Master of the Books

by James Moloney

  ‘You are just a boy, aren’t you, with imperfect skills. I can sense the uncertainty. You give if off like an odour from your skin. You are no threat to me. A common sword will be enough to cut you down tomorrow, along with all the rest.’

  Suddenly, Ismar’s presence was gone from the straw-strewn coop. Marcel couldn’t stay there though. He ventured into the streets again, most of them deserted now as the townsfolk gathered around their fires for what might be the last time. Through uncurtained windows he glimpsed some of them in the rosy light of the embers, young faces and old, all of them under threat from the evil that had spoken to him just now out of the darkness.

  A common sword will cut you down with the rest.

  BACK IN THE KEEP once more, Marcel followed the silent corridors to his room. With a hand on the doorknob he changed his mind and went to Nicola’s room instead.

  ‘I’m sorry I ran off,’ he confessed when she let him in. His sister returned to the window where she had been staring at the stars.

  ‘There’s something I’m going to do,’ he told her. ‘I thought, maybe, you’d want to be part of it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Nicola.

  ‘Most likely, we’ll die tomorrow. Do you remember what I said in the cell when I thought they were coming to execute us?’

  ‘We said a lot of things, Marcel.’

  ‘About our mother, I mean. Will you meet someone after death if you don’t remember them in life?’

  ‘We do remember her now, thanks to your magic.’

  ‘There was one part I didn’t open up to us. I told myself it was because of you, but really I didn’t want to face it.’

  ‘Mother’s death.’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to reclaim it now, before we … Well, before it’s too late. You’re right about the stone Rhys gave me. I don’t need it. Do you want to remember the day Ashlere died?’

  Nicola thought about his stark proposal for a moment, but only a moment. ‘Of course.’

  They sat down together on the edge of Nicola’s bed and, with a simple effort of will, Marcel broke through the last of Lord Alwyn’s magic and took them both back to that fateful day.

  HE FOUND HIMSELF FIGHTING with Fergus, although calling him Edwin, of course, as they grunted and swore at one another. Scattered among his newly reclaimed memories were more tussles with the boy than he could count, wresting bouts on the floor in their room mostly. That was hardly surprising, since they were perfectly matched in age, if not in size, and who could make better playmates for each other. As they’d grown older, wooden swords began to feature in their boyish battles and the grass among their mother’s roses had become the battlefield. That was what Marcel remembered now.

  ‘Ow, careful, you got me on the hand!’ he complained.

  His knuckles stung as though he’d thrust his fist into a fire, and as he looked down blood oozed into the cleft between his fingers.

  ‘Surrender then,’ his brother cried in triumph, but instead of moving in to force the sword from Marcel’s injured hand, he held back, deliberately giving him a moment to recover.

  Magic rose within Marcel and, watching himself now from more than a year ahead, he recalled the anger and how he’d wanted to hurt his brother using what he’d learned. It would have been easy to wipe that confident sneer off his brother’s face with one of many tricks he’d secretly mastered. He didn’t mutter any spells under his breath, however, and as the first shock of pain changed to a dull ache, he launched a counter-attack. His brother was waiting for this, and although Marcel fought manfully, he was soon beaten. He couldn’t remember even getting the better of Fergus in these skirmishes.

  ‘Marcel, come here, I want to talk to you,’ called Queen Ashlere, who had been watching from among the roses, although neither of the boys had spotted her. He walked around the end of the garden bed to join her, flexing the fingers of his damaged hand as he went and wiping at the blood with his sleeve.

  ‘I saw the look in your eyes when Edwin hit you on the hand,’ she said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. ‘You wanted to freeze his arm against his side and whack his bottom until he begged you to stop.’

  ‘I was thinking about it.’

  ‘But you didn’t do it.’

  ‘Didn’t seem fair to use magic for something like that,’ Marcel answered with a shrug. He looked back towards his brother, who was taking practice swipes with his sword like a knight in their father’s army. ‘I suppose if Edwin knew about my magic, he’d call me soft-hearted for not using it.’

  His mother reached out and took a surprisingly strong grip on his shoulder. Her face became solemn and when she spoke her voice was edged with a steel she rarely showed to her sons. ‘Not soft-hearted, Marcel, good-hearted, and although Edwin would scoff if he heard me say it, he’s the same. I’ve raised you both to be that way, and you especially. How could I encourage you to master your gifts if you weren’t good at heart? Evil can grow in the human heart too, Marcel, great evil.’

  His mother was being dramatic, Marcel decided. He’d never seen anything more frightening than the lord chancellor on a rampage through the palace when one of his orders was disobeyed.

  Ashlere saw the doubt in his eyes and let a frown betray her frustration. ‘Have you thought any more about the verse at the start of your book? What does the future hold for you, Marcel? Will you use the magic you’ve found inside you?’

  ‘I still can’t decide. I like doing all the simple tricks I’ve learned, even though I can’t show anyone else. But devoting the rest of my life to sorcery … I don’t know.’

  The queen was disappointed but she forced herself to greet his indifference with a smile. ‘All right, you’re still very young and I can see I’ll have to be patient with you. Your life is a rather easy one in this palace, even if your brother does draw blood occasionally. One day though, you’ll come face to face with the evil I’m talking about, and then you’ll know what your magic is for.’

  A voice called to them from the terrace that overlooked the rose garden. ‘There you are, Ashlere,’ said King Pelham as he glided easily down the wide steps and into the fading sunlight of the gardens. Despite the evening shadows, his affection for the queen was easy to see in his features. Marcel had known his father to be as long-faced as the chancellor from time to time, but never when he spoke to the queen. ‘The servants said you were out here. Beautiful, isn’t it, especially at this time of the day.’

  Seeing the blood on Marcel’s hand he asked, ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Battling evil,’ Marcel grinned, with a nod towards his twin who was still fighting imaginary wars on the other side of the garden. The answer made Queen Ashlere laugh at herself and the serious tone that had crept into her own words moments before.

  ‘Don’t let your mother stay out here too long, Marcel, there’s a banquet in the Great Hall tonight and she must be the first to taste the new season’s wine.’

  ‘I’d better get ready then,’ said the queen, making a face at the muddy state of her shoes. ‘I’ll come inside with you now, Pelham.’ She took the king’s arm and said to Marcel over her shoulder, ‘We’ll speak about this again in the morning.’

  Except there had been no talk between them in the morning. This was why his memory had picked out that particular afternoon. Once Ashlere disappeared into the palace, Marcel hadn’t seen her again, not while she was still alive. Aware of this, his mind jumped ahead to the same night, when he and his brother had just returned from the kitchen where the cooks had fed them an early meal.

  ‘Marcel! Edwin!’ the princess cried as she burst into their room. ‘Come down to the Great Hall, quickly! Mother’s been poisoned!’

  Marcel knew only too well what would follow but he let it come, living through the shock and the disbelief when he saw his mother lying still on the floor of the Great Hall, with physicians and Lord Alwyn trying to revive her and the king pacing and prowling behind them. Finally the moment came that he had dread
ed, then and now.

  ‘The queen is dead, Pelham, there’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘The wine! It must have been the wine,’ Pelham cried as the distraught and angry king tried to find out what had happened. The culprits were quickly discovered: Damon and Eleanor. They had wanted to murder the king, not his wife, but Pelham was so eager for Ashlere to taste the wine that he had given her his cup and urged her to take the first sip.

  The next memory to return found Marcel beside his mother’s body as it was laid out for burial. His sister and his brother were beside him, all three of them draped in black from head to toe, creating a stark contrast to the fine white gown Pelham had wanted for his dead wife, to show her innocence in the face of such a monstrous crime.

  Remembering this brought more pain to Marcel than he had ever known, a different kind of ache from a wound to the hand, or any harm that could be done to his body. It coursed through him like blood, reaching every part of him, crushing him mercilessly between the hope that his mother would open her eyes and the dreadful certainty that she never would. To feel so utterly hopeless was the hardest thing, for only when he admitted that she was dead could he begin to face it.

  ‘Why did they do it?’ he muttered.

  ‘Because they want Father’s crown for themselves,’ said Edwin from beside him.

  That wasn’t what Marcel had really been asking. He tried again, searching for words that grasped what he couldn’t understand. ‘How could they do it?’

  This time the answer came from Catherine, who stood by his other shoulder. ‘Because they have no heart, either of them,’ she whispered bitterly.

  ‘No heart,’ Marcel murmured. His sister’s answer caught an echo of something Ashlere had spoken about. Yes, it was in the rose garden after he and Edwin had been practising with their wooden swords. ‘Every human being has a heart,’ he said, ‘but some are filled with envy and greed and they don’t care who suffers as long as they get what they want. That’s what Mother was trying to tell me, but I couldn’t imagine it. I’ve never come face to face with evil before … until now. Why did my own mother have to die so that I’d learn about the suffering it brings?’

  He found the other two staring at him, jolted out of their own grief, and realised they didn’t understand what he was talking about. But words were tumbling into his head and he had to make sense of them, even if he didn’t speak them aloud.

  Look at what I am going through, and I’m just one person. Catherine and Edwin are suffering too, and Father. There are so many among the court who loved Queen Ashlere as well, and when word spreads throughout the kingdom … All this suffering from one act of evil. And if Damon and Eleanor had succeeded in killing Pelham, if they ruled Elster, then many more children would find themselves standing beside the dead body of a father or a mother or someone they loved.

  Marcel saw them all now, each face bearing the pain that he felt at that moment, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of them, their lives touched by evil in a way he hadn’t been able to imagine when his mother spoke of such things.

  Their voices called to him, so many of them, and he sensed the magic stir inside him, in his bones. An ache began to radiate into his flesh, created by a power he couldn’t control, building quickly into an agony he couldn’t bear. For just an instant, he glimpsed a world where hearts like Damon’s and Eleanor’s flourished, a world of constant warfare, of callous injustice dispensed by ruthless kings. Under the dark clothing, his skin became drenched with sweat, his breath came in short gasps and his head lightened as though he was going to faint.

  ‘I won’t let it happen, I can’t,’ he said, and this time he must have spoken aloud because his companions in grief were staring anxiously at him again.

  ‘What are you talking about, Marcel?’

  His sister’s words released him from the dark visions, but an afterglow of their intensity remained with him, reminding him of his pledge.

  He didn’t answer Catherine and she didn’t press him. All three returned to their silent vigil, aware that this would be their last glimpse of Ashlere before she was laid in the ground among her roses.

  Marcel spent those final minutes creating a verse in his head, one his mother had wanted him to write ever since she’d given him the blue book. The words came easily, even the rhyme, and as soon as he was alone in his room, he would copy it onto the first page of the book, beneath the verse already in place.

  That had been his plan anyway. As his memory unveiled the rest of that terrible day, he discovered why those words had never been written.

  After the funeral, Lord Alwyn had gathered the three royal children. ‘Your father wants you with him in the Great Hall,’ the old wizard had told them with as much tenderness as he ever allowed himself.

  Marcel knew what would happen then, because he had already taken back this memory from the mind of Lord Alwyn himself, only moments before the man died. With the entire court as witnesses, the children would find themselves accused of betrayal by the Book of Lies. Tormented by grief and confused by his own love for them, King Pelham would order his Master of the Books to take the children into the high country and to wipe their minds of all memories so that they could begin entirely new lives.

  Marcel ended the spell.

  ‘Our lives are complete at last,’ he said to Nicola, who sat on the bed beside him, quietly weeping amid her own memories of those days.

  Marcel knew they needed to console one another and spend this last night before the battle speaking about Ashlere, but there was something he had to do first.

  In his own room, the blue book lay on the table beside the window with the writing things he needed close at hand. A flick at the cover and the first page lay open, revealing the words his mother had helped him to write. Now, more than a year after he’d first composed them in his head, Marcel finally entered the words that had come to him as he stood at his dead mother’s side:

  When dark forces triumph, when good cannot flee My childhood is over, I am sorcery

  CHAPTER 26

  Sorcerer Against Sorcerer

  MARCEL AWOKE TO THE ringing of the great bell. The sound echoed in his head, reminding him of something. What did it mean? Then his body stiffened with dread, and in his haste to get hold of his sword, his feet caught in the sheets and he fell face first onto the hard floor.

  When he’d finished dressing and finally hooked the sword onto his belt, he hurried next door to Nicola’s room, opening the door without a knock. A man was leaning forward, lacing boots around the legs of his pants.

  ‘Where’s my sister?’

  The figure stood up straight and Marcel had his answer as soon as he saw the long golden-brown hair. Nicola had dressed herself in the pants and over-sized jacket she’d used to escape from Elstenwyck.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I can’t very well fight in a dress, it’s too awkward.’

  ‘Fight! What about your promise to Finn?’

  ‘I’m going to break it.’

  ‘But he’ll send you back as soon as he sees you and with a guard to keep you here.’

  ‘Not if he doesn’t know who’s fighting beside him,’ she announced boldly, and picking up a helmet from the bed, she pushed it down over her head until even her own brother couldn’t recognise her. ‘Let’s go.’

  When they reached the battlements, the first of the siege towers had just rolled into range of the archers on the southern wall. Finn ordered his men to work and instantly arrows hummed through the heavy morning air, whispering their deadly intent. The rebel soldiers who pushed the tower were well shielded by wooden screens, however; screens that soon resembled a porcupine backing relentlessly towards its enemy as more and more arrows thudded into them.

  Finn’s men couldn’t prevent the tower from reaching the wall and as soon as it settled into place, the first of the invading hordes jumped from the sheltered platform at its top across the short gap and onto the battlements.

  ‘Force them
back,’ Finn cried and his men went at the task, hacking and thrusting in a disciplined line as their captain had trained them to do. A wild scream traced the fall of the first man to plummet from the wall. Many more would follow him that day, until such howls and the ugly thud of bodies striking the hard earth below became just another sound of battle amid the clash of steel and the grunts and groans of men on every side.

  ‘Time to fight,’ said Nicola, taking a tentative step forward. Her voice was muffled by the helmet but Marcel still heard the terror in those words.

  ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ he asked.

  She looked around as much as the helmet would let her but still didn’t see what he was talking about.

  ‘Most people take some kind of weapon into battle.’

  Nicola’s shoulders slumped. ‘I stole a helmet and forgot about a sword!’ But before Marcel could react, she’d snatched his from his belt. It was the lightest sword he’d been able to find, and that made it perfect for his sister.

  ‘What will I fight with?’ he said.

  ‘You have a different a kind of weapon, Marcel, stay here and use it. Wish me luck,’ she said in farewell and charged off into the fray, arriving recklessly at Finn’s side in time to help him fend off one of the rebels who had broken through. She looked so much smaller than the men around her, who wielded their weapons with barely controlled rage. Marcel knew he should find another sword and fight alongside her. He might have done that if Termagant hadn’t raked her claws across the back of his hand where it rested on the solid stone sides of the staircase.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ he said with a yelp.

  The cat’s look accused him of stupidity. He knew what she wanted.

  ‘All right, I’ll turn you into your heart’s desire, but only so you can keep Nicola safe, do you understand?’

  Termagant was turning circles in anticipation. Without hesitating another moment, Marcel transformed the cat with an effortless surge of his own will. No sooner was Termagant huge and intimidating than she sprang away to the edge of the fighting where she took up position behind Nicola, snarling and slashing at anyone fool enough to raise a weapon against Elster’s princess.