Master of the Books

by James Moloney

  Marcel had expected to hear the familiar complaints, but on this occasion the chancellor’s attack took on a more sinister tone.

  ‘You must be wary, Pelham. Can you truly trust your children? The Book of Lies was clear in the way it responded to their words. It was here, in this hall, don’t you remember, with your beloved Ashlere barely cold in her grave, that it warned you not to trust them.’

  ‘We’ve discussed this many times, chancellor. The Book of Lies was corrupted by evil when it denounced them. It had found ways to deceive us, despite Alwyn’s magic, and these two are still paying for the injustice that was done to them. I trust my children, as any father would.’

  It was that father’s love that filled King Pelham’s eyes as he looked down at the prince and princess. But there was something else there too, which the children had seen many times: the regret and shame that touched him whenever he spoke of those terrible days after their mother’s death.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pelham. Perhaps I am overly harsh on these two,’ said the chancellor with finely measured caution. He let three long seconds pass, then went on, ‘But they have a brother, and the most dreadful accusations were made against him: that he would try to kill his own father.’

  ‘Alwyn’s book lied,’ the king insisted.

  ‘Then why is Edwin not here, living in the palace as a prince should? He has not been seen for a year and who can guess what he is up to.’

  King Pelham shifted uneasily on the throne. The chancellor saw the uncertainty and couldn’t resist a glance towards Marcel and Nicola. They saw unmistakable triumph dancing in his eyes.

  THE CHANCELLOR USHERED King Pelham out of the Great Hall. The soldiers unchained Termagant and departed as well, leaving brother and sister alone.

  ‘I hate him,’ said Nicola, giving vent to her frustration. ‘I hate him for the way he hates us.’

  ‘The chancellor? No, I doubt he hates us,’ Marcel said. ‘He doesn’t trust us though, and that’s worse because he makes Father doubt us as well. Especially Fergus.’

  Marcel was already moving towards the tapestry and Nicola felt drawn to join him. They quickly found the scene King Pelham had covered with his hand when he and Marcel had stood there earlier. Here were illustrated in the expert stitching of the embroiderers the dangers the three children had shared the year before. Termagant was there too, and Bea, the elf girl whom Marcel missed so much.

  ‘Lord Alwyn,’ said Nicola, touching the picture of a tall man in familiar black and green. ‘He was a good man really. If only he could have seen how the Book of Lies had turned against us, none of this would have happened.’

  She swept her hand across the scenes she would rather forget. ‘Are you any closer to breaking through his magic?’

  This was the second time today Marcel had been asked that question. ‘No!’ he snapped. ‘I’ve told you, I can’t do it. Why does it have to be me anyway?’

  ‘All right, all right, you don’t have to get angry. I don’t even want to remember my life as a princess, but I do want some memory of our mother, to see her face especially. This tapestry doesn’t show what she really looked like.’ Nicola’s voice was sad.

  ‘I’ll keep trying,’ Marcel said, cringing inside at how pathetic he sounded.

  ‘I need her,’ Nicola went on. ‘I know you want to remember her too, but I’m a girl and my father wants to marry me off to someone I don’t even know. If I had a mother here with me, it might be easier. If I could just remember the way she combed my hair, the way she talked to me, the things she said, I wouldn’t feel like such a stranger in this palace. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so … alone.’

  ‘Alone! We’ve hardly had a moment to ourselves since the Book of Lies was destroyed.’

  ‘The Book of Lies,’ said Nicola bitterly. ‘Yes, it’s gone, but have we really beaten it? It’s still got a hold on us, hasn’t it? Look at the way Father can’t quite trust us, no matter how much he wants to. And as for Fergus — you know why he left the palace as well as I do.’

  She took a few short steps to the scenes on the tapestry that kindled the deepest hatred in her heart. ‘Look at them, our mother’s murderers,’ she seethed. ‘Sometimes I want to come here with a knife and cut those two out of these pictures.’

  ‘What good would that do? Eleanor’s already dead.’

  ‘But Damon’s still alive,’ Nicola replied.

  It was true. One of the murderers was still alive, and although one man alone couldn’t threaten them, his survival cast a shadow over the entire kingdom. ‘Remember the day Fergus ran off?’ Marcel said.

  ‘He didn’t run off, he flew.’

  ‘Yes, he flew,’ said Marcel with a laugh. Images appeared behind his eyes as though the events were happening now and not a year ago. There was his brother breaking free of the stables, riding bareback on Gadfly, that ugliest and most wonderful of horses. He was tying a strap around her grey-speckled neck as he urged her forward, and dangling from that strap was a leather pouch. Marcel had known instantly what lay inside it: the last remaining fragment of the Book of Lies. That was where the magic came from for what followed. As the horse galloped wildly toward the palace gates, a magnificent pair of wings began to sprout from her flanks. In a matter of strides, they were fully formed and beating so powerfully that they carried horse and rider together over the high palace wall.

  The down-draught had almost knocked Marcel from his feet as he chased after them calling ‘Fergus, Fergus!’ Behind him, King Pelham had used a different name: ‘Edwin, where are you going?’

  Marcel couldn’t stop his brother, but he could answer his father’s question. ‘To find Damon,’ he’d said, ‘and kill him.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Fergus

  IN A FIELD MANY days’ ride from Elstenwyck and well beyond the borders of Elster itself, two figures crouched at opposite ends of a heavy stone.

  ‘Are you ready?’ said the taller of the two, the farmer who owned the field.

  His companion, a boy still, but broad-shouldered and strong, nodded in reply.

  ‘Up,’ hissed the man through gritted teeth, and to the accompaniment of grunts and groans from deep in their throats, they heaved the stone to waist height.

  ‘Mind your hand, Fergus,’ said the man as they swung it into place on the wall beside them. ‘There! We’ll have this fence done in no time.’

  The fence kept the farmer’s animals from wandering, but ice expanding between the stones had dislodged some of them and the gaps had to be filled before any beasts were freed from their winter home in the barn. The pair had spent the morning working steadily. Now, while the farmer chose the next stone from the rubble at his feet, Fergus took a moment to look out at his unlikely home.

  Where the wall shielded the ground from sunlight, snow lingered. He could see patches among the trees a hundred paces away as well. There hadn’t been a fall for more than a week and the farmer seemed sure there wouldn’t be any more. ‘Spring’s not far away,’ he’d said only yesterday.

  The air was still cold though, so the hard work helped to kept them warm. They’d be even warmer soon because the farmer’s wife was picking her way across the field towards them, a basket held steady in her hand.

  ‘Here’s something to keep your strength up, Stig,’ she called to her husband.

  There was no greeting for Fergus. He hadn’t expected one, but he would share in the steaming broth that emerged from the basket and he was thankful for that much.

  ‘We need wood for tonight’s fire,’ the woman announced once they’d settled on the unfinished wall to drink their soup. Her words were addressed to the farmer, but a deliberate glance towards the boy showed who would wield the axe.

  ‘I need Fergus here to finish the fences,’ the farmer said.

  The woman frowned, but instead of arguing she glanced anxiously over her shoulder towards the cottage.

  ‘Off you go,’ said her husband gently.

  Fergus watched the woman scurry towards the house
and knew why she hurried. ‘I’ll chop some wood before we come in,’ he called after her. Then he smiled to himself. Chopping firewood! That was the job he’d spurned at Mrs Timmins’ foundling home in Fallside. Let Hugh and Dominic do it, he’d raged back then. He was above such work.

  Well, there was no getting out of it on this farm. He picked at the scabs on his hands where his blisters had healed and thought of his brother and his sister. Wouldn’t they laugh to see him now. What were they doing, he wondered. Not lifting heavy stones, that was certain. Were they happy in the palace with their father? His father.

  One memory brought another and then another until soon his mind was filled with shouting that only he could hear — two names being called sharply across a cobblestoned courtyard.

  ‘Fergus!’

  ‘Edwin!’

  Both names were his. That confusion alone had been a reason to flee. But a greater urge had driven him that day. Go after him, kill him, the passion demanded and escape from Elstenwyck had been only the first fateful step.

  The memories swept over him again and though he stood now in a chilly paddock, Fergus could feel his hands clutching at the mane of a horse galloping beneath him. Around her neck he’d tied a leather pouch containing a page from Lord Alwyn’s Book of Lies.

  He’d seen for himself how the book could delve into the human heart and discover a person’s innermost desire. That was how it judged whether a person was speaking the truth or whether the words were a lie. But on animals, the Book of Lies had a quite unforeseen effect. Creatures of the forest and the farm couldn’t speak like humans and so instead the book made their desires known for all to see, and the horse beneath him that day wished most of all to fly like a bird.

  ‘Up, Gadfly, take me over the walls,’ he’d cried and that was exactly what she’d done. The palace had fallen away behind him, and soon after the city of Elstenwyck as well. Gadfly’s wings, grey mostly with flecks of muddy chestnut and black, had taken him out across the pastures and woods of his father’s kingdom. They were his to command.

  The sheer terror of riding so high above the ground overwhelmed Fergus and it seemed he wasn’t sitting on the cold wall any more. He was back there, with the bitter wind in his face. In his mind it wasn’t the past; it was happening now.

  ‘STRAIGHT ON, TO THE EAST,’ he shouted into the horse’s ear while his body shook uncontrollably, partly from the cold wind that whipped at him and partly from a fear of being so high. ‘If I fall, it’s the end of me, Gadfly. I don’t want it to be that way. If I’m going to die, it’ll be with a sword in my hand and Damon’s blood on the blade.’

  With these words in his ears, he closed his eyes and drove the fear out of his body with nothing more than a steely determination. When he forced himself to look down at the ground once more, the shaking had subsided.

  Damon had poisoned Lady Ashlere. He’d kill him for that alone if he got the chance. A heat rose in him until he wondered if his hands would scorch Gadfly’s mane. ‘I almost killed my own brother to please him,’ he said into the heedless wind.

  Despite the bitterness that tainted every word he realised that this second reason still hadn’t reached the deepest anger within him. There was something else, something more. ‘He let me believe I was his son, Gadfly, and then …’ A desolate sob burst from his throat and tears stung his eyes.

  No, he wouldn’t cry like a child. The tears sank back into his eyelids and no more sobs convulsed his chest. ‘Everyone else in the kingdom is free, but not me,’ he seethed.

  He hadn’t been able to settle in at the palace after Mortregis was destroyed. Every time he’d shown his face, the courtiers had stared at him with suspicious eyes, and the worst of all had been the chancellor. Fergus knew why, all too well. The Book of Lies. It might give the horse beneath him her wings, but all it had ever brought him was trouble. It had claimed that he would one day try to kill his own father. Horrible, horrible. He would never harm King Pelham, even if he couldn’t remember how he’d loved him. All sons love their father, don’t they? But there had been nothing he could do to make them trust him, nothing except, perhaps, if he killed Damon. Then they would see; then he would know for himself …

  ‘No!’ he cried, barely recognising the sound as his own. Clinging to Gadfly’s back, he refused to think about where those last words had come from — a part of him that was closed off, a part he wouldn’t admit existed. If he gave way, the knot of emotions he was trying to unravel would twist into a ball all over again and he’d never find a moment’s peace for the rest of his life.

  He’d found out one thing during his brief residence in the palace, though. There had been a shield above his bed and a sword hidden beneath it. Before Lord Alwyn had interfered with his Book of Lies, Fergus had wanted to be a soldier.

  ‘I’m going to get that life back again, Gadfly,’ he shouted, clutching her mane tightly. ‘You’re a fighter too, aren’t you? A real scrapper. You don’t let anyone else tell you what to do, you go off and do it. You’re just the one to help me.’

  He leaned forward and took hold of the pouch that dangled from the horse’s neck. His fingers outlined the tightly folded page inside. It was the only part of the book that hadn’t been burned when Marcel destroyed Mortregis, and this remnant was going to make up for all the trouble the Book of Lies had caused him. It gave this spirited horse her wings, and those wings had given Fergus a chance that no one else could claim.

  In the days before his flight from the palace, he’d heard some soldiers talking about a rumour that Damon had escaped towards Grenvey, disguised as a woman. The king had sent soldiers after him, but they could only travel as fast as a galloping horse. Fergus, riding on Gadfly’s back, could easily outstrip them.

  ‘To the east,’ he shouted again, and for what remained of that day he made the horse fly with the sun at her back. After a night spent sleeping in a fallow field, they pressed on, with the rising sun marking their direction this time. By the time that sun was overhead, Fergus had spotted the wide river that marked the boundary between Elster and the neighbouring kingdom of Grenvey.

  Gadfly glided back to earth where no one could see them, and after he’d removed the pouch from her neck he rode her into a sizeable town on the Grenvey side of the river, looking like any other boy riding his father’s horse to market. Some of the simple folk who saw him pointed out the sword on his belt, but the rest called insults about Gadfly’s unattractive coat.

  ‘Ignore them,’ Fergus soothed when he sensed his mount bristling at such rudeness. ‘If they knew what you can do, they’d call you the greatest horse in the world.’

  He guided Gadfly to the water’s edge and asked the many boatmen about their passengers. One soon made Fergus prick up his ears.

  ‘Just this morning I brought over a tall woman, on her own. You don’t see many like her travelling without an escort. Didn’t see her face and didn’t hear her voice neither, when she handed me the coin. No need. There’s only one destination, ain’t there, this side of the river. Last I saw of her, she was heading towards the inn where the coach leaves for the capital.’

  Fergus found the inn and led Gadfly through a carriage gate into the courtyard. The ale room stood on one side, the stables on another, and rooms for hire along the rest. A coach was waiting with four horses at the ready, and by the time he arrived the passengers were clambering aboard. He ran to the door and poked his head inside.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing, you young urchin!’ complained a high-pitched voice. A woman yes, but she was wearing no bonnet, leaving her face easy to see. The other two passengers were men, neither with the least resemblance to Damon.

  Fergus felt his heart pounding, he even heard the blood course through his ears. If he had found Damon sitting beside the sharp-tongued woman, what then?

  He backed away into the centre of the courtyard, light-headed with the raw fear of anticipation. Without looking where he was going, he collided with a body behind him. He turned quickl
y to apologise, expecting at least a growl of complaint, but there was no protest, not a sound. Instead, Fergus found himself staring at a woman wrapped in a muddy cloak topped by a hood and with a shawl thrown around the shoulders that obscured all but her eyes. She was taller than any woman he’d ever seen, taller than any woman had a right to be.

  Don’t think, don’t even take a breath, Fergus told himself, at the same time stepping back to draw his sword. Around the courtyard, the unmistakable sound of steel scraping against steel drew every eye. ‘Hey, what are you doing, drawing a sword on a woman!’ one man shouted in dismay.

  Two others unsheathed their own weapons and advanced towards Fergus. He had to force Damon’s hand before they reached him so he raised his arm, ready to strike, drawing more outrage from the crowd. But in that instant a sword appeared from beneath the voluminous cloak and if he hadn’t parried the vicious blow, he would have been cut in two.

  That was just the first. He still hadn’t seen the face inside the hood, but there was no time to look now, as stroke after stroke of the glinting blade rained down on him. He fought them away but he was being pushed back to the edge of the courtyard. When his heels sank in the mud, he fell, and if he hadn’t rolled under the coach’s leading horses the skirmish would have ended there, with his blood leaking rapidly onto the filthy cobblestones.

  Fergus rolled through the mud until he could scramble out from beneath the stamping horses and rush behind the coach itself. But his foe was waiting for him there and only a timely duck kept his head on his shoulders. Out into the open courtyard again, he stopped one blow, two, but they were increasing in strength with each strike. The next savage sweep of the blade wrenched the sword from his hands. The hilt flew up and caught him a sharp crack on the forehead. He went down, landing spreadeagled among the horse droppings, at the mercy of the mighty sword he saw rising for one final blow.