Rocking Horse War

by Lari Don

  “Have you been here before?” she called after him.

  “No!”

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “No!”

  “Do you know where the Laird and Emmie will be?” At least she didn’t have to keep pretending Ruby was here too.

  “No!” he shouted back. “But if we make enough noise, I’m sure they’ll come to us.”

  Pearl shook her head in astonishment. Then she brought Thomas to a halt by accelerating and getting in front of him.

  “That’s a dreadful tactic. You throw away all our advantages that way.”

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “We haven’t been invited. It would be rude to go in the front door, so let’s find the back way in. Then follow our noses, our eyes and our ears.”

  “Follow them to what exactly?” he asked impatiently.

  “To whatever trouble Emmie is causing the Laird.”

  “Trouble? She’s only ten years old. He’s a powerful and skilled lord of the land. She won’t be causing him any trouble.”

  “You don’t know Emmie. If we get in there, I’ll find her.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t argue. He nodded. “That’s why you’re here.” So he ran towards the northern corner of Swanhaugh Towers, rather than the arched and pillared front door.

  They sprinted round the side of the north wing, and found a jumble of outbuildings, stables and sheds forming a rough courtyard against the back wall of the castle.

  There were four back doors into the main building. Pearl guessed they would lead to the kitchen, the cellars, the gunroom and the servants’ quarters.

  Every door was closed, and every door was guarded by two or three swans. Not elegant as they were on the water, nor wide and swooping as they were in the air, but squat-bodied, snake-necked and menacing.

  Chapter 15

  Thomas and Pearl faced the barrier of swans.

  He lowered the muzzle of his silver gun. “I can’t shoot them all.”

  “Why not?” Pearl’s sympathy for the swan in the canal dissolved at the sight of these malignant birds between her and her sister.

  “I don’t have enough bullets.”

  Pearl counted the swans in the courtyard.

  “You didn’t bring a dozen bullets with you! What kind of war are you running here?”

  “I’d need more than a dozen. Look up.”

  About thirty swans were looping in a wide oval above them, and more were arriving, in twos and threes, from all over the estate.

  “There are already too many for me to fend off with my gun or my staff.”

  “Sorry,” Pearl said. “We should have gone to the front door after all.”

  “Never mind. It’s probably locked anyway.”

  Pearl examined the back of the castle. She and Thomas could easily climb the crumbling wall to the first floor windows, but they wouldn’t escape from winged enemies by going upwards.

  Downwards then? She saw the grimy hatch of a coal cellar, but it was blocked by swans too.

  No, the easiest thing was just to walk in through the back door.

  “Are they real swans?” Pearl asked suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Are they actual swans? Apart from doing what the Laird wants, do they act like real swans?”

  “Yes.” Thomas sounded puzzled. “But even ordinary swans are violent when they’re defending their territory.”

  “I have a plan,” she said quietly. “We’re aiming for the nearest door. It has a glass pane at the top, so even if it’s locked, you can smash the glass and unlock it. I’ll distract them. You break in.”

  Pearl began to walk slowly towards the three swans guarding the nearest door.

  Thomas lifted the gun and followed her.

  “Lower the gun,” she ordered.

  She slipped her hand into the biggest pocket of her pinafore. When she’d searched for weapons as they entered the Laird’s park, she hadn’t found a dagger or a pistol or any undetectable poison, but she had found something much more useful against swans.

  She pulled out a soft packet, unwrapped it and started to tear the contents into small lumps. Then, like a gardener sowing seeds, she swung her hand round, opened her fingers and cast dozens of jammy breadcrumbs onto the ground over to her right.

  The swans stared at the bread, then one by one they lifted their heads and stared at Pearl.

  If they went for her rather than the sandwich, she had nothing to defend herself with. She scattered more crumbs.

  The first swan broke, rushing to get to the food before the others.

  The second swan blundered after the first. They started hissing and barging each other out of the way as their bright orange beaks scooped up the breadcrumbs.

  That left only one swan, a huge cob, standing directly between her and the door.

  Pearl lifted the last sandwich and waved it at the remaining swan. Its tiny black eyes, hidden in the black feathers round its beak, watched the moving bread. She waved it further. The swan’s head and neck began to swing with the bread. Pearl flung the sandwich over the heads of the squabbling swans, further away from the door.

  The third swan crashed after the bread. Thomas threw his staff like a spear through the glass pane. He reached the door in four long strides, shoved his arm over the jagged glass and opened it from behind. He leapt across the doorstep and inside.

  Pearl walked calmly past two swans gobbling breadcrumbs. The third swan, with a triangular sandwich in its beak, flapped back towards her. Thomas grabbed her arm, pulled her in and slammed the door.

  “Feeding the enemy?” he said sternly, then laughed. “That was clever! What else do you have in those pockets?”

  “Nothing much.” Pearl heard a skyful of swans landing angrily outside. “Can they get through the door?”

  Thomas locked the door. Then he poked a finger through a rip in the sleeve of his tweed jacket. “They’ll not risk their necks on that sharp glass, and anyway, they can’t work the lock. We’re safe from swans while we’re inside.”

  He smiled at her. “We work well together, Pearl Chayne.”

  “Only when we want the same thing.”

  “Now we both want Emerald. Let’s go and get her.”

  They ran into a dark kitchen, past a wide cold oven and rows of copper pans hung on hooks in order of size. Pearl dropped the jammy paper wrapper on a scarred wooden table. She wondered if cooks had stuffed swans on it in the olden days.

  They sprinted along a dingy servants’ corridor and through a swing door into the entrance hall, then slid to a halt on the tiled floor.

  The air was chilly and musty, and Pearl’s footsteps echoed as she walked to the middle of the black and white tiles. She saw padlocks and chains hanging on the back of the huge front door. They couldn’t have got in that way after all.

  Opposite the door, a staircase swept up, curving several times round the sides of the oval hall. Pearl squinted up and counted five floors above. The balconies and landings were dimly lit through a glass ceiling, spotted with dirt.

  Pearl walked round, looking at a three-legged table with a silver tray for calling cards, though no one had called recently except dead flies; a chest of drawers topped by a bronze bust of a famous Scottish writer, whose name Pearl couldn’t remember, with yellowing envelopes tucked under his chin; a tilting coatstand holding a wide hat trimmed with white feathers, and a couple of motheaten velvet coats; and a cracked glass dome in an alcove, filled with stuffed birds: capercaillies and humming birds, woodpeckers and falcons, their wings fluffy with dust.

  “Knowing landlore hasn’t made the Laird rich or popular, has it?” she murmured.

  “That’s because he spends his time getting high on the smell of blood,” Thomas answered. “He only cares about his own pleasures, not about the health of his land or the weight of his purse.”

  Thomas leant against the bottom post of the banister, watching Pearl as she knelt down to look at the worn tiles
behind the front door.

  “My dear girl, are you really trying to use your low poacher’s tracking skills inside the castle?”

  Pearl didn’t answer. She counted the doors off the central hall. As well as the narrow swing doors that led to the servants’ corridors, there were four double wooden doors, heavy and carved.

  She pushed gently at one. It creaked open, revealing a room full of stiff armchairs, facing a wide window looking out at the canals. “Parlour,” she muttered.

  The next room had a huge table, a stone fireplace and dozens of wooden chairs. “Dining room.”

  The third contained just two chairs, but hundreds of bookshelves. “Library.”

  The last door was locked. She put her ear against the wood, but heard nothing except Thomas’s impatient sighs behind her.

  She walked round the hall again, measuring the width of the narrow doorways with her arms. She stood beside Thomas, looking at the first few steps of the staircase. Then she ran to the unlocked doors and looked at those rooms once more.

  The library’s highest bookshelves were on a gallery halfway up the walls. The parlour and the dining room were ringed with balconies for servants to light the chandeliers hanging from the high ceilings.

  “There’s another entrance to this locked room one floor up,” Pearl announced. “We have to go up those stairs to find Emmie.”

  “How do you know she’s in there?”

  “Because it’s the only locked door which is wide enough to let a horse through.”

  Thomas laughed. “Why does the width of the door matter?”

  “Because there are wet hoofprints behind the front door.”

  Thomas rushed over. Three distinct hoofprints were just visible, the damp shapes taking a long time to dry in this cold atmosphere. He cleared his throat, but Pearl had no time for apologies.

  “Could the horse go up the stairs without ripping or marking the carpet?” she demanded.

  “No.”

  “Are the servants’ doors wide enough to let a horse through?”

  “No.”

  “Then Emmie, or her horse at least, is behind that locked door. And there’s a balcony in every other room, so let’s go up and get onto the balcony of this room.”

  Thomas followed Pearl, two steps at a time, up the sweeping staircase to a single door directly above the locked double entrance in the hall. They put their shoulders to the door, shoved at it, then stumbled in when it opened easily.

  They found themselves standing in deep shadow on a narrow gallery, above a huge high room furnished with nothing but faded couches round the edges of a wooden floor. The gallery widened at one end into a platform, cluttered with rusty music stands.

  “Ballroom,” muttered Thomas.

  “Minstrels’ gallery,” murmured Pearl.

  But neither of them were really looking at the details of the room. They were staring at the people in the centre of the room.

  Pearl wondered if the two people in front of them were playing a game. The child was giggling, but the man was cursing under his breath. He was chasing the girl, trying to grab her arm, her dress, her foot. She was eluding him, moving faster, making sharper turns, ducking and somersaulting, always an inch away from his grasping fingers.

  Pearl held her breath as they raced up and down the ballroom. The man was skinny, wearing a purple velvet suit and a lacy shirt, his white hair tied back with a ribbon. He moved smoothly, skilfully, but without the speed and agility of his young quarry.

  The girl had curly blonde hair and a dark green cotton dress. Her cheeks were pink with effort and laughter.

  And she swooped through the air in front of Pearl and Thomas, chased by the man with flapping coat-tails and long bony arms.

  Emmie and the Laird. Both moving like birds through the air, or fish through the sea. No wires or ropes or wings. Just swooping and diving and floating and flying.

  Chapter 16

  “She can fly!” whispered Thomas. “She can fly!”

  He turned to Pearl, his face pale and clammy, looking as if he’d found maggots under his tongue.

  “She can fly! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The chase sped under the minstrels’ gallery. The Laird rose straight up so fast that he banged his head on the wooden underside of the platform. This time Pearl heard him curse out loud.

  She grinned. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know. But I did know she would be more than a match for the Laird. And for you and all your wooden horses.”

  “How could you not know? She must have been practising. Look at that, for goodness sake.” Emmie was cartwheeling along the ceiling.

  “Well, I wasn’t sure. When Ruby and Jasper fly they usually make a mess of it and end up trapped on wardrobes or dangling from doocots. I don’t have to rescue Emmie nearly as often, so I guessed she might be better at it.”

  “The others fly too?” Thomas asked faintly.

  Pearl peered over the edge of the gallery to watch the Laird chase Emmie along the floor, both gliding a nail’s breadth above the bare boards. They swerved up the wall beside the vast fireplace at the other end of the ballroom.

  “Yes, they fly too. Why? Don’t you want them now?” Pearl’s quiet voice was teasing. “Are flying children not part of your grand plan?”

  “I suppose the more powers they have, the stronger the crown will be. But the Horsburghs haven’t flown since Tam Horsburgh fell to his death. It’s a Swann power. Just like the birds reacting to Jasper’s singing. It may mean …” His voice faded away.

  “It may mean what?”

  “It may mean my grandfather wasn’t the only one who thought of creating children to be the jewels in our crown.”

  “How did he create them, exactly?” Pearl asked. “What does he want them for? They’re children, not a magical experiment. Tell me what you mean when you say he created them!”

  “Not now. No time. We have to rescue her.”

  He raised his staff and aimed it at the pair floating in front of the high windows. Emmie was bobbing in the air with her arms crossed and a grin on her porcelain doll’s face, moving just enough to avoid the bony arms stretching for her.

  Pearl cracked the edge of her hand against Thomas’s wrist and the staff fell. “No! She doesn’t need rescuing. Not by you.”

  As Thomas bent to pick up his stick, they heard a clatter below them.

  Thomas curled his upper body right over the panelled side of the gallery, to see the floor directly beneath. Then he uncurled and beckoned Pearl to join him. She didn’t entirely trust him not to pitch her over, so she knelt down and looked through a gap in the floorboards. She glimpsed a white shape, catching the light on its varnished curves.

  “Emmie’s horse?” Pearl asked.

  “Yes. The poor thing’s chained up, she’s terrified, and she’s wearing herself to splinters trying to escape. I have to rescue her as well as Emerald.”

  “Are the rocking horses really alive then? Do they have feelings?”

  “Of course. Once anything is alive it has a full set of feelings and a strong hold on life. I’m responsible for that horse,” insisted Thomas, “so I can’t just leave her here.”

  Pearl looked up at Emmie, flying near the ceiling, slowing down to fool the Laird into making a careless grab, then jinking out of his reach.

  “She’s trying to tire him out,” said Pearl.

  “Shouldn’t we let her know we’re here?”

  Pearl chuckled. “She knows.”

  “What makes you think that? We’re standing in shadow, we’re whispering and she hasn’t looked in this direction, nor has the Laird.”

  “Of course she knows we’re here. Look, she’s showing off.”

  Emmie was spinning and twisting in the air: first like a seed pod falling from a sycamore tree, then a coin in a magician’s hand, then a flame in the wind.

  Thomas sighed. “That’s how I would fly if I could. She’s amazing, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a very chee
ky little girl, and I need to get her home for her lunch.” Pearl was smiling broadly.

  “But what a power to harness!”

  “It’s not your power. It’s her power, to use however she wants.”

  “But my grandfather created her.”

  “Really? Did he create a child who could fly?”

  While Emmie concentrated on her dance, the Laird was crawling silently through the air towards her.

  “Look out!” yelled Thomas. “Behind you!”

  Emmie laughed, and shrank from a tall twisting flame to a tiny bouncing ball by wrapping her arms round her knees, so the Laird slipped right under her.

  Then she swam through the air and popped up at the gallery, vaulting over to land at Pearl’s side.

  “Hello Pearl! Did you follow the horse? Have you been watching me fly?”

  “You looked very fancy, Emmie. Come on, we need to get home.”

  The Laird hauled himself over the rail, and stood a few steps away with his hand pressed to his chest, getting his breath back.

  Thomas stepped heroically between the girls and the man, and lifted his staff.

  Now the Laird was so close, Pearl could see he wasn’t as dapper as he’d looked in the air. His purple velvet suit was faded and missing a few buttons. His white hair was greasy at the scalp and tinged with yellow at the ends. His shirt had food stains on its throat ruffles and splatters of dark red on its frayed cuffs.

  The Laird slid his left fingers up his right sleeve to pull out a smooth white stick as long as his forearm. A bone, with black and white feathers lashed to one end by a piece of leather. He pointed it at Thomas.

  “Oh, don’t be daft!” Emmie darted out in front of Thomas and stood between the two of them.

  “Put your toys down. If you fling spells at each other you might hurt me and you don’t want to do that, do you?”

  She stood with her hands on her hips and her head cocked, and she smiled as the man and the boy did exactly as she ordered.

  “Now,” she turned to Thomas, “perhaps you should introduce yourself, as my sister is usually too busy watching and thinking to be polite.”

  Pearl was watching her sister’s confident stance, and thinking it was going to be difficult to rescue someone who believed she was in charge. Emmie didn’t know how dangerous this war had become. Pearl’s back and legs twitched as she remembered the scree and the grinding rocks.