talkstohats

The lingering backache - going on a week now - is bad enough.

But this is the second night in a row that Sophie's woken up with a sudden urge to run down to the bathroom and lose last night's dinner, and she isn't amused. She scowls at herself in the mirror as she washes her hands. Bags under her eyes, hair hovering in all directions around her head - she feels like almost as much of a hag as she did under the witch's spell.

"You know you haven't got time for this being ill nonsense," she tells her reflection. "Whatever it is, you'd better get rid of-"


Her voice breaks off, as her knees, quite suddenly, give way, and she sinks to a seat on the side of the tub.


Her hands fold tightly over her stomach, fingers interlaced.

It seems she's always destined to be slow at figuring things out.

"Really," she says aloud, her voice quite calm, "you ought to have known yesterday. You ought to have known last week." Her cycle had been off, but it's easy to forget to worry about things like that when you've spent a significant amount of time as a ninety-year-old woman. But that's no excuse. It's especially no excuse for a witch -

- for a witch.

She can't see her reflection anymore from her position, but she's fairly sure that if she could, her face would be white as the clean-scrubbed porcelain sink.

What she'd almost said -

Her healthy heart is thumping furiously away under her ribcage. Somewhere inside her, there's another tiny one just forming - and who knows what a careless word from her could do to it?

Her fingers press harder into her stomach. She'd talked life into Howl, into Calcifer. She's talked life into dozens of things. But a child isn't a suit, or a walking stick. A child has a heart and a mind all its own (and that last, she thinks, with a sudden glimmer of unexpected pride, is likely to go double for any child with this particular parentage) and she wants, with a sudden entirely unexpected passion, to see who this child will turn out to be, all on its own. Without the addition of mysterious allure, or the youth of a spring leaf, or a good heart or wisdom or any of the other hundred attributes that she's accidentally granted in her magical career; she's no fairy godmother. She's -

- she's going to be -


"Listen," she says - not to herself, this time. "No, I mean - don't listen, you understand?" She squeezes her eyes shut and wills very hard, hard as she can, as she'd willed to give Calcifer his thousand years. "You're safe from me, do you hear? It won't work on you. This sort of magic, my sort, it won't work, not after tonight. You're safe."

There's no way to tell if it's working or not. She wants to go up and get Howl, but her legs feel all wobbly, and anyway, how can she move when she doesn't know if it's worked? Far easier to keep sitting on the edge of the bathtub in the middle of the night, surrounded by magical skincare products, and keep talking and working her own kind of magic.

[After this:]

Two hours pass. And Howl isn't back.

Then three.

Sophie darns apparently endless pairs of woolly socks without looking at them, her glare fixed on the door.

The clock ticks to midnight; Michael tucks himself into bed, with an anxious look in her direction; Calcifer sizzles down into coals, and Howl still hasn't returned.

As three in the morning rolls around, Sophie looks down and realizes that one sock is now a good three feet long.

"Gah!" she spits, and puts it down, and considers her options. She's not going to go to sleep before Howl gets back. She told him she wouldn't, and she won't - she's far too consumed with worry even to consider it. There is, after all, a war on.

If Howl's not back by the morning, she's already decided hours ago, she's going to see the palace and demand to know what's keeping them. But seeing the King in the morning on no sleep whatsoever doesn't sound like a particularly delightful prospect.

And if Howl's still gone, then certainly they're both still awake . . .

And after all, what right do people have - even royal people - to keep one's betrothed out until positively indecent hours of the night?

So the plan is settled, she tells herself, and before she can remind herself of the further fact that the plan is absolutely mad, she sweeps over to the closet, fetches out the cloak of disguise that turns her into a forbidding-looking red-bearded man, and turns the door to Kingsbury.

*********

Sophie has forgotten one crucial fact: she has no idea how to navigate in Kingsbury.

Somehow, the palace stays tantalizingly just ahead as she wanders through the streets, aiming her most ferocious glare at the occasional drunk exiting from a tavern and hoping that it comes across as fiercely as she hopes from under her fake red eyebrows. There's one good thing, though: by this point, she's far too furious at Howl, the King, Prince Justin, and anyone else who can possibly be blamed for the situation to feel at all frightened about walking through the city on her own.

The sun is well up in the sky by the time she reaches the Palace, too full of adrenaline to feel as exhausted as she probably should. She marches up the steps, throws off the disguise cloak, and announces to the astonished guards, in her most imperious tone, "Witch Hatter to see the King!"

She's half expecting them to deny her entrance, but instead they nod, looking rather startled, and show her immediately in.

'Immediately' still means it takes half an hour to get through the maze of passages and drowsily bowing pages to the audience chambers. When Sophie sees the King, she suspects that he's used the time bought in order to dress - his regal robes look as if they've been put on rather hastily, and his crown is askew on his head - but he rises to his feet as politely as if she'd been expected for weeks. "Always a pleasure, Miss Hatter," he says, clearly doing his best to hide a degree of bemusement.

Sophie has no time or patience for politeness.

"Where," she demands, "is Howl?"

"Wizard Howl?" The King blinks at her, startled. "I - er - well, I assumed he'd have told you -"

"He told me," Sophie snaps, "that he was summoned to talk with you. That was last night. As he didn't come home, I assume he's still here, so - where is he?"

The King hesitates.

Sophie fixes him with her very fiercest glare, and attempts to convey, with her eyes alone, that if he resists she can and will drench him in her very best brand of weedkiller.

"Well," the King says, rather apologetically, "he's in Strangia."




It's a good thing that the Palace is so large, and that its walls are thick - otherwise Sophie's scream of "STRANGIA?" might well compromise all the secrecy of the mission.



A carriage takes her back to the castle at her terse request, and twenty minutes later, Sophie, armed with the red-bearded disguise cloak and a pair of seven-league-boots, is on her way to Strangia.

She has to rescue Miss Angorian. It's all her fault; Howl will never, ever forgive her if she doesn't.

Sophie runs for the seven-league boots, grabbing her stick as she goes. She settles them in front of the shop, pushing aside various confused passers-by, and starts zipping, three-and-a-half leagues at a time, into the Waste.


It's horrible and hot and gritty, and by the time Sophie reaches the collecting of chimney pots that makes up the Witch's castle, she's far too exhausted to even consider carrying the boots with her all that way. She trudges on with just her stick. The Witch's page boys show up to give her sulky looks, pointing her through the entranceway.

It vanishes, of course, as soon as she's through. Sophie just shrugs. She'll deal with that on the other side.

Everything next seems to happen very quickly. The Witch is there, looking tall and skinny and very, very tired, with one long pigtail over one bony shoulder. She backs away when Sophie walks up to her and demands Miss Angorian - but then the page boys rise up, melting into sticky orange blobs, and somehow manage to glue Sophie to a chimney-pot pillar. It's worse than green slime, Sophie finds herself thinking; and meanwhile the Witch seems to lose interest entirely. She can't think of anything else to do except keep demanding Miss Angorian.

"We will wait until Howl comes," says the Witch, wearily.

"He's not coming!" Sophie says, hoping very hard that it's true. "He's got more sense. And your curse hasn't all worked anyways."

"It will," says the Witch, with a slight smile. "Now that you have fallen for our deception and come here, Howl will have to be honest for once."

Deception? thinks Sophie, but then she's distracted, because the Witch makes another gesture, and a throne trundles forward with a headless man on it.

Well. There's Prince Justin.

"If I were Fanny," Sophie says, indignantly, "I'd threaten to faint. Put his head back on at once! He looks terrible like that!"

But the Witch doesn't listen; simply rambles on and on about the perfect being, and leftover parts, and how with Howl's head on Prince Justin-Wizard Suliman's conglomerate body he will rule as King and she will rule as Queen. "I have worked very hard for this moment," she announces, "and I am not to be argued with," and then she wanders off.

One thing seems clear, and that is that the Witch is entirely insane.

But Sophie still has her stick, and the orange goo that's holding her to the pillar doesn't seem to like it. She's managed to work her head and shoulders loose from the stringy orange binding when she's distracted from her escape attempts by a sudden dull boom. Everything shakes. Sophie cranes her head around to see; if the castle's going to fall down while she's still inside it, she'd at least like to be aware.

The castle doesn't fall down. But a piece of wall does blow out, with a sound like a thousand crashing tea sets, and light pours through the opening. It hurts Sophie's eyes, but she turns towards it anyways - it must be Howl, mustn't it?

But instead it seems to be, of all things, the scarecrow. The Witch throws herself at it, and they begin to engage in a furious pitched battle.

If Sophie's shoulders were mobile enough, she would shrug in perplexity. As it is, she simply takes advantage of the new distraction to work steadily away at her bonds.

Percival follows Sophie outside, politely taking the bucket for her, which makes her grunt irritably - she's not that feeble! - and stomp ahead of him.

She pauses to look back once they get outside, taking in both the golden sunset and the vast mansion that is the side of the castle where the garden is. Due to her mood, she notices what she never has before; namely, that the place is ridiculously derelict. "Huh! I think the least Howl could do is make the place look more lived in," she says. "But no, he's too busy gadding off to Wales! - don't just stand there, Percival, pour some stuff in that can and then come along behind me."

Percival meekly obeys, and follows behind her, looking hangdog. Bullying him does not help with any of her anger at all. Sophie stops talking to him for a while, and takes her anger out on the weeds, which calms her down a little - enough to start asking Percival the questions she's been wanting to ever since his revelation earlier that day.

Percival answers as meekly as he obeyed her earlier, telling her that the Witch had wanted to find out about Howl when he came to Sophie's shop, and moreover that the Witch had mistaken Sophie for Lettie, which was why she'd cast the spell on her to begin with. (Percival didn't know why he'd been thinking about Lettie. Lettie, he said, had just been in his head; he couldn't remember where he'd met her, before the Witch.) Then the Witch had turned him into a dog, and he had gone to find Lettie at Mrs. Fairfax's.

All of this is terribly interesting, but not much of a surprise; not, at least, until Percival starts to tell about how Howl had come to court Lettie. "Lettie didn't want him," he says, which relieves Sophie's mind somewhat, "and she asked me to bite him to get rid of him, until Howl suddenly began asking her about you, and -"

Sophie almost loses control of the watering-can. The tips of her shoes start to smoke, and she hastily scuffs them off on the road. "What?"

"He said, 'I know someone called Sophie who looks a little like you,'" Percival says, looking at her gravely. "And Lettie said 'that's my sister', without thinking. And she got terribly worried then, particularly as Howl went on asking about her sister - Lettie said she could have bitten her tongue off." He goes on, in great and humiliating detail, to explain how Howl had told Lettie that Sophie was an old woman; how Lettie had fretted and cried and told Percival how very vulnerable Sophie would be to Howl; how Percival, listening to these descriptions of Sophie's kind-heartedness and vulnerability, had nobly offered to come protect her.

Sophie weed-kills furiously all through this recitation. "Bother Lettie!" she snaps, when he's done. She hopes she sounds very un-kind-hearted. "It's very kind of her, and I love her dearly for it. I've been quite as worried about her. But I do not need a watchdog!"

"Yes you do," says Percival. "Or you did. I arrived far too late."

Too late?

Sophie swings around furiously, spilling weed-killer in front of her; Percival gulps and runs aside to avoid being hit. She doesn't even need to ask what he's implying. She knows perfectly well. But it's not true, it's - it's simply not!

"Curse everyone!" she shouts. "I've done with the lot of you," drops the smoking watering can, and starts marching off towards the gateway in a rage. Too late! It's utter nonsense. She can't stand Howl! He's impossible. "And anyways," she tells herself, "I am an old woman!"

But that doesn't change the fact that something's . . . odd. She has been feeling on edge; she has been making excuses not to see her sisters, or change the status quo, or to leave -

"Oh, confound that gray-and-scarlet suit!" she snaps aloud. "I refuse to believe I was the one that got caught with it!"

Except of course it hadn't been the gray-and-scarlet that Howl was wearing all this time, but the blue-and-silver. And that one has apparently worked just as well.

Far too late.

And she had thought her heart acting queer was all a result of being old. Inside, it seems, she's still as young and - and stupid as ever. Which leads suddenly to a greatly reassuring thought: "Anyways, Howl doesn't like me!"

She's still safe. It isn't as if anyone (except Percival, but bother Percival; he's still half a dog, what does he know?) will ever have to find out just exactly how stupid she (and her stupid heart) have been.

Especially not if she leaves. Leaves now, never comes back, never has to look at Howl and his heartless green eyes again - yes, that's exactly the solution. After that she refuses to think, just keeps walking and walking and -

- she hasn't quite reached the gate when she sees the scarecrow.

Aches and pains or not, she doesn't waste a moment in picking up her skirts and running back, as fast as she can, to where Percival is still standing looking forlorn and abandoned. Sophie grabs him and drags him behind a tree, repeating her mantra: "Go away! Go away fast! You can't find us! Go away fast, twice as fast, three times as fast, ten times as fast, go away!"

And it does.

"What's wrong with it?" asks Percival, looking blankly bemused. "Why don't you want it?"

Sophie just shudders, and starts back towards the house. She can't leave now, not while the scarecrow's out there - and then she looks up, and blinks.

The deserted mansion is now beautiful, clean, and newly painted.

Struck by a sudden furious intuition, heart still clammering from the encounter with the scarecrow, Sophie picks up speed and heads purposefully towards the door. A fluttering from an open window catches her eye, which leads, presumably, into the mansion proper - a clear invitation to go in and explore.

Exactly what Howl wants her to do.

She ignores the window and throws the door open instead, with a crash.

Miss Angorian's visit has not, to put it mildly, left Sophie in a good mood.

And her subsequent, and probably unwise, visit to Milliways has added to this bad mood a bucket full of what used to be innocent ferns and are now ex-daffodils in highly toxic slime.



. . . Michael and the dog-man are both, wisely, avoiding her by this point.

Sophie sits without even her knitting, and mutters dark things about the Welsh, and glares at Calcifer whenever he peeks his head up over the logs.

She knows it's a silly way to behave, and she doesn't care.

The relocated castle is very close to the same shape it always was - inside, at least; all the same, there's an undeniable sense of difference, and Sophie is fidgety and curious all morning, wanting to see what's outside.

But Howl is gone, and the door is set to black-down and won't open, so she appeases her impatience by getting out a bucket of water and setting to work on scrubbing out the chalk marks on the floor instead. It relieves her stress.

With Howl and his sneezing out of the house, the morning passes in relative peace and quiet. Michael practices spell-work; Calcifer burns logs; Sophie pokes around surreptitiously for whatever suit Howl isn't wearing, with no success. The dog-man wanders around and looks tragic, but as that's his normal occupation nobody pays him much mind - at least, not until he gets hungry. Sophie has just convinced Calcifer to burn some bacon for them all when Howl's voice suddenly rings out of nowhere:

"Brace yourself, Calcifer! She's found me!"

"You'll have to wait!" Calcifer roars to the others, and blazes blindingly up into the fireplace. The saucepan falls across Sophie's knees; she hardly notices, she's so busy staring at Calcifer as he whips from side to side, his blurred face - or faces; sometimes he seems to have multiple ones - pulsing from deep blue to sky blue to almost white, his eyes one minute their normal demonic orange and the next a clear starry silver.

She's never seen or imagined anything like it. She'd gotten used to having Calcifer there in the fireplace, cooking their bacon and burning their leftovers; it's so much of a shock to see how strong he really is that it takes her another moment to notice the booming crashes echoing outside, not to mention all the shaking and clammering going on from various items within the castle itself.

"They're quite near!" Michael says, scurrying for the window, and, more slowly, Sophie tears herself away from Calcifer and follows suit, passing by the skull (yammering), a book (open on the floor, and fanning its pages back and forth), and Howl's guitar (twanging wildly away - of course, horribly out-of-tune.) They open the window and peer outside, but everything is maddeningly out of sight. Michael and Sophie look at each other, and then go to the closet to grab the cloaks of disguise. Sophie can't see herself, but from the style she knows she's grabbed the one that makes her look like a red-bearded man. Michael, on the other hand, now appears to be an extremely worried-looking horse.

Under normal circumstances Sophie might laugh, but there isn't time now; instead, she shoves her way out the door, accompanied by the dog-man - still looking mournful, and profoundly unperturbed by the crashings and shakings. Michael follows, in a clatter of nonexistent hooves, and together they shove their way into the middle of the gaping crowd on the street. Sophie wonders momentarily about the impression made by a horse coming out of the building, but everyone is very clearly far too busy staring up into the sky to worry at all about things like house-trained horses.

And with good reason; an enormous boiling black clowd hovers over the rooftops of Porthaven, with white flashes of light stabbing through it. As soon as Sophie starts to stare at it, it twists itself into wispier shapes like fighting snakes and then tears itself apart, with a noise like the greatest catfight ever seen. Both halves speed out over the sea - one pursuing, one following, both making hideous noises - and a good half the crowd speeds out after them and crowd along the harbor wall to see, sweeping Sophie and Michael along with them. This is the best entertainment that Porthaven's offered in years.

Out on the ocean, the two clouds are still raging at each other, spitting and sending up giant waves - the only two clouds on an otherwise calm blue sea - with what looks like an unfortunate vessel caught between them. This causes great indignation in the crowd, most of whom work along the sea in some fashion or another, and one or two of them start to heckle loudly and demand that the raging sorcerers have a care for the ship.

But then one of the waves crashes against the harbor wall, and most of the crowd hastily press backwards onto the dryer dock-area. The noise is mixed with a high-pitched screaming. Squinting into the wind, Sophie realizes that it comes from a group of wet, slithery-looking ladies with green-brown hair and fishtails who have taken over the vacated harbor wall.

"Confound it!" Sophie says aloud, the realization hitting her. "The mermaids from the curse!"

She looks up at the clouds, and sees Howl kneeling on the nearer one, still dressed in black. He's staring at the mermaids.

Typical! Sophie thinks, with mixed worry and irritation. The Witch clearly knows her business; trust Howl to get distracted by topless ladies in the middle of a fight for his life. The horse beside her puts a hoof up to his mouth and shouts, "Keep your mind on the Witch!" And even as he says it, the Witch appears on the further cloud, in a whirl of flame-colored robe and red hair - and Howl's cloud promptly bursts into flame.

Sophie gasps, feeling her heart give an unpleasant patter, but the horse next to her says, "It's all right!" And, after her initial shock, Sophie can see that Howl - a tiny figure - is now standing and waving cheerily on the ship, to let the Witch know she had missed. The Witch promptly turns into a bird and dives at him, but as soon as she does, the ship vanishes, and the bird, unable to stop, dives deep into the sea.

Everyone in the crowd cheers. "I knew that wasn't a real ship really!" says someone behind Sophie, and Michael-the-horse answers wisely, "Yes, it must have been an illusion. It was too small."

But the battle isn't over yet; a surging wave covers the harbor, and Sophie almost loses her balance before an arm comes out of the horse and hauls her back upright and towards the relative safety of the quay. A confusing ream of illusions follows, monsters upon monsters bounding over the quay and up towards the streets of Porthaven. This proves to be too much for a good three-quarters of the crowd, who have had enough thrills for the day, and have gotten distressingly wet besides. These set off to their houses or to clean up the ships sent into disarray by the waves. The remainder, however, think that the end of the battle will surely be too good to miss and set off through the streets of Porthaven to follow the illusory monsters, and Sophie and the dog-man and the Michael-horse join this group, Sophie's bones protesting creakily as she attempts to keep up.

The monsters retreat further and further into the distance, until they're nothing but specks vanishing into the marsh beyond Porthaven. Nothing happens for a long time. Sophie has to remember to stop holding her breath, but the rest of the crowd, less personally invested, are mumbling with boredom and discontent.

Finally, a rolling ball of fire appears in the distance, and turns into a giant pillar of smoke that dissipates into the distance - and that seems to be all.

"I reckon," says one of the crowd, sounding disappointed, "that they must have done for each other," and, this being the consensus, everyone else goes home.

Sophie and Michael are left staring numbly into the distance, with the dog-man bounding briskly around them. He is, in fact, so very cheerful that Sophie realizes he must surely believe that Howl is dead.

The door out of Milliways does not, as Sophie had half-hoped, lead her back to the castle. Still, at the very least her time at the bar, combined with her successful spell-casting, has left her refreshed and optimistic enough to form a new plan of action - make her way back to Mrs. Pentstemmon's and ask the footman which way she ought to go to find the disguised Kingsbury door.

The narrow street which holds Mrs. Pentstemmon's house is relatively easy to find, and Sophie is just starting to feel rather more hopeful about the whole thing as she turns down it -

- and finds herself face-to-face with almost the only person who could make this day worse.

The Witch of the Waste looks quite different than she had the last time Sophie saw her; all the same, Sophie recognizes her immediately. She can't even find it in herself to be properly surprised. And it isn't, she tells herself, all that disastrous. Surely the Witch won't even recognize her. She must have enchanted hundreds of people. So Sophie shuffles forward.

Unfortunately, Sophie's judgment, today, has not exactly been proven to be infallible.

"Why, it's Miss Hatter!" says the Witch, laughing. "I never forget a face, particularly one I've made myself! What are you doing here, dressed up so fine? If you're thinking of calling on Mrs. Pentstemmon, you can save yourself the trouble. The old biddy's dead."

"Dead?" echoes Sophie, blankly. But she was alive an hour ago! she thinks, and then curses herself for a fool; of course death is like that.

"Yes. Dead," the Witch confirms, with a breezy air. "She refused to tell me where someone was that I wanted to find. She said 'Over my dead body!' so I took her at her word."

It is, perhaps, fortunate that it has been the kind of day it has been. Only the fact that nearly every last one of Sophie's nerves have been thoroughly worn out stops her from being too scared to think - because of course the Witch is looking for Howl. And anyone who could kill Mrs. Penstemmon would have not the least trouble snuffing out the insignificant little life of Sophie Hatter, magic stick or no.

If the Witch suspected for a moment that Sophie was connected with Howl, Sophie would very shortly be dead.

But if there's one thing that Sophie's gotten a great deal of practice at since being turned old, it's lying; and if there's one thing she feels like doing, after the day she's had, it's being rude to someone. So she lies as hard as she can. She tells the Witch, with unfeigned indignation, that while she, Sophie, hasn't the faintest idea who Mrs. Pentstemmon might be, killing her makes the Witch a wicked murdereress; and when the Witch asks who Sophie might be going to see, Sophie says the only thing she can think of: that she's going to see the King. "I made an appointment," she declares, trembling with terror and anger. "I'm - going to petition him for better conditions for hatters. I keep going, you see, even after what you did to me."

But of course, like all Sophie's ideas today, this backfires more terribly than Sophie could have imagined - for the Witch laughs more than ever, and insists on accompanying Sophie all the way to the palace, where, Sophie thinks, I'll just get thrown out on my head, and she'll know I was lying - or I'll have to talk to the King again - and I don't know what's worse!

She's feeling so hopeless, as she trudges along next to the Witch, that there seems no point in not asking "Why did you make me like this?"

"You were preventing me from getting some information I needed," the Witch says cheerfully. "I got it in the end, of course." This leaves Sophie quite mystified; she's even about to say that there must have been some mistake, when the Witch adds, "Though I daresay you had no idea you were," and laughs again. Sophie is growing to detest that laugh horribly.

Then the Witch starts to ask Sophie about Howl, and it's only something of a relief to see those endless Palace stairs looming up in front of them.

"There you are. That's the Palace," says the Witch. "Are you sure you can manage all those stairs?"

"None the better for you," Sophie retorts. "Make me young again and I'll run up them, even in this heat."

The Witch smiles, with her young angelic face. "That wouldn't be half so funny," she says. "Up you go. And if you do persuade the King to see you, remind him that his grandfather sent me to the Waste and I bear him a grudge for that."

There seems nothing to do but hobble all the way back up the stairs, and so Sophie does, muttering "Drat her!" and hating the Witch more with every step. The Witch is still at the bottom of the steps when she reaches the top, clearly waiting to see her thrown out of the Palace, and so Sophie is forced to tell the guards, "There was something I forgot to tell the King."

The whole earlier process is repeated. It's like one of those dreams that doesn't end! Sophie thinks, and cranes her neck about in every room she goes through, hoping to see some sign of Howl or Michael, but no one appears except more and more courtiers, and - eventually - the King of Ingary, who is rather disconsolately moving flags around on a map.

"They tell me there was something you forgot to say," he says to Sophie, quite pleasantly.

"Yes." Sophie's mind is, once again, an utter blank, but she has to say something. "Howl says he'll only look for Prince Justin if you promise him your daughter's hand in marriage," she blurts out.

The King doesn't order her executed at once, which is only a small relief. Instead, he gives her a rather concerned look, and tells her gently that it's quite out of the question. "I can see you must be very worried about your son to suggest it," he says,"but you can't keep him tied to your apron strings forever, you know."

The King then proceeds to introduce her to his daughter Valeria, who has been sitting under the table with the map on it.

Valeria - who has not yet grown more than four teeth, but is starting to sprout a very promising head of hair - apparently takes to Sophie at once. At any rate, she grins cheerfully at her, grabs her fine gray skirt, and babbles something in infant-speak.

"I understand how a parent feels, Mrs. Pendragon," says the King.

Sophie, who has never felt more of an idiot, decides that this is undoubtedly the worst day of her life.

I can do this, Sophie tells herself, firmly, as she sees the footman, and the pageboy, and the polished marble staircase. She's dressed in her new finery, and she has her trusty stick with her, and even Howl hasn't seen through her disguise yet; she'll be perfectly fine.

She's gotten herself to mostly believe it by the time she sees Mrs. Pentstemmon for the first time - at which point the only panicked thought that flashes through her mind is I can't do this!

None of the kings, magicians, and various nonhuman entities Sophie has met in her time with Howl, whether at the castle or at Milliways, have been half so fine or so frightening as Mrs. Penstemmon, with her eagle face and sharp eyes and extremely expensive golden headdress (and Sophie knows about headdresses), and as Michael retreats hastily towards the door Sophie's sole desire is to join him.

But instead, she finds herself shaking Mrs. Penstemmon's golden-mesh-clad hand - she can't bring herself to kiss it as Howl had - and sitting grandly across from the other woman, and announcing herself to be ninety years old (which is all very well, screams an inner voice, when you're not talking to someone who's actually eighty-six and will probably see right through you!) It's all right, though, because Howl is still there, and he'll signal her or something if she does anything that will give herself away.

And then, of course, Howl heartlessly abandons Sophie to Mrs. Penstemmon's interrogation without a word of protest. Under other circumstances, Sophie might even have found his abrupt dismissal funny, but for now -

"That boy is going to the bad," Mrs. Penstemmon announces, startling Sophie out of her consternation.

"- who, Michael?" Sophie asks, bewildered. Surely Mrs. Penstemmon can't mean Howl; by this point he's not only arrived at the bad, but set up house and started buying up property values.

But it seems, in fact, that Mrs. Penstemmon does mean Howl. She disapproves of his hair, of his clothes - "He is always very careful about his appearance," Sophie agrees, wondering why she's putting it so mildly - and, in particular, of the suit he's wearing, which, says Mrs. Penstemmon, is charmed.

"It is a dazzling attraction charm, directed at ladies," Mrs. Penstemmon sniffs, watching Sophie with her hawkish eyes. "Very well done, I admit, and barely detectable even to my trained eye, since it appears to have been sewn into the seams - and one which will render him almost irresistible to women. This represents a downward trend into the black arts which must surely cause you some motherly concern, Mrs. Pendragon."

Sophie is certainly feeling concerned by this point, although 'motherly' might not be the best adjective to describe her worry - she had, after all, darned that suit herself. Then Mrs. Penstemmon leans forward as far as she can to stare piercingly at Sophie, and it's only by clutching her stick as tightly as she can that Sophie retains her composure at all.

"My life is nearly over," Mrs. Pentstemmon announces. "I have felt death tiptoeing close for some time now.

And what does one say to that? thinks Sophie frantically, even as she mutters, "Oh, I'm sure that isn't so."

Mrs. Penstemmon assures her, of course, that it is so, leaving Sophie feeling even more like an idiot, and goes on to explain her worries about Howl - apparently expecting that 'Mrs. Pendragon' will be able to figure out why Howl is no longer the "force for good" that Mrs. Pentstemmon expected him to be.

"Something has happened to him," she tells Sophie, still giving her that unnerving stare, "and I am determined to put that right before I die."

And then Mrs. Pentstemmon does the most unnerving thing yet - compare Howl to the Witch of the Waste. "It seems," she says, "as if those of high ability cannot resist some extra, dangerous stroke of cleverness, which results in a fatal flaw and begins a slow decline to evil. Do you, by any chance, have any clue what that might be?"

It's strange, Sophie thinks, how being old makes every draft that passes through the room feel twice as chill; or maybe it's just the memory of Calcifer, telling her about his bargain with Howl. The one she's supposed to break.

"Yes," she says. "He's made some sort of contract with his fire demon."

Mrs. Pentstemmon's hands shake a little on her stick. "That will be it. You must break that contract, Mrs. Pendragon."

Well, Sophie thinks, it isn't as if that's news. "I would if I knew how," she protests, but Mrs. Penstemmon breezes past this objection.

"Surely your maternal feelings and your own strong magical gift will tell you how. I have been looking at you, Mrs. Pendragon, though you may not have noticed -"

"Oh, I noticed, Mrs. Penstemmon," Sophie says, before she can stop herself.

"- and I like your gift," Mrs. Penstemmon continues, ignoring the interruption. "It brings life to things, such as that stick in your hand, which you have evidently talked to, to the extent that it has become what the layman would call a magic wand. I think you would not find it too hard to break that contract."

A thousand questions are simmering in Sophie's mind at this - but strangely enough for someone who has just been told that they're a witch, most of them have to do with Howl's contract. "Yes, but I need to know what the terms of it are," she protests. "Did Howl tell you I was a witch, because if he did -"

"He did not. There is no need to be coy. You can rely on my experience to know these things," Mrs. Penstemmon says, and, to Sophie's relief, closes her eyes, allowing Sophie to feel as if she can breathe normally again.

"I do not know, nor do I care to know about such contracts," she says, and her cane wobbles again a little - as if she might be shuddering. Her mouth changes position, too, into something that might be a frown. "But now I see," she says, "what has happened to the Witch. She made a contract with a fire demon and, over the years, that demon has taken control of her. Demons do not understand good and evil. But they can be bribed into a contract, provided the human offers them something valuable, something only humans have. This prolongs the life of both human and demon, and the human gets the demon's magic power to add to his or her own."

Sophie is listening, now, half-fascinated and half-squirming with embarrassment (surely Mrs. Penstemmon would never have been nearly as frank if she had known who Sophie really was) - but the flow of words abruptly cuts off, and Mrs. Pentstemmon opens her eyes again.

"That is all I can bear to say on the subject, except to advise you to find out what the demon got. Now I must bid you farewell. I have to rest awhile."

And, as suddenly as Howl had, Sophie finds herself dismissed.

More than that - she finds herself a witch.


It doesn't bother her half as much as she would have expected. It explains a great many things, in fact - like the popularity of certain hats, or Howl's suit -

And now Sophie almost falls down the stairs with the dismay that ought to have hit her upon being told of her magic, because, of course, she was the one who had put that charm on Howl's suit. "Built to pull in the girls!" she had murmured, and so it was, and now he'll go out and break twice as many hearts, and it is, of course, all her fault.

This is what comes of being the eldest of three and having magic, she thinks, dejectedly, and hobbles the rest of the way downstairs, feeling that something in the universe has gone very wrong indeed. Apparently she looks it, too; so much so that upon seeing her, Howl says that they'd better skip seeing the King, which is something she'd never thought she'd hear him say.

Sophie considers it seriously. She has a very great deal to think about, and, the way her luck has been going, she's more than half convinced the King will just throw her right back out on her head - but if the King did command Howl into the Waste, and the Witch did get him, there would be no way for her to break the curse, and her chance at being young again would be gone.

So she shakes her head, and grips her stick with determination. "After Mrs. Pentstemmon," she says, "the King of Ingary will seem just like an ordinary person."

So the plan as Sophie had conceived it a few minutes ago was to agree to go to talk to the King for Howl. Then he would stop bothering her and leave her free to think up a scheme to assure the happiness of her sisters.

It was, Sophie thinks, ruefully, a fairly decent plan, even though it was thought up on the spur of the moment and in a time of extreme frustration.

The trouble was that Sophie failed to take into account the hundreds of delicate little details that Howl apparently expects her to remember while she's talking to the King. So she tries to follow along, and nods, and smiles - but all she can think is that if she were the King, she wouldn't understand a word of what the old woman was driving at.