The Bastard Prince

by Patty Jansen

  “Not the food at the banquet. My father hardly ate anything and already looked unwell.”

  If it wasn’t the food, it could be the drinks.

  The Guentherite order had supplied the wine. The Guentherite order were not part of the Church of the Triune, but definitely had a good relationship with them. There were several monks in the palace.

  Wim in the kitchen tested the wine. They had all “tested” the wine. Yet she was sure that the kitchen would be blamed nevertheless.

  Lord Verdonck moved his lips, but no sound came out. He appeared to want to say something and grabbed onto her arm with surprising strength. His hands were cold.

  “Get out, my dear.” His voice was only a whisper. “Go without me. Take it to safety.”

  “You must be mistaken. I’m Nellie.”

  Madame Sabine was talking to the young coachman. Their voices were low and full of concern.

  Adalbert Verdonck—who looked quite a lot like his father—sat on the chair by the hearth, glaring at Madame Sabine or his father. Whenever Madame Sabine looked in his direction, he stared into the fire. There was no love lost between those two, for whatever reason.

  Nellie was done with the bandage. She folded back the cover, intending to cool the patient down, noticed that he was still in his clothes and that he had soiled the bed. My, what a stench. She recoiled and took a step back.

  Phew.

  The others stared at the mess.

  Lord Verdonck’s eyes held a sad expression.

  Nellie had an eerie thought. Sometimes, hunters or farmers brought birds to the kitchen that were still alive. They would come in a basket that Wim would carry into the yard, an axe dangling on his belt. The birds would be quiet and would look at Nellie with their beady eyes. They knew they were going to die.

  The same expression hovered in the lord’s eyes.

  He knew he would die and could do nothing to stop it. Nellie couldn’t stop it, either.

  “Have you got something to ease his stomach pains?” the young nobleman asked. “At least we can get him into the coach.”

  “He’s not fit to travel home like this,” Nellie said.

  “We have to go,” the lord’s son said. His eyes were intense. “This place is not safe for us.”

  No; if someone had poisoned him, she understood that. But . . .

  “At least let me clean him up.” By the Triune, she had never seen anything like this. “Get him out of bed and take his bottoms off. I’ll find clean clothes.” The lord’s travel chest stood on the other side of the bed.

  The two men and Madame Sabine pulled the sheets off the bed, and Nellie opened the heavy lid of the chest.

  Inside the chest lay all manner of clothing: a heavy coat, spare shirts, a jacket. She took them all out in search of clean trousers.

  Ah, there they were—but what was that?

  In a corner of the chest lay an octagonal box, made of fine polished wood. Her heart skipped a beat. Was that. . . ?

  In her mind, she saw an octagonal shape in the dust.

  The magic box she had seen on Mistress Johanna’s desk had been much more elaborate, made of inlaid wood with mother-of-pearl. The shape surely had to be a coincidence.

  Still, she draped a shirt over the top of the box and returned to the bed, where the men had pulled the lord to his feet and Madame Sabine had undone his belt.

  They pulled off his boots and socks and then his trousers. He moaned through it all, with slime dribbling down his chin.

  His underwear was soaked in watery shit and bloodstained urine.

  “Phew,” the coachman said.

  While the men helped him lift his legs, Nellie pulled down the soiled trousers, which was hard work because they were wet and stuck to his skin.

  The smell made her feel sick.

  But she got to his knees and asked the men to lift his leg so she could pull the trouser legs off. First the right one, and then the left—

  And there she stopped.

  Across the back of his left calf, he had a scar: a broad red mark about the width of her thumb.

  Nellie pulled his trouser leg further down and found two similar scars, parallel to each other, as if a giant cat had scratched him across his calf. Just like the scars on Madame Sabine’s back.

  And then she knew what they were: dragon scars.

  This could mean only one thing: that box in the chest was indeed the dragon box that everyone was looking for.

  By the Triune.

  That was why the guards had been searching the guest’s rooms.

  The church had not been experimenting with the box, he had, and Madame Sabine, and now the church was looking for the box, knowing one of the guests had it, upsetting the nobles’ rooms as they searched the entire palace.

  The trousers were off.

  Nellie wiped his legs and gave the young men a clean pair of underpants, although she wasn’t sure how long they would stay clean. Then the trousers.

  “Wait. I’ll get a shirt to put in his underwear to keep him clean longer.”

  Nellie turned back to the chest. Sweat rolled down between her breasts, and not just because it was hot and airless in this room.

  She crouched by the chest with her back to the two men. She picked up the shirt she had draped over the box and grabbed the box within it.

  “I’ll just fold this into a wad,” she said, with her back to the others.

  She let the box slip from the shirt into the pocket of her apron that was big and also filled with two spoons, the rest of the rag she’d torn the bandage from,, some buttons and pins and other small items. Then she grabbed a second shirt, rolled that up and stuffed that into the pocket as well, letting the ends hang out over the front to hide the shape of the box in her pocket.

  Between the four of them, they dressed Lord Verdonck in clean clothes.

  Madame Sabine kept asking if Nellie thought he would be all right.

  So the two of them had thought to elope with this object of great magical value that belonged to the church?

  They had thought to take it out of the city, to Lord Verdonck’s estate, which lay in the fertile lands to the south.

  Nellie feared much that the lord would not be all right. If he had been poisoned, there would be hell to pay, and he would have a long road to recovery, if he recovered at all.

  But they got him into his clothes and eased him back onto the bed after draping the covers over the soiled sheets. Nellie pitied the girl who would have to deal with those tomorrow morning.

  The lord’s son left the room to find someone else to help his father to the coach.

  “Can I go back to the kitchen now, Madame?” Nellie asked.

  Madame Sabine turned aside as if she had forgotten Nellie was in the room. “Yes, that’s fine.”

  Nellie fled the room, past the guards who stood outside the door, through the foyer where some guests were going home, and past the entrance into the hall where the music played and the drunken shouting continued.

  It was not until she had reached the kitchen that she realised the enormity of what she had just done.

  She had stolen something—something that belonged to the church and had been stolen from the crypt, that the church had bought for safekeeping.

  While Nellie continued to work, the corners of the box poked into the skin under her apron. She probably imagined it, but the box felt warm.

  She wanted to be rid of this horrible thing.

  She joined the line of servants carrying dishes of puddings into the big hall. The guests left much of the food uneaten, and she couldn’t imagine that anyone could still be hungry. As usual, the odd guest had fallen asleep at the table.

  A growing number of guests were already leaving.

  They were locals, and most did not look happy. As Nellie passed the groups on their way to the doors, she caught words like scandalous and outrageous. They might have been talking about the behaviour of the young nobles, or about the fact that people’s rooms were searche
d.

  The guard level in the hall had increased. Several palace guards stood at the door, demanding to check the coat pockets of everyone who left.

  Many of the nobles objected to being asked.

  “What do you think?” she heard one indignant man say, in a slurred voice, “that we steal the palace silverware? It’s not that nice. It hasn’t been polished for months. The tableware at my home is much nicer. I wouldn’t lower myself to steal second-rate things. You know this man, this foreigner who sits on the throne, is a leech. It’s inappropriate to hold festivities like a king while he’s only a pretend king. If he wants to be our king, he had better behave like one.”

  His wife was pulling him by the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t want to get into trouble, do you?”

  “I’m not the one who will get into trouble!”

  The wife hissed, “I don’t understand you. All night you’ve been talking as if Regent Bernard is your best friend. What has gotten into you?”

  The husband took off his coat so that the guards could check the pockets, but the look on his face spelled thunder.

  The guards found nothing of interest and returned the coat to him. He huffed while putting it on and the pair left through the front doors, still arguing.

  Now that she knew what the guards were looking for, Nellie felt conscious of the bulge in her apron pocket.

  After all the guests were gone, the drunks dragged to their rooms or removed from the palace by the staff, the plates cleared, the tables wiped and the floors mopped, Nellie could finally go to her room.

  She made sure the door was shut before she took off her apron, sat on the bed and dug the box from her pocket. The polished wood gleamed in the light of the lamp. Compared to the box that mistress Johanna used to have, it was a simple thing, although well made. She didn’t remember seeing this box before. Then again, Prince Bruno was only four, and no doubt his mother or his father would have kept it somewhere safe on his behalf.

  The wood felt warm under her fingers.

  It seemed to say, Open me if you dare.

  Nellie let her fingers slide along the crack between the lid and the bottom of the box. An ornate clip held the lid in place. Her fingertips traced the sharp outlines of the metal.

  With a soft mrrreeoooow, the kitten jumped onto the bed. It climbed onto her lap, pushing its head against the box.

  “No, don’t do that, I might drop it,” Nellie said.

  She rose from the bed, picked up Lord Verdonck’s shirt, wrapped the box in it, tied the parcel up with the sleeves and tucked it into the back of her clothes cupboard. The kitten watched her from the bed, meowing occasionally.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH TIRED, Nellie found it hard to sleep that night.

  She couldn’t help thinking about the box in her cupboard, the box that two deacons of the church had opened, setting fire to the crypt. The box that contained the dragon that had given Lord Verdonck and Madame Sabine terrible scars. The box that was now in her room in the unlocked wardrobe where people could accidentally stumble across it.

  It was as if the air became stifling with imaginary heat.

  Nellie had seen Li Fai’s dragon once, a terrible creature with a long, sinuous body and a large mouth with vicious teeth. It was about the size of a horse, could fly and blew fire from its nostrils.

  Back then, it had defeated a great evil sorcerer, so she had seen it as a good creature, but magical creatures existed under the command of their masters, and whether they performed good or ill depended on the master.

  If this dragon had belonged to Prince Bruno, who said he would have done good with it?

  And who commanded a dragon without a master?

  Then she worried about Lord Verdonck, wondering if he and his son and coachman had left the palace and if Madame Sabine had gone with them, and whether they missed the dragon box.

  More than the box itself, Nellie feared the bad things that other people could do with it.

  She gave up on trying to sleep and lit the lamp on her little table.

  The kitten bounced off the bed and sat at the door to the cupboard, miaowing, as if it wanted to investigate this strange thing.

  Now she had the box, did her father have any instructions about what to do next?

  She sat on the bed and opened her father’s book on her knees.

  She found the page where the dragon box was first mentioned and read backwards from that.

  In the pages she had previously only skimmed, she found references to the good artisans of the city, which included the bakers and the tailors and the people who worked in the harbour, and cooks and the carpenters.

  The city needed these people, her father said. It was in art that people had the ability to work their magic and make wonderful things. He did not believe all magic should be banned.

  Strange, she had never thought of him as a supporter of magic. Quite the opposite, in fact, even if only because the church banned magic and refused to acknowledge its existence.

  In a roundabout way, he even mentioned the sorceress Juliana as a woman who lived in the artisan quarter and whom many feared, but who they turned to when they had an illness.

  He said about her:

  Certain artisans with dubious qualities have a great interest in the items acquired by the church. It is not always clear how they know these items are in the crypts, but one woman is very insistent in her complaints. She claims to be the rightful owner of many of these objects, and although that is nonsense, she has a disturbingly accurate knowledge of what is there. It seems she uses a spy within the church, although we have not been able to ascertain who this is. The woman in question is known as a witch, and no self-respecting churchman would speak to her.

  And on the next page, she found,

  The witch claims the box has healing properties, and this is certainly untrue. Not only that, but Brother Alfred, who first attempted to open the box, would still be alive, since he was subjected to the full force of magic. But alas, he died of illness the same year. When handling the box, it can seem to be warm, in all likelihood caused by the anger of the creature hidden within. Maybe the man who holds it close to his person can derive benefit from this warmth, so as to make him less susceptible to common illnesses, but to be honest, that is extremely doubtful.

  Yes, Nellie had noticed the warmth. Healing properties? It had done nothing for Lord Verdonck’s health. What about this man called Brother Alfred? Nellie remembered him vaguely, a monk who had regularly come from the monastery to visit the church. He had been well into middle age when she was much younger.

  What was the box supposed to have done?

  She put the book down and went to the cupboard. She took out the bundle of fabric with the box inside. The kitten followed her every step, almost making her trip.

  Slowly, she peeled the shirt away.

  The gleaming wood of the box reflected the light from the candle.

  This box was not the same as Mistress Johanna’s. It was made of a darker wood, and while Mistress Johanna’s had carvings of flowers, this one was plain.

  Nellie shivered.

  She remembered the fire demons that had destroyed the city. She remembered them hovering over the roofs of houses.

  She definitely wasn’t going to open this box, but she was curious to know what was in it. How could a dragon hide in a little box like this? Surely, it couldn’t be a very big dragon. If it wasn’t a big dragon, it couldn’t be a dangerous dragon.

  She ran her fingers over the smooth wood. It didn’t feel warm to her. Her fingertips traced the outline of the clip that held the lid in place and started pushing the clip up.

  She caught herself. It was trying to trick her. It wanted her to open the box. She must put this thing away.

  She would wrap it up and take it to Shepherd Adrianus’ house to ask what she should do.

  She rolled the box back in the shirt.

  The l
ittle kitten found the movement of the fabric very interesting. It jumped onto the parcel and tried to claw at a dangling sleeve.

  Nellie batted the paws away.

  “No, this is not for you to play with.” The kitten had become so much stronger already.

  Nellie picked up the kitten and lowered it to the floor, rose from the bed and returned the box to the shelf.

  The little kitten didn’t give up so easily. It jumped back onto the bed and from the bed onto Nellie’s dress. Because its claws were so sharp, it climbed up the dress and jumped into the cupboard, using its claws to haul itself in.

  But with the weight of the kitten, the pile of clean aprons, towels and sheets tumbled into a heap on the floor, including the shirt that held the box. The kitten’s attempts to free itself unrolled the shirt from the box, and being octagonal, the box rolled on its side across the floor.

  The kitten chased after it.

  Nellie dived after the kitten and noticed that the clip on the box had come undone.

  No! No, no, no.

  Her fingers touched the box, but it slipped from her hands.

  The lid fell off.

  No, no, no.

  Nellie brought both her hands to her mouth and stared at the box in horror. “Oh, look what you have done—”

  Inside the box was—nothing, except soft red silk covering the inside of the bottom and the lid.

  Well, that was strange.

  Phew. She’d worried for nothing.

  And then another thought: this was a ruse. People looking for this box thought everything was about the box, but the dragon was no longer in the box. Someone had taken the dragon out and hidden it.

  She chuckled, though her heart thudded.

  She picked the box up and ran her fingers over the silk lining and felt in the corners of the fabric to check if anything hid in the folds.

  Nothing.

  The dragon was gone.

  That was a relief.

  She would never know the full history of it or how it came to be in Lord Verdonck’s position. And, what was more, she had no idea why the church would want this thing.

  It didn’t matter. Because she would not give it back to Lord Verdonck, and she didn’t have to think about what she would do with this dreadful thing anymore, because it was empty. It was empty! This box was a ruse. She could use it to store her hairpins, or other things.