Heir Apparent

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "When was the last time?" I asked, suspecting the mother might have coached her so that they could keep the penny.

  "Today," she said. "He was carrying big bundles of something or other, bigger than he usually does."

  Which was exactly how I had described him to her.

  But then she added, "He was looking even more fidgety than usual."

  Fidgety. How else would a man who'd just made off with a king's treasury look? Except I hadn't said who Rawdon was or why we were searching for him. Still, it could have been clever reasoning on the girl's part. Seeing that we were pursuing someone, she might guess that that someone had been worried about pursuit.

  "How do you mean, 'fidgety'?" I asked.

  "Looking over his shoulder to see if anybody was watching," the girl said. "Pretending to be just sitting there in the shade, eating his bread and cheese, until no one was looking."

  "Except you," I guessed.

  She snorted. "Grown-ups don't even see children unless we're bothering them."

  Well, that was certainly something I'd experienced.

  "And then?" I asked. "Once he thought no one was looking?"

  "He went into the old church."

  Church? A man who was making off with the entire assets of a kingdom?

  "What church?" I hadn't seen any church in Fairfield.

  "The one the barbarians burned down during the time of my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother."

  At least it wasn't anything I had caused to happen. "But you said—"

  "It's mostly ruins," the gid said. "The timbers burned, and the roof caved in, and the walls collapsed. But the way the stones fell, there are tunnels. And if you can find it, one of the tunnels leads down to the catacombs."

  Catacombs might be useful for hiding stuff.

  "Have you ever been down to these catacombs?" I asked.

  The girl glanced at her mother. "No."

  Neither the mother nor I believed her. The mother twisted the little girl's ear until the poor child squealed. The mother said, "I told you to stay away from there. That's no place to be playing—it's too dangerous."

  "Yes, Mama," the girl squealed.

  "You wait until your father gets home," the mother warned. "You are in so much trouble."

  "Excuse me," I said. "We're not finished yet. Are you saying children play in the catacombs?"

  "No," the girl said, but her mother still had a grip on that ear and warned, "Better not."

  "Other children," I clarified.

  Still, the girl said, "No. It's too scary. We peeked in once or twice. Owl The boys sometimes dare each other to run in, circle the marker, and run back out again. Owl Mama! But they always run as fast as they can, in case of ghosts. Nobody ever goes past the first room. Out!"

  "How many rooms are there?"

  The girl shook her head that she didn't know. The mother shrugged. "The church is in front of the hill, and the hill is where we buried our dead before we started the cemetery."

  I said, "We're willing to pay if you can show us how to get to that first room."

  "Pay with what?" the mother asked. "You had to borrow for what you've promised us already. Speaking of which..." She held out her hand.

  I glanced at the guard to see if he had any more coins with him. He shook his head.

  "Can you describe the way to us?" I asked the girl.

  She nodded, and I handed over the penny to her mother.

  THE GUARDS didn't have any money, but they did have the supplies to fashion the torches we'd need if we were going to be exploring underground.

  The church was, as the child and her mother had indicated, in ruins. I could see why the mother was frantic to keep her daughter away.

  We found the larch tree she said marked the opening that led under the rubble. Crawling in was the tightest squeeze. After that, the pathway, though cramped, was well-worn enough by hands and knees, that we easily found our way through: right turn at the Men and burned beam; right turn at the darker stone that was shaped like a round loaf of rye bread; ignore the wide way, which looked like where you should go but dead-ended a few feet beyond; left turn under the slab of rock as long and wide as a man.

  The biggest danger was crawling while carrying torches—the risk of those in back burning the butts of those in front. Crawling in a dress five sizes too big was no fun, either. I was worried I was going to crawl right out of it.

  Suddenly the stone rubble ended and we were on a dirt floor, the ceiling just high enough that the second tallest guard could stand upright. I readjusted my dress the best I could.

  I saw the marker the goose girl had talked about the town boys having to circle, if they dared. It looked like a waist-high stone pedestal on which rested a stone coffin. Was it just a marker, showing what lay beyond, or was it, in feet, the final resting place of the first dead person?

  Too late to be grossed out by that. Beyond the marker, the walls had been scooped out and wooden shelves had been built into them, three high, lining both sides. But these had begun to decay and disintegrate, and many had tipped or collapsed entirely. What the shelves had held was, of course, the stuff and purpose of catacombs: dead bodies. Just within our torchlight, we could see a doorway. Another room. Presumably more bodies. They had been laid head to toe, one after another after another, three tiers and a half-dozen sets of shelves on either side, with just enough room to let pass a small wagon through the center. My feet wobbled on the ruts the wheels had made, carrying generations' worth of Fairfield citizenry to their final rest.

  Some of the bundles were wrapped in linen, badly tattered now so that I could glimpse hints of hair and mummified flesh. Other bodies hadn't been wrapped so well, or the shrouds had deteriorated more. There were bones lying on the floor—either flung by the collapse of shelves or scattered by scavenging animals. The place smelled of humans returning to dust: a lung-coating, throat-clogging smell that wasn't the same but reminded me of the nursing-home room where my grandfather had died.

  One of the guards stepped forward and shone his smoking torch on the side of the pedestal on which the coffin rested.

  Janine de St. Jehan didn't know how to read, but Giannine Bellisario had had enough years of Catholic education to know that Requiescat pacem means, "Rest in peace."

  The guard knew more than I did. He rattled off the rest of the Latin words then translated: "Rest in peace. Let none but the dead pass through here."

  The guards looked spooked.

  I was, too. Still, "The dead didn't rest themselves here by themselves," I told them. "It must be safe for living people to pass through."

  I took the lead, trying to ignore the shadows that my torch sent dancing on the walls.

  No sign of treasure, which made sense, since Rawdon wouldn't have risked an especially daring Fairfield child stumbling upon his hoard. It had to be hidden farther in.

  We walked through into the second room, which was identical to the first, and then the third. Some of the remains had been scattered at a time when people had still been visiting, for bones were piled up along the sides: the skulls resting on the floor, their empty eye sockets watching us. But that wasn't the important thing about the third room. The important thing about the third room was that there were two doorways leading out of it.

  Uh-oh. I shone the torch into the right-hand room. In the gloomy distance, I could make out three doorways.

  The guard who had shone his torch into the left-hand room said, "Five."

  Five? I looked, just in case he could read Latin but couldn't count. Yup, five. So, eight possible ways to go.

  A quick look showed that all the routes had the wagon tracks and footprints of the people—now long dead themselves—who'd brought the bodies in. None of the footprints stood out as being fresher than the rest, so it was impossible to tell which direction Rawdon had taken.

  Oh, boy. A maze. And here I'd been hoping the topiary maze was the only one I'd have to deal with.

  "All right..." I said. Peo
ple around here weren't too good at thinking on their own or making suggestions; that was supposed to be my job. "First thing we'll need to do is go back to where the rubble was and get some stones so that we can scratch marks into the doorways. That way we can tell where we've been and not get lost. We'll divide into three pairs. You"—I pointed to Latin boy—"and I will go together. Whenever we have two choices, we'll take the right-hand route, and we'll mark the doorway with an arrow to show which way we passed."

  To the second pair, I said, "You two will always take the left-hand route. When you make your marks, make two arrows—one on top of the other—so that your mark will be different from ours and we can all immediately see who's passed, going in which direction."

  I subdivided the last pair of men. "You will wait in the first room with a supply of torches we can come back for in case we're in here long enough to need them"—I hope not, I hope not, I thought—"and in case one of the search parties actually finds the stolen booty." Please let it be soon. To the last man, the tall one, I said, "And you will wait outside the church, so you can flag down the wagons when they arrive."

  It was, I think, a good plan. The guards didn't disagree with me, but then, they probably wouldn't have, no matter what.

  My partner and I went from room to room to room. Rawdon wouldn't have hidden the stolen money one coin at a time on individual corpses. Spreading the treasure out like that would make it too difficult to recover. Or so I told myself so that I wouldn't have to frisk the dead bodies. Already I suspected bugs were gathering on my dragging hem, and I worried about bugs dropping down the front of my dress—bugs that had been crawling on and eating corpses.

  And then we came to a room just like all the others, except that there were bodies not only on either side but on the third wall also, the one opposite the doorway by which we'd entered. And there were no other doorways.

  Just as I was turning back, convinced we'd reached a dead end, my partner whispered, "What's that?"

  And at that moment I, too, caught the flutter of movement just beyond the glow of our torches.

  But there was nothing there.

  I was leery of approaching, but if something was moving, that might be a sign of a secret doorway. You HAVE to look, I thought, and forced myself to lean in close over one of the bodies. I held my breath against the stale, dusty smell, and kept the torch up and away from the cobwebs that hung thickly. Let it be a current of air, I hoped, and not a swarm of maggots.

  Something brushed my arm.

  I squealed and just barely managed to keep from dropping the torch onto a corpse.

  Cobweb. Just a loose piece of cobweb, despite my precautions.

  My partner hadn't fled, but neither had he come closer to make sure I wasn't under attack by Rawdon, the undead, or any other threat.

  There were no maggots; there probably couldn't have been on such a long-dead body. Nor was there any breath of air indicating a room beyond, no marks on floor or ceiling where an otherwise hidden door might scrape.

  So what had moved?

  "Nothing here," I told him. "We have overactive imaginations."

  He sighed. I sighed. I realized we'd both been holding our breaths.

  We backtracked through the maze, then took the next unexplored path, to begin again.

  It didn't get any better. Over and over in various rooms one or the other of us would jump, sure we saw something, sure we felt something brush against us, sure somebody or something was watching. But every time we looked directly, we never saw anything.

  Probably nerves, I told myself. Probably a trick of the eyes, where torchlight and shadow met. Probably.

  We could also hear what sounded like whispers.

  Probably the other team, I told myself....

  Until our paths crossed, and with none of the four of us speaking, we once again heard—just at the threshold of sensation—what may or may not have been voices.

  No wonder the Fairfield kids were afraid of ghosts.

  It must be some strange acoustical property of the interconnecting caves, I thought, the guard, left behind to make torches, talking to himself to help pass the time. But when we went back for more torches, I didn't ask him if he was.

  The wagons arrived sometime between our second and third torches, and still no sign of Rawdon or the treasure.

  I considered whether I should order the rest of the men to join the search but worried that if there were any tracks farther in, they'd get trampled.

  Some of the tucks and gathers of my dress had come loose, and I was dragging what felt like yards of velvet brocade along the packed earth path. At one point when I thought I must have picked up about five pounds of dirt, I turned to shake out the dust and saw that I had, in feet, snagged part of somebody's rib cage. I shook it loose and kicked it toward the wall, where I wouldn't step on it on my way back through here.

  I was sure we'd been looking for at least the three days of game play.

  Even if Rawdon had become worried that we would be on his trail, I assured myself, he couldn't have removed the entire treasury from here and relocated it in the brief half-day he'd had. It must still be here.

  I had to have the treasure to be able to keep the guards working for me, which I obviously needed to do. But I was hot and sweaty despite the chill air, and I was cranky and I was tired and I was hungry.

  It was so frustrating, I wanted to bite someone.

  And the thought of biting made me think of Wulfgar.

  We couldn't see any trace of Rawdon's passing down any of the passages we'd searched. But that didn't mean Rawdon had passed without a trace. Surely someone with wolf-keen senses could smell where a living man had walked among the dead.

  Couldn't he?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Calling in the Reinforcements

  I didn't want to call off the search entirely, just in case. So I ordered two new pairs of guards to take over while the original searchers rested.

  No rest for me, of course. I knew how far I'd get if I sent a messenger to ask Wulfgar—at the crack of dawn, no less—to make the two-hour trip to Fairfield to help me.

  So I headed back all by myself. It was eerie, riding my horse across the darkened countryside while the world slept, except for the occasional barking dog and an owl, which swooped so close I almost had a heart attack. The wind whispered in the trees and brushed against my arms, startling me over and over. I arrived at the castle at about the same time as sunrise. I'd made it to the second day. Hallelujah.

  Penrod must have talked some of the guards into remaining, because two of them guarded the raised drawbridge. The trouble was, they didn't recognize me. They insisted I was a beggar and told me to come back later in the morning when the gates were open.

  I argued calmly.

  Then forcibly.

  Then irritably.

  Then I yelled at them, "Get Captain Penrod now! He'll tell you who I am."

  "Sorry. No. Can't do that," they said. "Captain's asleep. Come back later."

  I was so tired and frustrated and angry, I didn't know what to do. So I screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed—like a teenage victim in a cheesy horror movie—hoping to wear them down, or to wake up somebody who would verify I was who I said. It sure scared my horse, and the castle's many dogs began to howl.

  Screaming continually is actually very tiring, and in less than a minute, my throat was suffering. At about two minutes, I could tell my volume was definitely going down. After three minutes Sister Mary Ursula strolled out from the bushes. She was wrapped in two towels—and only two towels: one around her; the other turban-style around her head. Believe me, under normal circumstances a seventy-year-old nun dressed in two towels is not a welcome sight, but I was delighted to see her.

  "Such a fuss," she said, shaking her head at me. "If you had cleansed your soul with me this past night, you wouldn't feel this way, I'm sure."

  The guards called down to her, "Be careful of the crazy girl, Sister!"

 
; "That's all right," Sister Mary Ursula assured them. "I know her."

  So they lowered the drawbridge and let the two of us in.

  I glowered at the guards as we passed. People in this world, I was coming to learn, were only able to think for themselves if it inconvenienced me.

  As I walked toward the castle, I heard a guard give the order for the bridge to be raised. A few moments later, he repeated the order. And then again.

  I went back to see what was the matter.

  "It's stuck," the guard manning the mechanism said.

  "How's it supposed to work?" I asked.

  He showed me the cogwheels and the chain that let the door down so that people could cross over it, and raised it for security at night and when the castle was under attack.

  I'm not an engineer, but it was immediately obvious that the drawbridge's natural position was up not down. The counterweights had to be lifted to lower the bridge so people could get in, which I guess makes sense from a defensive point of view. You don't want the bridge sticking down and open if an invading army is running toward you, screaming and waving weapons. All of which meant the bridge should be easier to raise than to lower—the exact opposite of what seemed to be the case now.

  Just what we need, I thought, with the barbarians on our doorstep.

  "Could it have been sabotaged?" I asked as the guard fiddled with the mechanism.

  "I don't see how." He pointed. "Nothing wrong here. The chain is fine. And there's nothing blocking there."

  "Except it won't work," I said.

  "Except it won't work," he repeated. "It's like something is holding the bridge down."

  The trouble was, we could plainly see nothing was.

  The bridge wasn't caught on anything, either in the ditch that surrounded the castle, or on the farside, where the drawbridge lay.

  Other guards came to see if they could do better, two pulling at a time, though the first guard said it wasn't supposed to be a matter of strength.

  "You should be able to do it," he said.

  He probably meant, "Even a weakling like you," but I said, "Yeah, like King Arthur being the only one who could pull the sword out of the stone."