The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (33 page)

Jack was hungry. No one had brought him breakfast. No one was going to bring him any dinner, either.

“Wytt, I can’t just stay here,” he said. “I have to have food, and sooner or later someone’s going to come into this room and find me.”

“I bring food,” Wytt answered, and scurried out the window.

It wouldn’t do. How much food could the Omah carry in while climbing up the wall? “No,” thought Jack, “I’m stuck and I’ve got to get out. They must be searching the whole place for me by now.”

He paced the floor. He sat down, got up, and paced some more. He wished Ellayne were here. She would have read a story in that Abombalbap book of hers, something that told you how to get out of a palace where you were held a prisoner. “But with my luck,” he said to himself, “it’d be something totally useless—like a magic spell to make you look like a washerwoman. It’d take some pretty fancy magic to make me look like a washerwoman.”

Oh! But wasn’t that the answer? A disguise—that was what he needed. The palace was full of servants and scullions, hundreds of them. One more wouldn’t be noticed.

Jack could have hugged himself. “All I’ll have to do is look busy,” he thought. “They’d never expect me to be roaming around on the loose.”

Wytt came back soon with half a buttered biscuit, carrying it in his mouth so he could climb. It was better than nothing, and Jack ate it.

“I get more.”

“No, Wytt. I’m not going to stay here. We’ve got to steal an apron, maybe a smock, and a hat, and some kind of bundle to carry around. Then we can sneak out of the palace.”

It took some doing to get Wytt to understand the plan. He didn’t clearly understand the use of clothing. But eventually he saw what Jack wanted to do.

“We have to find an unlocked room with someone’s clothes in it,” Jack said. “And there’s sure to be a spare apron in one of the kitchens. If I can change into different clothes, I’ve got a chance.”

Before the morning was out, they pilfered some clothes. You might think it would be fun, sneaking around what seemed like miles and miles of stone-lined hallways, where every footfall echoed hollowly; but Jack didn’t. “Lord knows what they’ll do to me if they catch me,” he whispered to Wytt—who showed his teeth and shook his stick.

They had to visit several unlocked rooms before Jack found clothes that fit. Wytt’s nose warned them off some rooms that had people in them. Time and again someone would come walking down the hall, and Jack would have to turn away and pretend to tie his shoes. Fortunately they were all servants busy with assorted errands, not members of a search party.

Jack put on a loose shirt with baggy sleeves, pale blue, and a soft, floppy cloth cap, grey, that hid most of his hair. He took a pillow case and filled it with more clothes. If anyone asked, he would say he was taking them to be laundered. Ellayne would be proud of him.

“Sniff out a kitchen for us, Wytt,” he said. “I’m starving.”

Wytt didn’t know what a kitchen was, but he was sure he could lead Jack to food.

The last time he was in Obann, the little girl who was a prophetess told Fnaa he was to do whatever came into his heart, for God was with him. He still wasn’t quite sure who God was, but he was sure he ought to do what the prophetess said. She was, after all, no ordinary girl.

So today, because it was in his heart to do it, he sought out Prester Jod. “I have to tell you something that no one else should hear—not even Gurun,” he said. Jod took him into his study and shut the door.

“What is it, my prince?” he asked.

“I don’t want that man from Silvertown to crown me,” Fnaa said. “It’d be wrong, anyhow, because I’m not the king. I only look like him.”

The prester couldn’t help staring. “Sire, what folly is this?”

“It’s the truth. My name is Fnaa. I’ve been holding King Ryons’ place because I look like him. I don’t know where he is now, but Gurun thinks he ran off to Lintum Forest, where he’s safe.”

Jod had heard many stories, from many different people, about the poor young king being not quite right in his head. “A spot of brain fever, last year,” most of them said: “it almost killed him.” Jod had no reason not to believe these stories.

“Your Majesty should probably rest,” he said. “All the excitement of the coronation—”

“But I’m telling you the truth. Listen!”

Fnaa told him the whole story: how he was a slave in the house of Vallach Vair, who hatched a plot to put him in place of the king; how he fled to Ninneburky; how Jack and Ellayne brought him back to warn the king; and how Gurun put him in the king’s place because Ryons had disappeared from the palace and no one could find him.

“I’ve been pretending to be him ever since,” he said. “I act like a fool sometimes because Gurun and my mother say it’s safer for me—those men won’t be afraid of a king who’s a half-wit and won’t be so anxious to get rid of him. The handmaid, Dakl, is my mother. She taught me to play the fool so Vallach Vair wouldn’t sell me away from her. That’s the true story, Master Prester. I thought you ought to know.”

It was very hard for the prester to believe, and he asked a host of questions. Fnaa answered all of them.

“I can see how Merffin Mord and the others might be plotting to restore the Oligarchy,” Jod said, more to himself than to Fnaa. “And I’ve heard rumors of a boy in Lintum Forest who pretends to be the king. But what are we to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” Fnaa said. “But whatever you do, you’ll have to be careful. And I won’t let them put that crown on my head.”

“I’ll be careful; I promise you,” Jod said. “We’re treading on thin ice, aren’t we?”

CHAPTER 36

Martis Has a Visitor

Angel the hawk saw Silvertown first. She knew somehow that Ryons and his people meant to go there. In him she sensed an excitement tinged with dread, and in the host of human beings that went with him, a tensing-up for bitter struggle. Hawks and people had such things in common.

They would be struggling down there, she understood, around that nest of stone. The people down below were as busy as ants, toiling with more stone, more timber, preparing for their fight with Ryons’ people. What Angel thought of it, she couldn’t have explained.

On the ground with Ryons, Baby was becoming hard to manage. Perkin had to put a stout rope around the great bird’s neck and hold it without ever letting go. Several times Baby snapped at men who came too close, and one bite from that hooked beak could kill.

“If he meant to hurt anyone, he’d have done it by now,” Perkin said. “But he’s nervy all the same. He knows something’s going to happen soon.” He never snapped at Perkin, who had raised him from a chick, and it seemed to soothe him when Ryons dismounted and walked beside him—a practice that the Ghols viewed with some uneasiness.

“Cavall knows, too,” said Ryons. The big dog trotted beside him, keeping Ryons between himself and Baby. “It’s
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going to be a bad battle. I’m afraid.”

The chiefs had placed the five hundred Hosa in the van of the host. Among all the nations in King Ryons’ army, only the black men had a tradition of fighting in disciplined formations. They marched as one man, in perfect step, from time to time clashing their spears against their shields in unison, making a noise that was like the tread of a battalion of giants in armor. They employed several different rhythms, often singing in time to the beating of the shields. It would be terrifying, Ryons thought, to face them on an open field.

Wild and undisciplined, the Abnaks moved in an ever-shifting mass, occasionally whooping and howling, loudly boasting of the deeds of their ancestors. The Griffs strode silently, implacably, with their dark hair piled up in coiled braids. Chief Zekelesh and his Fazzan, the wolf’s-heads, alternated between walking and trotting. So did the Dahai in their tartan kilts.

On the flanks rode the Wallekki, screening the army. They wouldn’t be much use against stone walls, Chief Shaffur admitted. “But let there be one breach in those walls,” he said, “and they’ll pour into Silvertown like boiling water.” The Attakotts, on foot, marched among them, poisoned arrows at the ready.

“It’s a terrible thing we go to do,” said Obst, “but God commands it. Pray He gives us victory without much bloodshed.”

“Pray fast,” Helki said. “We’ll be at Silvertown tomorrow.”

Something had gone wrong with the coronation.

“I don’t know what it could be,” Roshay Bault said, “but those men are working like there’s someone peering over their shoulders. There’s a rumor in the city that the king is sick.”

No one knew the crown was missing: that had been kept a secret, so far. But in the absence of truth, rumors spread unchecked.

“I wish I knew what Wytt was doing,” Ellayne said.

She would not have been relieved to know that Wytt was now hiding in a corner of a kitchen where Jack, clad in an apron, was kneading dough. “I’ve run away from being a king to be a scullion in a kitchen,” he thought. He had stains of flour on his face, and they’d served him well. Two soldiers that afternoon came in and looked around—looking right through him and then went on their way.

“They sent me here from Prester Herredd’s house,” he told a fat woman who’d asked. “The prester’s gone away, and they thought the palace kitchens might be shorthanded. They’ll come and get me when they want me.”

“I can see as how they didn’t mind getting rid of you,” she said. “Don’t you know how to do anything?” She took two minutes to teach him how to knead dough. “When you finish that lot, get busy washing those pots over there.”

When Wytt wasn’t hiding—with so many people about, he had to be careful—he was to find a way out of the palace other than via the main entrance. “If we can just get to some of those yards and stables in the back,” Jack said, “we can climb over the fence and be out of here.”

But for the time being, which would be a long time, there would be no break from toiling in the kitchen. Following the coronation, the palace would be full of feasting. The cooking staff would have to be ready well in advance.

“At least I’m learning how to bake bread,” he consoled himself.

Martis couldn’t get away from Goryk all day long, not until it was time to go to bed. He was asleep when Gallgoid knelt down and placed a hand over his mouth.

“Shh.”

Martis couldn’t see at first. The shutters were closed. But he made no resistance, and Gallgoid identified himself.