Fyre

Page 22

“You too.” With that, the Chief Hermetic Scribe strode off, his long blue robes brushing the snow, leaving a softly flattened wake behind them. Jenna watched Beetle walk into the shadows of the lapis lazuli–lined Great Arch and disappear into his new, unknown world. She took a deep breath, trying to shake off the melancholy that had settled on her, and walked on toward the gap between the last two houses on Wizard Way. Here she made a left-hand turn into a snow-filled alleyway, which led to the Castle Wall. The alley was about a foot deep in snow, which Jenna waded slowly through. She was in no hurry to get to where she was going.
But soon enough Jenna reached a flight of stone steps that led up to the path that ran along the top of the Castle walls, just behind the battlements. Kicking newly fallen snow away so that she could see where the steps were, Jenna climbed up and found herself standing on a wide, flat snow-covered path, which bore traces of footsteps blurred with snow from the previous night’s fall. Jenna stopped at the top of the steps and looked around. She loved this part of the Castle. Not many people chose to walk along the walls. It had been forbidden during the rule of the Custodians in the Bad Old Days—as they were now known—and many people still believed that only the ExtraOrdinary Wizard and the Princess were allowed to use the path. Jenna was happy with that. It was one of the few places in the Castle where she could wander without feeling she was public property.
The battlements were low at this point and Jenna could easily see over them. She looked across the iced-up Moat to the tall trees on the opposite bank: the outriders of the Forest. Their branches were laden with snow, thick and stark against the black bark of their trunks. Jenna thought of her four Forest Heap brothers. She was so glad that Sarah had persuaded them to stay in the Castle for the Big Freeze. She shivered. Even with a campfire burning day and night, even with all the smelly furs they wore, they must have been so cold in the Forest.
Jenna pulled her cloak closely around her and set off slowly along the path, following the tracks she had made the day before, and the days before that. The path on top of the Castle walls followed the curve of the Moat. The Moat slowly folded in toward her, turning always a little to the right like the python in the Marram Marshes. On her right-hand side the path was bounded by the back walls of typical tall, narrow Castle houses, which regularly gave way to unnerving sheer drops that could rapidly deliver the unwary walker to an alleyway twenty feet below. At these points she kept close to the battlements and took care not to look down.
Jenna passed softly—and unknowingly—over the ancient Hole in the Wall Tavern, a popular meeting place for ghosts that was hollowed out in the wall below, and approached a bend in the path. She rounded it and suddenly, laid out below, she saw Jannit Maarten’s boatyard, which was now no more than a collection of boat-shaped snowy mounds. Jenna walked on, following her old, snow-covered footsteps until she came to a widening of the wall, open like a plateau, where her footprints ended in a circle of well-trodden snow. She stopped for a moment and glanced around. The open space was deserted, as it always was. And yet, as she walked slowly forward, Jenna could not shake off the feeling that she was pushing through a crowd.
And she was—a crowd of ghostly Queens, Princesses and Princesses-in-Waiting were waiting anxiously for her. With each careful step that Jenna took, the ghosts of her grandmothers, great-grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts fell back to avoid being Passed Through. Ghostly violet eyes followed their descendant as she made her way slowly to an icy spot in the middle of the space from which the snow had been scraped away. Jenna stopped, shivered, looked around once more, then took a few steps across to the battlement at the edge of the wall. She leaned over and looked down to check she was in the right place—just in case she had got it wrong. Some six feet below she saw a burnished gold disc set into the wall. Jenna stood back from the battlements and sighed. She was in the right place; of course she was. The crowd of royal ghosts parted as she returned to the icy spot, kneeled down and began to unlace her fur-lined winter boots.
High up in one of the houses set back from the path, Jenna added one more to her audience—a small boy. He peered out of an attic window and saw the Princess. Again. Soon he was joined by his mother and grandmother. Noses pressed against the glass, they watched the Princess take off her boots and a pair of furry purple socks, then stand barefoot on the cold stones.
“See, I told you she did that,” whispered the little boy.
“Oh, dear,” whispered the mother. “I do hope she’s not going to be a crazy one like that Datchet.”
“Shh,” scolded the grandmother. “She’ll hear you.”