Lucky Rabbit

Pandy flew straight home as soon as Thaniel and the others settled in to work on his essay together. Hopefully, it wouldn’t take long, and they could just play for a while before bed. She hated to think of Thaniel going back to his dark, lonely bedroom still upset and worried over his homework. She really needed to talk to Augustus about having Thaniel move in with her. Though if the bad guys really were watching Thaniel, he couldn’t come to live with her while Eleanor was there. Argh!

When she got home, she found Eleanor slightly less enthusiastic about living in a rundown, mostly-abandoned house, but once the girl saw the pie, she made a miraculous recovery. While Eleanor and Isidor made inroads into the food, Pandy pulled Empress Glory aside and told her what Augustus had said.

With a snort, the other woman pushed back a lock of hair, shoveling a bite of rosemary bread thickly slathered with butter into her mouth. “Mffnt shoopd, y’know,” she mumbled, then swallowed and said, “I’m not stupid. He said he’d tww m’fml f’I shplld.”

This last was lost in another bite of bread, but the look on Glory’s face said she was Very Unhappy about it. She didn’t clarify, but Pandy remembered Augustus saying something about tattling to Glory’s family about her, as well as something about someone named… Andy? Anthony? Whichever one of these not-so-subtle threats had landed, Glory didn’t look inclined to break the rules about not speaking to people she knew before.

Feeling somewhat conflicted about her own relief, given that Empress Glory’s cooperation wasn’t exactly voluntary, Pandy moved on. “So, do you have any recommendations about where to go for things like furniture and scraps I can use to work on the house?”

Glory’s brows went up, and she swallowed the last of her bread, eyeing the rest of the vanishing loaf as she said, “If you give me some gold, I can go shopping while you’re gone tomorrow. Izzy can watch the kid for a few hours.” Then, misinterpreting Pandy’s expression, she added, “Don’t worry. They’re not places I go often. I don’t have the money for it. I can change up my clothes and makeup and they’ll never know it was me.”

Pandy shook her head, cleared her throat, and said, “Actually, Isidor will be at Kestrel tomorrow, so you’ll have to be here.” Everyone froze, and an actual grin started stealing over Isidor’s face before he noticed and wiped it away. Pandy grimaced. “Sorry I didn’t say anything sooner. There was the food, and I wanted to know what everyone did all day, and-” It was at this point that she realized something, and a cold chill crept up her back as she said, “Where’s Hazel?”

The three exchanged glances, but Isidor held up a hand. “It’s waited this long. Now what was that about Kestrel?”

Pandy didn’t like that at all, but with all eyes on her, she couldn’t just run out of the room in search of a marauding Dragon. Well, she could, but she doubted she’d ever hear the end of it. Just to keep the peace, she rattled off, “Augustus let it slip that we don’t have a way to get anywhere, so Lady Frances and Lady Brewer are going to come in the morning to pick us up, and their carriage will drop me off at Falconet, then take you to Kestrel, and the Kestrel chancellor said you could go there starting tomorrow, and you’ll have a uniform and books until we can get you your own, so that’s fine, and where is Hazel?”

Isidor sat crosslegged on the floor, a bit of pie halfway to his mouth, as he said, “I’m really going to Kestrel? Tomorrow?”

Pandy nodded, and if she didn’t know better, she would have sworn she caught the glint of tears in his eyes before he scowled down at the pie. “She’s up in the atrium. She tried to bite me when I told her to stop.”

Eleanor sniffed. “She didn’t try very hard.” Isidor rolled his eyes and passed her some milk in one of the cracked teacups that were the only beverage receptacles they’d been able to find.

With an apologetic smile at Glory, who rolled her eyes and didn’t even bother pausing as she stuffed her face, Pandy sprinted upstairs. It was easy enough to figure out at least some of what was happening, because Nyssa was there, sweeping the hall as she hummed tunelessly. Her feet had disappeared again, and she hovered a few inches above the floor, but she seemed happy enough with her task, so Pandy just waved as she jogged past, following the trail of dirt.

The floor of the atrium was covered in lumps and clumps of earth. Someone had brought up what looked like a spittoon out of an old Western, another container that probably used to be a vase, and a pitcher that was miraculously intact, and might have been useful if it wasn’t filled with soil. Plants of all kinds had been partially buried in the dirt, both in containers and just haphazardly planted in clumps on the formerly restored wooden floor. Even from the entryway, Pandy could see gouges in the wood from some unknown upheaval.

In the midst of all this was a filthy toddler, sitting on a particularly large mound of dirt, her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth as she patted the soil ever higher around the splayed roots of some shrub. As Pandy halted, feeling her heart sink at the destruction, Hazel looked up and said, “Plant!” while puffing out her little chest.

With a sigh of defeat, Pandy crossed to the adorable little troublemaker and squatted down beside her. “Didn’t I ask you to wait until I could get some pots? Do you remember?”

Hazel frowned. “Now,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Pandy shook her head. “Later,” she told the fledgling fiend. Hoping to distract her, she looked around. “Where’s Gus?”

“Plant!” Hazel declared again, this time pointing to a corner of the room, where Pandy could see that, indeed, the wooden duck had been planted up to his neck in a particularly moist mound of mulch.

Hurrying over, Pandy gently plucked the duck from his hillock and brushed him off. Ignoring Hazel’s cries of dismay, she sighed in relief as she saw that even though wood and water weren’t generally a good combination, the arboreal avian didn’t show any sign that the water had soaked into him, causing damage.

-4 LF

With a yelp, Pandy yanked her leg back, which did nothing to alleviate the sharp pain in her ankle. Looking down, she saw that Hazel had switched back to her draconic form and sunk her teeth into Pandy’s flesh. Her boots and pants had protected her from the worst of it, but the Dragon’s claws were about to be deployed, which probably wouldn’t go well.

Reaching down, Pandy plucked the petulant pipsqueak from her pants. “Bad dragon,” she said sternly as Hazel snapped her little teeth toward Pandy’s nose. “Look.” She showed the duck to the Dragon. “If water gets into him, he could be ruined. It would make the wood soft, and it might even split. Is that what you want?”

Hazel’s red eyes grew huge, and her whole body drooped. She let out a soft hiss, and an image entered Pandy’s mind of a sponge shaped like a duck, swelling to unrecognizable proportions. Pandy blinked. “Did you do that?” The dragonling tilted her head. “Could I do that?” Pandy asked. Hazel shrugged.

Seeing that the danger seemed to be over, Pandy lowered both Dragon and duck to the ground. Hazel immediately glomped onto Gus, catching him up in her clawed hands and turning him over and over as she examined every curve. Only once she was satisfied that he was all right did she look back up at Pandy, her gaze holding equal parts suspicion and concern.

Crouching, Pandy pushed at the wet mound where the duck had been immured. It looked like Hazel might have somehow gotten a few pitchers of water up here before using the pitcher itself as a pot, and the floor was soaked. As Pandy had suspected, the boards were dark and beginning to warp.

“See? This is what happens when you get wood wet. This is why we need pots,” Pandy told her. Hazel tilted her head to each side, examining the boards, then wrapped her arms around her duck and wilted. Pandy sighed and patted the scaly little head. “Next time I say we need to wait, will you listen?”

Hazel nodded, then turned and looked out of the window. It was already dark, but Pandy was almost certain there were fewer branches visible outside than there had been. Had the Dragon somehow managed to cut some down? Had she stopped at the branches, or would Pandy find whole trees brought low by the miniature mischief-maker? A sense of impatience reached her, pulling her out of her concern, and she focused on the Dragon again.

“I’ll try to go shopping tomorrow. I promise. And Eleanor is going to pick out the best plants to grow. Edible ones.” Which would be good, because Pandy couldn’t count on fruits and vegetables grown at Falconet or purchased from a market every day. Even with the magically cold pantry, she had a teen and a tween to feed, as well as Empress Glory, and as she’d seen when they devoured two meals worth of food in one sitting, that was going to take a lot of food. If Thaniel, Geraldine, or Abbington did get to move in with her, she’d have to get even more. How did parents do this?

Straightening up, she cast her mind over everything she needed to do. Go shopping, but she had a plan for that now. Hopefully Empress Glory would come up with a few good places to go as well, but in the worst case, everything but food could wait until Friday’s excursion. Pandy needed to set up regular orders of fresh meat, milk, and produce, as well as baked goods, at least until Nyssa remembered how to cook. Which she really, really hoped would happen soon, which meant she also needed to be ‘feeding’ the Apparition as often as possible.

Pandy also had to figure out how to be in two places at once. Eurydice needed to be at Avington House in order to be picked up first thing in the morning, but Bunny needed to be beside Thaniel, who had been struggling with nightmares ever since he started remembering the accident. And she had to keep working on the house itself, because she couldn’t just leave it in this condition. That wasn’t safe, and eventually Eleanor, Glory, or Isidor were going to find the cellar. It was down to sheer luck and the fact that the stairs were hidden behind a false wall in the cloak room that they hadn’t done so yet.

Walking back into the hall, Pandy said, “Nyssa?” and waited for the humming Apparition – it was more of an ominous drone, but Pandy was fairly certain it was meant to be cheerful – to look up.

“Yes, lady?” Nyssa said, hazy feet forming beneath the hem of her skirt, as if interacting with someone people-shaped had reminded her that she, too, was meant to be people-shaped.

“Could you help Hazel clean up in here? She can keep the, um, containers, but we can’t have a garden right on the floor,” Pandy said, and behind her, Hazel gave a dejected growl.

“Of course, my lady!” Nyssa said, only half of her body actually passing through Pandy on her way to the atrium. Fortunately, it wasn’t the half holding the broom, or Pandy probably would have taken a pole to the face. As it was, her ankle was still stinging from the Dragon bite, and she absently used Minor Heal to repair the small wound as she entered the office.

Pandy sat at the desk, picked up the Faithful Foundation book, and put another six hundred Mana into fixing Nyssa. That brought the Apparition up to a whopping sixty-two point seven percent complete, and Pandy stared at the number, feeling overwhelmed and defeated. Unless she wanted to start chopping off her own body parts and feeding them to the book to pay off the Life Force requirement, she was never going to…

Body parts. Body parts. In fact, Pandy had a whole laboratory full of body parts she didn’t know what to do with. What were the odds that they would work to pay off the book? Back in her old world, with her old luck, those odds were about the same as the chance of a shark in boxer shorts falling out of the sky directly through the roof of a sushi restaurant, and that had only happened once, as far as she knew. But here, for whatever reason, her luck didn’t seem to be as terrible. She had even – though she felt her whole body tense in fear of universal retribution as she thought it – had good luck now and then. Which meant it was time to go down and feed a philtrum to a folio.