Chapter 3: In which Anne enters into a castle and a bargain
Title: Alfred's Moving Castle
Genre: Fantasy/ Crossover
Pairings: USxfem!UK
Rating/Warnings: G, human names are used exclusively, genderbending
Summary: Based off the book version of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. Everything belongs to their respective owners. There are some odd familial relationships in here, but please just go with them :)
Notes: I had a lot of fun with a certain someone in this chapter... the hardest part was restraining him from cracking too many jokes! Enjoy!
There was a large black door in the black wall facing Anne and she made for that, hobbling briskly. The castle was uglier that ever close to it. It was far too tall for its height and not a very regular shape. As far as Anne could see in the growing darkness it was built of huge black blocks, like coal, and, like coal, the blocks were all different shapes and sizes. Chill breathed off those blocks as she got closer, but that failed frighten Anne at all. She just thought of chairs and firesides and stretched her hand out eagerly to the door.
Her hand could not come near it. Some invisible wall stopped her hand about a foot from the door. Anne prodded at it with an irritable finger. When that made no difference, she prodded with her stick. The wall seemed to be all over the door from as high as her stick could reach, and right down to the heather sticking out from under the doorstep.
“Open up!” Anne cackled at it.
That made no difference to the wall.
“Very well,” Anne said. “I’ll find your back door.” She hobbled off to the lefthand corner of the castle, that being both nearest and slightly downhill. But she could not get round the corner. The invisible wall stopped her again as soon as she was level with the irregular black cornerstones. At this, Anne said a word she had learned from Mei, that neither old ladies nor young girls are supposed to know, and stumped uphill and counterclockwise to the castle’s righthand corner. There was no barrier there. She turned that corner and hobbled eagerly toward the second big black door in the middle of that side of the castle.
There was a barrier over that door too.
Anne glowered at it impressively. “I call that very unwelcoming!” she said.
Black smoke blew down from the battlements in clouds. Anne coughed. Now she was angry. She was old, frail, chilly, and aching all over. Night was coming on and the castle just sat and blew smoke at her. “I’ll speak to Jones about this!” she said, and set off fiercely to the next corner. There was no barrier there - evidently you had to round the castle counterclockwise - but there, a bit sideways in the next wall, was a third door. This one was much smaller and shabbier.
“The back door at last!” Anne said.
The castle started to move again as Anne got near the back door. The ground shook. The wall shuddered and creaked, and the door started to travel away sideways from her.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Anne shouted. She ran after the door and hit it violently with her stick. “Open up!” she yelled.
The door sprang open inward, still moving away sideways. Anne, by hobbling furiously, managed to get one foot up on its doorstep. Then she hopped and scrambled and hopped again, while the great black blocks round the door jolted and crunched as the castle gathered speed over the uneven hillside. Anne did not wonder the castle had a lopsided look. The marvel was that it did not fall apart on the spot.
“What a stupid way to treat a building!” she panted as she threw herself inside it. She had to drop her stick and hang on to the open door in order not to be jolted straight out again.
When she began to get her breath, she realized there was a person standing in front of her, holding the door too. He was a head taller than Anne, but she could see he was the merest child, only a little older than Mei. And he seemed to be trying to shut the door on her and push her out of the warm, lamplit, low-beamed room beyond him, into the night again.
“Don’t you have the impudence to shut the door on me, my boy!” she said.
“I wasn’t going to, but you’re keeping the door open,” he protested, although somehow keeping an ounce of infinite politeness in his tone. “What do you want?”
Anne looked round at what she could see beyond the boy. There were a number of probably wizardly things hanging from the beams - strings of onions, bunches of herbs, and bundles of strange roots. There were also definitely wizardly things, like leather books, crooked bottles, and an old, brown, grinning human skull. On the other side of the boy was a fireplace with a much smaller fire than all the smoke outside suggested, but then this was obviously only a back room in the castle. Much more important to Anne, this fire had reached the glowing rosy stage, with little blue flames dancing on the logs, and placed beside it in the warmest position was a low chair with a cushion on it.
Anne pushed the boy aside and dived for that chair. “Ah! My fortune!” she said, settling herself comfortably in it. It was bliss. The fire warmed her aches and the chair supported her back and she knew that if anyone wanted to turn her out now, they were going to have to use extreme and violent magic to do it.
The boy shut the door. Then he picked up Anne’s stick and politely leaned it against the chair for her. Anne realized that there was now no sign at all that the castle was moving across the hillside: not even the ghost of a rumble or the tiniest shaking. How odd! “Tell Wizard Jones,” she said to the boy, “that this castle’s going to come apart round his ears if it travels much further.”
“The castle’s bespelled to hold to hold together,” the boy said. “But I’m afraid he's not here at the moment.”
This was good news to Anne. “When will he be back?” she asked a little nervously.
“Probably not till tomorrow now,” the boy said. “What do you want? Can I help you instead? I’m his apprentice, Matthew.”
This was better news than ever. “I’m afraid only the Wizard can possibly help me,” Anne said quickly and firmly. It was probably true too. “I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.” It was clear Matthew did mind. He hovered over her a little helplessly. To make it plain to him that she had no intention of being turned out by a mere boy apprentice, Anne closed her eyes and pretended to go to sleep. “Tell him the name’s Anne,” she murmured. “Old Anne,” she added, to be on the safe side.
“That will probably mean waiting all night,” Matthew said. Since this was exactly what Anne wanted, she pretended not to hear. In fact, she almost certainly fell into a swift doze. She was so tired from all that walking. After a moment Matthew gave her up and went back to the work he was doing at the workbench where the lamp stood.
So she would have a whole night’s shelter, even if it was on slightly false pretenses, Anne thought drowsily. Since Jones was such a wicked man, it probably served him right to be imposed upon. But she intended to be well away from here by the time Jones came back and raised objections. She looked sleepily and slyly across at the apprentice. It rather surprised her to find him such a nice, polite boy. After all, she had forced her way in quite rudely and Matthew had not complained at all. Perhaps Jones kept him in abject servility. But Matthew did not look servile. He was a tall, blond boy with a pleasant, open sort of face with glasses (but very ordinary, quite forgettable, honestly), and he was most respectably dressed. In fact, if Anne had not seen him at that moment carefully pouring green fluid out of a crooked flask onto black powder in a bent glass jar, she would have taken him for the son of a prosperous farmer. How odd!
Still, things were bound to be odd where wizards were concerned, Anne thought. And this kitchen, or workshop, was beautifully cozy and very peaceful. Anne went properly to sleep and snored. She did not wake up when there came a flash and a muted bang from the workbench, followed by a hurriedly bitten-off swear word from Matthew. She did not wake when Matthew, sucking his burned fingers, put the spell aside for the night and fetched bread and cheese out of the closet. She did not stir when Matthew knocked her stick down with a clatter, reaching over her for a log to put on the fire, or when Matthew, looking down into Anne’s open mouth, remarked to the fireplace, “She’s got all her teeth. She’s not the Witch of the Waste, is she?”
“I wouldn’t have let her come in if she was,” the fireplace retorted.
Matthew shrugged and picked Anne’s stick politely up again. Then he put a log on the fire with equal politeness and went away to bed somewhere overhead.
In the middle of the night Anne was woken by someone snoring. She jumped upright, rather irritated to discover that she was the one who had been snoring. It seemed to her that she had only dropped off for a second or so, but Matthew seemed to have vanished in those seconds, taking the light with him. No doubt a wizard’s apprentice learned to do that kind of thing in his first week. And he had left the fire very low. It was giving out irritating hissings and poppings. A cold draft blew on Anne’s back. Anne recalled that she was in a wizard’s castle, and also, with unpleasant distinctness, that there was a human skull on a workbench somewhere behind her.
She shivered and cranked her stiff old neck around, but there was only darkness behind her. “Let’s have a bit more light, shall we?” she said. Her cracked little voice seemed to make no more noise than the crackling of the fire. Anne was surprised. She had expected it to echo through the vault of the castle. Still, there was a basket of logs beside her. She stretched out a creaking arm and heaved a log on the fire, which sent a spray of green and blue sparks flying up the chimney. She heaved on a second log and sat back, not without a nervous look or so behind her, where blue-purple light from the fire was dancing over the polished brown bone of the skull. The room was quite small. There was no one in it but Anne and the skull.
“He’s got both feet in the grave and I’ve only got one,” she consoled herself. She turned back to the fire, which was now flaring up into blue and white flames. “Must be salt in that wood,” Anne murmured. She settled herself more comfortably, putting her knobby feet on the fender and her head into a corner of the chair, where she could stare into the colored flames, and began dreamily considering what she ought to do in the morning. But she was sidetracked a little by imagining a face in the flames. “It would be a thin blue face,” she murmured, “very long and thin, with a thin blue nose. But those curly white flames on top are most definitely your hair. Suppose I didn’t go until Jones gets back? Wizards can lift spells, I suppose. And those purple flames near the bottom make the mouth - you have savage teeth, my friend. You have two white tufts of flame for eyebrows….” Curiously enough, the only orange flames in the fire were under the white eyebrow flames, just like eyes, and they each had a little purple glint in the middle that Anne could almost imagine was looking at her, like the pupil of an eye. “On the other hand,” Anne continued, looking into the orange flames, “if the spell was off, I’d have my heart eaten before I could turn around.”
“Don’t you want your heart eaten?” asked the fire.
It was definitely the fire that spoke. Anne saw its purple mouth move as the words came. Its voice was nearly as cracked as her own, full of the spitting and whining of burning wood. “Naturally I don’t,” Anne answered. “What are you?”
“A fire demon,” answered the purple mouth. There was more whine than spit to its voice as it said, “I’m bound to this hearth by contract. I can’t move from this spot.” Then its voice became brisk and crackling. “And what are you?” it asked. “I can see you’re under a spell.”
This roused Anne from her dreamlike state. “You see!” she exclaimed. “Can you take the spell off?”
There was a popping, blazing silence while the orange eyes in the demon’s wavering blue face traveled up and down Anne. “It’s a strong spell,” it said at length. “It feels like one of the Witch of the Waste’s to me.”
“It is,” said Anne.
“But it seems more than that,” crackled the demon. “I detect two layers. And of course you won’t be able to tell anyone about it unless they know already.” It gazed at Sophie a moment longer. “I shall have to study it,” it said.
“How long will that take?” Anne asked.
“It may take a while,” said the demon. And it added in a soft, persuasive flicker, “How about making a bargain with the awesome me? I’ll break your spell if you agree to break this contract I’m under.”
Anne looked warily at the demon’s thin blue face. It had a distinctly cunning look as it made this proposal. Everything she had read showed the extreme danger of making a bargain with a demon. And there was no doubt that this one did look extraordinarily evil. Those long purple teeth...
“Not completely,” admitted the demon. “But do you want to stay like that till you die? That spell has shortened your life by about sixty years, if I am any judge of such things.”
This was a nasty thought, and one which Anne had tried not to think about up to now. It made quite a difference. “This contract you’re under,” she said. “It’s with Wizard Jones, is it?”
“Of course,” said the demon. Its voice took on a bit of a whine again. “I’m fastened to this hearth and I can’t stir so much as a foot away. I’m forced to do most of the magic around here. I have to maintain the castle and keep it moving and do all the special effects that scare people off, as well as anything else Alfred wants. Alfred, well, Wizard Jones to you, is quite heartless, you know.”
Anne did not need telling that Jones was heartless. On the other hand, the demon was probably quite as wicked. “Don’t you get anything out of this contract at all?” she said.
“I wouldn’t have entered into it if I didn’t,” said the demon, flickering sadly. “But I wouldn’t have done if I’d known what it would be like. I’m being exploited.”
In spite of her caution, Anne felt a good deal of sympathy for the demon. She thought of herself making hats for Yan while Yan went gadding. “All right,” she said. “What are the terms of the contract? How do I break it?”
An eager purple grin spread across the demon’s blue face. “You agree to a bargain?”
“If you agree to break the spell on me,” Anne said, with a brave sense of saying something fatal.
“Done!” cried the demon, his long face leaping gleefully up the chimney. “I’ll break your spell the very instant you break my contract!”
“Then tell me how I break you contract,” Anne said.
The orange eyes glinted at her and looked away. “I can’t. Part of the contract is that neither the Wizard nor I can say what the main clause is.”
Anne saw that she had been tricked. She opened her mouth to tell the demon it could sit in the fireplace until Doomsday in that case.
The demon realized she was going to. “Don’t be hasty!” it crackled. “You can find out what it is if you watch and listen carefully. I beg you to try, and fire demons don't often beg! The contract isn’t doing either of us any good in the long run. And I do keep my word. The fact that I’m stuck here shows that I keep it!”
It was in earnest, leaping about on its logs in an agitated way. Anne again felt a great deal of sympathy. “But if I’m to watch and listen, that means I have to stay here in Jones’s castle,” she objected.
“Only about a month. Remember, I have to study your spell too,” the demon pleaded.
“But what possible excuse can I give for doing that?” Anne asked.
“We’ll think of one. Alfred is pretty useless at most things. In fact,” the demon said, venomously hissing, “he’s too wrapped up in himself to see beyond his nose half the time. Sometimes I wonder if he even uses those glasses... Anyway, we can deceive him - as long as you’ll agree to stay.”
“Very well,” Anne said. “I’ll stay. Now find an excuse.”
She settled herself comfortably in the chair while the demon thought. It thought aloud, in a little crackling, flickering murmur, which reminded Anne rather of the way she had talked to her stick when she walked here, and it blazed while it thought with such a glad and powerful roaring that she dozed again. She thought the demon did make a few suggestions. She remembered shaking her head to the notion that she should pretend to be Jones’s long-lost great-aunt, and to one or two other ones even more far-fetched, but she did not remember very clearly. The demon at length fell to singing a gentle, flickering little song. It was not in any language Anne knew - or she thought not, until she distinctly heard the word “saucepan” in it several times - and it was very sleepy-sounding. Anne fell into a deep sleep, with a slight suspicion that she was being bewitched now, as well as beguiled, but it did not bother her particularly. She would be free of the spell soon….
A/N: So here is number three! I got accepted to my first choice college and I'm very happy, so I had time to post this! I hope you all enjoyed it! Please review! They make me so so happy!~ <3
Genre: Fantasy/ Crossover
Pairings: USxfem!UK
Rating/Warnings: G, human names are used exclusively, genderbending
Summary: Based off the book version of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. Everything belongs to their respective owners. There are some odd familial relationships in here, but please just go with them :)
Notes: I had a lot of fun with a certain someone in this chapter... the hardest part was restraining him from cracking too many jokes! Enjoy!
There was a large black door in the black wall facing Anne and she made for that, hobbling briskly. The castle was uglier that ever close to it. It was far too tall for its height and not a very regular shape. As far as Anne could see in the growing darkness it was built of huge black blocks, like coal, and, like coal, the blocks were all different shapes and sizes. Chill breathed off those blocks as she got closer, but that failed frighten Anne at all. She just thought of chairs and firesides and stretched her hand out eagerly to the door.
Her hand could not come near it. Some invisible wall stopped her hand about a foot from the door. Anne prodded at it with an irritable finger. When that made no difference, she prodded with her stick. The wall seemed to be all over the door from as high as her stick could reach, and right down to the heather sticking out from under the doorstep.
“Open up!” Anne cackled at it.
That made no difference to the wall.
“Very well,” Anne said. “I’ll find your back door.” She hobbled off to the lefthand corner of the castle, that being both nearest and slightly downhill. But she could not get round the corner. The invisible wall stopped her again as soon as she was level with the irregular black cornerstones. At this, Anne said a word she had learned from Mei, that neither old ladies nor young girls are supposed to know, and stumped uphill and counterclockwise to the castle’s righthand corner. There was no barrier there. She turned that corner and hobbled eagerly toward the second big black door in the middle of that side of the castle.
There was a barrier over that door too.
Anne glowered at it impressively. “I call that very unwelcoming!” she said.
Black smoke blew down from the battlements in clouds. Anne coughed. Now she was angry. She was old, frail, chilly, and aching all over. Night was coming on and the castle just sat and blew smoke at her. “I’ll speak to Jones about this!” she said, and set off fiercely to the next corner. There was no barrier there - evidently you had to round the castle counterclockwise - but there, a bit sideways in the next wall, was a third door. This one was much smaller and shabbier.
“The back door at last!” Anne said.
The castle started to move again as Anne got near the back door. The ground shook. The wall shuddered and creaked, and the door started to travel away sideways from her.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Anne shouted. She ran after the door and hit it violently with her stick. “Open up!” she yelled.
The door sprang open inward, still moving away sideways. Anne, by hobbling furiously, managed to get one foot up on its doorstep. Then she hopped and scrambled and hopped again, while the great black blocks round the door jolted and crunched as the castle gathered speed over the uneven hillside. Anne did not wonder the castle had a lopsided look. The marvel was that it did not fall apart on the spot.
“What a stupid way to treat a building!” she panted as she threw herself inside it. She had to drop her stick and hang on to the open door in order not to be jolted straight out again.
When she began to get her breath, she realized there was a person standing in front of her, holding the door too. He was a head taller than Anne, but she could see he was the merest child, only a little older than Mei. And he seemed to be trying to shut the door on her and push her out of the warm, lamplit, low-beamed room beyond him, into the night again.
“Don’t you have the impudence to shut the door on me, my boy!” she said.
“I wasn’t going to, but you’re keeping the door open,” he protested, although somehow keeping an ounce of infinite politeness in his tone. “What do you want?”
Anne looked round at what she could see beyond the boy. There were a number of probably wizardly things hanging from the beams - strings of onions, bunches of herbs, and bundles of strange roots. There were also definitely wizardly things, like leather books, crooked bottles, and an old, brown, grinning human skull. On the other side of the boy was a fireplace with a much smaller fire than all the smoke outside suggested, but then this was obviously only a back room in the castle. Much more important to Anne, this fire had reached the glowing rosy stage, with little blue flames dancing on the logs, and placed beside it in the warmest position was a low chair with a cushion on it.
Anne pushed the boy aside and dived for that chair. “Ah! My fortune!” she said, settling herself comfortably in it. It was bliss. The fire warmed her aches and the chair supported her back and she knew that if anyone wanted to turn her out now, they were going to have to use extreme and violent magic to do it.
The boy shut the door. Then he picked up Anne’s stick and politely leaned it against the chair for her. Anne realized that there was now no sign at all that the castle was moving across the hillside: not even the ghost of a rumble or the tiniest shaking. How odd! “Tell Wizard Jones,” she said to the boy, “that this castle’s going to come apart round his ears if it travels much further.”
“The castle’s bespelled to hold to hold together,” the boy said. “But I’m afraid he's not here at the moment.”
This was good news to Anne. “When will he be back?” she asked a little nervously.
“Probably not till tomorrow now,” the boy said. “What do you want? Can I help you instead? I’m his apprentice, Matthew.”
This was better news than ever. “I’m afraid only the Wizard can possibly help me,” Anne said quickly and firmly. It was probably true too. “I’ll wait, if you don’t mind.” It was clear Matthew did mind. He hovered over her a little helplessly. To make it plain to him that she had no intention of being turned out by a mere boy apprentice, Anne closed her eyes and pretended to go to sleep. “Tell him the name’s Anne,” she murmured. “Old Anne,” she added, to be on the safe side.
“That will probably mean waiting all night,” Matthew said. Since this was exactly what Anne wanted, she pretended not to hear. In fact, she almost certainly fell into a swift doze. She was so tired from all that walking. After a moment Matthew gave her up and went back to the work he was doing at the workbench where the lamp stood.
So she would have a whole night’s shelter, even if it was on slightly false pretenses, Anne thought drowsily. Since Jones was such a wicked man, it probably served him right to be imposed upon. But she intended to be well away from here by the time Jones came back and raised objections. She looked sleepily and slyly across at the apprentice. It rather surprised her to find him such a nice, polite boy. After all, she had forced her way in quite rudely and Matthew had not complained at all. Perhaps Jones kept him in abject servility. But Matthew did not look servile. He was a tall, blond boy with a pleasant, open sort of face with glasses (but very ordinary, quite forgettable, honestly), and he was most respectably dressed. In fact, if Anne had not seen him at that moment carefully pouring green fluid out of a crooked flask onto black powder in a bent glass jar, she would have taken him for the son of a prosperous farmer. How odd!
Still, things were bound to be odd where wizards were concerned, Anne thought. And this kitchen, or workshop, was beautifully cozy and very peaceful. Anne went properly to sleep and snored. She did not wake up when there came a flash and a muted bang from the workbench, followed by a hurriedly bitten-off swear word from Matthew. She did not wake when Matthew, sucking his burned fingers, put the spell aside for the night and fetched bread and cheese out of the closet. She did not stir when Matthew knocked her stick down with a clatter, reaching over her for a log to put on the fire, or when Matthew, looking down into Anne’s open mouth, remarked to the fireplace, “She’s got all her teeth. She’s not the Witch of the Waste, is she?”
“I wouldn’t have let her come in if she was,” the fireplace retorted.
Matthew shrugged and picked Anne’s stick politely up again. Then he put a log on the fire with equal politeness and went away to bed somewhere overhead.
In the middle of the night Anne was woken by someone snoring. She jumped upright, rather irritated to discover that she was the one who had been snoring. It seemed to her that she had only dropped off for a second or so, but Matthew seemed to have vanished in those seconds, taking the light with him. No doubt a wizard’s apprentice learned to do that kind of thing in his first week. And he had left the fire very low. It was giving out irritating hissings and poppings. A cold draft blew on Anne’s back. Anne recalled that she was in a wizard’s castle, and also, with unpleasant distinctness, that there was a human skull on a workbench somewhere behind her.
She shivered and cranked her stiff old neck around, but there was only darkness behind her. “Let’s have a bit more light, shall we?” she said. Her cracked little voice seemed to make no more noise than the crackling of the fire. Anne was surprised. She had expected it to echo through the vault of the castle. Still, there was a basket of logs beside her. She stretched out a creaking arm and heaved a log on the fire, which sent a spray of green and blue sparks flying up the chimney. She heaved on a second log and sat back, not without a nervous look or so behind her, where blue-purple light from the fire was dancing over the polished brown bone of the skull. The room was quite small. There was no one in it but Anne and the skull.
“He’s got both feet in the grave and I’ve only got one,” she consoled herself. She turned back to the fire, which was now flaring up into blue and white flames. “Must be salt in that wood,” Anne murmured. She settled herself more comfortably, putting her knobby feet on the fender and her head into a corner of the chair, where she could stare into the colored flames, and began dreamily considering what she ought to do in the morning. But she was sidetracked a little by imagining a face in the flames. “It would be a thin blue face,” she murmured, “very long and thin, with a thin blue nose. But those curly white flames on top are most definitely your hair. Suppose I didn’t go until Jones gets back? Wizards can lift spells, I suppose. And those purple flames near the bottom make the mouth - you have savage teeth, my friend. You have two white tufts of flame for eyebrows….” Curiously enough, the only orange flames in the fire were under the white eyebrow flames, just like eyes, and they each had a little purple glint in the middle that Anne could almost imagine was looking at her, like the pupil of an eye. “On the other hand,” Anne continued, looking into the orange flames, “if the spell was off, I’d have my heart eaten before I could turn around.”
“Don’t you want your heart eaten?” asked the fire.
It was definitely the fire that spoke. Anne saw its purple mouth move as the words came. Its voice was nearly as cracked as her own, full of the spitting and whining of burning wood. “Naturally I don’t,” Anne answered. “What are you?”
“A fire demon,” answered the purple mouth. There was more whine than spit to its voice as it said, “I’m bound to this hearth by contract. I can’t move from this spot.” Then its voice became brisk and crackling. “And what are you?” it asked. “I can see you’re under a spell.”
This roused Anne from her dreamlike state. “You see!” she exclaimed. “Can you take the spell off?”
There was a popping, blazing silence while the orange eyes in the demon’s wavering blue face traveled up and down Anne. “It’s a strong spell,” it said at length. “It feels like one of the Witch of the Waste’s to me.”
“It is,” said Anne.
“But it seems more than that,” crackled the demon. “I detect two layers. And of course you won’t be able to tell anyone about it unless they know already.” It gazed at Sophie a moment longer. “I shall have to study it,” it said.
“How long will that take?” Anne asked.
“It may take a while,” said the demon. And it added in a soft, persuasive flicker, “How about making a bargain with the awesome me? I’ll break your spell if you agree to break this contract I’m under.”
Anne looked warily at the demon’s thin blue face. It had a distinctly cunning look as it made this proposal. Everything she had read showed the extreme danger of making a bargain with a demon. And there was no doubt that this one did look extraordinarily evil. Those long purple teeth...
“Not completely,” admitted the demon. “But do you want to stay like that till you die? That spell has shortened your life by about sixty years, if I am any judge of such things.”
This was a nasty thought, and one which Anne had tried not to think about up to now. It made quite a difference. “This contract you’re under,” she said. “It’s with Wizard Jones, is it?”
“Of course,” said the demon. Its voice took on a bit of a whine again. “I’m fastened to this hearth and I can’t stir so much as a foot away. I’m forced to do most of the magic around here. I have to maintain the castle and keep it moving and do all the special effects that scare people off, as well as anything else Alfred wants. Alfred, well, Wizard Jones to you, is quite heartless, you know.”
Anne did not need telling that Jones was heartless. On the other hand, the demon was probably quite as wicked. “Don’t you get anything out of this contract at all?” she said.
“I wouldn’t have entered into it if I didn’t,” said the demon, flickering sadly. “But I wouldn’t have done if I’d known what it would be like. I’m being exploited.”
In spite of her caution, Anne felt a good deal of sympathy for the demon. She thought of herself making hats for Yan while Yan went gadding. “All right,” she said. “What are the terms of the contract? How do I break it?”
An eager purple grin spread across the demon’s blue face. “You agree to a bargain?”
“If you agree to break the spell on me,” Anne said, with a brave sense of saying something fatal.
“Done!” cried the demon, his long face leaping gleefully up the chimney. “I’ll break your spell the very instant you break my contract!”
“Then tell me how I break you contract,” Anne said.
The orange eyes glinted at her and looked away. “I can’t. Part of the contract is that neither the Wizard nor I can say what the main clause is.”
Anne saw that she had been tricked. She opened her mouth to tell the demon it could sit in the fireplace until Doomsday in that case.
The demon realized she was going to. “Don’t be hasty!” it crackled. “You can find out what it is if you watch and listen carefully. I beg you to try, and fire demons don't often beg! The contract isn’t doing either of us any good in the long run. And I do keep my word. The fact that I’m stuck here shows that I keep it!”
It was in earnest, leaping about on its logs in an agitated way. Anne again felt a great deal of sympathy. “But if I’m to watch and listen, that means I have to stay here in Jones’s castle,” she objected.
“Only about a month. Remember, I have to study your spell too,” the demon pleaded.
“But what possible excuse can I give for doing that?” Anne asked.
“We’ll think of one. Alfred is pretty useless at most things. In fact,” the demon said, venomously hissing, “he’s too wrapped up in himself to see beyond his nose half the time. Sometimes I wonder if he even uses those glasses... Anyway, we can deceive him - as long as you’ll agree to stay.”
“Very well,” Anne said. “I’ll stay. Now find an excuse.”
She settled herself comfortably in the chair while the demon thought. It thought aloud, in a little crackling, flickering murmur, which reminded Anne rather of the way she had talked to her stick when she walked here, and it blazed while it thought with such a glad and powerful roaring that she dozed again. She thought the demon did make a few suggestions. She remembered shaking her head to the notion that she should pretend to be Jones’s long-lost great-aunt, and to one or two other ones even more far-fetched, but she did not remember very clearly. The demon at length fell to singing a gentle, flickering little song. It was not in any language Anne knew - or she thought not, until she distinctly heard the word “saucepan” in it several times - and it was very sleepy-sounding. Anne fell into a deep sleep, with a slight suspicion that she was being bewitched now, as well as beguiled, but it did not bother her particularly. She would be free of the spell soon….
A/N: So here is number three! I got accepted to my first choice college and I'm very happy, so I had time to post this! I hope you all enjoyed it! Please review! They make me so so happy!~ <3