338. Malina Badlight's Little Castle

338. Malina Badlight’s Little Castle

While we were thinking what to do next, an embassy from Ambivolo arrived at Uncle Rich’s plantation. The grand old man had sent his favorite pages, the imps Shiver and Quiver, with a huge yellow pumpkin stuffed with angel’s hair sweet and cases of bottles of  apple brandy, vanilla whisky, spiced pear, bramble and almond liquers and a fig leaf and white chocolate concotion.

He wanted to know if we had advanced in our search.

“How do we tell this mercurial crackpot that the spirit of his son is now within a tiny pink cocoon? He sends us all this load of stuff and we in return a tiny pink cocoon. He won’t be able to bear it. At least not calmly. I can already hear him screaming and raging and tearing his clothes and putting ashes in his hair and banging and breaking stuff and maybe even fainting if he isn’t too manly for it,” asked Uncle Rich.

“That doesn’t surprise me. I myself would burn the place to the ground if one of my kids ended up in a cocoon,”

“What place? Your home? Because we don’t know where Malina’s is,” said Uncle Gentlerain. “And it won’t do to burn Nick of Time’s workshop.”

“You have such a stiff upper lip, Gentie. First you find the place and then you throw a fit. It doesn’t work that way. You have to go berserk from the first minute. Raze everything in your way till you get where you want to.”

“I would rather find someone to lift this curse before matters get further out of hand. Quiver and Shiver, do  you think Henny might have some notion how to help his brother? This isn’t exactly an illness, but … who knows? We can hope, can’t we?”

“That pink cocoon is Master Umbrian?” the imps were aghast. “Kill the messenger! No, we´re not telling Don Ambivolo that. Are you sure? Because if he massacres everybody in his way and it turns out that isn’t Umbrian at all and we would have died in vain and...”

“Would you tell Henny? Or at least bring him here in secrecy for us to tell? Maybe he can give his father a tranquilizer before informing him.”

“Yes, like put him to sleep for a thousand years too. Well, till that cocoon thing cracks open or whatever it has to do,” said Brightfire.

“Yes, we can get Henny. It’s probably all we can do,” said Quiver. “But we´ve heard you mention Malina, and we can’t find her, but we know where she used to live and you can burn that house.”

“Get Henny and if he can’t do anything, we´ll see about Malina. No sense in alerting her about this if we can fix the problem ourselves. She’s a very bad lot,” said Gentlerain.

Henny’s eyes were as round as two billiard balls. He didn’t say a word. He just listened to Gentlerain explain the situation to him. It was not his father he was worried about. “My mother had better not hear of this,” he finally said when he spoke. For all his knowledge, he had never heard of the cocoon curse and we had no choice but to allow Quiver and Shiver to take us to Malina’s old home, a small castle-like place somewhere near Minced Forest.

We thought it would be abandoned and even in ruins, but no. It looked very well tended. It had, for instance, all around it, a magnificent space of brightly colourful poisonous flowers.

“Who lives here now? Because someone does,” said Brightfire.     

“Clients is it? I’m inside hanging a chandelier,” shouted a woman’s voice.

And we stepped into the castle and there was …the oversized third tooth woman who could multiply herself by three. She was about to place lit candles in a metal chandelier that hung from the ceiling. There were six candles and three of her, and the candles were momentarily stuck in her foreheads, two each, like horns, until she began to pluck them out of there and put them in their places on the metal structure.

“What can I do for you? You’re quite a crowd. And with children too. You don’t bring children along on occasions like these unless you mean to eat them. You are fay folk. We can speak openly. What is this about?”

“Why are you living in Malina’s home?” asked Uncle Gentlerain.

“Are you relatives of hers? She gave us this house in payment for a job we did for her. Like three hundred years ago,” said La Avernina.

“Was it a cocoon curse job?”

“Why, no. Is that where the girl ended? Inside a cocoon?”

“Malina?”

“Not Malina. The other girl. Her rival. The one she payed us to hex.”

“No. This is not her in here either. What did you do to hex the rival?”

“Oh, we gave a friend of ours  who owed us a favor a tiny vial with coal pea juice and instructions to pour it into a coke the girl would be drinking. That girl drank lots of coke. That would turn the girl into a green pea. We used to turn people into peas a lot back then.”

“Well, that didn’t happen.”

“Really? Well, if it didn’t you should have said so hundreds of years ago. We’re not answering for a mistake now. So the girl ended in a cocoon? But you said she didn’t, and that sort of curse doesn’t need anything but mean words. No drinking anything.”

“I have two questions for you now,” said Gentlerain. “The first is have you any idea how to lift a cocoon curse? And the second is who is the friend who was supposed to administer the coal pea juice?”

“You’ll have to ask my husband both questions,” said La Avernina. “I’ve already spoken too much. And for free. He’ll want something in exchange for the answers.”

“I don’t think he’s going to like what we will offer him for his answers,” said Brightfire. And his hair suddenly glowed like a bonfire.