They pulled away, all resisting elbows and eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Gone?” they said. “Gone where? We saw you yesterday. You brought us cinnamon cookies in bed.”
“Bah, Your Highness, but that is ba-a-a-d, ba-a-a-d for their tee-ee-eeth,” chided Nanny Nanny, who likewise did not seem astonished to see her.
Stunned, she turned, looked around her. Everything was exactly as she had left it a year before, and she, too, seemed exactly the same as the day she had set out on her glorious adventure, down to her ladybug slippers and her blue parasol (although she thought it had been of a slightly brighter shade). The children paid her no attention. She lingered in the nursery for another minute, then kissed them on the tops of their heads, one blond, one chestnut, and, frowning, left for the tower where Archibald the Clockmaker lived next to his brother, Arbadac the Bumbler.
The winding stairs were long and narrow, with a great many landings. She leaned the parasol (decidedly, decidedly, of a lighter color now!) against the wall at the bottom and began to climb. By the time she reached the third landing, she had forgotten the boat of the otherworldly moon and the little gray man with his cabbages. The gypsy grandmother with the braids spun from the eternal night vanished on the fifth, the gypsy thief’s peppery kiss faded on the seventh. The beekeeper with his soft burr of an accent and someone else’s face was the last to cling to the edges of her recollections, but at last he, too, slipped into oblivion, and by the time she knocked on Arbadac’s door on the seventeenth landing, she was fully certain—and it was quite plausibly the truth of the matter—that only one hour had passed since she had finished correcting the scrawny orphan’s orthography lesson.
(“Master Archibald’s brother is a magician,” the boy, who was the clockmaker’s assistant, had told her. “He can sure do magic. When he’s in his cups, he likes to set all the cogs of the clock dancing. Master Archibald gets horribly mad.”
And he had giggled.
“Now, why haven’t I thought of him before,” she had said to herself. “I’ll go speak to him after we get done with this lesson.” And, forcing herself to focus: “Write down, please: ‘dressmaker,’ ‘thief,’ ‘cabbage,’ ‘destiny.’ No, dear, ‘cabbage’ has two bees. I mean, two bs. Oh, this is making me sleepy, I’d better lie down for a bit before going up to the tower.”)
After her seventh, rather impatient knock, the door flew open abruptly. From the dimness of the stairwell, she squinted at the tall, lean man who wobbled on the threshold, his wispy hair aflame with the sun setting in the windows behind him. But the light had an odd, fragmented quality to it, and she heard a soft flapping sound, as of hundreds of insect wings beating at once. Just then, sure enough, a stupendous yellow butterfly brushed past her face and sailed majestically out of sight around the curve of the staircase, and another, and three more.
“They’re escaping, they’re escaping!” Arbadac cried, and before she could collect her wits enough to reply, he pulled her inside and slammed the door shut behind them. She blinked. The chamber shone, tinkled, and flittered. Brilliant sunlight filled hundreds of potion bottles, crystal balls, and specimen jars with many-colored radiance, odd spindly-legged instruments clicked and clacked, and a thick swarm of butterflies drifted through the air. Immediately a full dozen were quivering in her sleeves, tickling her neck, stirring in her hair.
“Is this a bad time?” she asked weakly.
“How’s that? Oh. No. No, everything’s fine.” Arbadac’s eyes were the color of fog and had a perennially dreamy look. “It’s only that I’m not entirely sure where these pests came from, you see, so it’s best to keep them all in here. Just in case, yes. Still, no harm done, thank goodness, not like the other month, Archie was most unhappy, he so dislikes untidiness and explosions, and that hole in the ceiling was a hassle to repair… Well. What can I do for you, Your Highness? May I offer you some tea? The cups often turn furry, but it tastes perfectly fine, I assure you.”
She refused the offer with hasty courtesy and told him about the prince’s enchantment. While she talked, he drifted about, waving butterflies away, his robes floating and billowing around him, his gaze abstracted; she had a distinct feeling that he was not listening to a word she said. When she finished, she looked at him with scant expectation. She was, in truth, feeling rather forlorn.
“Can you help break the spell, then?”
“The spell?” he said, stopping sharply and turning to her with a surprised look. “Ah, yes. The spell. Of course. Yes. Do you know who placed it?”
She had to confess she did not.
“I suppose it could be anyone,” Arbadac proclaimed in his airy voice. “All royals are like lightning rods for curses. Well, but you don’t really need to know the culprit. What you need is to weave a shirt.”
There was a brief pause filled with the beating of wings.
“A… shirt?” she asked, faintly.
“A shirt. Give it to your husband on the anniversary of your wedding day. When he puts it on, the spell will be over.”
He beamed at her.
She spat out a butterfly and looked at him wildly.
“And… that’s it?”
“That’s it. Except.” His smile vanished. He pressed his hands to his forehead and stood restlessly rippling his fingers as though trying to summon a melody on the harpsichord of his memory, likely somewhat out of tune. “Ah. Yes. The shirt must be woven out of bluebells. No, that doesn’t sound quite… Not bluebells… nettles. Yes, a shirt out of nettles.”
“Nettles? Are you quite sure?”
“Yes. And you can’t talk or laugh the entire time you’re weaving it, not until the prince puts it on. Silence is of the essence. If you speak even one word, you must unravel everything and start over.”
“Oh.”
“And you must weave it only by the light of the full moon. Or in the hour before sunrise.” He was gathering momentum now, speaking quickly, his fingers tap-tap-tapping against his forehead, his dreamy eyes gleaming with bursts of inspiration. “And only on Mondays. Though Tuesdays are probably fine, too. Yes. You do need to mind the buttons, of course.”
“Buttons?” Her nerves were so taut with her spirits rising and falling by turn that she felt they might snap. “Oh, please, what buttons?”
“But the buttons are the most important part! When you weave the shirt, you must think about the happy years you and your husband had together. Before he was under the spell, do you see, when he was still himself. Sew on a button for each true year, and he will be restored to his true self when he wears the shirt on his birthday.”
“On our wedding anniversary, you mean.”
“What? Yes, yes, the anniversary, of course… You only get one chance at breaking the spell, mind, so you have to get everything right the first time. But as long as you do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work, really. May I interest you in some tea?”
Hope palpitated in her heart with the hundredfold motion of soaring butterflies, and desperate to keep it alive, she declined, once again, the distinctly furry teacup he was holding out to her, thanked him, and ran out the door and down the winding stairs, yellow wings trembling in her hair, just as he was saying: “You might, of course, consider adding the tincture of…”
That very evening, she discovered that bunches of nettles were to be had in the kitchens (the head cook favored herbal soups), and she started on the shirt without delay. Her hands were soon covered in blisters, but she did not complain, because she was not in the habit of complaining, and also because she had now ceased to speak altogether, just as instructed. She had wondered how she would explain her precipitous silence, yet no one appeared to notice. Prince Roland never came near her, the old king had grown quite feeble and was napping his days away, Angie was currently answering all her own questions, Ro seemed satisfied with her mere presence in the nursery while he staged epic battles between forks and spoons, servants found her a perfect mistress who smiled and nodded at all their requests, and Brie and Nibbles had recently befriended a family of field mice and left the palace, possibly for good.