‘Yes! So can Jack. But is it really there?’
‘Of course, dear. If you can see it, it must be.’
‘I knew it!’
Jaide thumped her fist on the table, sending the milk slopping from side to side in her bowl. ‘But why can’t Mum see it? When we pointed it out to her, she just told us off.’
‘That’s one of the mysteries, dear,’ said Grandma X, and blew out the match. The smoke from it wound once around her head and then went out the window.
‘One of what mysteries?’ Jaide persisted. Grandma X’s lack of straight answers was utterly infuriating her.
‘You’ll have to be patient, Jaidith. There is a time for the telling of these things, and a natural order to be maintained. Some doors are not meant to be opened before their time. Rushing things would be . . . ill-advised. Here, have a cup of hot chocolate. The day doesn’t start until I’ve had one, and I love the smell it gives the place. What do you think?’
Jack looked up from his cereal. Grandma X had a cup of hot chocolate in each hand. But she’d only just lit the stove for the kettle, and she hadn’t even got out any milk or anything. Or had she?
Steam swirled up from the mugs into the twins’ nostrils, and they breathed in its velvety scent. It filled Jaide’s mind with a warm, caressing breeze, and Jack’s with a comforting, companionable darkness. Breeze and darkness did their work, and all the twins’ thoughts ceased for an instant.
When they started again, neither Jaide nor Jack could remember what they had just been talking about.
‘CARDS,’ SAID GRANDMA X FIRMLY. ‘You said you can play. How about you show me after breakfast? I have a deck I save for special guests. We can have a game or two in here, then see if the weather is going to clear.’
Jack felt as though he’d forgotten something, but the aroma of the hot chocolate reminded him of what was really important. He raised the mug to his lips and sipped. It was absolutely delicious. If every day in Portland started with hot chocolate, he was going to like it here very much.
Jaide’s frown hadn’t completely faded, but she did the same as Jack, telling herself that she was worried about nothing. If it’s important, it’ll come back, her father was always saying. Hector was notoriously absent-minded, another Shield trait Jaide hoped she wouldn’t inherit.
After their hot chocolate, Grandma X served the twins thick slices of toast spread with real butter and her own homemade gooseberry jam. They had just finished clearing up when a slender, blue-grey cat came through the window, landed elegantly on the table, and immediately jumped to the kitchen bench and paraded along it like a model to receive a pat from Grandma X.
‘Kleo, at last,’ said Grandma X. ‘What kept you? These two troubletwisters, as you no doubt already know, are my grandchildren, Jaidith and Jackaran.’
The cat rubbed her chin under Grandma X’s hand, then turned and meowed at Jack and Jaide.
‘She missed breakfast,’ said Jack, remembering Ari’s hungry eyes. ‘Can I get her a snack?’
‘She’s fed well enough already where she lives.’
‘I thought she was your cat,’ said Jaide.
‘If Kleopatra here belongs to anyone, it’s to David Smeaton, who runs the second-hand bookshop around the corner. She just likes to visit, when it suits her.’
Kleo meowed again, defensively.
‘Rubbish!’ said Grandma X. ‘Ari is always happy to see you, whatever his other . . . ah . . . engagements. Wait here and I’ll get the cards.’
Kleo inclined her head in regal agreement and turned her attention to the twins. She watched them and the children watched the cat until, one after the other, they found Kleo’s cool blue gaze too unnerving. Surely cats weren’t supposed to look people in the eye, Jack wondered, or engage them in staring contests?
‘Uh, can I pat you?’ asked Jaide.
‘Rowr,’ Kleo acquiesced. She lay down and allowed herself to be stroked.
Grandma X bustled back into the room, holding a rather large pack of cards.
‘Who wants to deal?’ she said. Instead of waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘You try it, Jack. Five cards each, facedown, just like poker.’
Jack took the deck from her and almost dropped it, surprised by its weight. The cards were more square than rectangular, and though at first he had thought they were gilt-edged, by the weight alone he realised they were actually thin plates of gold that had been enamelled with colourful designs, the diamond pattern on the backs a rich green and red, reminiscent of a tartan.
‘Deal Kleo in, too,’ Grandma X added as Jack tentatively shuffled the metal cards. ‘She can sit in this round.’
Mad as a meat axe, Jack thought, using a phrase his father sometimes employed to describe very rich people who paid millions for paintings they didn’t like by artists who were famous. It was bad enough that Grandma X talked to cats as though they could understand her. Now she expected them to play cards as well!
Odder still was what he saw on the cards when he picked up his hand. Instead of the usual suits and numbers, there were illustrations in red and green lines of enamel on the first three cards: a cave mouth in a mountain; a crescent moon; and a wave that reminded him of a famous Japanese woodcut of a tsunami. Even stranger, the last two cards were blank, just burnished gold, without enamelled illustrations.
Jaide was puzzling over her cards, too. She had been dealt an old-fashioned sun with long, wavy streaks of fire around a disc; a bird in flight, its wings outstretched, with more wavy lines that she supposed represented the wind underneath; a half-shut human eye with very long lashes; and she also had two cards of plain burnished gold.
‘Let’s see what I’ve got,’ said Grandma X. She laid her cards on the table, but stacked so only the topmost card was visible. It was a crescent moon.
‘As one might expect,’ she commented. Quickly she flicked over her other cards. The next three were all also crescent moons. The fifth card was the same eye Jaide had, only instead of being half-shut, it was open and staring.
Jaide and Jack looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing: What kind of game was this, when Grandma X showed her hand at the start?
Instead of explaining, Grandma X pointed at the five cards sitting in a stack in front of Kleo, who was sitting up again and had one paw sitting on them as if she actually did know how to play. ‘Do either of you know what cards Kleo has?’
‘How could we?’ Jaide asked. ‘We can’t see them.’
‘Well, if you don’t know, perhaps you can guess. Let’s see if, between the three of us, we can get all five by guessing two each. That gives us one spare guess. I’ll go first: a tree and the hanged mouse. Now you guess, Jaidith.’
‘But the only cards I know in this weird deck are yours and the ones I have!’ Jaide protested.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Grandma X with a wink. ‘Perhaps this deck contains anything you can think of.’
‘Uh, if you say so . . .’ Jaide looked at Jack, who shrugged, and then said the first things that fell into her mind. ‘A house and the number two.’
‘Jackaran?’
Jack scratched his nose.
‘Um, I guess . . . a nose . . . and a . . . doughnut.’
Grandma X reached over and Kleo delicately withdrew her paw. Her blue gaze was curious as Grandma X turned over the first card. It showed a mouse hanging upside down in a snarl of threads.
‘The hanged mouse!’ said Jack. ‘How did you know?’
Grandma X just smiled mysteriously and turned over the remaining four: an acorn; a barbed arrow; a gutted fish; and an oak tree, her first guess.
‘No correct guesses from the troubletwisters,’ said Grandma X, with a rueful look for both of them. ‘Perhaps we shall see something from the other perspective. Show me your cards, Jackaran.’
‘Oka
y,’ said Jack. He folded his cards into a stack and put them in front of him, as she had done. The first he turned over was plain burnished gold, and the second was, too. But so were the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The illustrations were gone.
‘But . . . but there was a wave, and a cave, and . . . uh . . .’
‘Not unexpected,’ said Grandma X, ‘and not terribly helpful, either. What about your cards, Jaidith?’