Chapter three plz
Three
In which Vindicta runs away
Chantrelle felt sick.
That morning she had awoken to sunlight flowing through the wide dormitory windows, birdsong sung by birds who had obviously taken voice lessons, the smell of crepes from downstairs, a warm eiderdown and an empty bed on the other side of the room. This would not have been so distressing if there hadn't been a note:
Dear Chantrelle,
I've left Ms Adrianne's. I won't be coming back. 4 yrs is too long to spend In a place like that. I'm going to become a pirate. In the mean time I'm staying at the witch school across the city from here. I really hope I'll see you again sometime, you're awesome.
Your friend,
Vicki
Folded into the quartered note was a small map of the city drawn, in a hurry, by Vicki. A circle marked Miss Adrianne's and the witch school was marked by a star.
Chantrelle realised that moisture was forming in the corners of her eyes. She hurriedly wiped it away. She crumpled up the note and map and lobbed them across the room. They missed the waste basket entirely. She flopped onto her bed, on top of the covers, and tried to get back to sleep. It was impossible. She rolled over onto her stomach.
An observer might have heard a muffled sob or ten. They might have seen how her pillowcase was damp and her eyes ringed in red when she finally got up and got dressed. They might possibly have noticed her pause and bend over just before exiting. They could, conceivably, have witnessed her slipping a carefully folded piece of paper into he pocket.
As she went to breakfast, the two words rebounding in her mind were you're awesome.
Vicki had been gone for two weeks and Chantrelle thought she might be going mad.* Vicki's half of the room was exactly as it had been left, except for the note, which Chantrelle kept with her at all times. The room was as pristine as Vicki had left it, with half her clothes still in the dresser. Chantrelle was always up until the unholy hours of the morning, and could often be found bawling about some book at any godforsaken oh-dark-thirty the gods cared to forsake. She tripped over walls and walked into the floor, and fell off her horse four times in one week, at which point she was banned from horseback riding. Once, she managed to incapacitate herself via the ceiling. No one was quite sure how she had done it. She moved the note and map from pocket to pocket, and if she didn't have any pockets she carried it around in her hand. If you wanted her to do something that required both hands, she was useless. (This is partly why she kept falling off her horse.) If you suggested that she put it down, she looked at you like a religious fanatic might look at a person who has just ordered them to tar and feather their god, and then taunt the god with fondue forks.**
One day, Mrs. Tortouwa summoned Chantrelle to her office. It turned out that the only reason Chantrelle was at this extremely expensive school at all was that her mother had been a famous model. Thus, she had won a scholarship for her daughter. However, the scholarship only covered four years of education...
“...However, as you are now a legal adult, you can do whatever you want.” Mrs. Tortouwa droned on.
“What?”
“Miss LaReche, your eighteenth birthday was two days ago. We threw you a party, but you were so submersed in doom and gloom that you didn't even notice.”
Chantrelle's lips moved. Today was June 4th. She realised what was bothering her. “Two days ago? That's
when I fell down the stairs.”
Aprua Tortouwa scowled. “Yes. In the absence of a horse, you decided that you needed some other way to incapacitate yourself.”
“Well, I had a concussion. No wonder I didn't understand.” Chantrelle had thought they were celebrating the fact that she'd injured herself.
Vindicta was in trouble.
Serious trouble.
Deep, deep trouble.
The kind of trouble you can only get into when you sneak into a witch school, and it's time for fees to be paid and figures of authority realise that yours haven't been paid and you're not even enrolled, and you don't have any magical talent at all.
She had vaulted over a ten-foot stone wall around the school from a third-story window, and had heard a disconcerting and deceivingly quiet snap from her left ankle, and was now running painfully through the streets. She had also heard a series of clicks from both wrists as she landed, palms out to protect her head. Even Miss Adrianne's would be better than being out in the open right now.
She reached the main street, and leaped over a short garden wall into the front seat of a stagecoach. It was going a lot faster than the stages usually went...
Vicki looked across the wide red seat at the driver standing in front of the seat. It was a girl not much older than Vicki herself, With skin so pale it was silvery-grey. Across her nose, where one would normally freckle, was a scattering of faint silver-dollar circles (the same size, and the same colour). In fact, they occurred wherever normally she would have freckled or tanned. She wore a soft fur shirt, she same sheeny colour as her skin. The ends of the fur shone a bright white-silver. Her pants were bright white suede, laced up the sides of her legs with suede cords and her tail, a thick, fur-less, fish-like tail, was wrapped in the cords. Her hair was white-silver and bound into a shape like a fish tail using more white cords. Her eyes were deep, fluid, dark silver, wide with surprise, and aimed at Vicki.
“Hello.”
“Hello?”
Vicki said, “Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Why?”
“I'm an adventuress.”
“Oh.” You didn't ask adventurers why they were leaving somewhere; you only asked them why they were going to somewhere. If you asked why they were leaving, they might have to admit that they were running away.
“I stole the enchanted mallet that must be used to ring
The Gong of À§ŒŞŽÖšFĆ.”
She sounded very proud of herself.
“I see. That's very impressive. Uh... Why?”
“Because the sorcerer who employed me ordered me to make sure that
The Gong of À§ŒŞŽÖšFĆ
is not rung!”
“and how does stealing the mallet keep it from being rung?”
“You can't ring a gong without a mallet, silly!”
“Uh, can't they ring it with a different mallet?”
“No, they'd never do that.”
“Ah. Priests? Tradition? Et cetera?”
Her gaze fixed on a point in the distance that she was not, in fact, driving to.
“Uh, I think it's more the way that when it's not rung with this exact mallet, it makes everyone who hears it explode one organ at a time starting with the liver.”
“Ah.” they galloped past a stretch of rippling blue. “Hey!”
“What!?” The girl pulled hard on the reins. The horses pulled up short, steaming.
Vicki hopped out. “Thanks, 'bye!”
Vicki broke into a painful run as the coach rolled off, the horses kicking sparks from the cobbles in their effort to get going again.
She eventually came to a dockside tavern. She went in.
Faces with less teeth than eyes leered greasily out of the smoky haze. Many took back their leers when they saw her face, to spend them on girls who couldn't literally cut someone dead with a look. She limped to the bar and dropped her coin purse on the counter.
The heavy, expensive thump of gold muted by velvet beckoned sweetly to nearly every ear in the room.
“That's all I have,” she said, partly to the barman and partly to anyone else who might be listening. “Does anyone around here know anything about healing broken ankles?”
“There's my wife,” said the barman, mesmerised by the sound of the gold. “She can take care of you. She was a nurse.” Vicki could tell that he was keeping from her the fact that she had failed nearly all her tests.
“Alright,” said Vicki. Her ankle was really hurting now. So were both her wrists.
She turned and saw three large men looming in the corner, definitely not believing that all she had was on the counter. She glared at them. They moved back a bit. She limped up the stairs, to which the barman had indicated. Eyes now watering, she opened the door at the top of the stairs. A large woman in a very white dress with a very pink apron was bending over a kind-of-white bed. She was changing the vaguely white sheets for fairly white ones. This must mean she was the barman's wife.
“Excuse me?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know anything about broken ankles?”
“Oh, my goodness!” She dropped the sheets and began to rush over. Then she stopped. “Do I know you?”
“Uh, I don't think so.”
“Oh. I thought you might be my daughter... you sound like her. And you look a little like her... Well, you broke your ankle?”
“Yes. I think.”
The woman took one look at Vicki's ankle, and said, “Oh, dear.”
Maybe half an hour later, Vicki was sitting on the edge of one slightly white bed. Her ankle was wrapped in bandages and cotton, and had had some volatile ointment applied to it. Her wrists were wrapped in bandage. The bandages on her wrists were very stiff-- this was partly because of the sticks woven into them.
“It's to keep them from getting hurt again. Now, how did you already know your ankle was broken?”
“I kind of jumped over a ten-foot wall--”
“Oh!”
“--From a third-story window--”
“Oh, my goodness!”
“--and landed on it.” Vicki finished, slightly annoyed.
“Why on Earth--!”
“I was being chased by rabid witches.”
Chantrelle wandered through the streets. This was hard, seeing as she was carrying her own cheap cardboard suitcase as well as Vicki's purple alligator skin case. She had gone to the witch school looking for Vicki, and had been informed that they were looking for her too. As it happened, she passed the docks and inquired around, but although she got hit on a total of 18 times by different sailors in 15 minutes, she heard nothing of Vicki. She must already have left.
Even if she couldn't find Vicki, she still needed to go home. She couldn't pay for a train, but Vicki had left her a little money in a little satin shovel purse with a note:
Use it well. -V.
It was just enough to catch a ship home. Assuming she chose one run by “Privateers,” who were apparently legal pirates... The accommodations were nicer than those on the other non-passenger ships, but less expensive than passenger ships.
Hmmm.......
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*Not Vicki, Chantrelle. Although Chantrelle did occasionally think of Vicki as mad, she more often thought of her as the opposite of mad for getting herself out of this figgin place.
**You can imagine for yourself how this is done.