Master of the Books Read online

  ‘We know, yes, but the rest of the kingdom has to be sure as well. If I put this curse in place over all of Elster, no one would dare such a crime, not if it condemned them to a terrible death. Then the court and the chancellor and, best of all, Father himself can be sure of Fergus at last.’

  Nicola understood what he was saying but she frowned all the same. ‘We should see what Father says.’

  WHEN MARCEL AND NICOLA entered the Great Hall, King Pelham and the chancellor were questioning a man with the weary face and muddy boots of a messenger from far away.

  ‘How strong are the rebel forces?’ the chancellor asked.

  ‘Ismar is gathering strength, my lord,’ the messenger replied. ‘He’s a wizard as well as a soldier and this gives his fighting men an advantage that’s difficult to judge. We have no count of his numbers but more seem to join him every day.’

  ‘Will he overthrow Osward?’

  When Marcel heard this last question he relaxed. The rebellion they spoke of had nothing to do with Elster, it seemed, and he didn’t listen to the reply.

  The messenger was dismissed and King Pelham’s final word on the matter was a comment to the chancellor. ‘Have our spies keep a close watch. If war breaks out, we must be sure it won’t spread to these shores.’

  The king had seen his children enter the hall and now called to them. ‘What’s that book you’re carrying, Marcel?’

  ‘It’s called The Nature and Magic of Curses,’ and speaking with barely a pause for breath, Marcel told of the curse he had found. ‘If I cast this spell over the entire kingdom, every subject of Elster, wherever he is, would have to answer to it.’

  ‘Wherever he or she is,’ the king murmured. He turned a wary eye to his chancellor, before saying to Marcel, ‘I can guess why you’re so keen on this curse. It’s about your brother. But aren’t you afraid of the terrible suffering it will call down upon him?’

  ‘He’ll never have to face it,’ Marcel answered proudly. ‘He loves you as much as Nic — as Catherine and I do.’

  ‘That is not a great recommendation,’ said the chancellor cruelly. ‘Not when you consider the prophecy of the Book of Lies.’

  Nicola spun to face him. If the hatred in her eyes wasn’t enough to set the man back a pace or two, the insults she began to throw at him certainly were.

  ‘Catherine!’ the king snapped, cutting off his daughter’s attack. ‘And you, Chancellor, I’ve heard enough about the book’s prophecy.’

  He turned back to Marcel. ‘I don’t need magic to know that my own son won’t kill me.’

  ‘Pardon me, Father, but it was magic that told you he would try and it should be magic that convinces you he won’t,’ Marcel said. ‘Please let me do this. It will take away the doubt I see in so many faces.’

  He looked directly towards the chancellor as he spoke these words and dared keep his gaze as strong when he returned his eyes to his father. For a moment the king’s expression betrayed him. There was doubt there still, no matter how much he tried to bury it.

  Marcel had another argument to sway his father and he used it now. ‘I am Master of the Books. It’s my job to protect the king as well as the kingdom. You told me only yesterday that it’s time I started to carry out the role you’ve given me. Whether my brother is trusted again or not, this magic is for you.’

  ‘And powerful magic it is too, Marcel. Yes, you should conjure your spell.’ King Pelham called over the boy’s head to the chancellor. ‘Arrange a ceremony in the market square. We’ll let everyone in Elstenwyck see what my Master of the Books can do.’

  TWO DAYS PASSED WHILE preparations were made. In the main square of Elstenwyck a stage was built and the king’s red and gold colours draped all around. By the time Pelham and his family arrived for the ceremony, the square was teeming with townsfolk and visitors from the surrounding villages drawn by the promise of a spectacle. Jugglers entertained the crowd and a play was performed depicting the murder of an unfortunate father by a greedy son impatient for his inheritance. When the pageantry was done, the crowd fell silent. Onto the deserted stage stepped a lone figure.

  Marcel felt every eye upon him, thousands of people, all his father’s subjects, all dependent upon his magic, as much as it could serve them. He wore robes of the black and dark green favoured by Lord Alwyn, even though he didn’t feel right inside them. On a simple table set in the centre of the stage lay The Nature and Magic of Curses, opened at the two pages that Marcel had studied, over and over, until he could recite every word. So many of the words were new to him and there were whole passages that he didn’t understand.

  ‘I’m not so sure I should do it now,’ he’d confessed to Nicola only that morning. ‘In all the time I’ve studied Lord Alwyn’s books, I’ve never worked a spell as powerful as this.’

  His sister had taken his hand sympathetically, but her message was blunt and brutal. ‘This is not about the magic, Marcel. It’s to show our faith in Fergus so that everyone else will trust him like we do.’

  She was right and he didn’t want to let his brother down, nor his father, who was watching nervously, surrounded by his courtiers. He looked out across the sea of expectant faces, felt their anticipation, and tried to swallow his own doubts.

  His lips began to move, chanting words he didn’t know, some of them so strange he wasn’t sure he pronounced them correctly: gramarye, theurgy, cantrip, periapt. It worried him that they rolled off his tongue so easily. He closed his eyes, fighting for concentration, all too aware that reciting these verses by heart came not from the power of memory, but through magic alone. The rest came flowing off the page of the book and into his body, surging up through his chest and onto his tongue, words he certainly did understand, words that described the vile punishments that would fall on any son or daughter who killed a parent.

  He opened his eyes and found the air swirling in front of him. As he watched, it formed a funnel, spinning ever faster and becoming narrower and longer until it stretched outwards across the crowd and went on without end it seemed, even beyond the limits of the mortal world. Marcel recoiled at the stench of death and cruellest torment that seeped into this gateway, this opening into a hoard of magic that he had never sensed before.

  A tiny sliver of it came shooting along the funnel. The living could not see raw agony and so in Marcel’s eyes it became an arrow that kept coming, gathering speed, aimed unerringly at his heart. He screamed, though none in the square heard him. Then came the impact, his body shuddering as the arrow pierced his chest with a searing intensity that no words could describe.

  Then it was gone. Whatever it was had passed through him, letting him know its terrible pain for the briefest instant, then releasing him, alive and without even a wound. He had been given a foretaste, the smallest demonstration of the power this sorcery had called into the world. To hold it any longer would have been more than he could bear. Yet this was what lay in store for anyone who invoked the curse. Even when he stood before the great dragon Mortregis, even amid the fear of its flames and its fury, Marcel hadn’t felt uncontrolled magic like this.

  Slowly, he became aware of himself in the real world again. The stage, the huge crowd before him, deathly silent in a square that normally bustled with the noisy business of the city. Had they felt that tiny gate open into an unnatural world? Could they guess what had come into their own?

  ‘The magic is done,’ Marcel called to the crowd, the act draining the last of his strength. He turned and staggered drunkenly towards his father who caught him before he fell. Every face he saw had gone white, even the chancellor’s, although he struggled hard to hide his apprehension.

  Out in the square, the first murmurs broke the silence and bodies began to move. The festival air had died, however, and the square emptied quickly, like a graveyard after the soil has covered the coffin.

  THAT NIGHT, THE FIRST demons visited Marcel’s dreams. Each of them screamed with the pain he had felt as the curse passed through him, into life. He had
been lucky, the stab of agony had been momentary and touched only his heart, but these poor souls suffered in every part of their bodies and, worse still, in their minds. Their faces contorted, their mouths worked in wordless pleas for mercy. He couldn’t bear it and woke amid bedclothes soaked in perspiration and twisted around him like a snake.

  ‘They’re not real,’ he consoled himself. ‘No one has called the curse down upon themselves. Not yet.’

  But three nights later, he saw among the tortured souls a familiar face. The features weren’t clear, and in the way dreams so often play tricks he could only guess who it might be. A male, yes, but a boy rather than a man.

  The face disappeared, replaced by a woman’s voice. Lonely and desolate, it cut through him with its urgency. ‘You don’t realise what you have done,’ the woman called to him. ‘Save my son before your magic causes a grave injustice.’

  ‘Marcel, are you all right?’ asked a different voice, female, but younger and certainly no dream.

  ‘Nicola. What are you doing in my room?’

  ‘You were calling out, loud enough to wake the whole palace. Help me, help me! I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s what you were shouting. It was more than a nightmare, wasn’t it?’

  Marcel sat up, shaking, and let his sister wrap her arms around him. Despite her claims of a ferocious heart, Termagant leapt onto the bed beside Nicola to offer the comfort of her warm fur against his arm. Moonlight streamed through the window onto the open pages of The Nature and Magic of Curses.

  ‘I’m all right now,’ Marcel whispered from within the comfort of his sister’s embrace. She released him but stayed perched on the bedside.

  ‘I heard a voice, a voice from the dead, I’m sure of it. Save my son. I think it was Ashlere.’

  ‘Are you sure? Is your magic breaking through after all?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t try any spell. It came to me in a dream, the same dream I’ve been having since …’

  ‘But was it Mother who spoke to you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It was a sad voice, lonely, like a ghost. I thought it was Mother because of what it said. Save my son.’

  ‘Fergus! Save him from the curse. Is that what the voice was saying?’

  Marcel’s mind was too crowded with worry to let him answer. ‘Nicola,’ he said after a long silence, ‘have you ever thought about those times the Book of Lies tried to trick us?’

  ‘It was corrupted by the evil on its pages, Marcel. We know that now. Father says the same thing. Lord Alwyn’s magic had grown weak, like his body.’

  ‘But it was mostly Fergus the book lied about, wasn’t it? It said he would try to kill Father, and then when we tried to rescue him from Zadenwolf’s camp, it pretended that Fergus wasn’t even Pelham’s son.’

  ‘A lie to make him stay.’

  ‘But how could the book do that? It had found ways to deceive us, but I can’t remember one other time when it answered falsely to a direct question.’

  Nicola shrugged, unable to answer Marcel’s questions. At his further reassurance that he was all right, she left him. He knew the dreams would not return, not tonight. They had done their job; their message lay in his waking mind now, if only he could interpret the meaning. A boy was threatened by a grave injustice and Marcel’s own magic was the cause. He couldn’t shake off the worry that he already knew who that boy was. The rest of it, though, was a hazy cloud he couldn’t grasp.

  CHAPTER 5

  Spring in Grenvey

  FERGUS HAD WORKED HARD, but winter on the farm wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. His hands had grown callused, his muscles had hardened and he had begun to find an odd pride in his chores. He’d learned the names of all the chickens and discovered, to his delight, that even the pigs had endearing personalities. He talked to them like he talked to Gadfly, and he’d cried all night when one of them had been slaughtered for the family’s winter meat.

  When the snow swept down from the mountains, collecting in knee-high drifts across the landscape, the farmer had removed the shackle from Fergus’s ankle. ‘Your horse is chained in my barn, and anyway, the roads out of this region are cut,’ he’d said. ‘If you try to escape, your carcass will turn up in the forest somewhere when the snow melts. Better to stay here, where you have a warm bed, at least.’

  Fergus knew Stig was right and although he was as determined as ever to find Damon, he let the urge to flee settle as a dull ache into his bones.

  Something else happened during those bitterly cold months, something entirely unexpected. Fergus had grown very fond of little Arabella, who made him walk her around the cottage on her unsteady legs. She giggled when he bounced her on his knee by the fire and insisted on giving him a kiss each night before the family went to bed.

  He had been disturbed by the story Stig told him while they were mending the stone fences. The night before, Fergus had angered the farmer’s wife with a simple suggestion.

  ‘Why don’t you take Arabella into the village on market days so she can play with the other children?’

  Stig’s wife had rounded on him. ‘So none but trusted friends know she’s alive, that’s why,’ she’d screeched, leaving Fergus silent and perplexed.

  As they hefted rocks into place, Fergus had asked, ‘Master, why don’t you want people to know about Arabella?’

  ‘Master! I don’t like the way you make me out to be some lord, Fergus. My name is Stig. Call me that from now on,’ he’d said. ‘As for Arabella, it’s a sad tale. All the farms here are close to the forest and in the forest lives a witch. Her name is Tilwith and she is a terror.’

  Hearing this, Fergus immediately remembered Gadfly’s odd behaviour on their first cold night in the forest. As Stig told him the rest, Fergus realised how lucky he’d been.

  Stig and his wife had had a son named Hein. He would have been three years old by then, except on his first birthday, Tilwith stole him away and fed him to her husband. He wasn’t the only child to go missing. Stig’s wife was frightened that once Arabella was the same age, she’d be snatched away too. Their only hope was that the witch never learned she was there, in the cottage. The fear was driving her mad.

  ‘Why hasn’t anyone gone into the forest to kill the witch?’

  ‘We’ve tried, boy, many times, but her husband is twice the height of a normal man. He’s not much of a swordsman, but none can stand against the strength of his blows. Arrows cannot harm him either, thanks to Tilwith’s enchantments. Believe me, many good men have died trying to chase the pair of them out of our forest.’ And as he’d said this, Stig touched a livid scar that ran from wrist to elbow on his left arm.

  WEEKS PASSED AND THOUGH the snow was gone, the farmer allowed Fergus to move around the farm unfettered. He was treated more as a trusted worker than a slave these days. A month after Fergus had sat on the wall remembering his escape from Elstenwyck, the first birds appeared in the sky and five days after the birds came a tinker.

  Stig’s wife eyed the tinker suspiciously as he pulled his wagon to a halt in the muddy yard. But she needed a new cooking pot and came out to inspect his wares. ‘The roads are open then,’ she commented.

  ‘Certainly are, been open in some parts for quite a while,’ said the tinker, a lively man who liked to talk. ‘I’ve visited a new village every day for three weeks now.’

  Fergus’s ears pricked up at this. ‘Have you seen a lord travelling by himself in any of the villages?’

  ‘Lords don’t travel by ’emselves,’ said the tinker with a laugh. ‘They have servants and fine ladies for company.’

  ‘Not the man I’m thinking of. He’d be trying to stay out of sight.’

  ‘Well, if he was keeping out of sight, I wouldn’t see him, would I?’

  ‘No … I … I suppose not,’ said Fergus, feeling rather stupid. ‘I just thought you might have heard of him, from your customers, a stranger out of place who wouldn’t tell anyone where he came from.’

  ‘Well, now that you mention it, I do hear
rumours from time to time in this job.’ He seemed about to launch into a story but the farmer’s wife saw the eagerness in Fergus’s face and ordered him off to feed the pigs until the tinker’s wagon was on its way again.

  When Stig returned from the fields she whispered in his ear, and although he seemed reluctant, he’d brought the heavy shackle from the barn and from that day, Fergus once again had to wear it day and night. The weight of it around his ankle only made him more determined to escape. Each day he slipped into the barn to grind a little more away from Gadfly’s chain with a file he’d found under the straw. Each night he did the same to his own.

  ‘Spring ploughing starts Monday,’ Stig told his wife one night while they ate. Fergus had to hide the smile that came to his lips because by Monday morning, he’d be gone.

  The following day Birdie and his wife came to visit. He’d heard of Fergus’s hard work and somehow this had affected his memory. ‘Just as well I didn’t let you kill the boy then,’ he said to Stig, who smiled wryly but didn’t argue.

  As the couple were leaving, Birdie’s wife turned at the gate, forty paces from the cottage, and shouted, ‘Oh, I forgot to wish Arabella a happy birthday. She’ll be a year old on Sunday, isn’t that right?’

  Fergus saw Stig’s wife stiffen in the doorway, and wave her arms about frantically to silence the silly woman, but the damage was done. From the edge of the forest, a sudden breeze swooped across the fields, growing, growing, until it became a witch’s cackle that resounded all the way to the village.

  The desperate mother slammed the door and pressed her back against it. ‘She’s not getting her hands on Arabella. Never! My girl is never to be left alone, not for a second. That’s how we’ll save her. If we never take our eyes off the baby, Tilwith can’t steal her away — isn’t that right, Stig?’ she appealed to her husband.’ Then she slipped slowly to the floor and began to cry a flood of desolate tears.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, NOT long before dawn, Fergus finally broke through his shackle. He rose silently from his mattress and crept towards the door. He would take nothing with him, not even his own sword, which Stig had locked away. He’d find another before his meeting with Damon.