Page 38 of Confounding Oaths
After a moment’s consideration, Miss Bickle screwed up her nose. “Why would anybody want anything like that? None of those are pleasant at all. Anyway, we have placed the offering, now all that remains is to say the words.”
“The words,” Mr. Caesar pointed out once again, “that came to you in a dream.”
“Yes.” Miss Bickle nodded emphatically. “Those words.” Because she was the best kind of human being, Miss Bickle paused for an appropriately dramatic time and then said, loudly and clearly: “By the compact of three veils and nine cyphers, I request audience.”
For a moment nothing happened. And then for another moment.
Captain James gave Miss Bickle a regretful look. “I don’t think it worked, miss.”
Being, once again, possessed of a perspicacity that most of her kind lack, Miss Bickle beamed. “Oh, but it wouldn’t, you see, until somebody said that it hadn’t. But now you’ve said it didn’t, so I’m sure it shall.”
The captain glanced confusedly at Mr. Caesar but the only reply he received was “I’m sorry, I have no idea either.”
“She means,” said the Ambassador, stepping out from behind the tree trunk, “that we like to keep you waiting.”
Without hesitation, Miss Bickle scooped up the hamper. “We bring offerings.”
“We bring cheese,” clarified Mr. Caesar.
“But she’s rich,” explained the captain, “so it’s probably good.”
“It’s Cornish,” explained Miss Bickle. “From a little village near my grandfather’s country house. I do not believe it to be famous, but I think it very fine regardless.”
The Ambassador took the hamper. “And the teacakes?”
“Homemade,” Miss Bickle told him. “Well, made by our cook. But I understand she’s fearfully talented.”
Holding the basket over one arm, the Ambassador crumbled a corner from one of the cheeses and sampled it. “Acceptable. Now, I assume you’re here about your sister?”
It was a trick that never ceased to delight one member of the party nor to infuriate another.
“And how do you know that?” asked Mr. Caesar, warily.
“He’s from theotherworld,John,” Miss Bickle stage-whispered. “Theyknow thingsthere.”
“We have sources, certainly.” The Ambassador cast me a sly glance over Miss Bickle’s head.
“What sources?” asked Mr. Caesar, not so easily placated as his friend.
“A little bird. But if you are intending to ask what Ithinkyou are intending to ask, then you should know it will be dangerous.”
“I’d have gone with ‘fraught with danger,’” I told him.
“How dangerous?” asked Captain James.
This display of caution earned my contempt and an exclamation of shock from Miss Bickle. “You’re a military man, surely you should say, ‘I laugh in the face of danger.’ I believe there are rules.”
“In my experience, miss, them as laugh in the face of danger get a musket ball down the throat. Now, tell us what we can expect. And be detailed. Very detailed.”
Being, as he so recently reminded me, technically mortal, theAmbassador was not capable of atrulywithering stare, but he made the best approximation he could. “He was right, youaresupremely irritating.”
Mr. Caesar’s inevitable response of “Who was right?” was roundly ignored by everybody present except for your humble narrator since I am both thewhoin question and mystically bound to record every detail I observe for later explication.
When it became clear that he was not going to derail the conversation onto any other topic—a common strategy and necessary for survival in the Other Court if you don’t want one casual suggestion to see you spending a thousand years transformed into a living croquet set—the Ambassador continued. “What happened to your sister was the work of a being we callthe Lady—”
“How gnomic.” Mr. Caesar’s tone was as arch as his eyebrow.
“Do you want this information or not? She is a servant of Titania and as such I have no influence over her whatsoever. If you wished, you could assault her court and see if you could force some kind of concession”—
