Master of the Books

by James Moloney

  ‘There’s no hurry, and if we go by barge we won’t need an escort of soldiers,’ Sir Finton explained the next morning as the lines were cast off and the bargemen began to pole their vessel out into the current. ‘The princess hasn’t come to see you off, I notice.’

  ‘She hates me,’ Marcel replied. ‘Probably won’t speak to me for a year.’

  ‘She’ll thank you if this journey helps to find her a husband.’

  Marcel groaned deep in his throat. ‘Sir Finton, if this trip does find her a husband, she won’t speak to me for the rest of her life.’

  The young knight looked a little confused by Marcel’s reply but he seemed eager to keep talking. ‘People call me Finn — everyone except my father,’ he added with a grin.

  Marcel didn’t smile back, and he didn’t want to talk either. He’d travelled with a knight before, one he’d trusted with a child’s innocence, only to be betrayed. The chancellor’s son might not turn on him as viciously as Starkey had done, but he was a spy for his father all the same, and for those first three days of their journey together he said no more to Finn than he had to.

  He did become used to his guardian’s quiet presence, however. The young knight rose at dawn each morning, and by the time Marcel appeared on deck he’d shaved meticulously and dressed once more in the white shirt and red leather jerkin of his rank. Despite Marcel’s coldness, Finn always greeted him with a smile.

  On the final day though, he dropped the forced friendliness for a moment and said, ‘You don’t trust me, do you?’

  ‘Is that such a surprise when your father doesn’t trust me?’

  Finn folded his arms and let his head tilt to one side while he considered what to say. It was the gesture of a man assured of his place in life. Marcel couldn’t help but envy his confidence.

  ‘I thought that was why you were so silent,’ he said bluntly. ‘Listen, Your Highness, a son might owe loyalty to his father, but this uniform shows whom I serve,’ and as he spoke he touched the gold crown stamped on the jerkin’s breast.

  Marcel stared at him for a lengthy moment, then nodded in silent acceptance. ‘Maybe it’s time you started using my name instead of my title then.’

  Once they arrived in the bustling port of Elsmouth, things moved quickly. Finn went off to find a ship heading for Noam, leaving Marcel on the barge to collect their things. He returned soon after. ‘I found one, a good-looking ship too, with a cargo of flour for the bakers of Noam. Come on, the captain wants to catch the tide and he’ll leave without us if we don’t hurry.’

  They raced onto the dock and across the precarious gangplank, jumping down onto the deck in time to hear the captain give the order. ‘Cast off the lines. Get us out into the current.’

  Five men armed with long poles pushed against the solid timbers of the wharf and slowly the ship’s bow turned out into the river. A sixth figure stood apart from them, shrouded in a heavy cloak topped by a hood that concealed his face.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Marcel, who’d already guessed the stranger wasn’t part of the crew. He didn’t seem as tall as the men who’d just pushed them away from the dock and the legs of his pants bunched awkwardly at his ankles. While Marcel looked him over, the man kept his face turned towards the river mouth; it was hard to tell if he was unaware of the recent arrivals or deliberately ignoring them. Most intriguing of all was the basket wrapped in a saddle blanket that he held firmly against his stomach. If it contained his travelling luggage, why not stow it below, or at least put it down on the deck beside him?

  ‘You didn’t tell me you had another passenger,’ Finn said to the captain when he spotted the stranger as well.

  ‘You didn’t ask. That one came aboard this morning, determined to reach Noam as soon as possible. Paid me with a gold coin and hasn’t said a word since.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that, or what he’s hiding under the blanket,’ Finn said. He took a few paces across the deck and called, ‘You, sir — I’ll have your name, if you please, and a look at your face.’

  The stranger turned, still holding the folds of his hood tightly in one hand to ensure that all but his eyes remained hidden.

  ‘Show yourself!’ Finn demanded, and to enforce his order he drew his sword and advanced fearlessly towards the bow.

  ‘I warn you, no closer,’ came a muffled voice.

  The warning seemed as odd as the voice, thought Marcel, for the stranger carried no sword on his belt. What other weapon could fend off a determined knight? Finn was almost upon the stubborn stranger now and that was when Marcel’s question was answered in a way he could never have guessed.

  Suddenly, Finn was staggering backwards until a sack of flour caught his heels and over he went, landing indignantly on his bottom as his sword flew from his hand. He recovered it quickly, as a soldier is trained to do, but once on his feet again he continued to back away.

  And who wouldn’t back away when faced by a snarling, spitting creature with claws like knives and teeth more fearsome than a lion’s? The shimmering black beast shaped to spring at Finn, then, as quickly as it had brought such chaos, it disappeared. Where it had gone only magic could explain, for now a simple cat stood in its place, a cat Marcel knew well. He rushed past Finn and snatched her up before turning his attention to the stranger.

  ‘I know who you are. There’s no point hiding your face now.’

  A hand poked out of the cloak and snatched at the hood, freeing Nicola’s tresses to bounce onto her shoulders and down her back.

  ‘The princess!’ came a gasp from behind Marcel. Finn sheathed his sword and came to stand alongside him, both of them facing Nicola. ‘What are you doing here, Your Highness? If you needed to travel, why didn’t your father send you with Marcel and me on the barge?’

  ‘Because Father doesn’t know she’s here,’ said Marcel, surprised that the young knight hadn’t worked this out for himself. Perhaps he couldn’t believe that anyone would defy King Pelham. He’d learn a thing or two from Nicola, then.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ Marcel said to his sister. ‘You’ve run away, like Fergus did. Father probably has half the army out looking for you right now.’

  ‘I haven’t run away, I’m going with you to Noam.’

  ‘Not without the king’s permission,’ said Finn, who was catching on fast. ‘Take us back to the dock,’ he called to the captain.

  ‘No, hold your course,’ cried Nicola.

  The ship’s captain stood at the tiller, staring one moment at the young knight and the next at the girl who’d come aboard his boat disguised as a man.

  ‘The dock,’ Finn repeated, this time pointing back the way they had come.

  ‘Out to sea,’ shouted Nicola, backing up her demand with an arm pointed towards the watery horizon.

  The captain scratched the heavy stubble on his chin, wondering whom to obey.

  ‘Do as I say,’ Finn ordered roughly. ‘I’m a knight in the king’s army,’

  ‘And I’m the king’s daughter,’ Nicola shouted. ‘Do as I say or you’ll answer to him. Is that what you want, Captain, to stand before King Pelham and explain why you refused the order of a princess?’

  ‘Is she really a princess?’ the captain asked Finn, no longer concerned with whose order to follow but whom he could afford to disobey.

  ‘Yes, she’s Pelham’s daughter, but she’s only young and doesn’t know her own mind.’

  ‘Don’t know my own mind!’ Fortunately for Finn there were no books or inkpots for Nicola to throw at his head.

  The captain looked towards Finn, then at the princess, and finally at the black cat in Marcel’s arms that had so recently been a savage beast. Finn became angry at the delay and began to shout at the captain.

  ‘Can’t you see what’s happened? The princess has run off without the king’s permission. I have to take her back to the palace before her brother and I go on to Noam.’

  But by now the ship had drifted too far from the dock to go back easily. �
�Captain!’ cried one of the crew. ‘The tide is taking us towards the river mouth. What should we do?’

  ‘Turn the ship!’ Finn roared.

  ‘I can’t,’ said the captain. ‘The current has us now. If I try to turn while we’re still in the river, we’ll end up on those rocks,’ and he pointed towards a patch of treacherous white water. ‘Once we’re across the bar and a little way out to sea, I can swing the tiller, but even then we’ll have to wait for the tide.’

  The frustration showed on Finn’s face but he left the captain to do his job. Nicola, however, had every intention of turning this brief reprieve into a permanent escape.

  ‘Help me, Marcel. I want to go with you to Noam. It’s my future that’s being decided. If I’m there with you, then maybe the Grand Master will … oh, I don’t know. Wizards are all so old. I’ll bet he’s forgotten what it’s like to be young.’

  She seemed on the verge of tears, then swept them aside to start on a new argument. ‘There’s got to be a better way than making a new Book of Lies. Don’t you remember what harm the last one caused?’

  ‘Only because the magic that made it was flawed,’ he muttered under his breath. But this journey wasn’t about a new Book of Lies or the choice of his sister’s husband. He was trying to save Fergus before it was too late. Now Nicola had turned up! If Finn took her back to the palace, that meant a three-day journey to Elstenwyck and another three before they could reach the port again — almost a week’s delay, and every day until he arrived in Noam left Fergus exposed to the curse.

  He turned his attention to the deck, where sails had been hoisted to catch the faint breeze and steady the vessel as it crossed the bar. They hung listlessly from the mast for now but Marcel would soon change that. He closed his eyes for concentration and uttered the words. It wasn’t such a complicated spell. The first hint that it was working came when a gust caught his sleeve. Above him, he heard ropes come tight with a snap and opening his eyes he saw the mainsail bulge suddenly like a fat man’s belly.

  ‘A wind has come up,’ cried the captain. After a stream of orders to his crew, he said to Finn, ‘It’s coming offshore. We can’t beat back against it and hope to enter the river. We’ll have to wait it out.’

  Nicola guessed what was happening and whispered to her brother, ‘You’ve done this, haven’t you?’ When he closed his eyes again, concentrating, she was sure.

  ‘You’ll never wait it out,’ she called triumphantly to Finn and the captain. ‘My brother’s magic has made this wind. It will blow you all the way to Noam, if you let it, and I’m coming with you.’

  ‘I’m afraid the princess is right,’ the captain told Finn. ‘King’s soldier or king’s daughter, it makes no difference. If the wind stays like this, we’re all heading for Noam.’

  ‘It will stay like this,’ said Marcel, letting the spell take care of itself for a while. ‘We’re not going back. My sister will have to come with us.’

  Finn swore harshly and snatched at his cloak, which was flapping wildly around him in the wind. He gazed up at the mast as it strained against the pull of the sail, then switched his glare to Nicola. It was difficult to tell what annoyed him more: the failure of his commands or losing this standoff to the princess. Defeated, he stormed off to the bow where the spray from the ship’s wake could cool his temper.

  ‘Look at him, he’s like one of those suitors Father keeps bringing to the palace,’ Nicola said. ‘I hate him. Too bad we can’t toss him over the side and make him swim back to Elsmouth.’

  Marcel didn’t hear a word she was saying, for he had returned all his attention to the spell that was making the wind.

  CHAPTER 10

  Weather Magic

  FOR TWO DAYS, THE ship carried Marcel, Nicola and Finn towards Noam.

  ‘We’re making better time than I could have hoped for,’ the captain told Marcel. ‘At this time of year the winds usually come from the south-east. I wish I could have you on all my voyages.’

  Nicola wasn’t there to hear the captain’s appreciation. Instead, she was below deck, stretched out listlessly on the bunk in her cabin with a bucket beside her head. ‘How much longer?’ she moaned when Marcel went down to visit her.

  ‘A few days at least, maybe more.’

  ‘The only way I’m going to feel better is to get off this ship. Can’t you speed things up, Marcel?’ She grabbed for the bucket, but there was nothing left in her stomach and the spasm quickly subsided.

  Could he make the journey go any faster, Marcel wondered. There was more than Nicola’s seasickness to consider. The sooner they reached Noam, the sooner Fergus would be safe from the curse.

  Returning to the deck he studied the sails and wondered if they could stand a little more wind. They seemed sturdy enough and they weren’t straining against the mast as much as they might. He opened his book of spells to the verses he’d used to create the wind and studied the words.

  ‘Perhaps if I altered the spell a little … I could change zephyr to breeze and breeze to a gusty wind.’

  Encouraged by the captain’s praise, he recited the verses again using these stronger words and at first they seemed to work. The ship was certainly slicing through the water more eagerly than before. But during the night that followed, squalls began to lash the ship and the captain ordered his sailors aloft in the darkness and the rain to reduce the sail. As dawn broke they found themselves sailing towards a column of cloud that towered as high as they could see and turned the sky the colour of a painful bruise.

  ‘I don’t like the look of that,’ the captain told them. ‘Master wizard, can you push that storm away to the north?’

  Marcel had no magic for this, and instead of moving away from them, the storm was drawing closer. The captain altered course to run before it, but by then the current was too strong.

  ‘I’ve never seen the ocean take hold of a ship like this,’ muttered one of the crew. ‘Are you sure that magic of yours is working in our favour?’ he asked Marcel.

  By then, Marcel wasn’t sure of anything. He had the blue book open before him, anxiously chanting the original verses and hoping this would somehow countermand the more powerful words he’d used. When this didn’t make any difference, he began to suspect the original magic might not have been a good idea either. The trailing breeze he’d conjured to whisk them towards Noam seemed to have collided with the natural winds of the season. Swirling together in a spiteful dance, they’d become a monster that bore down on them, spitting tongues of lightning and growling with thunderous menace. Before the crew could secure the last of the sails, the storm struck.

  Rain drove Marcel to seek shelter below deck, taking Termagant with him. She wriggled out of his arms and went off towards Nicola’s cabin, leaving him near the hatchway. Soon all except the captain were below deck with him as massive waves broke over the ship’s sides. The wind grew suddenly stronger and with a deafening crack the mast snapped in two, sending its top half onto the deck above their heads, along with the ropes and the spars. A wave took hold of the wreckage and they all lost their footing as the ship tilted alarmingly.

  ‘What have you done to us, boy?’ said one of the frightened sailors as he fought to stay upright on the sloping floor.

  ‘If you’re a wizard, you’re a mighty poor one,’ said another. ‘You’ve brought this on us.’

  What could Marcel say? He had brought this storm down upon them by overstepping his skills, and now it seemed they would all end on the bottom of the sea.

  The sailors were angry with Marcel, but they were a brave lot too and not about to let the sea take them without a fight. ‘We’ll have to cut away the fallen mast before it pulls the ship onto its side,’ said the bosun and already he was reaching for an axe kept near the stairs for that very purpose.

  ‘A sword can cut as well as an axe,’ said Finn and he followed the first man through the hatch and onto the wave-washed deck.

  When all the crew had scrambled up the stairs to do what they could, Marc
el climbed some of the way himself and poked his head into the chaos of the storm. The men were chopping at the ropes that held the wreckage stubbornly entangled over the starboard side, and hacking more furiously than any of them was the young knight. With his free hand he held onto the ship’s rail to save himself from being swept overboard by the relentless sea.

  There were too many ropes though and the ship was listing more precariously as every moment passed. If it toppled all the way over, the hungry waters would quickly drag them below.

  Marcel jumped down and hurried as best he could on the pitching floorboards towards Nicola’s cabin. He had to get her out of there in case the ship went down suddenly and she became trapped by the rapidly rising water. His mind was so full of this task that he didn’t notice when the sea around the ship began to calm itself. The wind was dying away too, and by the time he’d helped Nicola onto the deck it was only half the strength it had been just minutes before. As brother and sister stared around them in amazement, a shaft of sunlight broke through the leaden cloud to illuminate a patch of deck nearby.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Marcel asked.

  ‘Your weather magic has tamed the storm. Well done, Marcel, you saved us,’ said Finn, who’d come to join them, leaving the crew to cut the broken mast loose and send it over the side.

  But I haven’t done a thing, thought Marcel. He’d given up on his magic long before. It couldn’t have been him.

  ‘There’s a ship away to starboard!’ called the captain.

  Now that the wreckage had been cut away to fall harmlessly into the sea, passengers and crew alike crowded at the starboard rail to look. The ship was bearing down on them quickly, all its sails unfurled and straining in the steady wind that seemed to follow it.

  ‘Where’s it come from?’ one of the crew asked. ‘How could it survive a storm like that without any damage?’

  There certainly didn’t seem to be any ripped sails or broken rigging when the ship hove to alongside them. In fact, some passengers were sunning themselves on deck: a stoutly built man and his wife, both in fine clothes, watching as two young children played beneath the foremast.