Magicians of Caprona - Diana Wynne Jones [44]
“Unless,” said Angelica, suddenly bright and pert, “we steady it with a spell.”
Tonino transferred his miserable look from the table legs to her sharp little face. He sighed. The subject had been bound to come up. “You’ll have to do the spell,” he said. Angelica stared at him. He could feel his face heating up. “I hardly know any spells,” he said. “I—I’m slow.”
He had expected Angelica to laugh, and she did. But he thought she need not have laughed in such a mean, exultant way, nor keep saying, “Oh that’s good!” like that.
“What’s so funny?” he said. “You can laugh! I know all about you turning your father green. You’re no better than me!”
“Want to bet?” said Angelica, still laughing.
“No,” said Tonino. “Just make the spell.”
“I can’t,” said Angelica. It was Tonino’s turn to stare, and Angelica’s turn to blush. A thin bright pink spread right up the bulge of her forehead, and she put her chin up defiantly. “I’m hopeless at spells,” she said. “I’ve never got a spell right in my life.” Seeing Tonino still staring, she said, “It’s a pity you didn’t bet. I’m much worse than you are.”
Tonino could not credit it. “How?” he said. “Why? Can’t you learn spells either, then?”
“Oh, I can learn them all right.” Angelica took up the broken tap again and scribbled angrily with it, great yellow scratches in the varnished top of the table. “I know hundreds of spells,” she said, “but I always get them wrong. For a start, I’m tone-deaf. I can’t sing a tune right to save my life. Like now.” Carefully, as if she was a craftsman doing a fine carving, she peeled up a long yellow curl of varnish from the table, using the tap as a gouge. “But it’s not only that,” she said angrily, following her work intently. “I get words wrong too—everything wrong. And my spells always work, that’s the worst of it. I’ve turned all my family all colors of the rainbow. I’ve turned the baby’s bath into wine, and the wine into gravy. I turned my own head back to front once. I’m much worse than you. I daren’t do spells. About all I’m good for is under standing cats. And I even turned my cat purple too.”
Tonino watched her working away with the tap, with rather mixed feelings. If you looked at it practically, this was the worst possible news. Neither of them had a hope against the powerful spell-maker who had caught them. On the other hand, he had never met anyone who was worse at spells than he was. He thought, a little smugly, that at least he had never made a mistake in a spell, and that made him feel good. He wondered how the Casa Montana would feel if he kept turning them all colors of the rainbow. He imagined the stern Petrocchis must hate it. “Doesn’t your family mind?” he asked.
“Not much,” Angelica said, surprisingly. “They don’t mind it half as much as I do. Everyone has a good laugh every time I make a new mistake—but they don’t let anyone talk about it outside the Casa. Papa says I’m notorious enough for turning him green, and he doesn’t like me to be even seen anywhere until I’ve grown out of it.”
“But you went to the Palace,” said Tonino. He thought Angelica must be exaggerating.
“Only because Cousin Monica was having her baby and everyone was so busy on the Old Bridge,” said Angelica. “He had to take Renata off her shift and get my brother out of bed to drive the coach, in order to have enough of us.”
“There were five of us,” Tonino said, smugly.
“Our horses collapsed in the rain.” Angelica turned from her gouging and looked at Tonino keenly. “So my brother said yours were bound to have collapsed too, because you only had a cardboard coachman.”
Uncomfortably, Tonino knew Angelica had scored a point. “Our coachman collapsed too,” he admitted.
“I thought so,” said Angelica, “from the look on your face.” She went back to scraping the table, conscious of victory.
“It wasn’t our fault!” Tonino protested. “Chrestomanci says there’s an enemy enchanter.”
Angelica took such a slice out of the varnish that the table swooped sideways and Tonino had to push it straight. “And he’s got us now,” she said. “And he’s taken