#draft 6 ish

‘Lost a dog, your highness?’ he called pleasantly.

Ron swung to him and flinched.

‘Uh, um, yes, exactly!’ he jumped in with potent enthusiasm.

Marbrand noted the prince was smoking slightly from the rear and filed this offhandedly in a mental file labelled simply as ‘Ron’.

‘Have you seen him?’

‘What does he look like, your highness?’

‘He’s…’

Ron paused, curling his upper lip inward.

‘Black. With white spots,’ he added as a slow afterthought, ‘on his… regions in the rear. Yeah.’

Ron shot Marbrand a wide grin. Then a slight frown.

‘Can you smell pork?’

‘Um, no, sir. Black with white spots, is it?’ he said, scratching his chin. ‘Can’t say I’ve seen him. I’ll put the guards on the lookout and call you when they’ve found him, yes? Allow me to walk you to your quarters and the lads, they—Sir!’

‘What?’ Ron said.

A plume of white flame flickered around Ron’s waistband, stark in the twilight.

Marbrand shoved him onto the grass behind him and rolled him back and forth.

Two figures dashed past his peripheral vision.

Marbrand jolted his attention from the extinguished Ron.

Plumes of a similar nature roared across the roof of Fred’s shed.

‘Crap!’

He guided Ron to his feet before jogging to Fred’s aid.

 Ron watched the guard race out of sight. He dusted himself off, glanced at the shed to make sure that, yes, Fred and the bull were out safely and, regaining posture, made for the direction of the palace orchard.

‘Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?’

Archie double over, massaging his shins.

Howie waved his sleeve in the air, which was aflame.

‘Please tell me there’s no more running,’ Archie panted. ‘My shins are on fire!’

‘Are they, Archie?’ Howie asked hysterically. ‘Are they really?’

Archie snatched his shoulder and ripped the sleeve off at the seams.

Howie flung it to the ground and stomped it into the path, his arm prickling.

‘What now?’

Ron smiled faintly into the distance for a moment.

‘Oh, yeah, the plan,’ he said with a start. ‘We climb the tree by the wall, go over the wall and onto the flat roof sloping down to the back alley.’

‘Then what?’

Ron sucked his top lip. ‘Didn’t think that far ahead.’

‘I thought not,’ Howie said dully.

‘First thing I’m doing is picking up Adrienne,’ Archie said, ‘before someone hears she’s at the shop unattended. Point us to the tree.’

‘We don’t have time,’ Howie said. ‘He’s gonna send guards after us, they know this city like the back of their hand. We need to leave the city as soon as we’ve over that wall. We can send her a letter once we’re somewhere safe.’

‘Oh yes, a letter. The best known defence for armed robbers in the night. Excellent idea.’

‘She’s a surgeon-in-training,’ Howie said in exasperation. ‘She owns a collection of tiny knives and knows where main arteries are. She’ll be fine.’

‘Oh, is she your girlfriend?’ Ron said in interest.

Howie glared at him.

Archie glared at Howie. ‘She’d better not be.’

‘She isn’t!’ Howie said firmly.

Ron shrugged and guided them to the tree closest to the wall.

Archie pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at Howie.

‘She isn’t!’ Howie hissed at him.

They wound off the gravel pathway and ducked under hanging branches. Thin ones, Howie noted with unease.

‘They’re very spindly,’ he said.

‘This one’s fine, I’ve climbed it loads of times,’ Ron said. ‘And there’s footholds on the upper part of the wall. I made them.’

They came to the tree and looked up. And up.

Archie swung his gaze from the summit of the wall to the top of the tree. There was a considerable distance between the tree and the wall – at least twice as long as the tree was by itself.

Archie made unintelligible noises. He simply flung his hands in demonstration.

‘I’ve done it loads of times,’ Ron said flippantly.

Archie thrust his hand to Ron’s face, fingers first.

‘You’re twenty-one!’ he screamed at him. ‘I’m twice your age, how the hell am I gonna—’

Howie shushed him violently, covering his face with both hands.

‘We’ll manage!’ he hissed at him. ‘So shut up!’

Shuffling footsteps urged them towards the tree.

 Sixteen buckets of water and twelve bottles of brandy later, Marbrand stood outside the charred remains of Fred’s shed as its owner wobbled in blissfully medicinal drunkenness.

‘The two prisoners have escaped, you say?’ Marbrand asked to clarify.

‘Hyeah, dah lackhwit prince helped them to hescape, sir,’ slurred Fred, nursing the last of his dozen bottles closely to his chest in case it might run off. ‘Sheems like he’s hup to something shushpishishousousous…’

He paused with a frown.

‘… ous,’ he finished with a smile.

‘I quite agree with you,’ said Marbrand.

He recognised the curling of the upper lip anywhere. Anyone subject to Ron’s drunken and/or sober pranks knew the signs of fabrication when they saw them. And while sending guards chasing off after imaginary dogs could be deemed a suitable prank, it wasn’t half as imaginative as the antics Ron got up to and what’s more, it was done in a hurry.

‘I’ll have a guard posted at the trapdoor tonight, Fred. You find an inn and take the day off tomorrow. We’ll cover the expenses.’

‘O’ course, shit, couldun impee on your doo-tees, not at all,’ he said, grinning at the prospect of a day off. ‘Any chance of some more—’

Marbrand strategically ignored him.

‘Ankovich?’ he called behind him. ‘Inform the crown prince of the captives’ exit, will you?’

He paused and added an afterthought.

‘And check on Spotty-Balls, will you? Just in case he is missing?’

‘Of course, sir.’ The soldier saluted, turning to leave.

Marbrand followed close behind, his mind on Ron.

He couldn’t think why he would want to release two prisoners. An unfortunate side-effect of a mother like Aaliyaa Horne was that friends were a rare occurrence.

But perhaps that was the idea?

What if Ron had taken a night-time jaunt to the dungeons and they nabbed him there? Offered to take him on an adventure?

‘Let us out,’ he pictured them saying. ‘We’ll be your friends.’

It seemed feasible. He ought to go after them and bring him back. At least to get away from the silly ‘Sadie’ jokes for a while.

As if on cue, Fred trilled behind him.

‘Goo-bye, Sadie! S’always nice to have you call down!’

Sniggers followed Marbrand’s hand as it rose to rub his temple tiredly.

 ‘My shins!’ Archie squealed.

‘We get it, you’re old!’ Howie hissed down at him. ‘Now be quiet!’

The branch teetered against the flat of the wall. A conveniently-placed oil lamp illuminated their way from directly above them. Howie decided that the task of meandering it could wait until the very last minute to plan. Stress, plus Archie’s numerous shin-related complaints, held Howie’s brain in a pincer-grip.

Quiet rustling ahead marked Ron’s self-assured climb.

‘Got it!’ he said softly. ‘I’m on the wall. Let me know once you’re here and I’ll help with the footholds.’

Howie made to surge ahead.

A strangled yelp.

‘I’m stuck.’

‘Oh, for Christs’ sake,’ Howie spat at the wall.

The branch wavered beneath him.

‘Don’t shake it!’ he scolded Archie. ‘I’m not gonna be able to help you up the tree if I fall off!’

‘Stay there!’ Ron called down in a soft voice. ‘I’ll help Howie up and come back for you.’

Archie flapped frantically, his limbs contained in a layer of foliage.

Howie squirmed ahead, his stomach flat against the branch. He gave a short yelp as it tilted downwards.

‘You’ll be fine, keep going,’ Ron assured him. ‘It’s a good branch, I’ve used it loads of times.’

Howie grimaced, straining a hand out.

Rough stone brushed his fingertips, to his immense relief.

‘Go easy,’ Ron said.

The branch scraped against the blocks.

Howie scooted closer to the wall, fingers locked into two footholds. This was clearly a well-worn route, he saw: small footholds stood out in clusters spanning a yard in every direction, black holes in the gentle yellow light.

His knees clattered into the rock. He pulled himself up, joints trembling.

He heard Ron climb back onto the tree.

Howie negotiated the footholds, in silence broken only by shifting leaves and his own shallow breath. This was not what he signed up for eight years ago. Not by a long shot.

His fingers slipped on the bricks.

A small animal shriek escaped from him involuntarily.

‘You alright?’ Ron called.

‘Yep, just nearly fell to my death,’ Howie said in a strangled whimper.

‘You’ll be fine, there’s shrubbery just below us.’

‘Great,’ Howie whined. ‘That’s very reassuring.’

He groped upward again, hoisting himself up. His shoulders were beginning to smart.

‘Archie, you alright?’

‘No,’ floated up from within the foliage.

‘He’s fine,’ Ron called.

Howie’s foot clanged on the edge of the brazier. He hissed, dragging himself up with haste.

His hands flailed in mid-air for a moment.

Howie yelped and threw himself forward.

He fell horizontally onto his stomach and clung to the edge, legs flailing.

He had reached the top.

He shuffled forward until his fingers gripped the back edge. The wall was as thick as he was tall, which was a relief. He pulled himself into a sitting position and glanced down into darkness for a moment before, with a shudder, directing his gaze to the battlements.

‘I’m at the top.’

‘Great!’ Ron said brightly. ‘Go on, up you get.’

‘No!’ Archie squeaked. ‘I’m going back to the dungeon.’

Howie ignored him. Pivoting and hopping into the narrow corridor forming the battlements, he faced the city of Stoneguard, peering out between two of the crenellations.

A vast collection of terraced roofs and disjointed chimneys greeted him from below. For as far as the eye could see, tiny bursts of yellow light illuminated the narrow streets and close-knit houses beyond. Faint laughter sounded from Howie’s far left, a small group of men exiting a bar.

Howie followed the winding streets back to his home, the tiny terraced house where they and Archibald Hart’s Carpentry Shop lived. He eyed the street longingly, the dirt road, the small tavern, the empty stalls. The road he called home since he was twelve years old.

‘Get your ass over here, Howard! I need a hand up.’

Howie obediently crossed the battlements to assist.

He heaved Archie up, Ron assisting from behind.

‘There,’ Ron said in annoyance. ‘Wasn’t so hard, was it?’

Howie ignored them. A glint outside the carpentry shop caught his eye.

‘And how are we supposed to get back down?’ Archie shrieked. ‘Magic? If you’d told me we were supposed to fly down, I’d have brought the cat!’

‘There’s a flat roof sloping down the other side,’ Ron said, crossly. ‘Don’t you listen?’

‘Guys, there’s guards outside the shop,’ Howie said quickly.

‘What?’

Archie bolted forward, hands clasped to the edge.

A shining brass breastplate paced outside the shop, waiting access.

‘Shit, Adrienne,’ Archie whispered in horror.

‘As long as we’re not there, she’ll be fine,’ Howie said.

‘What? No, we have to go get her—’

‘No, we can’t,’ Howie insisted, ‘otherwise she’ll be harbouring escaped criminals. We’re no use to her up here in any case.’

‘Not now she’s opened the door,’ Ron said.

Sure enough, the faint outline of Adrienne’s head came into view in the faint light from the carpentry shop door. A brief exchange occurred between her and the guard before, with a curtsy, she closed the door.

‘See, he’s leaving,’ Howie said. ‘She’s fine where she is.’

Archie looked defeated for a moment before blazing pure indignance.

‘If I should return to find her missing a limb,’ he threatened, pointing a finger at the space between Howie’s eyes, ‘or an eye or her maidenhead or so much as a frigging eyelash, I will skin you alive.’

‘That’s fair,’ Howie said. ‘Can we leave now before we get caught?’

Ron hopped onto the ledge between the crenellations. Hopped, Howie observed in horror, watching the toe of Ron’s left boot hang over the edge.

‘So the flat roof is by the cake shop,’ he announced to the wall at large.

Archie flung fleeting glances across the street below. ‘Which is…’

Ron tilted his head down. And around.

‘… on the… other side… of the castle,’ he said. He flung them a sheepish glance. ‘Sorry.’

They watched the wall yawn out in a broad circle, rising and falling in gentle slopes. Howie guesstimated at least a hundred feet of walking distance.

‘I hate you,’ Archie seethed.

Lilly approached Cienne with a smile.

Cienne plastered the most stoic smile she could manage, quickly asserting a boundary.

‘Morning,’ Lilly said, in a high-pitched voice grossly ill-fitting to her personality. ‘Any joy with Seth?’

Cienne sighed. ‘I wish.’

‘Oh. Well, the old man’s new toy has arrived,’ she said brightly.

She skipped to the crate, her mace swinging idly at her side.

‘Come and see!’

Cienne approached the crate warily.

The thing about crates like this arriving on the Creys’ doorstep was that they were frequently very dangerous – which was probably the point. She missed Portabella and its frilliness. At least it was genuine and didn’t have a couple of knives hidden anywhere.

Lilly-Anna (what a terrible name that was for her, Cienne thought) grasped a handful of the cloak covering the crate and thrust it away grandly.

The dragon blinked in the sudden light and screamed, sending smoke billowing from its great nostrils.

Cienne gasped, stumbling backwards into the middle of the hall.

The cage stood ten feet wide and tall, and it was packed with furious muscle. The dragon’s long neck hunched beneath the top bars of the cage. It’s discomfort was evident in the beast’s wriggling and jerking. Scales shimmered with every movement, turning from crimson to jade green to every colour in between. It had Crey written all over it.

‘That’s his “new toy”?’ Cienne gaped, unable to blink for fear of missing a single movement. ‘I, I thought he could get a, a dog or something, not a, a—’

‘Dragon.’ Lilly beamed. ‘Isn’t it brilliant? We’ve always wanted one, ever since we were little, me and—Seth! We should bring him out, he’d love it, come on!’

She tugged on Cienne’s sleeve and pulled her to the stairs.

They panted up every step, Lilly in her ill-fitting breeches and jerkin, Cienne struggling to gather her masses of petticoats, until they reached the third and highest floor of the palace and burst into Seth’s private quarters.

Lilly threw the coffin door open and shook Seth by the arm.

He snorted awake.

‘Seth, Seth, wake up, look! He got a dragon! Come down and see!’

Seth bolted upright. ‘A dragon?!’

‘Yes, a dragon! Come on!’

She pulled him upright and dragged him downstairs.

Cienne followed close behind.

She knew, deep down, that no one could get Seth to do anything except for his tomboyish baby sister and her insistent enthusiasm. Not even his mother, or his wife – especially his wife. And it wouldn’t even bother Cienne all that much were it not for the fact that she loved him, indefinitely and inexplicably.

And he knew it. He knew it from the day they first met… and he hated it.

They arrived back to the imposing animal’s cage. As Cienne predicted, all memory of Seth’s ‘death’ had temporarily dissipated, to be replaced by awe.

‘Mine!’ he proclaimed in a hushed voice, staring up with wide eyes.

‘No hogging it, brov, it’s mine too,’ Lilly said with a smile.

Seth reached between the bars to brush its scales.

It hissed smoke into the air.

‘What do we name it?’

Cienne approached and brushed a tentative hand against his, thinking he wouldn’t notice.

He edged away, fixated to the dragon.

‘What about Smokey?’ Lilly said.

Seth burst out laughing.

‘Smokey? What kind of a name is that? Why don’t we call you Smokey, since you have smoke for an imagination?’

‘Oh, alright then,’ she said mildly. ‘How about—’

‘Lyseria,’ Cienne said.

Seth turned to her in surprise.

Cienne’s heart skipped a beat as their eyes met, a seldom occurrence.

‘I like it,’ he said. ‘Where did you pull that from?’

‘It’s the same of Salator Crey’s companion,’ she said meekly. ‘I figure the king would approve, since she’s a religious figure. She’s a deity in her own right in my parts.’

‘Oh, the dragon lady,’ Lilly said in recognition.

The dragon released a puff of approval.

‘Lyseria it is,’ Seth said with a grin – the first she’d seen in a long time.

‘Is it a girl?’ Lilly wondered.

Seth tilted his head to the side and bent his knees.

‘It’s either that or a eunuch.’

A messenger entered the hall and they turned to face him as he bowed theatrically.

‘Your highnesses,’ he said, touching his forelock, ‘I come from Stoneguard with a message. The king cannot attend today’s discussion on the betrothal.’

Lilly breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Why not this time?’ said Cienne sharply.

There’s always an excuse, she thought irritably. The king has man-flu, the prince is violently hung-over…

‘The king is missing, your highness,’ said the messenger. ‘He’s presumed dead.’

 The gods proclaimed to anyone who would listen that all things happened for a reason.

When Adrienne’s father was killed by a lunatic and her mother died in childbirth, Adrienne believed this had to happen in order for her to live with her beloved uncle Archie.

And when Archie brought a mysterious orphan born on the Night of Raining Thorns to live with them as his apprentice and made them move to a strange country, Adrienne believed this had to happen in order for her to fall in love with him.

And Adrienne reckoned that one day quite soon, something else would happen in order for her to marry Howard Rosethorn and have a lot of children. Or at the very least treat Howie for an injury and examine him very closely.

At the moment, the two were in Adrienne’s tiny bedroom, unpacking her things. She waited for the catalyst for her aforementioned fate. She’d been waiting for eight years. It was bound to happen sometime.

Her room was half the size of Howie’s, but she forgave him for that. It was littered with Howie’s definition of art – little boxes with ‘Adrienne’ carved on top clumsily and frames for her sketches that were more like wonky diamonds than squares. Half of her charcoal drawings were of Howie, much to his approval: the rest were landscapes and still life drawings with him in there somewhere, usually bent at a ninety degree angle for reasons only an artiste can justify.

The only parts of the room that showed no hint of Howie’s existence was where the straw bed consumed most of the floor space. Even the dangerously lopsided chest of drawers stood in the corner as a mark of Adrienne’s reluctance to part with his good-intentioned yet poorly-crafted efforts for her.

‘So what’s working with the dreaded Serpus-folk like?’ asked Howie, listlessly scanning the junk mail from his Aunty Philippina.

‘It doesn’t end,’ she said with a sigh, sitting on her bed beside him. ‘It would probably be fine if they weren’t all sailors. Not only do you have to monitor those nearly on the croak, you have to keep the rest from fighting each other and throwing knives at people. They’re lunatics.’

Howie laughed. ‘You’re better off setting up here, then. Worst you have to deal with is that rash going around. Speaking of,’ he added mischievously, twitching ominously. ‘Think I might have a touch of it down there. You wouldn’t mind taking a look, would you?’

The image appeared in her head in total clarity.

‘Of course,’ she said evenly. ‘I am a professional.’

Howie snorted and dropped the pretence. He flopped onto his back to gaze at the ceiling.

‘So what have you been up to in my absence?’ she said, diverting her attention to cleaner territory. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Got my hair cut—’

‘Looks great.’

‘Thanks,’ he said with a smile. ‘That’s about it, though. Talking to Archie doesn’t beat our little chats, you know.’

‘You missed me, then?’ she said with a grin.

‘Of course I did,’ he said, sitting upright to meet her gaze. ‘You’re my favourite person.’

A pink sensation blossomed in her chest, spreading out in a glorious wave.

‘Oh,’ she said faintly.

She dropped her head on his shoulder.

She turned her face upward and her head spun at the mere smell of him. It was funny how the sawdust wasn’t as appealing on Uncle Archie. His skin was coated in it, the fine substance settling in the folds of his shirt and even in his ears. He reminded her of the seaside on a sunny day with his sandy hair and eyes the colour of a summer sky. His hair really looked like sand, especially cut short, and his arm was warm around her shoulders, like the sun.

She felt immensely happy. Any minute now, the catalyst was going to occur. She could already hear wedding bells from the near future. Or maybe cow bells from the market outside, one or the other.

‘Adrienne?’

‘Mmm?’ she murmured happily.

‘I know you’re tired from your trip back, but can I have my shoulder back? It’s gone numb.’

She opened her eyes. ‘Oh, sorry.’ She sat up awkwardly.

Archie’s voice floated up the stairs.

‘Oi! When are you getting started on those pews?’

‘In a minute!’ Howie called.

He glanced at Adrienne with a wink.

‘I’ll manipulate Archie into letting me off and I’ll be right back.’

‘Okay,’ Adrienne said, beaming.

He pecked her cheek. It grew warm and reddened profusely.

‘Happy birthday,’ he said, rising. ‘I’m missed you!’

Adrienne smiled.

I’ve missed you too, she thought privately.

 ‘Have you searched the Forest?’

‘Yes, your highness. We’ve also searched the city, to no avail.’

‘Maybe yusshould check the booze cabinet, ‘e migh’ be’n there,’ slurred Ron in amusement.

In the upper level of the Stonekeep, Stoneguard’s only tourist destination, two princes stood in the drawing room of the elder prince’s quarters. One was considerably wobblier than the other as the elder, a narrow man with a pointed face, folded his arms impatiently, his brown hair hanging over his bloodshot green eyes.

‘Did he arrive in Adem?’

‘There have been no sightings in the ports of King Samuel—’

‘King Stuffs ‘Is Face, more like,’ snorted Ron. ‘Have you tried the pantry? Probably stuck in the sweetie cabinet, the shtupi’ bah—’

After twenty minutes of pithy remarks, Prince Vladimir, finally, snapped.

‘Be gone, you utter wretch!’ he screamed at Prince Ronald, shoving him backward.

Ron stumbled on the flagstones, waving his wineglass in the air.

‘Ooh, somebody’s got all his feathers in a clump,’ he trilled, with a pronounced ‘P’. ‘All summer roun’ the lower regions, where even the tumbleweed’s bin avoid—’

‘GET! OUT!!’

Vladimir grabbed the scuff of his neck and threw him bodily into the corridor.

The man was a menace. At the tender age of twenty-one, Ron had gained the maturity of a six-year-old and a drinking problem that resulted in him looking physically ten years his own senior. Except that his hair, Vladimir mused hatefully, had managed to stay black while Vladimir’s wasn’t staying anywhere at all.

Ronald was the last thing the Hornes needed right now.

Ron slammed into the wall opposite.

‘Watch out, you mis’rubble git!’ he barked.

‘Get out of my sight! I have more significant issues to deal with then your DRUNKEN BUMBLING!’

Ron pulled a face at him and stumbled out, cackling.

One of the most unfathomable mysteries of the continent of Truphoria was the condition of Ronald Horne’s psyche. The trouble was that he had the mind of a ten-year-old – until he started drinking. It was incredibly difficult not to wonder how a man with such a passion for daisy-chains, climbing trees, leap-frog and the weekly game of snakes and ladders every Tuesday could have a tendency towards alcohol.

As if his childish imagination and energy weren’t exhausting enough, Vladimir had Ron’s drunken hallucinations to contend with, not forgetting a vulgar interpretation of life’s little details that, once sobriety hit, seemed to disappear without a trace. This double-personality was aging Vladimir so badly he reckoned he’d die of old age before he hit thirty-five.

Vladimir dismissed the messenger with a wave and glared out at the morning sun.

King Samuel was missing, presumed dead by the authorities. Which was Vladimir, his successor, but that was besides the point. King Samuel dead wasn’t such a bad thing. King Samuel dead meant good things.

King Samuel and the crown of Stoneguard missing, however, did not.

The crown of Stoneguard was a hideously important factor of Vladimir’s life. Without the crown, the king was not a king, and without a king the kingdom was not a kingdom, making the Battle for the Orchard over fifty years ago – the Hornes’ greatest victory – void. Without that awful, jagged crown-shaped lump of rock, Vladimir was nothing, and Stoneguard was a joke.

Needless to say, the safety of the crown was a damn sight more important to him than that ‘shtupi’ bastard’.

Vladimir narrowed his eyes to the south, to where the black mountains of the Wastelands framed the distant horizon.

He suspected her, of course. Who didn’t? The nameless Queen was a madwoman, which was perfectly fine compared to her people. Vladimir didn’t dare contemplate what the king might have gotten himself into with them.

Because in actual fact, despite being well-liked in general, King Samuel of Stoneguard was a fool. A big fool. And Prince Ronald was inheriting that foolishness in every respect.

A knock came to the door.

Vladimir spun on one heel, his jewellery clanging.

A monk stood just outside the door, twiddling his thumbs with the sheepish little smile his people favoured. A steel cross hung from his neck, adorned with five buttons down the spine and one more on the end of each arm – the motif of the Faith of the Seven.

Vladimir heaved a sigh. ‘I take it my mother summoned you?’

‘Um, no, your highness,’ he said in a quiet voice.

Vladimir shot the Cross of the Seven scathing glance.

What the Seven actually were was disputed – their faith thought they were gods, the Faith of Salator Crey thought they were devils, and most of the higher class thought they were imaginary.

But they definitely existed – Vladimir had seen the proof of that, twenty years ago, when his mother had deposited him on the altar and they had bestowed upon him the Sword of Thorns.

Apparently. His eyes were closed at the time in prayer, so he couldn’t be sure.

But they definitely existed – the chapel in Stoneguard’s capital of the same name often saw food donations vanish without a trace. And on very rare occasion, some small-folk swore blind that family members of a sinful persuasion sometimes disappeared as well.

Vladimir wished that had the decency to take Ronald with them.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

The monk bowed in his filthy grey robe, his bald and badly sunburned head reflecting the light of the sun. ‘Majesty, there is a matter of great importance we need to discuss with you. It is a prophecy concerning the king’s disappearance.’

Vladimir glared at him in disdain. ‘Of course there is.’

The monk nodded. ‘Indeed.’ They never were very good at picking out sarcasm. ‘My lord, it is finally time to wield the Crystal Sword. The Knight of Thorns has been summoned by law of the Testament.’

Vladimir’s eyes rolled upward.

‘The Prophet has confirmed it,’ the monk continued, ‘and the texts of the Testament have illuminated in light of the Catalyst—’

Vladimir opened his mouth and, with great volume, yawned.

The monk looked taken aback. ‘Am I boring you, your highness?’

Vladimir closed his mouth.

‘Oh. Yes,’ he said mildly. ‘You rather are.’

The monk spluttered. ‘But—the Prophet—he said—it’s the day we’ve been waiting for, your highness. Your time to defeat the Antichrist is come.’

‘Has come,’ Vladimir corrected. ‘Proper grammar isn’t a sin, you know.’

He eyed the monk’s defeated expression with a mild sense of pity.

‘Look, I grew out of this religious hero lark a very long time ago,’ he drawled. ‘But if it entertains you lot to pander to the call of a group of tricksters, by all means have fun with this new charade. Just keep me out of it. You can tell my mother I have handed in my notice as resident Knight of Raining Thorns, or whatever it is. Hers is the east wing, by the way.’

He waved a dismissive hand.

‘But your highness—’

‘Oh, “but your highness” what? “The world is coming to an end”? “A traitor is among you”?’ Vladimir mocked shrilly, waving his arms about. ‘Oh, what about “the holy flying”, I dunno, “cat has descended from the heavens to proclaim the Chosen One”!’

‘My lord, that is something the Crey religion would come up with,’ the monk said in a hurt tone.

Ronald’s re-entrance to the hall interrupted them.

He stood before them, his eyes wide and bloodshot.

‘A cat just flew right past my bedroom window!’

Vladimir gave him a withering glance. ‘Have you been at the incense again? You know you’re not supposed to drink that—’

‘A flying cat?’ the monk cut in.

‘Glowing, too,’ Ron added.

‘Don’t encourage him,’ Vladimir scolded the monk, ‘he was just eavesdropping at the door—’

‘See? Look! Look out there!’

Ron pointed out of the window, bouncing on his heels.

Vladimir pivoted lazily.

And leapt back at the sight.

A scruffy old grey cat glared at them through beady eyes. It hovered behind the glass and hissed at them through an ethereal glow.

Vladimir trembled, his back pressed to Ron’s shoulder.

‘Th-this is highly irregular,’ he stammered.

The cat launched himself at a robin and slammed it into the glass.

‘Quite,’ said the monk. ‘Usually the Seven aren’t quite so receptive to idle mockery outside of mass.’

‘You were blaming it on the Creys a minute ago,’ Vladimir drawled.

‘The ethereal glow, your highness,’ the monk said, gesturing with splayed fingers. ‘The Seven do this all the time at the chapel, usually when someone questions their existence. Religious artefacts fly about the place every odd Sunday. Keeps the patrons coming in.’

‘Do I get a reward for finding the Holy Flying Cat?’

‘The only reward you’ll get,’ Vladimir sneered at Ron, ‘will be a sharp shove down a long flight of stairs if you don’t sober up sharpish.’

Ron cowered. ‘Can I have the cat?’

‘No, you can’t have the cat. Honestly, your father’s presumed dead and the entire kingdom dangles by a thread, and you’re stood here going on about a stupid cat—’

‘Behold!’ exclaimed the monk.

The cat had disappeared.

The three rushed to the window to see it soar into the chapel after the robin.

Ron bolted outside, curious.

Vladimir’s eyes flitted back to the window.

The local carpenter carried three benches into the chapel, assisted by a young fair-haired apprentice.

Vladimir blinked and looked closer at the youth, who promptly dropped all three benches on his master’s foot with a wince.

‘The boy,’ Vladimir said. ‘Who is he?’

‘An orphan, your highness. Comes from Serpus originally.’ The monk lowered his voice. ‘There is a rumour he was found in the Queen’s Forest on the Night of Raining Thorns. He may be an instrumental part of the prophecy if the rumours are true.’

Vladimir cracked a smile.

The monk shivered. A smile from the elder prince of Stoneguard never boded well.

‘Of course he is,’ he said. ‘He’s Seth Crey’s double.’

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Hope had seen the dragon with his own two eyes before, passing through Serpus on the way to Creys’ Keep – which could only mean it belonged to the Creys.

Go figure.

He wrung his hands, dropping the scroll to the floor.

‘What does he want us to do?’

‘He said to prepare sanctuary for the Prophet,’ the monk supplied. ‘And pass the letter on. The messenger said this is the only letter being sent to the orders.’

‘To all of them?’

‘To lessen the chances of the Antichrist finding it.’

‘To increase the chances of it being lost, you mean.’ Father Hope sighed. There was no teaching logic to some people. ‘Does word of mouth not suffice?’

‘He may hear us.’

‘Everyone hears us on a weekly basis, how many of them listen to a word we say?’

The monk sighed. He had a point.

Hope stared out of the chapel, to the hills where Creys’ Keep could just be seen in the distance.

This did not bode well. Everyone suspected, surely, but he always thought King Theo’s bark was worse than his bite. He was no Rubeous Crey – he had been the worst one. And as for King Theo’s father, well, the Wastelands didn’t create itself.

He turned to the monk. ‘Who sent the letter?’

‘It’s from Stoneguard, but whether they are the original writers of the letter, we don’t know.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It has always been thought that His Eminence brought the Prophet to Stoneguard when he was discovered.’

That was true, Hope realised.

‘Send it on,’ he ordered. ‘Whoever did write it was right. The others must be warned, whether it’s true or not. We cannot take any chances.’

He stared out at the keep again.

‘If it’s true, this Knight of Thorns will need help saving King Samuel. He has no chance up against a Crey.’

 Everyone remembered the Night of Raining Thorns, although funnily enough only a handful of people recalled the notion that there were any thorns involved at all.

Everyone knew there had been an explosion. Several explosions, in fact: the first within the old keep in the Forest commencing a trail of detonations in a path all the way to the edge of Serpus. The inhabitants saw that part.

The thorns, ashes and occasional rose petal that had rained over Adem’s capital after, however, had gone very much unnoticed. It was Prince Seth’s wedding day, after all. Most of Serpus had either been too blind-drunk to see them or too concerned with the gravel buried in their faces from their unceremonious exit from the local pub.

Everyone knew about the fighting it had caused a week later. As Father Hope of the Faith of Salator Crey reminisced in the chapel log, the Forest Queen’s War ‘wrought horror upon the residents of Serpus for many days to come, with flame, gore and bits of beast-flesh a common sight, thus making an unholy mess of the chapel façade for me to clean up on my own because SOMEBODY was in the pub, BROTHER DANIEL.’

Two accounts of the Night had been quickly snuffed out. A man claiming to have spotted a dragon flying over the Forest had shortly been beaten with a hammer, and a manuscript had been quickly disposed of from a priest’s room, a manuscript detailing what appeared to be a war dated twenty-five years into the future…

Best not to dwell on that type of thing. As Father Hope cites in his records, ‘blood be-eth a bugger to get out of lacquered doors’. And blood was a common enough feature of Salator Crey’s chapels as it was.

Everyone in Truphoria saw one thing. Everyone, from as close as Serpus to as far as the kingdom of Stoneguard beyond the mountains of the Wastelands, saw the blinding white light of the Queen’s fortress exploding. Yes, they all remembered the Flash.

But no one remembered the Hole. And nobody would remember the Hole because the Hole could make damn sure the Hole would be well and truly forgotten about by the next night. And it did.

Almost.

But that would be telling.

Which is called foreshadowing.

Which is a fancy word for cheating.

And speaking of cheating…

 Creys’ Keep, on the hills north of Serpus, on the second week of spring, 1365 YM.

It was getting stressful in the palace of Adem.

The Queen of the Forest was rumoured to be planning another strike to push the borders and Stoneguard’s king was on his way to discuss an alliance between Lilly-Anna and his runt Ronald. Theo was away to discuss trade deals with allies abroad, leaving Cienne in the lurch.

And why wasn’t the next heir himself in charge of affairs?

Because he was dead.

And yet still alive.

To the misfortune of everyone involved, the assassination attempt on Seth Crey had failed – yet this knowledge remained unbeknownst to the prince himself. Seth’s account of the whole ordeal included a description of the moment he departed his body and became a spectral poltergeist and that was it.

It never mentioned where the body went if he wasn’t still in it or why he never ascended to the realm of Salator Crey like all Creys did in the legends of old –

But he was fine. So the matter was never raised again.

No one crossed Seth’s beliefs because he had the scare to prove it. A small slit on his right palm, made by the knife of a man widely dismissed as a disappointment. There were standards to uphold, after all. If you’re going to kill the prince of the realm, you might as well do it right.

But that didn’t matter.

Twenty years later, through force feeding and manipulation, the ‘Ghost of Adem’ still lived – in a casket on the floor of his exasperating wife’s bedchamber as time slid past for Cienne very slowly.

‘Darling,’ she coaxed.

She sat cross-legged, leaning an elbow on the lip of his open casket. She dangled an apple under his nose with her free hand.

‘Please eat the apple. The physician says you need it, darling. Please…’

‘Can’t,’ Seth said serenely. ‘I’m dead.’

She sighed angrily.

She was thirty-three years of age, same as him. She should have six children by now, not some ‘dead’ man in a box. What made it worse was that force-feeding him was her only hobby, bar changing her Portabellan accent to a Truphorian one and researching every synonym to the word ‘exaggeration’.

‘Please,’ she begged.

‘I’m dead,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘Sorry.’

Cienne dropped the apple onto her lap in frustration.

‘Seth,’ she said sharply, ‘you are not a ghost, you never died, you are not thirteen, you are thirty-three, and if you do not take me to bed this  instant, you shall feel what death really is like!’

Seth shrugged. ‘I’m already dead. Your words mean nothing to me.’

Cienne clenched her teeth. ‘Eat your apple!’

She shoved it into his mouth, slamming the coffin shut in his face.

Seth removed the apple, rubbing the joint of his jaw.

If Seth was alive, which unfortunately he was not at all, he would have thought of his wife Cienne Crey nee Fleurelle as a desperate woman. But dead men didn’t think, they just remembered.

For instance, he recalled the night before, when Cienne decided to take out her frustrations on her late husband. This resulted in Seth being dragged mercilessly from his casket, thrown onto their bed and forced to perform an act of vulgarity before he escaped at a sprint, screaming for his mother.

That was not a good day, or so Seth remembered.

Then there was the week before, with the psychiatrist. The man swung a chain with a spiral-patterned disk on it back and forth in front of his eyes, intoning something about love and duty to the kingdom and a proper diet until Seth’s mind went fuzzy.

Seth recalled in unfelt wonder at how, as if controlled by an outside force, Seth had rushed into the pantry, eaten the entire contents and climbed into Cienne’s bed to throw up in her mouth.

That was also not a good day, Seth reminisced, particularly for Cienne.

He also reflected on his daily routine – his force-feeding sessions with the lovely maid Anna. It was a pity he was dead. He remembered her being quite taken with him indeed.

If Seth had an opinion – which dead men cannot have – he would have thought his family to be very imbecilic indeed. Imagine forcing yourself on a dead man! The atrocity! And force-feeding him! What was the point? And as for Anna… well, she had better hope Cienne doesn’t catch her soon. She took respect for the dead a little too far.

If Seth could feel wonder, he would amaze at the power of the human belief system for the way his family kept his position in the household alive using nothing but the sheer force of denial to assist them – but, as a ghost, he could not feel, or think. Just remember.

Seth would always remember the last person who saw him ‘alive’.

He raised a hand idly and gazed at the scar running across his right palm. His memory of his last moments was fuzzy, but the scar proved it had happened, without a doubt.

Seth’s Great Illness had lasted twenty years and counting. He smiled faintly in the privacy of his little refuge. He wondered if he could push it a little more… before his method acting reminded him that he was supposed to be remembering, not wondering.

Seth settled down in the comfort of his casket. Now that Cienne had been left in charge, he could perhaps have some peace and quiet.

Seth rested his eyes, because dead men couldn’t sleep.

 Archibald Hart’s Carpentry Shop, the unnamed capital of the kingdom of Stoneguard on the continent of Truphoria.

Things were about to change in the Hart household – or rather, the carpentry workshop where Archibald Hart was about to be confronted by his apprentice and his new hairstyle. There had never been anything like a hairstyle before. Stoneguard’s residents opined that hair was nothing to be worried about and happened to everyone.

But Howie was breaking the mould – and how broken it looked, too.

‘Who tried to skin you, then?’ Archie asked.

Howie emerged from the market with his sandy hair chopped to half an inch long.

‘A hair stylist from Serpus,’ he said, running a hand through his short-back-and-sides. ‘Reckons I look like the Prince of Adem now. Nice lady. Didn’t try to kill me or eat me or anything. I told you all that rubbish about Serpus wasn’t true.’

‘She was from Serpus?’ asked Archie in horror. ‘I wouldn’t go near someone from Serpus with a barge pole. Their king eats children!’

‘She said there were plenty of children when she was last over. I took a risk. Could be worse, because I could look like you.’

Archie scowled at that remark. To his mind, there was nothing wrong with hair that resembled a grizzled knot of yarn sprinkled with icing sugar, so long as it was kept away from the lathe at all costs. But the problem with Archie was that he was, as Howie put it, an old biddy. This new-fangled ‘style’ thing was beyond him, and would no longer be any use to him in any case, unless he somehow reverted back to twenty and grew a bit.

Archie shook his head and turned to the church bench legs he was working on.

Howie meandered around the debris.

Archie tried to ignore him as the boy tripped over chairs and stools, sending sawdust into the light of the sun and half-made furnishings flying across the room. Fine sawdust soared into his throat and nose, sending Archie into a fit of coughing.

He forever warned Howie about disturbing the delicate balance of the workplace, but he never listened. At least he knocked over his own lopsided handiwork as opposed to Archie’s masterpieces.

‘Adrienne back yet?’

Howie picked up a jewellery box Archie had great contempt for, turning it this way and that.

‘No, but your annual newsletter came for you from your Aunty Doo-Dah from the orphanage. Why?’

‘I made her a birthday present,’ he said with pride, holding up the offending article.

Archie gave it a withering glance.

The dovetail joints quivered as if in response.

‘Hmm,’ Archie said cynically. ‘Jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you? Adrienne’s birthday is in the spring.’

Howie glanced out of the door, lifting an eyebrow.

‘It is the spring, Archie.’

Archie frowned and consulted his diary, unrolling the end of the parchment tacked on the back wall of the shop.

‘Oh,’ he said faintly.

‘You’d notice this if you weren’t cooped up in here all day long.’

Archie shot the window an apprehensive squint.

‘You’d coop yourself up all day too if you saw the things I’ve seen.’

Howie rolled his eyes, anticipating the old lament.

‘I didn’t ship you and Adrienne over here for nothing,’ he said in earnest. ‘There are savages out there, you know. The war normalised it, all the things they do to people. I’ll never forget what they tried to do to you when I first got you—’

‘Yes, yes, they tried to eat me in the night. I know the story. Still pretty sure you dreamt it, though.’

Archie pointed a finger at him.

‘That was no dream,’ he said sharply. ‘They tried to kidnap you and sell you to a lady who eats kids for eternal youth. They drug you so you don’t remember anything, they do it all the time. Look it up in a library.’

Howie’s eyes lifted to the rafters again.

‘Anyway, she’s not back yet,’ said Archie. ‘She’s still on her apprenticeship at the apothecary in the Shades, although whoever gave her that idea ought to have been killed. A woman’s place is in front of the stove.’

‘Don’t let her hear that, she knows every poison in the world now,’ Howie said in amusement. ‘Anyway, she’s very independent. And woman in the workplace is all the rage these days.’

‘I expect the husbands will be enraged, yes. That’s hardly a good thing, we have far too much violence as it is.’

‘Er, no, Archie, I meant—’

‘Anyway, cooking’s less dangerous. Carrots don’t try and rape you for changing its dressing.’

‘She’s fine,’ Howie brushed off.

Archie hoped so.

‘Alright, enough chit-chat, we have a large order to fill for the clergy,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘And try not to bugger up the pews like you buggered up that present, eh?’

Howie pulled a face at him and put the box down delicately.

Archie averted his eyes from the wonky joints. They were physically hurting his brain.

He regarded Howie as they got to work. He was, despite his faults in the woodwork department, a great kid. Possibly the best kid Archie had ever met, in fact, bar a young boy he apprenticed before him who became famous for curing lemurs. Or maybe lepers, he wasn’t sure.

People often said he had the Crey profile. Archie didn’t see it, but he sometimes wondered if he wasn’t related in some way. He had a strange kind of charisma – the kind that borders on hypnotism, pushes the borders on manipulation and downright conquers on indoctrination. Archie supposed that must have been why he kept him on. He did strange things to people’s minds, even Archie’s at times. It was a pity about his carpentry skills. It didn’t matter how charismatic the boy was: as far as Archie was concerned, if he couldn’t use wood properly he wasn’t a real man.

A knock interrupted him.

Archie looked up.

Adrienne beamed at them, laden with rucksacks from her time away.

‘Hi, uncle,’ she said brightly.

Archie grinned.

He had a great many nieces, so many in fact he kept a sign-in book for every one who came to visit, just so he could remember their names. Many were so awful he often threatened to give them away free with any table and chair set, just so he could be rid of them.

But Adrienne was his favourite.

Her auburn hair shone in the morning sun, parts of it turning gold in the light. Her round face was flushed from the weight of her belongings, and her silver eyes – her mother’s eyes – glinted happily as she stood in front of her makeshift family, dressed in an apron that could only be described as the muddied-and-bloodied hand-me-down of a surgeon with as little sanitation as a dung beetle’s basement. Archie encouraged her to wear it to ward off predators. She was too pretty for his peace of mind. Just like her mother had been.

She had been with Archie since birth and he had loved her like a daughter ever since.

Archie rose to greet her with a rare grin. ‘How did you get on?’

‘Great! They recommended I start up here after I sewed a Serpus man’s finger back on. They even offered to lend me some money!’ She beamed with pride.

‘Oh, brilliant, well done. Oi, Howie, take her stuff upstairs, will you? Oof,’ he gasped, dropping a rucksack, ‘what’s in here? You bring back a couple dead bodies as souvenirs?’

Adrienne giggled.

Howie skipped to the door.

‘Happy birthday,’ Howie said, handing her the little homemade box.

Her face lit up at the dreadful artefact, in spite of the chunks he’d hacked out of the lid beside the letter ‘A’.

She opened the lid.

‘Oh, Howie, it’s lovely—’

The joints gave way, causing it to flatten.

She quickly pulled them back into place and closed the lid in one fluid motion.

‘Thank you!’

She threw her arms around his neck.

‘You don’t have to go to so much effort!’

‘It’s nuffin,’ he said modestly.

Archie lifted an eyebrow, knowing if he had presented something of such low quality to her, she’d have laughed in his face.

The boy was a threat to society with his disgustingly heart-warming personality. Or a threat to the female populace, at any rate. Adrienne worshipped him. She’d be married to him by now were it not for the fact that in terms of The Hint, Howie was as dense as a fortress wall.

Howie hefted her luggage onto one shoulder and trudged upstairs, to where the three of them lived.

Adrienne followed at his heels, clutching the box to her chest fondly.

It took Archie a moment before all feelings of unexplained paternal affection for Howie could be pushed out, to be replaced by his usual grouchy demeanour as the thought slacker slid into consciousness once more. 

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Archie stood against the back wall on one leg, rubbing his left foot as the two remaining heirs to Stoneguard examined their ‘hero’ intently. It must have taken Vladimir a lifetime to hate every living soul in existence, Archie observed as he shifted his weight onto the left. It wasn’t easy hating someone who could indoctrinate a nation with an offhanded opinion such as a favourite food.

Mind you, Vladimir Horne was never thought of as part of the nation.

‘Why are you here?’ Vladimir demanded, unfazed by Howie’s usually appealing underdog expression.

Howie swallowed. ‘You summoned me here, sir.’

Vladimir scowled at him. ‘Not in the room,’ he said scathingly. ‘Here. In Stoneguard. You’re clearly a relation of the Creys, what business have you here?’

Howie glanced around and proffered, ‘Carpentry?’

Vladimir narrowed his eyes to slits.

Ron got onto all fours and crawled towards the cat, who flopped onto the carpet, bathing in a ray of sun.

‘Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,’ he trilled, holding a hand out.

Vladimir aimed a kick at him.

The toe of his boot connected with Ron’s shoulder.

Ron flinched back, reddening.

Teeth gritted, Vladimir met Archie’s gaze. ‘He’s yours, I believe?’

‘Yes,’ Archie said dubiously.

Vladimir rose and walked around to Archie, his three gold chains jingling.

‘And what do you think of him?’

‘He’s a pleasant lad with good prospects, actually,’ he snapped in reply before frowning.

That was strange. He’d been about to say ‘he’s a bone-idle shit’, but then he’d spied the infamous underdog expression.

Vladimir blinked. ‘You seem very… vehement about that, don’t you?’

Archie gulped. ‘Just fond of him, is all.’ He flung Vladimir a defensive frown.

‘Hmm.’

Vladimir paced around the room, his ringed hands behind his back.

‘Prince Death Crey’s image, inexplicable charisma and a famously questionable existence, all manifested to us on the day of my father’s disappearance. How quaint.’

Ron rose to his feet, scowling.

‘Don’t mind him, he’s just getting arsy because he isn’t the Knight of Wotsit anymore.’

Vladimir flung him a harsh glare. ‘Oh, what do you know? You’re loath to leave your beer tankard long enough to pass water.’

‘And you’re the vampire prince who recoils at the sight of the sun,’ Ron spat back.

‘Shut up!’

‘You shut up!’ Ron howled in indignation.

Vladimir punched him in the face.

Ron threw himself at him.

Howie and Archie watched in utter bewilderment as the two grappled at each other.

‘Shall we just leave?’ Archie asked.

‘Don’t move!’ Vladimir screamed.

He held Ron in a headlock.

‘Twenty years ago,’ he gritted, straining to hold Ron still, ‘when you were but a quickening of the womb, I was brought upon the Seven Gods and bequeathed the Crystal Sword. I am the Knight of Raining Thorns. You, Mister Rosethorn, are a charlatan!’

‘Okay,’ said Howie.

‘You will denounce all claim to the title of—stop it, STOP IT, get your claws out of my leg!!—and inform the clergy that their real Knight of Thorns will request their presence moment—HOOAAOOW, YOU BASTARD!!’

Ron had wrapped his teeth around Vladimir’s wrist.

‘Will do,’ Howie said mildly, holding his hands out in defeat. He grimaced at the pair. ‘Permission to leave, your highnesses?’

‘NO!’

Vladimir threw Ron bodily onto the flagstones.

Ron landed on his knees and elbows, wincing.

‘I want an explanation,’ Vladimir said, breathing heavily, ‘for why Seth Crey’s doppelganger lives in my city. Who are you? A bastard brother? That sounds like it, I’m sure his parents have a couple knocking around between them. No doubt you’re trying to claw back some kind of worth by pretending to be the Knight, I’m sure they were very eager to get rid of another Seth Crey.’

Archie’s nostrils flared. ‘What’s your problem? He hasn’t done anything to you!’

‘As much of a “pleasant lad” as he is,’ Vladimir mimicked, ‘he comes from bad stock. I’m not having him steal my glory and covet my throne. I will find my father, as soon as court affairs are settled. No Crey is depriving me of my crown, do you understand?’

Ron hauled himself to his feet in front of Howie and Archie.

‘All I understand,’ he seethed, ‘is that you’re angry at him because he looks a bit like the bloke that nicked your girly-girlfriend.’ Ron lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Think it’s time you let that one go, brov.’

Vladimir bared his teeth and launched himself at them with a screech.

Ron ducked behind Howie.

Howie flung his hands out in self-defence, his eyes squeezed shut.

When he opened them, Vladimir lay sprawled across the floor.

Vladimir lifted his chin from the flagstones. He spat blood and rifled in his mouth.

A tooth came away in his hand.

There was a brief silence in which Archie’s thought processes consisted of profanities in different font sizes.

Howie eyed the crown prince and stood back.

Vladimir’s face looked like thunder.

Ron bolted for the double doors.

‘Traitor!’ Vladimir howled. ‘He assaulted me! Guards, arrest them! GUARDS!’

Two huge men who embodied the name ‘Stoneguard’ in every sense appeared in the open doorway, bolting forward to grasp Howie and Archie by the elbows.

The two squealed as their shoulder joints creaked.

Vladimir rose slowly, hissing through the weeping gap in his top teeth.

His gaze locked to Howie’s.

‘Take them to Fred’s shed,’ he snarled.

 Night fell on the only city of Stoneguard.

The Stonekeep lurked over the dissipating crowd to cast a deep shadow over the minute city. Beside it the chapel stood twice its height to block out the light of the moon.

Pacing outside of said chapel, with one hand behind his back and the other clutching the crucifix around his neck, was Toffer, becoming increasing exasperated as his monks hovered inside the huge entrance. The order dared not move a muscle for fear of disrupting the priest’s furious ponderings.

In the dank regions of the priest’s rather small mind, much pondering was travelling in figures of eight, punctuated by excessive amounts of impressive swearing.

The Hornes had had Howard Rosethorn and his smelly uncle in their custody since morning. Dusk had fallen about an hour ago, and the third turn of the clock was well underway. Toffer doubted the batty prince had simply invited them to a late dinner.

Toffer was just pondering the likelihood of appealing to the good nature of the savage Queen Aaliyaa when a small voice pierced the silence.

‘Father?’

‘What? What is it? In the name of the gods, can’t a man think for five… min… utes…’

A young woman visibly shook in front of him.

Toffer planted a hand over his mouth and glanced at the monks, who were trying their very hardest not to give him the look of disdain they had mastered in his order.

‘Father,’ she said, fumbling with a small wooden box in her hands. ‘I was wondering if you’d seen my friend and uncle anywhere recently? Sandy hair, five foot ten, blue eyes?’ Her eyes welled up. ‘I wouldn’t bother you, only they’ve been gone all day and I’m worried about them and I thought to ask you because they were supposed to be here—’

‘Figured I had nothing better to do, is it?’ he barked. ‘Send a search party! I’ve better things to do!’

Adrienne wiped her nose and hurried away, blinking back tears.

A nun stormed up to him, indignant.

‘Father, that was ghastly in the highest degree!’

‘So,’ he snarled, ‘is capturing the Chosen One after I had given him all our money! You think I ought to be nice to everyone merely because I work in a church? You obviously haven’t met Father Giery of the Creys’ Keep, have you? It’s not me that’s horrible! I only wanted to help the boy on his way and perhaps get a bit of a name for ourselves, but no. The only way to make anything to yourself in this world is to be a dirty piece of pond scum with the morals of a common, a common…’

His eyes widened.

‘Criminal.’

A light ignited in the depths of his eyes.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘I have an idea.’

The monks, plus one nun, gulped.

‘Oh dear,’ one of them said.

 A figure shuffled itself out of the tallest tower of the Stonekeep and clung to two footholds just below the window.

The pitch darkness lay in silence over the city, but a handful of soldiers stood guard outside the palace regardless, armed in chainmail and long spears. They leaned heavily on the spears and their snores soon reverberated down the empty street.

Thankfully, their backs were turned away from Ronald Horne as he painstakingly groped for gap after gap, flinging a wary glance at the portcullis with every step.

Ron may not have been the sharpest spear in the armoury, but he knew a bad atmosphere when he saw one. He lived with Vladimir, after all. The man had bad atmosphere coming out of his backside, and if Ron had learned anything from his twenty-one years of experience, it was to avoid an atmospherically constipated Vladimir like the plague.

However.

Howard Rosethorn was in captivity.

Despite his father being the most powerful man in the country and he being second to that, Vladimir had not known about Howard Rosethorn prior to their first meeting. But Ron did. He was all anyone could talk about for the last five years – at least among the servants.

As far as Ron could gather, he was an enigma, an anomaly. That he was the bastard son of a Crey was undisputed: the question was which one. Seth Crey had locked himself in a casket since he was thirteen and King Theo was, as King Samuel had put it, ‘a prude, in a vicious kind of way’. Some said he was an immaculate conception of Seth’s wife that had been wrongly discarded at birth. Some said he was trueborn and put into hiding after his brother’s assassination attempt. One man claimed he emerged from a litter of kittens – but then he sold narcotics for a living, so he couldn’t really be trusted.

People didn’t make up stories like that about Vladimir, who was just pale and sulky. It was the charisma that did that. People loved him.

Even Ron liked him.

He didn’t know why. Objectively, Howie came across to Ron as quite ordinary, just a kid doing carpentry for the local craftsman. But Ron didn’t have many friends and beggars couldn’t be choosers and so, that made him Ron’s friend.

Although, he added mentally, the piteous underdog expression probably helped.

As soon as Ron’s left foot brushed the gravel, he touched down gently.

The ground crunched slightly underfoot.

He flinched, casting the gate a cursory glance.

The guards didn’t so much as stir.

Ron crept around to the back of the keep, wrapping his dark green cloak tightly around him.

At the rear wall of the keep stood an old garden shed, in which lived the castle groundskeeper amongst his equipment. Ron peered into the tiny rippled window of the decrepit stone shack to see an equally decrepit old man curled up in a stitched woollen armchair, asleep.

Dropped on top of each other in careless piles around the chair were woodchopping axes, shovels, trowels and picks. He’d carefully arranged his gardening tools into a subtle booby-trap, Ron knew, which left a trapdoor to the dungeons blatant next to the door.

Ron paused to think.

The trap was set by a cunning bastard. This could only mean it was set for an equally cunning bastard to fall into.

There was only one approach to this kind of intellect.

Brute, stupid force.

Ron glanced around, turning about. His gaze lingered on a bull paddock twenty yards behind the keep. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the farm for any signs of life.

He swept across the gardens noiselessly.

In the shed, old Fred the groundskeeper slid into bleary consciousness and sank comfortably back into the warm regions of sub-sleep.

Shortly after, chaos erupted.

Fred jolted awake to the overlapping sounds of a very angry bull and the front wall of his shack collapsing behind him.

He bolted backwards.

Heavy debris launched across his armchair, burying it beneath stone, mortar and the second heir to Stoneguard.

‘Sorry, royal business. LOOK OUT!’

The bull bolted free of the reins.

Fred screamed, scrambling into the corner.

The bull launched himself at him.

A ceiling beam collapsed a hand’s breadth away from the old man, landing between him and the offended bull.

‘Help,’ squeaked Fred.

He poked his head out from behind the wreckage.

‘Sorry, can’t, as I say, royal matters,’ Ron said quickly.

He leaped from the small coach he had hurried lashed onto the bull. Scrambling over bricks and debris, Ron laboured his way to the trapdoor in the corner.

‘Er,’ he paused, turning to face Fred, ‘where’s the key?’

Fred, trembling, pointed over the rubble.

Ron swung his gaze around and up a bit.

‘Oh,’ he said with a laugh, smacking his forehead. ‘Trust me to walk around with my eyes closed. Thanks.’

‘But,’ said Fred.

Ron lifted the door up with both hands and let it drop back against the wall. Squinting into the darkness, he quickly found the stairs and hunched down to lower himself into the pit.

‘But… what about me?’

Ron didn’t hear, or else he didn’t respond.

The bull, on the other hand, turned around and released a call of nature right in the spot where Fred had flung an outstretched hand.

Fred felt the heavy yellow stream engulf his palm and began to cry.

 The dungeons of the Stonekeep made up one of the largest prisons in the realm, only beaten by Adem’s infamous Tower. The immense city of cells, built one mile down into the earth’s crust, was lit by a mere five lanterns on each level, fuelled by a gas link sourced at the surface of Stoneguard.

These lanterns gave off the only light in the dungeons. The sparse illumination gave them an eerie atmosphere that, given enough time, tended to sent prisoners mad.

And Archie would have found all of this incredibly fascinating were he and Howie not sat in the middle of it all – or the lower middle, anyway.

Vladimir had banished them to the lowest level of the dungeons, into a damp cell slick with mildew and slug trails. One smell permeated the bottom of the keep: death, the damp, musty smell of decay and neglect.

The whole atmosphere disconcerted Archie. He blinked and blinked, struggling to adjust to the dim light of the lanterns and the snoozing cat thrown in with them, possibly for spite.

In the tiny cell with him, Howie hunched in the corner, miserable. Archie felt sorry for the lad. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was the prince’s dentistry Archie blamed. He clearly wasn’t looking after his teeth very well if a mild knock on the floor had dislodged one.

Something Ronald Horne had said returned to Archie suddenly.

The bloke who nicked your girly-girlfriend.

He meant Seth Crey, of course – Howie’s rumoured heritage didn’t come from nowhere, he was the spitting image of him. And Seth Crey’s wife was that girl from the east – Sienna something, Archie thought.

Archie found that strange. How did the pale, spidery Vladimir Horne get away with an affair with King Theo Crey’s daughter-in-law? Surely that was against the law to get off with the future queen?

Unless Ron just meant he had a crush on her. That probably made more sense, Archie thought. And it fit with the delusions of grandeur. He clearly thought very much of himself if he thought he was a prophetic hero.

Howie’s head shot up.

‘I can hear something.’

Straining his ears, Archie leaned against the bars of their cell.

Sure enough, he could hear the subtle creaking of the lift’s cog mechanism.

It shrieked to a halt.

The sound woke the guard, who scrambled to his feet.

‘Excuse me, sir, but Prince Vladimir has orders to forbid—’

Thunk.

‘Urgh…’

Thud.

Footsteps sounded on the flagstones, the only sound to be heard after the guard’s collapse. Archie held his breath as another sound manifested in the darkness… the sound of a spinning ring of keys.

‘Sorry I took so long,’ a familiar voice echoed down the corridor.

Archie blinked in disbelief.

Howie joined him in front of the bars.

‘Prince Ronald,’ Archie said in disbelief.

‘Just Ron will do, thanks,’ said Ron with a grimace.

He looked the worse for wear. His hair was matted with dust and mortar, as if he’d thrown himself through a wall, wearing the worn garb of the caretaker, by the look of it.

Ron caught Archie’s bemused stare and self-consciously brushed some of the dust lingering in the folds of his shirt.

He glanced up at them and grinned.

‘What the bloody hell do you want?’ Archie snarled.

Ron lifted an eyebrow.

‘Well, if you’re going to take that tone, I’ll take my ring of keys elsewhere—’

‘No, don’t do that!’ Howie said hastily.

Ron’s chin rose in disdain. Nevertheless, he returned his foot to the floor.

‘He’s sorry, now look. I’m sorry for pushing your brother, but it was self-defence! He threw himself at me, you can’t lock us up for that!’

‘Well, I was going to let you out,’ Ron said haughtily, ‘before he decided to snap at me.’

‘Sorry, your highness, it’s a side-effect of being locked in a dungeon.’

Howie stomped on his foot.

Archie bit back a howl. He’d just trod on his broken toe.

‘What changed your tune?’ he squeaked, hanging from his grip on the bars. ‘You were eager to leave earlier, so I recall.’

Ron shrugged. ‘I got to thinking. Being on the run with a bloke with a magic cat sounds a lot more fun than staying here with my scary older brother.’

Ron shot Archie a malevolent squint.

‘However, that was before you were rude. I could go for a bit of family unity after that.’

He stalked back to the lift.

‘Oh,’ Archie groaned, ‘come on, look, I’ll make it up to you, look, we, we’ll, we will—’

‘Find your father,’ Howie said.

Ron froze in his tracks.

Archie grimaced.

‘Make you a cabinet…’ he finished in a pained voice.

Ron pivoted.

‘You’ll find my father?’

Howie grimaced, then nodded. ‘Promise.’

Ron thought about this.

‘We’ll throw in the magic cat,’ Archie added.

‘Deal,’ Ron said brightly.

He scrambled to the lock and fumbled with the keys.

‘How are we getting past the guards?’ Howie asked.

Ron swung the door open.

‘They’ll be asleep, we’ll worry about them later. I’ve a plan.’

Ron glanced at the cat, sleeping contentedly in the corner.

‘I think we’ll have to leave the cat here for this one…’

Moments after their swift ascent in the lift, the cat awoke and stretched with a yawn.

After establishing that it was alone, it curled back into a ball, shone like a beacon… and disappeared.

 Meanwhile, a mile above them, Fred’s right hand crawled beneath the rubble in agonising silence.

The bull snorted directly above his head, but he was used to that at this stage.

His arthritis-riddled fingers squirmed beneath the rocks. Something thin and long slid beneath his thumbnail. The booby trap.

Old Fred Turpentine was, he was wont to admit, not the best groundskeeper in the world. You didn’t get sent to King Horne-Half-Empty for talent. The Stonekeep was the lowest rung in the caretaking business, and possessing a tendency to dig for buried treasure didn’t get you up the promotion ladder.

But Fred’s kleptomania had its uses. His knowledge of every booby trap in the known universe was what ultimately kept him in employment.

He snatched the wire tightly in his fist and, shying away from the bull, tugged gently, listening for the atmosphere to change.

The rug moved slightly under the influence of the chicken wire.

It pulled the pike with it.

Strapped to the handle, a piece of flint skidded off the floorboards.

A flame appeared.

It multiplied by two upon contact with a splinter in the floorboards, and a sliver of smoke began to rise.

Fred waited patiently for the shed to burst into flames and, hopefully, engulf the bastards who caused the bull to piss on his head. 

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