiper for weeks.

I began seriously to believe I had bungled that working in Wales, or why else had the spell sent me an amateur wizard with a swelled head? Oh, well, I thought, and went and found the far-speaker in the hall.

Grandad had one of those useful codepads, where you punch the name of the person you want and it springs open, to show you the code. Hoping hard that he had kept it up to date, I punched in Daniel Hyde. It duly sprang open, and the code looked right. Court codes are usually two letters and three numbers. This said “DH145,” so I dialed that.

It rang for quite a long time and was finally answered by a high, breathless voice saying, “Court Weather Office.”

The relief! I was so glad to get through that I hardly noticed or minded that the voice was the voice of Grundo’s odious sister, Alicia. She was a royal page after all, and one of her duties was to take calls when everyone else was too busy. “Oh, Alicia!” I said. “Could I speak to Dad? This is Roddy, and it’s urgent.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net