Question everything. And everyone. Even those you trust.
Unless she had already decided that the war was going to happen. Unless she already knew that Taroom was going to be attacked.
Roderick felt as if everything was collapsing. The only word he could manage was, ‘Why?’
This stopped Ruby for a moment. When she spoke, it was less stridently. ‘I don’t know. But this is what we do know. The Queen wanted Banfor, and got him by kidnapping and threatening his daughter. Once he got here, Taroom was torched, and that gave her a reason to go to war. Meanwhile, you started to dig around and uncover things, and suddenly you’re being kept here under armed guard.’
Through all the difficult times he had had as a knight, what had kept Roderick going was the knowledge that he had been chosen by the Queen to serve her. When things threatened to overwhelm him, he had clung to the idea that if he carried out the Queen’s orders, he would be doing the right thing. Returning with Banfor and fulfilling his mission had filled him with pride, and the two times that the Queen had thanked him – on his return from the Circle of Mountains and today at the parade – had been the greatest moments in his life.
‘If you’re right,’ he said, ‘by bringing Banfor back, I’ve delivered to the Queen the weapon she needs to go to war.’
Ruby nodded.
‘Back at the mountains you tried to warn me that there was something about our mission to find Banfor that didn’t make sense,’ continued Roderick slowly.
Ruby nodded again.
‘And I wouldn’t listen,’ said Roderick aloud, but to himself. He punched his leg. ‘Why?’
But he knew the answer. Because he had wanted to be a hero.
And now he was one.
But at what cost?
He felt sick.
Ruby’s voice came from far away.
‘Ask yourself this. Tomorrow you’re supposed to march off to fight Nareeans. Do you really think that’s what you should be doing?’
They both sat still, examining their hands and their options. ‘Why did you come back, Ruby? You could have just kept going to Nareea, and told them what you’ve told me.’
‘In a couple of days the Queen will use the power she has over Banfor to start a war that no one, except her, wants. You helped create this mess, so you should help fix it.’ Her tone lightened. ‘Besides, in Nareea I’m a criminal, and in Baronia I’m an escaped spy. Who else but you would listen to me?’
Roderick let his head fall back. He stared at the ceiling and half wished it would fall in on him. At least then he would get some peace.
PART 3
MAYHEM
CHAPTER 19
TRACKING SONYA
Roderick tried the door. It was of course locked, so he knocked loudly. Within moments a tall, thickset guard with blond hair and a beard opened it. ‘Yes?’
‘I need to speak to the Queen urgently.’
‘I will send a message immediately, sir,’ said the guard, moving to shut the door.
Roderick put out his hand to stop it. ‘Sorry, it can’t wait. I must go to her now. It is of the utmost importance.’
‘I will send word that the matter is urgent, sir, but the Queen’s orders are that it is not safe for you to leave these rooms . . . Huh!’
As he was talking, the soldier’s sword had drawn itself from his scabbard and was pointing at his nose. Ruby, invisible, had grabbed it.
‘It really is quite urgent. Sorry,’ said Roderick, stepping through the door.
The hovering sword advanced on the guard, who backed up against the far wall of the corridor. The sword then rounded on the second guard, who had drawn his own sword.
Roderick turned to him. ‘I think your friend’s sword thinks you should let me leave. What do you think?’
The second guard hesitated, looking from the levitating sword to Roderick and back again. Suddenly, the levitating sword slashed through the air towards the second guard, closing in on his neck. The guard struck back, but his confusion robbed him of strength and skill. The hovering sword struck a fierce blow, knocking the guard’s sword to the ground, then came to rest lightly on his neck. The guards’ eyes looked as if they were about to detonate. Roderick picked up the dropped sword and herded both guards into the suite he had occupied, relieved them of their keys and a knife, which he stashed in his belt, then locked them in.
‘You carry both swords,’ said Ruby. ‘One floating along might attract attention.’
Roderick tucked them into his belt and then started to creep along the corridor. A hand tugged at his shirt. His stomach lurched and he stifled a cry.
‘Don’t creep,’ said Ruby. ‘Stride. No one except the Queen, those guards and maybe one or two other knights knows you’re supposed to be locked up, so look like you own the place and we’ll walk out of here.’
He nodded and tried to walk tall. They reached the circular staircase and started to descend. Two servants moved respectfully to the side of the stairwell to let Roderick pass. As Roderick and Ruby rounded the staircase’s final turn they emerged into the palace’s giant foyer. Servants and knights hurried across it in various directions.
‘No noise now,’ whispered Roderick back over his shoulder.
‘I’m in front of you, you idiot,’ hissed Ruby.
Roderick moved as confidently as he could across the foyer, trying to walk in a relaxed nothing-much-happening-here-definitely-not-anyone-escaping-or-anything-like-that sort of way, and made it through the palace’s two massive doors and out into the courtyard.
He blinked in the sun. The courtyard was, as usual, littered with servants hurrying, and knights strolling, chatting or playing horseshoes. Three knights were making their way diagonally across the courtyard towards him. The middle one was Sir Lilley. Roderick’s stomach did a somersault with a sideways flip. He jumped back behind a pillar. Lilley passed within a few steps of him and entered the palace.
‘Remember,’ whispered Ruby in his ear. ‘You’re Sir Roderick. You’ve just been honoured in a parade. You’re a hero. Stop hiding, walk over to the stables and get us a horse.’ She gave him a firm push.
Roderick started walking again, hoping that he was the only one who could hear his heart thumping.
A group of knights were playing cards around a stone table. One of them was Fromley. He looked up and for a moment their eyes met. Roderick pulled his gaze away and kept going.
They reached the stables and Roderick extracted Fruitcake. He felt Ruby get up behind him and they trotted towards the castle gates. They were twenty steps away from them when the two guards Roderick had just locked in his room rushed out of a doorway built into the castle walls next to the gates. Behind them were four other guards. Roderick didn’t know how they had got out of the room, but they had done it quickly. The guard with the blond beard whispered urgently into the ear of Aloysius the doorman, and then stepped forward. ‘Sir Roderick, it is the Queen’s orders that you return to the palace.’
As he spoke the other guards pushed the huge castle gates shut. Roderick looked around. There was no other way out. Even with the invisible Ruby, there was no way they could defeat all of them, especially as he couldn’t even be relied upon to get the better of one.
Suddenly there was a fearsome growl behind them, and a big furry shape rushed past. Chester! He bounded straight at the guards, who wisely scattered. Blond-beard was either braver or slower than the rest and started to draw his sword. Before he could unsheathe it, Chester had batted his arm away, picked him up and turned him upside down by his ankles. ‘Hello, Mister Person who no longer has a sword or even feet that do what they are supposed to do and make contact with the ground. That’s a long name, isn’t it?’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’re going to leave now, but when I say “we” I don’t mean you. I am sure that with your brain inside your head you will think of following us, but I am going to
wait just outside the city gates and if anyone who is you, or smells like you or looks like you or any of those others comes out of the gate, I’m going to say hello to them in a friendly fashion and then eat them, which involves biting and chewing and swallowing and digesting for me, and screaming and bleeding and hurting for you.’
As he was talking, Chester strolled over to the castle gates and, still holding Blond-beard upside down with one paw, pulled the gates open with the other. Roderick urged Fruitcake through the gates. Chester laid Blond-beard down on his back, and then picked up a chain that was used to secure the gates from the inside, and followed them out. Once outside he pulled the gates shut behind him and wrapped the chain around its huge handles, effectively locking it.
‘Come on,’ urged Chester, jogging towards the city gates. ‘We have stopped them for a while, but how long is a while? By the time the while is over, we need to be not here. In fact not even close to here. Wherever we are, we will still say it is here, but it needs to be a very different “here” to this “here”. That makes sense!’
They rushed through the city gates and across the nearly empty bridge, then turned left off the road into the trees.
‘By the way,’ said Chester, ‘I have not seen Ruby, but I think I can smell her scent with my nose. Bears have excellent smelling noses. Are you a person who is a here but who is unseeable again, Ruby?’
‘Hello, Chester,’ panted Ruby. ‘But why are you here?’
‘Because a long time ago I was born and I haven’t got around to the bit where I die yet. Is that a good answer? No, it is not. Accurate, but much too vague and general. Let me try this answer. I was with Mister Banfor in the castley place and he shut his eyes and looked the way Mister Banfor looks when he is trying to see things without his eyes, and nothing happened for a while, and then nothing happened for a bit longer, and then he opened his eyes and said, “Chester, go and help Roderick and Ruby leave the castle. Meet them at the front gate.” Then I started to ask him a very long and quite complicated question and he stopped me and said “Go! Now!” And so I stopped talking, which was the hardest bit of the whole day, and I came. And now we are here.’
They headed further into the trees and when they could no longer see the road they turned right so they were travelling east, parallel to it. They stopped for a moment and looked back but could detect no signs of pursuit.
They moved onwards, picking their way carefully between the trees, still heading east towards Nareea. As their distance from Palandan increased, Roderick began to think about his next problem: what to do next.
Soon evening dropped in. They found a narrow stream tucked away and dismounted. Chester disappeared into the trees, and soon returned chomping a rabbit. Before they had escaped from the palace, Ruby and Roderick had stuffed as much of the food from Roderick’s room into their pockets as they could, so they were able to have a dinner of bread with cheese and ham, followed by gleaming apples so crisp that the sound of Ruby’s first bite made Roderick jump.
Roderick took a very loud bite of his own, chewed and then with his mouth still half-full said, ‘So we need to find my sister. Agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ replied Ruby.
‘How do we do it?’
‘Simple,’ said Ruby. ‘We sneak back into the castle and torture your friend Fromley until he tells us where she is.’
‘Sneaking is not something a bear does well,’ said Chester. ‘We are too big for sneaking. If it’s sneaking you want, you’re better off with an animal who is not a bear. Maybe a fly, or a lizard. Lizards are excellent sneakers.’
Roderick shook his head. ‘Fromley doesn’t know where she is,’ he said. ‘He took Sonya to a farmhouse an hour’s ride east of Palandan and handed her over to some other men who took her somewhere else. The only people who know where she is are probably Sir Lilley and the Queen, and they’ll have guards all around them.’
Roderick took another bite of his apple. Two startled birds leapt off a branch.
‘She’s probably somewhere between that farmhouse and the Nareean border,’ said Ruby. ‘If the Queen wants to use her to make Banfor do what she wants, she’ll need Sonya close when the armies meet, so Banfor will know that she can carry out any threats she makes against Sonya. We’re in the right general area, so you can do the rest,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Huh? How?’
‘You found out what happened in Taroom two nights ago just by holding a button. Surely you can find your own sister.’
Could he? Would he be able to track her like a bloodhound? He rubbed his eyes. The weight of the day suddenly pressed down on him. It was worth a try, but first he needed sleep.
They lay side by side, staring at the stars. Luckily, it was a dry night. Eventually, Roderick asked, ‘So why did you really come back?’
She hesitated. ‘I owed you for helping me escape that dungeon. And I didn’t think you would want to fight – maybe die – in a war that was wrong. But the main reason is that maybe we can stop this war from starting. If we can rescue Sonya, then the Queen’s hold over Banfor will be broken. If she can no longer rely on his help, it might stop her.’
As Roderick drifted towards sleep he felt something prod his brain awake. Something searching and seeking. His eyes jumped open. It was the Queen! She was trying to find him. He heard her inside his head, persuasive and needy. ‘Come back, Roderick. I need your help. Please.’
The message repeated, echoing inside his mind and becoming more and more convincing. He began to wonder what he had done. How could he have run away at the moment his country needed him most? He had deserted his Queen, and his people. What had he been thinking? He was needed. Without really making the decision to, he found himself pulling on his boots.
Ruby grabbed him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have to go back. I’m needed.’
‘Roderick! Snap out of it!’ She slapped him hard on the cheek.
‘Ow! That hurt!’
‘Good! Now sit down.’
She pulled him down to the ground and threw the blanket over him.
‘Don’t move.’
Roderick heard Ruby get to her feet and walk off in the direction of Fruitcake. In a moment she returned with the horse’s bridle and reins and tied one end to Roderick’s ankle.
‘What are you doing?’
‘The other end’s tied to my wrist. You’re not going anywhere. If you try to untie it I’ll wake up and punch you in the nose. Goodnight.’
He lay back uneasily. Ruby’s intervention seemed to have broken the Queen’s hold over him. He could still sense her in the background, searching for him, but he no longer felt as if he had to return to Palandan. Yet he wondered if he had done the right thing in leaving the palace. He knew that he had been tricked and manipulated, he just wasn’t sure by whom. Was it really the Queen who was telling lies? Or was Ruby, once again, using him? And what was Banfor up to?
The next morning, Chester loped off to hunt for some breakfast while Roderick and Ruby ate more ham, cheese and bread. Afterwards Roderick sat cross-legged, shut his eyes and tried to find his sister.
He let his mind go quiet, not concentrating too hard, and pictured her. He thought of times they had spent together, playing and running, arguing and fighting. A pang of homesickness washed through him.
A new feeling entered his mind. A sort of worried boredom, or bored worrydom. Monotony mixed with anxiety. He had a sense that it was connected to his sister. He realised that this was what a prisoner might feel. He let himself connect with the feeling and tried to develop a sense of where it was coming from. He got a vague sense of over-there-ness, further east towards Nareea but north as well.
He opened his eyes. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Ruby jumped to her feet. ‘You’ve found her!’
‘Not quite. But I’m pretty sure of the general direction. By the way, are you inv
isible forever now, or will you come back at some point?’
‘It’s supposed to be temporary this time. Another day or two, probably.’
They decided they were far enough away from Palandan to risk the road and travelled east through the morning. At some point Roderick felt the Queen’s presence again, but it wasn’t as strong as it had been the previous night, perhaps because they were further away, and he had no urge to turn around. He wondered if the Baronian army had left Palandan yet.
Regularly he tried to zone in on his sister. At first he had to stop, dismount and sit cross-legged with his eyes closed while he tried to work out which way to go, but the more he did it the easier it became, and soon he was able to get a sense of what direction they should head without even dismounting.
In the middle of the afternoon they came to a track that led off the road and wound away north into tree-covered hills.
‘This is it,’ said Roderick, turning Fruitcake onto the track.
‘How do you know?’ asked Ruby.
‘I don’t know. I just do.’
‘Sometimes you know something without knowing how you know it,’ said Chester solemnly. ‘That is a clear known true fact that is definitely true.’
Trees closed in on them as the track climbed. The forest wasn’t as dense as the one that had dropped a snake on him on his way to the Circle of Mountains, but Roderick felt uneasy nonetheless, and kept casting anxious glances skywards. Each time he did he saw dozens of snake-shaped branches. Or were they branch-shaped snakes?!
The track led them to the top of a hill, then down into a narrow valley. At the bottom it turned left and ran uphill again, alongside a narrow bubbling stream. Progress was slow as vines and branches intruded onto the narrow track. As they picked a slow path upstream, Roderick saw a narrow track leading up the hill on the other side of the stream. He splashed Fruitcake across. He could feel his sister’s presence almost constantly now.
The Adventures of Sir Roderick, the Not-Very Brave Page 19
