his grip on the table and grabbed at his head.
The Craven Lodge laughed loudly.
Villius pulled Oland up again. “Shall we cut off his long blond locks, then? A head of short hair won’t ignite… quite so quickly.”
Croft, a dull-eyed sycophant, stepped forward and handed Villius a knife. Oland again kicked out, catching Villius hard on the wrist. The knife spun through the air towards them. Villius flinched, and released him. Oland fell, half twisting, striking his cheek hard on the table, but quickly finding his feet. The Craven Lodge swayed in front of him, then descended, their faces warped with anger.
Oland ran.
The story would always end with Wickham’s dramatic, low-pitched judgement: “To deprive a son of his father is unpardonable.” And Oland agreed.
As Oland ran, he heard footsteps behind him and guessed, from the damp, rasping breath and the clank of his loosened belt buckle, that it was Viande, a true savage, the crudest of The Craven Lodge. He liked to hack and spit, scratch and belch. He grabbed and sneered at the women who visited the castle, calling them sweetlings, never caring for their names.
Oland glanced back and saw a doubled-over Viande try to point at him and speak. He kept running. At the end of the hallway, he took a sharp right into the games room, continuing on through the portrait room. Only one portrait had replaced the hundreds that The Craven Lodge had destroyed. Anyone passing could now admire the broad, leather-shouldered expanse of Villius Ren. His elaborate black chest plate was adorned with an entwined V and R in garnet-coloured leather that matched the flaming corners of his eyes. His stare was defiant, the squirrel-brown of his irises like the unvarnished gates to an elaborate hell.
Oland ran into the hallway. The last room he passed was the throne room. Oland had never been inside it, never even seen the door opened a crack. Its only keyholder was Villius Ren. All Oland knew of it were its two unremarkable doors. But instinct told him that, like the eyes in Villius’ head, what lay behind them was best left unexplored.
Oland ran into the outer ward and came to an eventual stop at the deserted northeast tower. He made his way up the winding staircase that led to the vast library. Here, always, he would be safe, for behind the tall mahogany bookshelves was a hidden room, filled with the rescued culture of the castle: books, plays, portraits and paintings, musical instruments and costumes from the king’s theatre. Oland did not know who had gathered the relics and kept them so wisely from The Craven Lodge.
He had found the room six years earlier, yet in all that time, had explored only a fraction of its treasures. He had added to it his own creations: drawings and ships, and tiny tin soldiers arranged in mock battles. But more valuable than the room’s contents was the sanctuary it offered. Instead of his damp and miserable bedroom, instead of the rattling cavern of the great hall, or the disarray of his masters’ quarters, Oland could hide away here, by the warmth of a log fire that burned, unseen.
He called his room The Holdings… where everything was held dear. Its only keyholder was Oland Born.
Oland closed the door of The Holdings gently behind him. He went to the small table by the fire and picked up one of his recent finds: a book called The Ancient Myths of Envar that had almost toppled off the shelf as he had been looking for another. He opened the chapter on ‘The Drogues of Curfew Peak’ and read:
One mythic beast was four engulfed: vulture, bull, bear and wolf.
Oland read on:
It was said that hundreds of years ago, as the last fracture opened up on the southernmost tip of Envar, the only creatures that remained were a vulture, a bull, a bear and a wolf. As the ground they stood upon began to crumble into the sea, these four beasts vaulted the huge chasm and landed on the black shores of Curfew Peak. And, alone for years on this island-mountain, miles from the mainland, they were transformed, by breeding, into the Drogues of Curfew Peak.
Drogues were seven feet tall, black as coal, their bull-like torsos tapering into thick hind legs that carried their weight like loaded springs. They had rapid-clenching jaws and sword-like fangs that tore quickly through their victims. Each knotted vertebra of a drogue’s spine was visible, even though the flesh that covered it was thick and unyielding, the surface coated with coarse black hair. As a victim lay dying at the hooves of a drogue, his final indignity was to be drenched in vile secretions vomited from the pit of the beast’s insides; secretions that would quickly dissolve its prey, bones and all, without trace.
Oland wondered whether, simply by living among The Craven Lodge, he too was slowly being dissolved.
One hundred of Villius Ren’s soldiers stood on watch in the outer ward every day, filing in from their garrisons by the ten towers he had commissioned when he took power. He had cobbled together a ragged army of one thousand from all across Envar and the precision of their numbers was because of Villius’ strict belief in the Fortune of Tens.
Good fortune was said to come in tens in Decresian. Ten hills bounded the village, forty silver birch trees bordered its square, ten houses lined each of its fifty cobbled streets. Twenty market stalls crowded Merchants’ Alley, all opening at ten o’clock in the morning and closing at ten o’clock at night. But more important than the superstitious grouping of objects was what someone achieved by their tenth birthday and by every decade thereafter. That was the true meaning of the Fortune of Tens.
King Micah had been born at the turn of a century in the tenth minute of the tenth hour of the tenth day of the tenth month – an unsurmountable Fortune of Tens. In contrast, Villius Ren grabbed wildly at tens, taking them in whatever form he could: his soldiers were all in the last year of their teens, twenties, thirties or forties, men fearful of reaching another decade without having achieved their Fortune of Tens. Villius Ren had been haunted by a similar fear until he overthrew King Micah in his twenty-ninth year.
The ranks that clung to the craven of Castle Derrington stank of ill will, desperation and bitter contest.
Oland walked down the spiral staircase from the library, and across the courtyard into the kitchen. As he reached out for the handle of the back door, he heard a rough choking sound behind him. He jumped. When he turned, he saw Viande curled in the corner, snoring and twitching. Someone had tucked him inside one of the dogs’ blankets. Oland quietly put on his boots then
