up and the cart rolling.’
‘Deserters!’ said the old man. ‘What did you do?’
‘What could I do? I wished them luck.’
‘They deserve no luck,’ said the old man. ‘Running away. Bumskittles! They are your people.’
‘They are their own people,’ said the girl. ‘What have I ever done for them?’
‘Your best.’ He reached out, squeezing her hand in his own thin, bony one, then patting it. He had a strange knobbly face with startled eyebrows, round inquiring eyes and a long nose that turned up at the tip. For all his age he had a quality of youthfulness which, Nathan reflected, few young people ever exhibited – he seemed vividly alive, curious, alert, exuding enough energy for a small mobile generator. ‘Never mind,’ he went on. ‘The loyal and the true-hearted remain.’
‘Only because they have no choice. Bandy Crow is a cripple; Granny Cleep passed a hundred and twenty last year. The Twymoors and the Yngleveres …’
‘They’ll not leave,’ the old man said. ‘They’ve always been faithful to your family. They won’t abandon your father.’
‘My father’s sick,’ said the girl, ‘and growing sicker. I sometimes think the kingdom’s been under a curse since my great-great-I-don’t-know-how-many-greats grandfather first lifted the Traitor’s Sword. And since I brought the Urdemons …’
‘Don’t be silly,’ her mentor admonished. ‘You didn’t bring them. They are drawn to acts of magic –’
‘My magic.’
‘You were a child, playing games of illusion. There’s always been a little magic in your family; as magic goes, it’s fairly harmless. You had no idea –’
‘It’s still my fault,’ the princess insisted, brooding into her hair. (Like Hazel.)
‘Babbletosh!’ the old man said briskly. ‘You take too much on yourself. Just because you’re the princess, you think you can claim responsibility for everything? I never heard of such presumption. You’re like a little girl who treads in a puddle, and then blames herself for a flood. Utter foolishness! Isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said with a furtive smile. ‘Sorry. It’s only … Prenders told me …’
‘That Woman,’ her mentor said with unmistakable capital letters, ‘talks a load of –’
‘Frim!’
‘Squiffle-piffle! That’s all I was going to say. Doesn’t know her coccyx from her humerus. Why, when everyone else leaves, she has to stay around …’
‘She loves me,’ the princess said gently. ‘And Papa.’
‘Overrated, love. People use it as an excuse for anything.’ Absently, he stroked her hand again. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a cure for the king – and then, so they say, the kingdom will be healed. Somewhere there’ll be a formula – the recipe for a potion …’
‘Then light the lamp,’ said the girl, indicating an oil lamp on the desk, ‘or you’ll miss it.’ She removed the glass chimney, struck a match and held the flame to the wick. The sudden glow flushed her cheek and spun a shimmer of gold from her hair. As the dream faded Nathan tried to fix the image in his mind, wanting to remember exactly how she looked, but of course, when he awoke, he couldn’t.
It was deep night. He got out of bed and climbed up to the Den, his childhood retreat under the pitch of the roof. Through the skylight he saw a single star look down, watching him. But he knew it wasn’t a star: it was a spy-crystal through which, in an alternative universe, the faceless ruler of Eos could survey anything in its range. Sometimes, when the world was ordinary, that knowledge seemed like a brief glimpse into madness, but not now, not tonight.
‘Things are happening,’ he thought, with a complicated shiver, reaching back into the dream. Something had been said, something significant – something which struck a faint chord of familiarity – but he was too busy trying to re-create the face of the princess, and he couldn’t remember what it was.
Bartlemy Goodman was home the night the burglars came. He usually was at home. For a man who had seen so much, and done so much, he now led a very tranquil life, or so it appeared, visiting the village of Eade mainly to see Annie Ward, who was widely thought to be his niece, and rarely venturing beyond Crowford. He was known to own the bookshop where Annie and her son lodged, and believed to be a collector, though no one was quite sure of what. The villagers accepted his unspecified eccentricities, and respected him for no particular reason, except that he appeared worthy of respect. It was a part of his Gift that he could pass almost unremarked in the local community, giving rise to no gossip, awakening no curiosity, though he had lived at Thornyhill, the old house out in the woods, since the original Thorns had sold up and all but died out generations before. Without really thinking about it, people assumed that the house had been bought by Bartlemy’s grandfather, or some other elderly relative, and had passed on from Goodman to Goodman until it reached the present incumbent. They never wondered why each successive owner should look the same, or remain apparently the same age, around sixty; indeed, had anyone been asked, they would have sworn to little differences between the Bartlemys, to periods of absence following the death of one when another must have been growing up somewhere abroad. Nor did they ever wonder about the dog.
Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would foregather in Bartlemy’s kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object (which had belonged to someone else) had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumours that Bartlemy ‘collected’ it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone.
The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn’t locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn’t bark: it would’ve meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark-blue dressing-gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn’t growling – he never growled – but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth which wouldn’t have looked out-of-place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterwards, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise.
‘This is – this is assault,’ the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper.
