The situation was worse than Zacharias had thought. He had expected some coolness on Edgeworth’s part, but not this readiness to snub him in public.
That Edgeworth was on such terms with Midsomer as to address him by his Christian name was no surprise—they had probably been at school together. What worried Zacharias more was what it was that Midsomer had promised.
“I must say, this is very irregular!” exclaimed Mr. Othman.
Sultan Ahmad corroborated this with a murmured complaint. He was richly attired in an embroidered gold suit, the look completed by a knotted headdress and a dagger in an elegant scabbard at his hip. His splendour drew admiring glances from the other guests, but any desire to be introduced could not survive the sultan’s glower.
Zacharias roused himself. He must consider his position at another time. For now, he had an offended foreign dignitary to deal with.
“I wish you would convey my apologies for what occurred at our previous encounter,” he said to the translator. “I had no notion wewould be broken in upon in that fashion. I would not have offended His Highness for the world.”
“Mr. Edgeworth has explained all,” said Mr. Othman grudgingly. “It was a shamefully botched affair, but His Highness is willing to overlook it. He is extremely unhappy that he has not yet received a commitment from your Government, however.”
It struck Zacharias that it might have served Edgeworth’s purpose to avoid giving the sultan a proper account of the Sorcerer Royal’s position. Edgeworth himself knew, or ought to know, that Zacharias was not beholden to the Crown, nor even at the service of the Society. His first allegiance was to the cause of magic itself, and how it could be turned to the nation’s advantage.
“His Highness knows, of course, that it could not rightly be calledmyGovernment,” Zacharias began.
“The sultan is not surprised! He thought it strange that a black man should be a representative of the British King,” said Mr. Othman. “He is pleased to understand the true state of affairs.”
Sultan Ahmad added a stream of lugubrious commentary, which Mr. Othman translated into a fluid particularisation of grievances, much to Zacharias’s discomfort:
“Since you, too, are a stranger here, you will enter into the sultan’s feelings. He fears the British are as untrustworthy as we have always heard. He suspects they have no intention of giving us ships or guns. The sultan wishes he had never been so injudicious as to abandon his island—he finds England excessively cold and uncomfortable, the food unpalatable, and the people unfriendly. It is all the more unfortunate that the country should be so inhospitable, with the queen in her delicate condition. She could not bear to let the sultan leave her for so long, and insisted on accompanying us. We cannot even leave, for we cannot contemplate travelling until the queen is safe. To think that the prince will be born under foreign skies, and not on the soil of his own kingdom!”
Zacharias tried to break into this flow of confidence, but in vain. When Mr. Othman finally paused for breath, he said:
“I sympathise extremely with the sultan’s distress, and am sorry he should be so displeased with this country, but I fear he labours under a misapprehension.”
But Mr. Othman was not listening. Both he and the sultan were staring over Zacharias’s shoulder, transfixed by a sight that seemed to horrify them. The translator opened his mouth and closed it again, and pointed a trembling finger.
“Witch!” he cried. He shot Zacharias a furious look. “You have led her to us. We are betrayed!”
Zacharias turned, and saw something even more dreadful than Mak Genggang standing at the end of the room with her arms akimbo and her eyes ablaze with the light of war. Next to her, rigged out in a spectacular pink dress and looking around with lively curiosity, was Prunella.
13
PRUNELLAHADNOTbegun the day with any intention of making an appearance at the Spring Ball. Zacharias had departed at noon, leaving her and Mak Genggang at his town house—which was just as well, in Prunella’s view, for she had her own plans for the day.
Mak Genggang disposed of herself, declaring that she meant to examine the English sky.
“Surely it cannot be very different from the skies above your country,” said Prunella.
Mak Genggang looked pityingly at her. “That shows you have not travelled abroad, child. There is much that can be read from a foreign sky. I shall require solitude, so you need not come with me.”
With that Prunella was left alone, which suited her.
The longer she continued in possession of the eggs, the more she felt a strange sympathy with them—but she lacked any language in which to communicate with her treasures. If she was to awaken theeggs, she must learn more about them, and the Sorcerer Royal’s library would contain all she could need to know.
The house formed part of the Crown’s property, the lease of which was enjoyed by the Society, and it had been inhabited for centuries by Sorcerers Royal conscious of the fact that more rooms meant a greater number of nooks and crannies in which their enemies might conceal themselves. It required only a brief search for Prunella to find Zacharias’s study.
She was not an imaginative creature, and she was more amused than daunted by the alchemical sigils on the floor and the skull on the windowsill.
“How divertingly thaumaturgical!” she exclaimed. “I wonder what the symbols signify, and what would happen if one were to string them into a spell. But there, if anything like the squashes should recur, Mr. Wythe would be very cross, and likely send me back to the school directly. I must be circumspect.”
She curbed the temptation to rummage in Mr. Wythe’s desk, decipher the sigils on the floor, or take a closer look at the unlamented Mr. Longmire. Instead she mounted a step Zacharias kept in the study to enable his reaching the higher shelves (though for Prunella it only served to elevate her to the middling level), and surveyed the books.
Zacharias possessed a tidy mind, but it was not a mind organised on wholly predictable principles. Prunella could not at first make out that the books had been arranged according to any sensible system. She discarded tome after weighty tome of thaumaturgical lore—all prodigiously interesting and philosophical, no doubt, but not at all to the purpose. But when she had pulled out and dismissed six medieval bestiaries in a row, the answer struck her.
He has ordered his books by subject, of course.
