The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (16 page)

Under no circumstances must King Ryons himself come to the city for the coronation, Gallgoid thought. He had to admire Merffin for inviting both of the boys. The one who didn’t come would be denounced as a fraud. If both came, it would be easy to convince the people that they both were frauds. And if neither of them came—the same.

Gallgoid was uncomfortable with prayer, or else he would have prayed for guidance. “God knows me for a murderer, a liar, and a traitor,” he thought. “My prayers can only offend Him.” But God had saved him from the avalanche at Golden Pass. The best he could do was to serve the king whom God had chosen. “I will die serving this king,” he thought. “But what more can I do?”

As for Helki, he and his men were mapping out paths that would best take the king’s army eastward through the forest to Silvertown.

Coming out of the east end of the forest, where it reached toward Silvertown, was the best plan he could think of. “It’ll give them less time to get ready for us,” he thought, “than if we march on the plains for everyone to see.”

But moving four thousand men through Lintum Forest would be only slightly more difficult than capturing the city. Here and there you could see traces of an ancient road that once passed through the forest, east to west. How ancient, no one knew anymore. Maybe someday, in a time of peace, it could be restored. But for the time being, the army would have to be split into many smaller units taking many different paths, and all emerging from the forest at the same time so it could regroup without delay. The chiefs were busy calculating how much food would have to be carried along with them in wagons and how many men would have to be left at Carbonek to keep it safe. They’d already doubled the hunting parties that scoured the woods for outlaws and found more of them than expected. And also the east half of the forest would have to be swept clean of Silvertown’s spies. It made Helki’s head spin, trying to keep track of everything. No wonder the Thunder King’s invasions of the forest had come to grief.

“They say the defenses of Silvertown are still in pretty poor repair,” he said to Tiliqua, chief of a dozen Griffs who’d attached themselves to him last year and now followed him on all his scouting missions, learning woodcraft. “Let’s hope so! It’ll be a tired and hungry army that finally gets there.”

“We’ll get there, Giant-killer,” said the Griff. A day of trampling through thick underbrush had badly disarranged his hair—the pride of every Griff—but Tiliqua had learned not to mind it too much. “Also, we’ll greatly outnumber the defenders, if our scouts are not mistaken. The battle will be ours to win, if only we can get there.”

“God wants us to go there, so we’ll go,” Helki said. “He wants His name to be known to all those Heathen in the East who never knew it. I think we’re going to be away from home for a long time.”

CHAPTER 17

How Ellayne Received a Secret Message

When you are old, two years seems like not much time. But when you are as young as Ellayne was when she and Jack set out to climb Bell Mountain, two years is a sizable portion of your life.

For two years Ellayne had been with Jack up and down mountains, back and forth across Obann, day and night, winter and summer, seeing things and going places that were more wonderful, or more terrible, than anything she’d read in storybooks. Many times, for days on end, they’d had no one but each other to see or talk to. Those years, to Ellayne, seemed like a lifetime, and now, without Jack, she hardly knew what to do with herself. His not being there made her feel like a different person—almost a stranger to herself.

So she did a thing she never would have done if he were with her.

Under her bed in a little wooden box—Jack didn’t want it under his bed: he was afraid of it—was something that only she, Jack, and Martis knew she had. They had agreed to keep it a secret, even from Ellayne’s mother and father. “It would be best if no one at all had ever seen this thing,” Martis said.

To obtain it, they’d committed a crime—brained a man with a stone while he was sleeping, and stolen it from him. The fact that the man was an agent of the Thunder King, and up to no good purpose, did not entirely pacify their consciences. “This is a thing that Lord Reesh would have killed you to possess,” Martis said. “Indeed, there’s nothing he wouldn’t have done to get it. And what Lord Reesh would have done, others would be glad to do. So keep it secret.”

Ellayne removed it from the box and took to carrying it with her at all times: not to speak of it, not to show it to anyone, just to have it with her. At least until both Jack and Martis—and Wytt, too—came home again, she promised herself. Then she’d put it away. She knew it was superstitious rot to believe in lucky charms or amulets, but that wasn’t why she wanted it. Somehow, keeping the item in her pocket—or tucked into a stocking, if she had to wear a dress—made Jack seem a tiny bit less absent, and her a tiny bit less lonely.

What was it? Just a little piece of something-or-other left over from the distant past. No one had a name for it. No one could even figure out what it was made of—some strange kind of material that the ancients had, scraps and shards of which could still be found in ruins or dug up in gardens. Modern people had nothing like it. It weighed almost nothing and looked as fragile as glass; but it was much stronger than glass, even though you could see through it like glass—except for a little, shiny knob in the center of it that looked like metal, but wasn’t.

It was a small thing, smaller than the palm of Ellayne’s hand, and of an oval shape. It didn’t look like much. But if you rubbed it a certain way, it gave off light—a good, strong, white light. And if you rubbed it another way, and pressed the little knob in the middle, it would break out in a stream of weird, tinny music—“ant music,” Ellayne called it—and also, strangest of all, it would display a woman’s face: a woman with unnaturally large eyes. No woman really looked like that. But that was how they used to depict women’s faces in those ancient days, Martis said; no one knew why. Nor could he even guess at whom the woman might have been.

“She could be anyone,” he said. “A princess, some rich man’s wife or daughter, or even a pagan goddess. Maybe the music was once a song about her. There’s no way to find out.”

He knew about those things because Lord Reesh used to collect them, and Martis had seen that collection many times. But of all the items Lord Reesh had collected over many years, not one of them could make light or music, or do anything at all.

“This little trinket’s harmless,” Martis said, “but the ancients had many devices that could do great harm indeed. I don’t blame Jack for being afraid of it. The age that produced it was an evil age that God wiped out in one day, in the Day of Fire.” The low, isolated hills that dotted the plains of Obann were all that remained of the Empire’s many cities. Only Omah lived there now.

So Ellayne knew that what she fetched from under her bed and carried on her person was not a toy, not a trinket, but something much more valuable than diamonds. If Martis were here, she knew he’d scold her severely for carrying it around with her.

“I’ll take a scolding any day,” she said to herself, “as long as he and Jack and Wytt come home!”

It drove her nearly wild to be fatzing about in Ninneburky while Jack was in danger, somewhere far away, and Martis hardly less so. What was there to do all day?

“Don’t sulk,” said her father. “If I’d sent you out on the river with Jack, I would have lost both of you. There’s nothing we can do, just now, except to put our trust in Martis.”

“Pray, Ellayne,” said her mother. “Pray hard for both of them.”

Enith came to see her every day and spent most of the day with her—much of the evening, too. She was better than nobody, Ellayne decided. She didn’t much care for Enith taking Jack’s place in their Scripture lessons, but Mother seemed to want it that way, and it would have seemed ungracious to complain. If Obst were here, she’d get another scolding.

“I know what you’re up to, Enith,” she said, while they were playing by the riverbank one afternoon, trying unsuccessfully to skip stones on the water. “You think I’ve got a lot of secrets I could tell, if only you can get them out of me.”

“Well, I won’t lie about it,” Enith said. She paused to throw a stone that sank immediately, just like the last one. “Everybody knows that you and Jack ran away from home one day and didn’t come back for the longest time, and then Jack came to live with you. Who could help wondering about that? Where did you and Jack go, Ellayne?”

She could almost feel Enith’s curiosity reach out and try to wrap itself around her. Enith must have questioned her a thousand times by now. Thanks to that, and to being distracted with worry, and to frustration over not being able to do anything about it, Ellayne slipped.

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” she said, “and it wouldn’t be safe for you to know about it!” It wasn’t the sort of thing you said to discourage curiosity.

“Now we’re getting somewhere!” Enith thought. For some days in a row she’d hardly left Ellayne’s side and plied her with as many questions as she dared. Enith knew many girls in the city who liked to keep secrets, usually about boys. She’d learned to excel at worming secrets out of them. The main thing, she came to understand, is that people are dying to talk about their secrets. They really can’t help themselves. Ellayne was no different.

Any day now she’d give up the struggle to hold on to her secrets. Enith had learned to judge this like an expert, and not to push too hard.

That evening, before going next door to see Ellayne, she went to a shop to buy some honey-drops. She would share these with Ellayne and, by just that little bit, wear down her resistance.

“It’s not like I’m going to do her a bad turn or anything,” she told herself. “After all, we’re friends! She’s the only friend I’ve got in this dull little town. She’d be bound to feel better if she has a friend to share her secrets with. It’ll be good for her.” Besides which, something told her Ellayne’s secrets would be anything but dull.

Having obtained a small sack of candy, she was about to head home when a man spoke to her.

“Pardon me, miss! You be friends with the baron’s daughter, ain’t you?”

He was a scruffy-looking man, with ragged clothes and a drooping, colorless mustache. Badly in need of a bath, Enith thought.

“And who are you?” she said.

“Just a hunter and a trapper passing through,” he said, “and a man who knows a thing that your friend would want to know. Nelligg’s my name. I don’t get into town much, but I see what there is to see, outside. I’ve seen that boy what lives in her house, you see. Spoken to him, too. And he says I was to give a message to the baron’s daughter. Maybe you might help me.”