When the waggon clattered through a broken gateway she muttered quietly to Finn, ‘What are you up to?’
‘Keeping them on our side. If they knew who we were …’
‘They’d jump to help! We could pay …’ He was watching her strangely. ‘Sometimes, Claudia, I think you don’t understand anything at all.’
‘Such as what?’ she snapped.
He nodded ahead. ‘Their lives. Look at this.’ Cottages was hardly a word for them. Two lopsided, squalid buildings squatted at the edge of the track. Their thatch was in holes, wattle and daub walls patched with hurdles. A few ragged children ran out and stared, silent, and as Claudia came closer she saw how thin they were, how the youngest coughed and the oldest was bow-legged with rickets.
The waggon rumbled into the lee of the buildings. Rafe yelled at the children to find the horses and they scattered, and then he ducked under one of the low doorways. Claudia and Finn waited for the older man to climb down. His hunched back was even more evident when he stood, no taller than Finn’s shoulder.
‘This way, lord’s groom and lady’s maid. We don’t have much, but we do have a fire.’ Claudia frowned. She followed him down the steps under the wooden lintel.
At first she saw nothing but the fire. The interior was black.
Then the stink rose up and hit her with its full force, and it was so bad she gasped and stopped dead, and only Finn’s shove in her back made her stumble on. The Court had its share of bad smells but there was nothing like this; a stench of animal dung and urine and sour milk and the fly-buzzed remnants of bones that cracked in the straw under her feet.
And above all, the sweet smell of damp, as if the whole hovel was settling deep into the earth, tilting and softening, its wooden posts rotten and beetle-bored.
As her eyes became used to the gloom she saw sparse furnishings — a table, joint-stools, a box-bed built into the wall. There were two windows, small and wood-slatted, a branch of ivy growing in through one.
The old man dragged up a stool for her. ‘Sit, missy, and dry yourself. You too, lad. They call me Tom. Old Tom.’ She didn’t want to sit. There were certainly fleas in the straw The miserable poverty of the place sickened her. But she sat, holding out her hands to the paltry fire.
‘Put some kindling on.’ Tom shuffled to the table.
‘You live here alone?’ Finn asked, tossing on dry sticks.
‘My wife died these five years. But some of Rafe’s young ones sleep here. He has six, and his sick mother to care for…’ Claudia noticed something in a dim doorway; she realized after a moment that it was a pig, snuffling the straw of the adjoining room. That would be the byre.
She shivered. ‘You should glass the windows. The draught is terrible.’ The old man laughed, pouring out thin ale. ‘But that wouldn’t be Protocol, would it? And we must abide by the Protocol, even as it kills us.’
‘There are ways round it,’ Finn said softly.
‘Not for us.’ He pushed the pottery cups towards them.
‘For the Queen maybe, because them that make the rules can break them, but not for the poor. Era is no pretence for us, no playing at the past with all its edges softened. It’s real. We have no skinwands, lad, none of the precious electricity or plastiglas. The picturesque squalor the Queen likes to ride past is where we live. You play at history. We endure it.’ Claudia sipped the sour beer. She realized she had always known this. Jared had taught her, and she had visited the poor of the Wardenry, ruled over by her father’s strict regime. Once, in a snowy January; seeing beggars from the coach, she had asked him if more couldn’t be done for them.
He had smiled his remote smile, smoothed his dark gloves.
‘They are the price we pay, Claudia, for peace. For the tranquillity of our time.’ A small cold flame of anger burned in her now, remembering. But she said nothing. It was Finn who asked, ‘Is there resentment?’
‘There is.’ The old man drank, and rapped his pipe on the table. ‘Now, I have little food but...’
‘We’re not hungry.’ Finn hadn’t missed the evasion, but Claudia’s voice interrupted him.
‘May I ask you, sir. What is that?’ She was staring at a small image in the darkest corner of the room. A slant of sunlight caught it; showed a crude carving of a man, his face shadowy; his hair dark.
Tom was still. He seemed dismayed; for a moment Finn was sure he would yell for the brawny neighbour. Then he went on knocking dust from his pipe. ‘That is the Nine-Fingered One, missy.’ Claudia put down her cup. ‘He has another name.’
‘A name to be spoken in whispers.’ She met his eye. ‘Sapphique.’ The old man looked at her, then Finn. ‘His name is known in the Court then. You surprise me, Miss lady’s maid.’
‘Only among the servants: Finn said quickly. ‘And we know very little of him. Except that he Escaped from Encarceron.’ His hand shook on the cup. He wondered what the old man would say if he knew that he, Finn, had spoken to Sapphique in visions.
‘Escaped?’The old man shook his head. ‘I know nothing about that. Sapphique appeared from nowhere in a flash of blinding light. He possessed great powers of magic — they say he turned stones into cakes, that he danced with the children. He promised to renew the moon and free the Prisoners.’ Claudia glanced at Finn. She was desperate to know more, but if they asked too much the old man would stop. ‘Where exactly did he appear?’
‘Some say the Forest. Others a cave, far to the north, where a charred circle is still burnt on the mountainside. But how can you pin down such a happening?’
‘Where is he now?’ Finn asked.
The old man stared. ‘You don’t know? They tried to silence him, of course. But he turned himself into a swan. He sang his final song and flew away to the stars. One day he will return and end the Era for ever.’ The fetid room was silent. Only the fire crackled. Claudia didn’t look at Finn. When he spoke again his question shocked her.
‘So what do you know of the Steel Wolves, old man?’ Tom paled. ‘I know nothing of them.’
‘No?’
‘I don’t talk of them.’
‘Because they plan revolution, like your loose-tongued neighbour? Because they want to murder the Queen and the Prince, and destroy Protocol?’ Finn nodded. ‘Wise to keep silent then. I suppose they tell you when that happens the Prison will be opened and there will be no more hunger. Do you believe them?’ The hunchback stared back evenly at him across the table.
‘Do you?’ he whispered.
A tense silence. It was broken by the stamp and rattle of hooves, a child’s shout.
Tom rose slowly. ‘Rafe’s boys have found your horses: He looked at Claudia, then back at Finn and said, ‘I think perhaps too much has been said here. You’re no groom, lad.
Are you a prince?’ Finn smiled ruefully. ‘I’m a Prisoner, old man. Just like you.’ They mounted and rode back as quickly as they could.
Claudia had given all the coins she had to the children.
Neither spoke. Finn was alert for another ambush, Claudia still brooding over the injustice of Era, her own unthinking acceptance of riches. Why should she be rich? She had been born in Incarceron. If it hadn’t been for the Warden’s ambitions she would be there still.
‘Claudia, look,’ Finn said.
He was staring through the trees, and glancing up at the alarm in his voice she saw a tall plume of smoke rising ahead.
‘It looks like a fire.’ Anxious, she urged her horse on. As they emerged from the forest and clattered under the barbican the acrid smell grew. Smoke filled the inner courtyards of the Palace and as they galloped in the wind was crackling. A frenzied army of ostlers and grooms and servants were running, dragging out horses and squawking hawks, hauling pumps, buckets of water.
‘Where is it?’ Claudia swung down.
But she could already see where it was. The whole ground floor of the East Wing was ablaze, furniture and hangings being tossed out of windows, the great bell ringing, flocks of disturbed doves flapping in the hot air.