The Prince's Secret (The Royal Biography Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) (13 page)

12 years later, March

Chapter 1

Of Bubbling Owls, Multi-turreted Castles and a Frightful Night Remembered
.

High on a hill overlooking the market town of Oundle stood a shining castle with so many towers and turrets in alternating black and white that it was affectionately known as
The Chess Board.

Inside the tallest turret, Eldred of Mercia spent the entire day waiting by the bedside of a girl who had arrived at the castle in a most peculiar fashion. Perched on a post by the girl’s bed, an owl hooted wearily. It had been a long day. The owl was large and tawny, and not understanding the strangeness of human ways, wished impatiently for dinner.

“Food at a time like this?” questioned Eldred, feeling so stretched and thin with the previous night’s perilous activities that he wrung his hands.

“She’ll be all right. You can’t sit there all day like a mother hen,” said a different girl, this one tall and fair and with the rather poetic name of Edeline. “After all, the child has a pulse,” she added.

Just as the owl had trouble understanding human ways, Eldred could not for the life of him figure out girls. How could Edeline be so calm –tending the fire in the enormous hearth, fluffing up pillows, and carrying in tray after tray of food as if everything were perfectly normal? As if last night had simply been any other night in the history of Anglia and Greater Breton?

“What if she doesn’t wake up?” Eldred frowned with concern, and the bird of prey, who was a constant companion, gave a sympathetic “Whooo.”

“She’s fine Eldred –truly– the master snatched her just in time. Watch it, though…your owl!”

The tawny owl, as it turned out, was molting. Its large frothy feathers swirled lazily to the floor with every movement of its bird body.

“I’ll fetch the broom.” Edeline was out the door in a flash of white dress and silver slippers. It was only after she returned and was sweeping up that Eldred voiced his concern, “I must say, Edeline, your composure is quite unnerving. It seems as if you have taken everything that has happened with a grain of salt.”

The tall girl raised a brow. “Nobody would take what happened last night lightly –but everyone is safe. Not to worry, I’m sure the master hardly remembers that you left him for dead.” Her tone was meant to be lighthearted but Eldred would not be consoled. There was nothing lighthearted about leaving someone for dead in their darkest hour. Nothing at all. In fact leaving someone for dead in the darkest hour was the very opposite of lighthearted. It was all enough to make Eldred wonder softly, “How much trouble am I in?”
Once again the owl replied and this time its “whooo” sounded extraordinarily forlorn.

“You’re right, now is not the time to worry about punishment,” Eldred mused. “I need to do something else, I need to stop worrying. I need to put my own troubles aside.” For a brief moment, he distracted himself by studying the layout of the room. It was vast. Although it was inside a turret, it was a large turret; the largest turret of the 39 turrets of the castle whose official name was Camaalot. Along the west wall, the room was rounded and contained a dozen diamond-paned windows that were currently being lashed by a frigid rain. On the east wall, close to the door was a second bed. Like the one that currently contained the sick child, this bed was a four-poster with a lumpy mattress and long, velvet curtains.

“Hmm, Edeline’s bed looks most uncomfortable,” he mumbled to nobody but himself, and then returned to gazing about the room. A stone fireplace large enough to warm a squatting giant was the main fixture of the north wall. In front of the fireplace stood a mahogany table which was currently being inundated with wave after wave of food trays that Edeline carried in from the kitchens below. The table was flanked by two wooden chairs with cushions stained the color of beets. And running along the floor and walls were the finest tapestries in all the realm, with scenes of deer and hunting dogs and even the standard of the court: a ferocious dragon of the sort one hoped to confront only in nightmares.

But Eldred could only stare at the room so long. Soon his eyes betrayed him and his gaze shifted back to the bed. Dwarfed by the huge velvet curtains that hung from all sides of her four-poster, the newest arrival to Camaalot appeared extremely fragile. Earlier that day, Eldred had tied back her curtains. Surely the young girl would want some light. In fact, Eldred thought, after everything the girl had been through, she would probably want something cheery when she woke up. The cheeriest thing Eldred could think of was fiddlers, so he ordered a page to fetch the musicians from the pub.

Now, however, as the fiddlers were tuning up on the spiral staircase outside Turret 39, their music sounded so raucous that Eldred thought he had made a mistake. No girl who has been whisked across time and space and had her memory altered would be in the mood for such song. Perhaps he should send them back.

Maybe the girl would like some flowers instead.

“Girls like flowers, don’t they?” he called to Edeline who was energetically sweeping feathers into a bin.

“Given your marks, Eldred, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea…”

Too late. Eldred closed his eyes. He screwed his face up tight. “To make it you must believe it –become the flower, light and beautiful,” he said, repeating Lady Penda’s unconventional instructions. These instructions seemed absurd at the time, indeed the entire class on apprentice level aesthetics seemed absurd –who cared about making the world a more beautiful place when war was afoot? Instead of listening to Lady Penda, Eldred had perfected the art of whizzing spitballs across the room. Whenever he could, he took his hollow reed out of his pocket and sent wads of spit sailing along on a direct course for the foreheads of three very nasty Mercians: Cnut the Callous, Milfred the Miserly and Seifer the Sinister. Granted those were the names Eldred had made up for the sons of the noble brother of the king of Mercia, but he felt the names suited them to a T. They were all a bunch of pretenders –and nothing is worse, or more dangerous, than pretenders to the throne. He also relished sending spitballs in the direction of their cousin, Grendrin of Mercia. She was the ultimate pretender. She was, as a matter-of-fact, the very daughter of the King of Mercia, and she did not recognize the legitimacy of the Anglian overlordship. In short, she was a snobby, spoiled brat and Eldred was always happy to recant to anyone who would listen that once he had pelted her with a spitball right between the eyes.

“Ah, but that was pretty funny,” Eldred laughed, briefly forgetting his troubles as he remembered Grendrin eyes crossing as the tiny, waded up piece of paper flew her way.

“What was funny?” Edeline sounded harassed as she rearranged the platters on the mahogany table for the fifth time tonight.

“Nothing. Nothing. I was just saying perhaps I should have concentrated a little more on how to properly produce pansies and posies from mid-air and a little less on keeping the offspring of the nobles of Mercia in check.”

“What’s that?” Edeline asked again. She was obviously not listening to a word he was saying. Instead, in an attempt to deal with her own anxiety over the current situation, Edeline had turned into the human equivalent of the beaver, unable to stop working for even one-millionth of a second. Done rearranging the platters, she turned her attention to the floor. Hastily she retrieved water and bucket from Turret 39’s sumptuous bathroom. Then she began scrubbing the place where the owl feathers had fallen with so much vim and vigor that Eldred could see his reflection in the dull stone beneath his feet.

Eldred watched in silence for a while and then returned to his idea of presenting the girl in the bed with a flower, if and when, she woke up.

“I was just saying that when her grace wakes up, I shall present her with the perfect flower. Can you help me, Eddy? Do you remember the Pansy Postulates?”

“Each and every one. And if you’d paid attention in class, so would you,” Edeline snapped, her brows knitting together into a perilous line of reproach.

Bah, who cares about pansies –way too complicated
, Eldred thought. Indeed, he would try something else. He closed his eyes again. The first step, as he recalled, was to picture the flower in his mind.

“I feel myself becoming the daisy!” he shouted.

“Really…is this the time?” 

“I feel myself light and beautiful!”

“Need I remind you, Eldred that we have more important things to do…”

“LIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL! WHITE AND YELLOW!”

There was a loud cracking sound, like the splitting of a piece of wood. A second later the room filled with a coal-black smoke that reeked of sulfur.

“What in the name of Fray is
that
?”

“Light and beautiful as a flower!” The boy continued, holding every muscle in his face taut with concentration.

“Woden save us!” shouted Edeline.

Eldred opened his eyes. Something that looked like a runny poached egg hung in mid-air. This was too much for the hungry owl. It swooped off its perch and swallowed the unknown object whole.

“That can’t be good…” Edeline murmured. Indeed, the owl began to belch.

“No, no, no! Take it outside, Eddy –you know what they say about belching owls.”

“Superstitious tosh,” the slender girl answered, but she swooped up the owl. Whispering soothing words into its large, feathery ears, she carried it out the door. No sooner did girl and bird disappear than Eldred gave way to his emotions. After all, he hadn’t slept in hours. There was a part of him that was angry over the stupidity he had displayed the night before, a part of him that was worried about the punishment he would receive for the trouble he caused, and a part of him that was welling up with anxiety like the great river Ouse in flood. Every glance down at the small girl caused his anxiety to rise. Was it his imagination or did she look worse? Yes, she looked worse, paler by the minute, as if her very life were slipping away. Yet the master had promised she would be all right. Right before he had collapsed with exhaustion, the master had shouted that the girl would survive.

“Enough with the waterworks, I am a young man, aged twelve years. I am the apprentice to the most powerful sorcerer in the land. And, after all, didn’t my master say that everything would be all right? Yes, he did. He said everything will be all right and it will be. What I need to do now is compose myself.”

He sat again in silence, lost in his thoughts. What would they tell this girl when she woke up? How could they tell her of her father, dead on the battle field? And how could they talk about her mother, whose death was still the biggest mystery in all of Anglia? Eldred’s dark thoughts were disturbed by a banging noise. It was Edeline, kicking the door open with her foot; in her hands she carried a tray of roasted vegetables.

Eldred wiped his moist eyes on his sleeve. No one should see him cry, he had a reputation to uphold. 

“Tubers,” mused Edeline, attempting to squeeze the tray of veggies she was carrying in between platter of cheese and fruit.

“What?”

“Tubers --you know, rutabagas, carrots, pastorates, parsnips.”

“And that funny one there?” said Eldred, who, feeling uncharacteristically chivalrous, stood up to help Edeline rearrange the platters on the high table.

“The polka dotted one?”

“Yeah… the one that is… pulsating.”

“Hmm, yes, well cook’s been crossing some plants using magic. Of course you can’t eat magic, like Noctum the owl just tried to do, but apparently using magic to cross-pollinate the occasional tuber plant is alright. Cooks says this one is tasty. Says it goes down like broccoli mixed with apricots.”

“And who wouldn’t want that?” Eldred extending a curious hand to touch the quivering vegetable. At the mere brush of his fingers, it made a horrible squishy sound like someone stepping on a beetle.

“What the…you’ve got to be kidding…what in the name of Woden…I wouldn’t eat that if it were the last thing in Anglia,” he said, so horrified by the vegetable, or whatever it was, that it was hard to keep from cursing.

“It’s not for you, anyway,” Edeline harrumphed, side-stepping him deftly and making a beeline for the high table.

“That may be, but all I can say is, this poor girl better wake up hungrier than a pack of peffer footers. Honestly, Edeline, how much food do you thing the child can eat. Look at her, she’s the scrawniest twelve year old I’ve ever seen.”