“You’ll need to consult with Captain Soames, my lady. I believe he’s in the kitchens.”
“Find him. And Ralph.” She turned. “I want all the servants assembled in the lower hall in twenty minutes.”
He nodded, his wig slightly askew. “I’ll see to it.”
At the door, just before he bowed himself out, he said, “Welcome back, my lady. We’ve missed you.”
She smiled, surprised. “Thank you.”
When the doors were closed, Finn went straight to the cold meats and fruit laid out on the table. “He won’t be so pleased when the Queen’s army comes over the horizon.”
She nodded, and sat wearily in the chair. “Pass me some of that chicken.”
For a while they ate silently. Finn gazed around at the room, its white plaster ceiling pargeted with scrolls and lozenges, the great fireplace with the emblems of the black swan. The house was calm, the stillness drowsy with bees and the sweetness of roses.
“So this is the Wardenry.”
“Yes.” She poured out some wine. “Mine, and staying mine.”
“It’s beautiful.” He put down his plate. “But there’s no way we can defend it.”
She scowled. “It has a moat and a drawbridge. It commands the land around. We have two hundred men.”
“The Queen has cannon.” He stood and walked to the window, pushing it open. “My grandfather chose the wrong Era for us. Something a bit more primitive would have kept us equal.” He turned quickly. “They will use the weapons of the time, won’t they? Do you think they might have things we don’t know about … relics of the War?”
The thought turned her cold. The Years of Rage had been a cataclysm that had destroyed a civilization; its energies had stilled the tides and hollowed the moon. “Let’s hope we’re too small a target.”
For a moment she crumbled cheese on her plate. Then she said, “Come on.”
The servants’ hall was a buzz of anxiety. As he walked in beside Claudia, Finn felt the noise subside, but a fraction too slowly. Grooms and maidservants turned; powdered footmen waited in elaborate livery.
There was a long wooden table in the center; Claudia stepped up onto a bench and then onto the tabletop.
“Friends.”
They were silent now, except for the doves cooing outside.
“I’m very glad to be back home.” She smiled, but he knew she was tense. “But things have changed. You’ll have had all the news from Court—you know about the two candidates for the throne. Well, things have come to such a point that we … I … have had to make a decision about which one I support.” She stretched out her hand, and Finn stepped up beside her.
“This is Prince Giles. Our future king. My betrothed.”
The last phrase astonished him but he tried not to show it. He nodded at them gravely and they all stared up at him, their eyes taking in every travel-worn detail of his clothing, his face. He found himself standing tall, steeling himself not to flinch from that examination.
He should say something. He managed, “I thank you all for your support,” but it produced not even a ripple. Alys was by the door, her hands gripped tight together. Ralph, near the table, said boldly, “God bless you, sire!”
Claudia didn’t wait for any response. “The Queen has declared the Pretender as her candidate. Essentially, this means civil war. I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but it’s important you all understand what is happening here. Many of you have lived at the Wardenry for generations. You were my father’s servants. The Warden is no longer here, but I have spoken to him …”
That did produce a murmur.
“Is he in favor of this prince?” someone asked.
“He is. But he would wish me to treat you with respect. Therefore I say this.”
She folded her arms and gazed out at them. “The young women and all the children will leave immediately. I’ll give you an armed escort to the village, though it won’t be needed. As for the men and the senior staff, the choice is yours. No one who wants to go will be prevented. There’s no Protocol here anymore—I’m saying this to you as equals. You must make up your own minds.”
She paused, but there was silence, so into it she said, “Assemble in the courtyard at the midday bell, and Captain Soames’s men will take care of you. I wish you well.”
“But my lady,” someone said. “What will you do?”
It was a boy, near the back.
Claudia grinned at him. “Hello, Job. We’ll stay. Finn and I will use the … machinery in my father’s study to try and contact him in Incarceron. It will take time, but …”
“And Master Jared, ma’am.” One of the maids’ voices, anxious. “Where is he? He would know what to do.”
There was a ripple of agreement. Claudia’s eyes slid to Finn. She said sharply, “Jared’s on his way. But we already know what to do. The true king has been found, and those who once tried to destroy him must not succeed again.”
She was in control, but she had not won them over. Finn could sense that. There was a silent discontent, an unspoken doubt. They knew her too well, from a child. And though she was an imperious mistress, they had probably never loved her. She wasn’t speaking to their hearts.
So he held his hand out and took hers. “Friends, Claudia is right to give you a choice. I owe everything to her. Without her I would be dead now, or worse, thrown back into the hell of Incarceron. I wish I could tell you what her support means. But to do that I would have to explain the Prison to you, and I won’t do that, because I dare not speak about it, it hurts me even to think of it.”
They were intent; the word Incarceron was like a charm. Finn allowed his voice to tremble.
“I was a child. I was snatched from a world of beauty and peace to a torment of pain and hunger, a hell where men murder each other without a care, where women and children sell themselves to stay alive. I know about death. I’ve suffered the miseries of the poor. I know about loneliness, how wretched it is to be alone and terrified in a maze of echoing halls and dark dread. This is the knowledge Incarceron gave me. And when I am King, this is the knowledge I will use. There will be no more Protocol, no more fear. No more being locked in. I will do my best—I swear this to you—my best to make this Realm a true paradise, and a free world for all its people. And Incarceron too. That’s all I can say to you. All I can promise you. Except that if we lose, I will kill myself rather than go back there.”
The silence was different. It was caught in their throats.
And when a soldier growled, “I’m with you, my lord,” another answered at once, and then another, and suddenly the room was a hubbub of voices until Ralph’s reedy “God save Prince Giles” had them roaring their approval.
Finn smiled, wan.
Claudia watched him, and when their eyes met, she saw there was a triumph in him, quiet but proud.
Keiro had been right, she thought. Finn could talk his way to a crown.
She turned. A footman was pushing his way through to her, white and wide-eyed. She crouched, and his voice, thin and terrified, silenced the hubbub.
“They’re here, my lady. The Queen’s army is here.”
25
Some say a vast pendulum swings in the heart of the Prison, or that there is a chamber there white-hot with energy, like the core of a star. For myself, I think that if Incarceron has a heart it is icy, and nothing could survive there.
—Lord Calliston’s Diary
T he tunnel narrowed rapidly. Soon Keiro was on hands and knees in the shallow water, struggling to keep the new torch alight. Behind her Attia heard Rix gasp as he crawled, the pack slung under his belly, the roof bruising his back.
And was it her imagination, or was the air warmer?
She said, “What if it gets too small?”
“Stupid question,” Keiro muttered. “We die. There’s no way back.”
It was hotter. And choked with dust. She felt it on her lips and skin. Crawling was painful; her knees and palms sore and cut. The tunn
el had shrunk to a tube now, a red pulsing heat that they had to force their way through.
Suddenly Rix stopped dead. “Volcano.”
Keiro twisted around. “What! ”
“Imagine. If the heart of the Prison is in fact a great magma chamber, sealed by terrible compression in the very center of its being.”
“Oh for god’s sake …”
“And if we reach it, if it is pierced by even so much as a needle point …”
“Rix!” Attia said fiercely. “This isn’t helping.”
She heard him breathing hard. “But it may be true. What do we know? And yet we could know. We could understand all things at once.”
She squirmed to look back. He was lying full length in the water. He had the Glove in his hand.
“No,” she breathed.
He looked up and his face was lit with that sly delight she had come to dread. And then he was shouting, his voice deafening in the confined space.
“I WILL PUT ON THE GLOVE. I WILL BECOME ALL-KNOWING.”
Keiro was beside her, knife in hand. “I’ll finish him this time. I swear I will.”
“LIKE THE MAN IN THE GARDEN …”
“What garden, Rix?” she asked quietly. “What garden?”
“The one in the Prison, somewhere. You know.”
“I don’t.” She had her hand around Keiro’s wrist, forcing him still. “Tell me.”
Rix stroked the Glove. “There was a garden and a tree grew there with golden apples and if you ate one of them, you knew everything. And then Sapphique climbed over the fence and killed the many-headed monster and picked the apple, because he wanted to know, you see, Attia. He wanted to know how to Escape.”
“Right.” She had wriggled back. She was close to his pocked face.
“And a snake came out of the grass and it said, ‘Oh go on, eat the apple. I dare you.’ And he stopped then with it to his mouth because he knew the snake was Incarceron.”
Keiro groaned. “Let me …”
“Put the Glove away, Rix. Or give it to me.”
His fingers caressed its dark scales. “And because if he ate it he would know how small he was. How much of a nothing he was. He would see himself as a speck in the vastness of the Prison.”
“So he didn’t eat it, right?”
Rix stared at her. “What?”
“In the patchbook. He didn’t eat it.”
There was silence. Something seemed to pass over Rix’s face; then he frowned crossly at her and tucked the Glove away inside his coat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Attia. What patchbook? Why aren’t we getting on?”
She watched him a moment, then shoved Keiro on with her foot. Muttering, he shuffled back. The moment was over, but it had been too close. Somehow, quickly, she had to get the Glove from Rix before he went too far.
But as she gripped the slimy filth and pulled herself after Keiro she felt his boots ahead and he wasn’t moving.
She looked up and saw the torchlight glowing on the end of the tunnel.
It was a rounded vault of corbelled stone, and a single gargoyle leered down at them with its tongue impudently out. The water was pouring from its mouth, a green slime down the walls.
“That’s it? The end?” She almost dropped her forehead down into the water. “We can’t even turn!”
“End of the tunnel. Not quite the end of the line.” Keiro had wriggled over on his back and was looking up, his hair dripping. “Look.”
In the roof immediately above him was a shaft. It was circular and around it were letters, strange sigils in some language Attia didn’t know.
“Sapient letters.” Keiro flinched as the sparks from the torch fell toward his face. “Gildas used to use them all the time. And look at that.”
An eagle. Her heart leaped as she saw the sign that Finn wore on his wrist, its wings wide, a crown around its neck.
Down through the center of the hole, its final links just drifting above Keiro’s hand, hung a chain ladder. As they watched, it shuddered gently, in the vibrations from above.
Rix’s voice was calm in the darkness behind her. “Well, climb it, Apprentice.”
THERE WAS no stable.
Jared stood in the center of the clearing and looked blearily around.
No stable, no feathers. Only, on the floor of the clearing, a scorched circle, that might once have been the blackened scar of a fire. He walked around it. The bracken was deep and curled in the dawn light; spiderwebs, looking like cradles of wool meshed with dew, filled every crack between stem and stalk.
He sucked his dry lips, then ran his hand over his forehead, behind his neck.
He must have been here one, perhaps two days, rolled in that blanket, delirious, the horse snuffling and cropping leaves and wandering aimlessly nearby.
His clothes were sodden with damp and sweat, his hair lank, his hands bitten by insects, and he still couldn’t stop shivering. But he felt as if some door had opened inside him, some bridge had been crossed.
Walking back to the horse, he took out his medication pouch and crouched, considering the dose. Then he injected the fine needle into his vein, feeling the sharp prick that always set his teeth on edge. He withdrew it, cleaned it, and put it away. Then he took his own pulse, wiped a handkerchief in the dew, and washed his face and smiled at a sudden memory of one of the maids at home asking him if dew was really good for her complexion.
It was certainly fresh and cold.
He took the horse’s reins in hand and climbed up onto its back.
He could not have survived such a fever without warmth. Without water. He should be parched with thirst, and he wasn’t. And yet no one had been here.
As he urged the horse to a gallop, he thought about the power of vision; whether Sapphique had been an aspect of his own mind, or a real being. None of it was that simple.
There were whole shelves of texts back in the Library discussing the powers of the visionary imagination, of memory and dreams.
Jared smiled wanly to the trees of the wood.
For him it had happened. That was what mattered.
He rode hard. By midday he was in the lands of the Wardenry, tired, but surprising himself by his endurance.
At a farm he climbed down a little stiffly and was given milk and cheese by the farmer, a stout, perspiring man who seemed on edge, his glance always wandering to the horizon.
When Jared offered money the man pressed it back at him. “No, Master. A Sapient once treated my wife for free and I’ve never forgotten that. But a word of advice. Hurry on now, wherever you’re bound. There’s trouble brewing here.”
“Trouble?” Jared looked at him.
“I’ve heard the Lady Claudia is condemned. And that lad with her, the one who claims to be the Prince.”
“He is the Prince.”
The farmer pulled a face. “Whatever you say, Master. High politics are not for me. But this I do know: The Queen has an army on the march, and they’re maybe at the Wardenry itself by now. I had three outlying barns fired by them yesterday, and sheep snatched. Thieving scum.”
Jared stared at him in cold terror. Grabbing the horse, he said, “I would be grateful, sir, if you hadn’t seen me. You understand ?”
The farmer nodded. “In these hard times, Master, only the silent are wise.”
He was afraid now. He rode more carefully, taking field paths and bridleways, keeping to deep lanes between high hedges. In one place, crossing a road, he saw the tracks of hooves and wagons; deep ruts of wheels dragging some heavy ironware. He rubbed the horse’s coarse mane.
Where was Claudia? What had happened at Court?
By late afternoon he came up a track into a small copse of beeches on a hilltop. The trees were quiet, their leaves brushed only by a faint breeze, full of the tiny whistlings of invisible birds.
Jared climbed down, and stood for a moment letting the ache ease in his back and legs. Then he tied up the horse and walked cautiously through the bronze leaf-litter, ankl
e-deep in its rustling crispness.
Under the beeches nothing grew; he moved from tree to tree awkwardly, but only a fox confronted him.
“Master Fox,” Jared muttered.
The fox paused a second. Then it turned and trotted away.
Reassured, he moved to the edge of the trees and crouched behind a broad trunk. Carefully, he peered around it.
An army was encamped on the broad hillside. All around the ancient house of the Wardenry, there were tents and wagons and the glint of armor. Squadrons of cavalry rode in arrogant display; a mass of soldiers were digging a great trench in the wide lawns.
Jared drew in a breath of dismay.
He could see more men arriving down the lanes; pikemen led by drummers and a fife-player, the reedy whistle audible even up here. Flags fluttered everywhere, and to the left, under a brilliant standard of the white rose, a great pavilion was being raised by sweating men.
The Queen’s tent.
He looked at the house. The windows were shuttered, the drawbridge tightly raised. On the roof of the gatehouse metal glinted; he thought there were men up there, and perhaps the light cannon that were kept there had been prepared and moved up to the battlements. His own tower had someone on its parapet.
He breathed out and turned, sitting knees up in the dead leaves.
This was a disaster. There was no way the Wardenry could withstand any sort of sustained attack. Its walls were thick, but it was a fortified manor and not a castle.
Claudia must simply be playing for time. She must be planning to use the Portal.
The thought made him agitated; he stood and paced.
She had no idea of the dangers of that device! He had to get inside before she tried anything so foolish.
The horse whickered.
He froze, hearing the tread behind him, the footsteps through the rustling leaves.
And then the voice, lightly mocking. “Well, Master Jared. Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“HOW MANY?” Finn asked.
Claudia had a visor that magnified things. She was staring through it now, counting. “Seven. Eight. I’m not sure what’s on that contraption to the left of the Queen’s tent.”