“I recommend you return to your seat,” he said in a calmly conversational tone. “You will be more comfortable there while I deal with—”
The sky flashed. Not lightning, Alice realized, seeing a large, ornate conservatory looming outside.Cannon fire.
“—this spot of bother,” Daniel said.
“People in glass houses should not throw cannonballs!”
“True,” Daniel agreed. “Unfortunately, pirates aren’t very keen on shoulds. Hold on.”
Alice assumed he meant to take a moment of silence to regather his thoughts, but in fact he meantliterallyhold on. Swinging the wheel starboard, he intoned several phrases of the flight incantation, and the cottage veered sharply. Something shattered. The sofa tipped upside down and skidded across the room to smash against a wall.
“Perhaps you would not have been comfortable there after all,” Daniel remarked.
Alice, clutching the windowsill for dear life (and Dearlove, for that matter, since she feared if she let go she would suffer the same fate as the sofa), stared amazedly at the man. His face was entirely serene as he wedged a bootheel against one of the wheel spokes so as to force the wheel around even as it strained against the pressure of magic. The wheel groaned. The air seemed to twist and heat. Snodgrass crawled out of the water closet, soaking wet and with blood streaking his forehead.
“What is happening?” he wailed.
“Just having a small disagreement with a pirate,” Daniel explained. “Nothing to worry about.”
Crash!
Chimney bricks clattered over the roof and rained past the window. A cloud of black ash and dust billowed from the fireplace. Peering over the windowsill, Alice saw the conservatory’s cannon smoking.
“If this is a small disagreement,” she said, “what would happen in a large one?”
“We’d die,” Daniel said. He removed his foot from the wheel, and spokes seemed to blur as the wheel spun back. A string of Latin words urged it faster, faster; Alice could have sworn she saw the wood sparking. A rumble shook the house—
“That was thunder,” Daniel assured her.
He had barely finished speaking when another rumble sent shutters slamming across the window, then back again, leaving cracked panes in their wake.
“That one was gunfire.”
“Bother,” Alice said. She drew the pistol from her dress pocket, but Daniel shook his head.
“That won’t have the necessary range. Dr. Snodgrass, did you pack any weapons in your suitcase?”
“Unnghghugh,” Snodgrass replied.
Daniel and Alice exchanged a dry look.
“I’ll go,” Alice said. She reeled across the room, pushing herself from chair to bench to upturned sofa until finally reaching Snodgrass’s suitcase. She wrestled with the latches, wincing as the lid suddenly flung open. A clutter of metal objects and underclothes tumbled out. Alice immediately snatched what appeared to be a rotary egg beater.
“Is this what I think it is?” she asked Snodgrass.
He peered up from where he had coiled himself against the kitchen bench. “You can’t use that while in flight!” he cried. “It will be disastrous!”
Taking that for a positive reply, Alice clambered to her feet once more and staggered back to the window.
“Don’t try it!” Snodgrass shouted desperately. “I say, don’t try it!”
“Before you do,” Daniel said, “show me your petticoat.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake,” she murmured. “Men!” Nevertheless, she lifted her skirt to reveal the heavy, lace-trimmed petticoat beneath.
Daniel’s mouth twitched with what might have been a smile or merely a consequence of speaking wild piratic magic.
“Satisfied?” Alice asked.
