snorted green sparks up the chimney.
“I was afraid you’d start thinking that,” Michael said. “But you’d be deceiving yourself, just like Mrs Fairfax.”
“How do you know?” said Sophie.
Calcifer and Michael exchanged glances. “Did he forget to spend at least an hour in the bathroom this morning?” Michael asked.
“He was in there two hours,” said Calcifer, “putting spells on his face. Vain fool!”
“There you are, then,” said Michael. “The day Howl forgets to do that will be the day I believe he’s really in love, and not before.”
Sophie thought of Howl on one knee in the orchard, posing to look as handsome as possible, and she knew they were right. She thought of going to the bathroom and tipping all Howl’s beauty spells down the toilet. But she did not quite dare. Instead, she hobbled up and fetched the blue and silver suit, which she spent the rest of the day cutting little blue triangles out of in order to make a patchwork sort of skirt.
Michael patted her shoulder kindly as he came to throw all seventeen pages of his notes on to Calcifer. “Everyone gets over things in the end, you know,” he said.
By this time it was clear Michael was having trouble with his spell. He gave up the notes and scraped some soot off the chimney. Calcifer craned round to watch him in a mystified way. Michael took a withered root from one of the bags hanging on the beams and put it in the soot. Then, after much thought, he turned the doorknob blue-down and vanished for twenty minutes into Porthaven. He came back with a large, whorled seashell and put that with the root and the soot. After that he tore up pages and pages of paper and put those in too. He put the lot in front of the human skull and stood blowing on it, so that soot and bits of paper whirled all over the bench.
“What’s he doing, do you think?” Calcifer asked Sophie.
Michael gave up blowing and started mashing everything, paper and all, with a pestle and mortar, looking at the skull expectantly from time to time. Nothing happened, so he tried different ingredients from bags and jars.
“I feel bad about spying on Howl,” he announced as he pounded a third set of ingredients to death in a bowl. “He may be fickle to females, but he’s been awfully good to me. He took me in when I was just an unwanted orphan sitting on his doorstep in Porthaven.”
“How did that come about?” asked Sophie as she snipped out another blue triangle.
“My mother died and my father got drowned in a storm,” Michael said. “And nobody wants you when that happens. I had to leave our house because I couldn’t pay rent, and I tried to live in the streets, but people kept turning me off doorsteps and out of boats until the only place I could think of to go was somewhere everyone was too scared of to interfere with. Howl had just started up in a small way as Sorcerer Jenkin then. But everyone said his house had devils in it, so I slept on his doorstep for a couple of nights until Howl opened the door one morning on his way to buy bread and I fell inside. So he said I could wait indoors while he got something to eat. I went in, and there was Calcifer, and I started talking to him because I’d never met a demon before.”
“What did you talk about?” said Sophie, wondering if Calcifer had asked Michael to break his contract too.
“He told me his troubles and dripped on me. Didn’t you?” said Calcifer. “It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might have troubles as well.”
“I don’t think you have. You just grumble a lot,” Michael said. “You were quite nice to me that morning, and I think Howl was impressed. But you know how he is. He didn’t tell me I could stay. He just didn’t tell me to go. So I started being useful wherever I could, like looking after money so that he didn’t spend it all as soon as he’d got it, and so on.”
The spell gave a sort of whuff then and exploded mildly. Michael brushed soot off the skull, sighing, and tried new ingredients. Sophie began making a patchwork of blue triangles round her feet on the floor.
“I did make lots of stupid mistakes when I first started,” Michael went on. “Howl was awfully nice about it. I thought I’d got over that now. And I think I do help with money. Howl buys such expensive clothes. He says no one’s going to employ a wizard who looks as if he can’t make money at the trade.”
“That’s just because he likes clothes,” said Calcifer. His orange eyes watched Sophie at work rather meaningly.
“This suit was spoiled,” Sophie said.
“It isn’t just clothes,” Michael said. “Remember last winter when we were down to your last log and Howl went off and bought the skull and that stupid guitar? I was really annoyed with him. He said they looked good.”
“What did you do about logs?” Sophie asked.
“Howl conjured some from someone who owed him money,” Michael said. “At least, he said they did, and I just hoped he was telling the truth. And we ate seaweed. Howl says it’s good for you.”
“Nice stuff,” murmured Calcifer. “Dry and crackly.”
“I hate it,” said Michael, staring abstractedly at his bowl of pounded stuff. “I don’t know – there should be seven ingredients, unless it’s seven processes, but let’s try it in a pentacle anyway.” He put the bowl on the floor and chalked a sort of five-pointed star round it.
The powder exploded with a force that blew Sophie’s triangles into the hearth. Michael swore and hurriedly rubbed out the chalk marks.
“Sophie,” he said, “I’m stuck in this spell. You don’t think you could possibly help me, do you?”
Just like someone bringing their homework to their granny, Sophie thought, collecting triangles and patiently laying them out again. “Let’s have a look,” she said cautiously. “I don’t know anything about magic, you know.”
Michael eagerly thrust a strange, slightly shiny paper into her hand. It looked unusual, even for a spell. It was printed in bold letters, but they were slightly grey and blurred, and there were grey blurs, like retreating stormclouds, round all the edges. “See what you think,” said Michael.
Sophie read:
“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.
Teach me to hear the mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
Decide what this is about
Write a second verse yourself.”
It puzzled Sophie exceedingly. It was not quite like any
