by Angie Sage
Sally Mullin paused to draw breath and have a large gulp of tea.
“That poor little Princess. God help the little one. I wonder where she is now. Probably wasting away in some dungeon somewhere. Not like your little angel over there…How is she doing?”
“Oh, she’s just fine,” said Sarah, who usually would have talked at length about Jenna’s snuffles and new tooth and how she could sit up and hold her own cup now. But just at that moment Sarah wanted to turn the attention away from Jenna—because Sarah had spent the last six months wondering who her baby really was, and now she knew.
Jenna was, thought Sarah, surely she must be…the baby Princess.
For once Sarah was glad to wave good-bye to Sally Mullin. She watched her bustle off down the corridor, and, as Sarah closed the door behind her, she breathed a sigh of relief. Then she rushed over to Jenna’s basket.
Sarah lifted Jenna up and held her in her arms. Jenna smiled at Sarah and reached out to grab her charm necklace.
“Well, little Princess,” murmured Sarah, “I always knew you were special, but I never dreamed you were our own Princess.” The baby’s dark violet eyes met Sarah’s gaze and she looked solemnly at Sarah as if to say, Well, now you know.
Sarah gently laid Jenna back in her baby basket. Her head was spinning and her hands shook as she poured herself another cup of tea. She found it hard to believe all that she had heard. The Queen was dead. And Alther too. Their Jenna was the heir to the Castle. The Princess. What was happening?
Sarah spent the rest of the afternoon torn between gazing at Jenna, Princess Jenna, and worrying about what would happen if anyone found out where she was. Where was Silas when she needed him?
Silas was enjoying a day’s fishing with the boys.
There was a small sandy beach in the bend of the river just along from The Ramblings. Silas was showing Nicko and Jo-Jo, the two youngest boys, how to tie their jam jars onto the end of a pole and dip them in the water. Jo-Jo had already caught three tiddlers, but Nicko kept dropping his and was getting upset.
Silas picked Nicko up and took him over to see Erik and Edd, the five-year-old twins. Erik was daydreaming happily and dangling his foot in the warm, clear water. Edd was poking at something under a stone with a stick. It was a huge water beetle. Nicko wailed and clung on tightly around Silas’s neck.
Sam, who was nearly seven, was a serious fisherman. He had been given a proper fishing rod for his last birthday, and there were two small silver fish laid out on a rock beside him. He was about to reel in another. Nicko squealed with excitement.
“Take him away, Dad. He’ll frighten the fish,” Sam said crossly.
Silas tiptoed off with Nicko and went to sit beside his oldest son, Simon. Simon had a fishing rod in one hand and a book in the other. It was Simon’s ambition to be the ExtraOrdinary Wizard, and he was busy reading all of Silas’s old magic books. This one, Silas noticed, was called The Compleat Fish-Charmer.
Silas expected all his boys to be some kind of Wizard; it was in the family. Silas’s aunt was a renowned White Witch and both Silas’s father and uncle had been Shape-Shifters, which was a very specialized branch, and one that Silas hoped his boys would avoid, for successful Shape-Shifters became increasingly unstable as they grew older, sometimes unable to hold their own shape for more than a few minutes at a time. Silas’s father had eventually disappeared into the Forest as a tree, but no one knew which one. It was one of the reasons why Silas enjoyed his walks through the Forest. He would often address a remark to an untidy-looking tree in the hope that it might be his father.
Sarah Heap came from a Warlock and Wizard family. As a girl, Sarah had studied herbs and healing with Galen, the Physik Woman in the Forest, which was where she had met Silas one day. Silas had been out looking for his father. He was lost and unhappy, and Sarah took him back with her to see Galen. Galen had helped Silas to understand that his father, as a Shape-Shifter, would have chosen his final destination as a tree many years ago and would now be truly happy. And Silas too, for the first time in his life, realized he felt truly happy sitting next to Sarah by the Physik Woman’s fire.
When Sarah understood all she could about herbs and healing, she had said a fond good-bye to Galen and joined Silas in his room in The Ramblings. And there they had stayed ever since, squeezing in more and more children while Silas happily gave up his Apprenticeship and worked as a jobbing Ordinary Wizard to pay the bills. Sarah made herb tinctures at the kitchen table when she had a spare moment—which did not often happen.
That evening, as Silas and the boys made their way up the beach steps to go back to The Ramblings, a large and menacing Custodian Guard, dressed in black from head to toe, barred their way.
“Halt!” he barked. Nicko started to cry.
Silas stopped and told the boys to behave.
“Papers!” shouted the Guard. “Where are your papers?”
Silas stared at him. “What papers?” he asked quietly, not wanting to cause trouble with six tired boys around him needing to go home for supper.
“Your papers, Wizard scum. The beach area is forbidden to all without the required papers,” sneered the Guard.
Silas was shocked. If he had not been with the boys, he would have argued, but he had noticed the pistol that the guard was carrying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
The Guard looked them all up and down as if deciding what to do, but luckily for Silas he had other people to go and terrorize.
“Take your rabble out of here and don’t come back,” snapped the Guard. “Stay where you belong.”
Silas hurried the shocked boys away up the steps and into the safety of The Ramblings. Sam dropped his fish and started to sob.
“There there,” said Silas, “it’s all right.” But Silas felt that things were most certainly not all right. What was going on?
“Why did he call us Wizard scum, Dad?” asked Simon. “Wizards are the best, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” said Silas distractedly, “the best.”
But the trouble was, thought Silas, there was no hiding it if you were a Wizard. All Wizards, and only Wizards, had them. Silas had them, Sarah had them and all the boys except Nicko and Jo-Jo had them. And as soon as Nicko and Jo-Jo went to the Magyk class in school they would have them too. Slowly but surely, until there was no mistaking it, a Wizard child’s eyes would turn green when he or she was exposed to Magyk learning. It had always been something to be proud of. Until now, when suddenly it felt dangerous.
That evening, when at long last all the children were asleep, Silas and Sarah talked late into the night. They talked about their Princess and their Wizard boys and the changes that had overtaken the Castle. They discussed escaping to the Marram Marshes, or going into the Forest and living with Galen. By the time dawn broke and at last they fell asleep, Silas and Sarah had decided to do what the Heaps usually did. Muddle through and hope for the best.
And so, for the next nine and a half years, Silas and Sarah kept quiet. They locked and barred their door, they spoke to only their neighbors and those they could trust and, when the Magyk classes were stopped at school, they taught the children Magyk at home in the evenings.
And that is why, nine and a half years later, all the Heaps except one had piercing green eyes.
3
THE SUPREME CUSTODIAN
It was six in the morning and still dark, ten years to the day since Silas had found the bundle.
At the end of Corridor 223, behind the big black door with the number 16 stamped on it by the Numerical Patrol, the Heap household slept peacefully. Jenna lay curled up snugly in her small box bed that Silas had made for her from driftwood washed up along the riverbank. The bed was built neatly into a big cupboard leading off a large room, which was in fact the only room that the Heaps possessed.
Jenna loved her cupboard bed. Sarah had made some bright patchwork curtains that Jenna could draw around the bed to keep out both the cold and her noisy
brothers. Best of all, she had a small window in the wall above her pillow that looked out onto the river. If Jenna couldn’t sleep, she would gaze out of her window for hours on end, watching the endless variety of boats that made their way to and from the Castle, and sometimes on clear dark nights she loved to count the stars until she fell fast asleep.
The large room was the place where all the Heaps lived, cooked, ate, argued and (occasionally) did their homework, and it was a mess. It was stuffed full of twenty years’ worth of clutter that had accumulated since Sarah and Silas had set up home together. There were fishing rods and reels, shoes and socks, rope and rat traps, bags and bedding, nets and knitting, clothes and cooking pots, and books, books, books and yet more books.
If you were foolish enough to cast your eye around the Heaps’ room hoping to find a space in which to sit, the chances were a book would have found it first. Everywhere you looked there were books. On sagging shelves, in boxes, hanging in bags from the ceiling, propping up the table and stacked up in such precariously high piles that they threatened to collapse at any moment. There were storybooks, herb books, cookery books, boat books, fishing books, but mainly there were the hundreds of Magyk books, which Silas had illegally rescued from the school when Magyk had been banned a few years back.
In the middle of the room was a large hearth from which a tall chimney snaked up into the roof; it held the remains of a fire, now grown cold, around which all six Heap boys and a large dog were asleep in a chaotic pile of quilts and blankets.
Sarah and Silas were also fast asleep. They had escaped to the small attic space that Silas had acquired a few years back by the simple means of knocking a hole up through the ceiling, after Sarah had declared that she could no longer stand living with six growing boys in just one room.
But, amid all the chaos in the big room, a small island of tidiness stood out; a long and rather wobbly table was covered with a clean white cloth. On it were placed nine plates and mugs, and at the head of the table was a small chair decorated with winter berries and leaves. On the table in front of the chair a small present, carefully wrapped in colorful paper and tied with a red ribbon, had been placed ready for Jenna to open on her tenth birthday.
All was quiet and still as the Heap household slept peacefully on through the last hours of darkness before the winter sun was due to rise.
However, on the other side of the Castle, in the Palace of the Custodians, sleep, peaceful or not, had been abandoned.
The Supreme Custodian had been called from his bed and had, with the help of the Night Servant, hurriedly put on his black, fur-trimmed tunic and heavy black and gold cloak, and he had instructed the Night Servant how to lace up his embroidered silk shoes. Then he himself had carefully placed a beautiful Crown upon his head. The Supreme Custodian was never seen without the Crown, which still had a dent in it from the day it had fallen from the Queen’s head and crashed to the stone floor. The Crown sat crookedly on his slightly pointed bald head, but the Night Servant, being new and terrified, did not dare to tell him.
The Supreme Custodian strode briskly down the corridor to the Throne Room. He was a small, ratlike man with pale, almost colorless eyes and a complicated goatee beard that he was in the habit of spending many happy hours tending. He was almost swamped by his voluminous cloak, which was heavily encrusted with military badges, and his appearance was made faintly ridiculous by his crooked, and slightly feminine, Crown. But had you seen him that morning you would not have laughed. You would have shrunk back into the shadows and hoped he would not notice you, for the Supreme Custodian carried with him a powerful air of menace.
The Night Servant helped the Supreme Custodian arrange himself on the ornate throne in the Throne Room. He was then waved impatiently away and scuttled off gratefully, his shift nearly over.
The chill morning air lay heavily in the Throne Room. The Supreme Custodian sat impassively on the throne, but his breath, which misted the cold air in small quick bursts, betrayed his excitement.
He did not have long to wait before a tall young woman wearing the severe black cloak and deep red tunic of an Assassin walked briskly in and bowed low, her long slashed sleeves sweeping across the stone floor.
“The Queenling, my lord. She has been found,” the Assassin said in a low voice.
The Supreme Custodian sat up and stared at the Assassin with his pale eyes.
“Are you sure? I want no mistakes this time,” he said menacingly.
“Our spy, my lord, has suspected a child for a while. She considers her to be a stranger in her family. Yesterday our spy found out that the child is of the age.”
“What age exactly?”
“Ten years old today, my lord.”
“Really?” The Supreme Custodian sat back in the throne and considered what the Assassin had said.
“I have a likeness of the child here, my lord. I understand she is much like her mother, the ex-Queen.” From inside her tunic the Assassin took a small piece of paper. On it was a skillful drawing of a young girl with dark violet eyes and long dark hair. The Supreme Custodian took the drawing. It was true. The girl did look remarkably like the dead Queen. He came to a swift decision and clicked his bony fingers loudly.
The Assassin inclined her head. “My lord?”
“Tonight. Midnight. You are to pay a visit to—where is it?”
“Room 16, Corridor 223, my lord.”
“Family name?”
“Heap, my lord.”
“Ah. Take the silver pistol. How many in the family?”
“Nine, my lord, including the child.”
“And nine bullets in case of trouble. Silver for the child. And bring her to me. I want proof.”
The young woman looked pale. It was her first, and only, test. There were no second chances for an Assassin.
“Yes, my lord.” She bowed briefly and withdrew, her hands shaking.
In a quiet corner of the Throne Room the ghost of Alther Mella eased himself up from the cold stone bench he had been sitting on. He sighed and stretched his old ghostly legs. Then he gathered his faded purple robes around him, took a deep breath and walked out through the thick stone wall of the Throne Room.
Outside he found himself hovering sixty feet above the ground in the cold dark morning air. Instead of walking off in a dignified manner as a ghost of his age and status really should, Alther stuck his arms out like the wings of a bird and swooped gracefully through the falling snow.
Flying was about the only thing that Alther liked about being a ghost. Flying, or the Lost Art of Flyte, was something that modern ExtraOrdinary Wizards could no longer do. Even Marcia, who was determined to fly, could do no more than a quick hover before crashing to the ground. Somewhere, somehow, the secret had been lost. But all ghosts could, of course, fly. And since he had become a ghost, Alther had lost his crippling fear of heights and had spent many exciting hours perfecting his acrobatic moves. But there wasn’t much else about being a ghost that he enjoyed, and sitting in the Throne Room where he had actually become one—and consequently where he had had to spend the first year and a day of his ghosthood—was one of his least favorite occupations. But it had to be done. Alther made it his business to know what the Custodians were planning and to try and keep Marcia up to date. With his help she had managed to stay one step ahead of the Custodians and keep Jenna safe. Until now.
Over the years, since the death of the Queen, the Supreme Custodian had become more and more desperate to track down the Princess. Every year he would make a long—and much dreaded—trip to the Badlands, where he woud have to report his progress to a certain ex-ExtraOrdinary Wizard turned Necromancer, DomDaniel. It was DomDaniel who had sent the first Assassin to kill the Queen, and it was DomDaniel who had installed the Supreme Custodian and his henchmen to scour the Castle and search for the Princess. For while the Princess remained in the Castle, DomDaniel dared not come near. And so, every year, the Supreme Custodian would promise DomDaniel that this year he would be successf
ul. This year he would get rid of the Queenling and at last deliver the Castle up to its rightful Master, DomDaniel.
And this was why, as Alther left the Throne Room, the Supreme Custodian wore what his mother would have called a silly grin on his face. At last, he had done the job he was sent to do. Of course, he thought, his silly grin changing to a smug smile, it was only due to his superior intelligence and talent that he had discovered the girl. But it wasn’t—it was due to a bizarre stroke of luck.
When the Supreme Custodian took over the Castle, one of the first things he did was to ban women from the Courthouse. The Ladies’ Washroom, which was no longer needed, had eventually become a small committee room. During the past bitterly cold month, the Committee of the Custodians had taken to meeting in the former Ladies’ Washroom, which had the great advantage of a wood-burning stove, rather than the cavernous Custodian Committee Room, where the chill wind whistled through and froze their feet to blocks of ice.
And so, unknowingly, for once the Custodians were one step ahead of Alther Mella. As a ghost, Alther could only go to the places he had been to in his lifetime—and, as a well-brought-up young Wizard, Alther had never set foot in a Ladies’ Washroom in his life. The most he was able to do was hover outside waiting, just as he had done when he was alive and courting Judge Alice Nettles.
It had been late one particularly cold afternoon a few weeks ago when Alther had watched the Custodian Committee take themselves into the Ladies’ Washroom. The heavy door, with LADIES still visible in faded gold letters, was slammed behind them, and Alther hovered outside with his ear to the door, trying to hear what was going on. But try as he might, he was not able to hear the Committee decide to send their very best spy, Linda Lane, with her interest in herbs and healing, to live in Room 17, Corridor 223. Right next door to the Heaps.
