The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (4 page)

“Ysbott the Snake at your service, Your Royal Majesty!”

“What royal majesty?” Jack said. “You’ve made a big mistake!”

“Oh, I don’t think so—King Ryons,” Ysbott answered. Now Jack remembered the name. This was one of the outlaw chiefs that Helki was trying to drive out of Lintum Forest. Well, they were out of the forest now. Ysbott and his men were a long way from home.

“You see,” said Ysbott, “it’s you and your friends who’ve made a mistake, Your Majesty. You let my men live, who captured you when you came to Lintum Forest to join up with Helki.

“I’ll admit you gave my lads a good scare—showing off your witchcraft and putting the curse of the Little People on us. But I am Ysbott, and I don’t scare so easily. When Helki sent you off to hide in Ninneburky, I made it my business to follow you. We had to be very patient, watching over that tedious little town for months on end. We were all set to come in and grab you out of the baron’s house—and then you went a-boating. That was a mistake! But your loss is our gain. Silvertown and the Thunder King will pay handsomely for you.”

Jack remembered now. Some outlaws captured them, but Ellayne made those men surrender by dazzling them with magic—something left over from the ancient times, Martis said: not really magic at all, but strange and frightening enough to convince anyone who didn’t know better. Later they’d let the men go, hoping they’d tell tales that would make the outlaws shun Helki’s settlement at Carbonek. But now their mercy had come back to bite them, Jack thought, and Martis was dead. It took all his strength, but Jack refused to weep in front of these murderers.

“I’m not the king,” was all he would say.

“Who but the king would have a witch to guard him,” Ysbott said, “and the Little People to protect his castle in the forest? Now Helki has a boy at Carbonek who he says is the king, but he’s not fooling us.”

“I’m not the king! I’ve lived in Ninneburky all my life. Anybody there can tell you that.”

“We followed you to Ninneburky from the forest, when you and the girl and the man left,” said Ysbott. “I know perfectly well who you are, Your Highness. And it’s not wise to keep insulting me with silly lies.”

I’m done for, Jack thought. I can’t get out of this. They’ve killed Martis, and there’s no one to help me.

“I’m hungry,” said one of Ysbott’s men.

But Martis wasn’t dead. The men who were trying to kill him got in each other’s way, and he was only stunned. He came to before he drowned, and had the wit to float on his back without moving, letting the river carry him out of danger. He was too weak to swim, nor did he dare to cry out after Herger. When he felt sufficiently recovered, he paddled slowly to a stand of tall grass at the river’s edge. By then Herger was long gone, swimming with the current. Martis crawled ashore and caught his breath.

Herger knew the river, knew where to find help. Martis trusted him to get back to Ninneburky and tell the baron what had happened. His own task would be to follow after Jack and rescue him, as soon as he was fit to walk.

It would have to wait until the morning. Not even Martis could follow a trail after dark.

Jack had friends who would risk anything to save him, but they were far away.

King Ryons and his army, along with Helki and Obst, were at Carbonek in Lintum Forest. Helki himself, or King Ryons’ wiry little Attakotts, would have no trouble running down Ysbott’s men. But none of them knew, and they had many other things to keep them busy.

The king’s army had annihilated a punitive expedition sent out from Silvertown. Several hundred men of that expedition, black Hosa warriors from a faraway country, swore oaths to the king and joined his army. Their skill at farming made them a welcome addition to the settlement. Meanwhile, the Attakotts and the king’s Wallekki horsemen patrolled the plains around the forest, and the king’s Abnaks, with Helki’s rangers, hunted down the outlaws in the forest. So Carbonek had peace all through the winter, and when spring came, the settlers planted their crops with God’s blessings.

Obst schooled King Ryons in the Scriptures, while his Ghol bodyguards schooled him in horsemanship, archery, and the finer points of knife-throwing. For the boy king, it was the best time he’d ever had in his life.

Obst wrote letters to, and received letters from, Preceptor Constan in Obann. Ryons watched him write one.

“How will he ever be able to read that, Obst?” he asked, peering over the old man’s shoulder. “What you’ve written makes no sense.”

Obst smiled up at him.

“That’s because I’m writing to him in a cipher,” he said. “Constan has the key, so he can read it. This way, in case an enemy intercepts the message, he won’t be able to understand it. All the words are in the Book of Sacred Songs, and the numbers say in which song each word is to be found. Constan and I devised this code ourselves. A couple of sly old foxes, eh?”

“What enemy are you trying to outfox?” Ryons asked.

“There’s treachery in the city, Ryons. The Thunder King will try to win by treachery what he couldn’t win by force. But there are good men in the city, too—like Constan and the new First Prester, Lord Orth. Someday they may have need of us—and of your army.”

“I’d like to stay here in the forest from now on,” Ryons said.

“It’s all in God’s hands,” said Obst.

Jack had other friends who would have risked their lives to save him, but they were even farther away.

When Gurun left Obann with the boy, Fnaa, masquerading as the king, and the old Abnak chief, Uduqu, to guard him, they went to Durmurot, Obann’s great city in the west. There Jod, Prester of Durmurot, protected them. And from there—as the spirit often moved her—Gurun could ride a day’s ride and rest her eyes upon the sea.

Even as Jack was being hauled from his boat, Gurun stood on the crest of a sand dune, admiring the waves that rolled restlessly ashore. Beside her stood Fnaa, and Uduqu holding the reins of their horses. All three, in spite of themselves, had learned to ride. In Uduqu’s case the learning took all fall and winter.

“I think I must be the first Abnak ever to see this,” he said. He kept his head shaved, Abnak-fashion, except for one thick lock of greying hair. A knobby old scar on his forehead, along with the tattoos around his eyes and on his cheeks, lent him a fierce appearance that had never been belied by his conduct in a fight. But Gurun and Fnaa were used to it.

“Did you really come to Obann over all that water, Gurun—and in a storm, no less?” said Fnaa. He was a perfect double of the king. As far as most people in Durmurot or Obann City knew, he was King Ryons. “We’d better let it stay that way, for now,” Prester Jod had said, for reasons that Fnaa didn’t fully understand. Gurun and Uduqu agreed with the prester.

“We Fogo Islanders love the sea,” said Gurun. “That my boat was blown all the way down to Obann, and did not sink until I was close enough to swim to shore, was a miracle.”

The people of Obann called her Queen, although she wasn’t. There were no titles of nobility among the northern islanders. But as Prester Jod and several others often said, she looked every inch a queen—tall, fair, as straight as a fine ash spear. She would have been married on her sixteenth birthday to one of her father’s neighbors. Now she was seventeen and still unmarried—for a Fogo Island girl, unusual. Almost old enough to be a spinster, she thought.

“Do you think you’ll ever get another boat and go back home?” Fnaa said.

“My father would have something to say to me for losing his best skiff!” Gurun smiled wistfully. “And he would marry me off without delay—just as soon as he finished scolding me and kissing me. I would enjoy seeing him try to do both at the same time.”

“I wonder how long we’ll have to stay out here in Durmurot,” Uduqu said. “The sea is a grand sight, but my heart is in the hills. I guess my two wives reckon I’ve been killed.”

“But you’re famous, old man!” Fnaa grinned at him. “By now your wives must have heard the song about you killing two men with one blow. Cut them both in half! They’ll be proud of you.”

“That was a good day,” the chief agreed, “but it’s a silly song.”

So they stood and gazed upon the sea, at peace. But there was hardly a minute in which either Gurun or Uduqu didn’t think of King Ryons—supposedly safe in Lintum Forest now, but neither of them knew for sure. They weren’t thinking of Jack at all: yet had they known how much he needed them, all three would have set out at once to help him.

CHAPTER 4

A Mission for Ellayne

Enith’s Great-aunt Lanora was the cook for Baron Roshay Bault in Ninneburky. She lived right next door to the baron, in a much smaller house, and Enith and Nywed were to live with her. Grammum would help her sister in the baron’s kitchen and help the baroness with this and that around the house. It had all been arranged by letters.

They had not made any particular arrangements for Enith. Her room in her great-aunt’s house was hardly bigger than a closet, and there was nothing much for her to do all day and night. In Obann, Enith had friends, a tutor, and a nice neighborhood full of stately homes. Here she knew no one, and there was nothing worth looking at.

“You’ll never make any friends if you just sit around and mope,” Grammum said.

“I want to go back to the city!”

Grammum tried to get her to go next door and make friends with the baron’s daughter; and there was a boy living there, too, sort of an adopted son. In fact, after a few days of pure tedium, Enith would have loved to do just that. But she didn’t; it would have been giving in.

But then the boy went off on a trip somewhere, and Aunt Lanora said the girl was really in a sulk about it because she hadn’t been allowed to go, too. “I don’t think she ever wants to settle down and learn how to be a proper lady,” Aunt Lanora said to Grammum. And Nywed said, “She’s polite enough, but I always wonder what she’s thinking.”

This made the girl sound interesting; so the next morning, Enith went through a hole in the hedge around the baron’s yard, hoping to find Ellayne and see what she was like.

She found the girl sooner than she expected, in a space between the hedge and the back of the stables, sitting on a wooden crate and playing with—of all things!—a rat. As soon as Enith stepped through the hedge, the rat jumped out of Ellayne’s arms and dove into the shrubbery.

“What in the world was that!” Enith cried.

Ellayne looked up at her, far from welcoming. “Who are you?” she said. “The new girl next door?”