As she grabbed a candle and shook it into life she tried not to feel so agitated. She opened the door in the panelling of the lavish corridor and pattered down the spiral staircase that led to the cellars, ducking cobwebs that regenerated themselves with irritating speed. The deep vaults were damp and chilly. Squeezing between the barrels and winecasks she hurried to the darkest corner where the high bronze doors reared to the roof and found to her horror that they were shut. The great snails that seemed to infest this place clung to the icy metal; their trails crisscrossed the damp surface.
‘Master!’ Claudia slammed her fist against the door.
‘Let me in!’ Silence.
For a moment she knew for sure that he couldn’t, that he was lying unconscious, that the slow illness that had been consuming him for years had crumpled him in pam. Then another fear stabbed her even harder; that he had finally got the Portal to work and had trapped himself in Incarceron.
The door sprang open with a click.
She slipped in and stared.
And then she laughed.
On his hands and knees, trying to pick up hundreds and hundreds of glistening blue feathers, Jared glanced up at her irritably. ‘This is not funny, Claudia.’ She couldn’t stop. She was silly with relief. She sat down in the single chair and let the giggles rise to a sort of hysteria that left her wiping her eyes with the silk of her skirt. Jared leant back on his hands in the blue ocean of plumage and watched her. He wore a dark green shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His Sapient coat, flung over the chair, was buried in feathers. His long hair was tangled. But his smile, when it came, was rueful and real. ‘Well, all right. Perhaps it is.’ The room that had always been so pure and white looked as if a thousand kingfishers had been plucked in it. Feathers lay on the metal desk and coated the sleek silver shelves with their unknowable devices. The floor was ankle deep. Clouds of them rose and settled at every movement.
‘Be careful. I knocked a flask over trying to grab them.’
‘Why feathers?’ she managed to say at last.
Jared sighed. ‘One feather. I picked it up from the lawn.
Small. Organic. Perfect for experimentation.’ She stared at him. ‘One? Then...'
‘Yes, Claudia. I finally managed to get something to happen. But not the right thing.’ Amazed, she gazed around. The Portal was the way into Incarceron, but only her father knew its secrets and he had sabotaged it in his escape inside. He had sat in this very chair and disappeared, and she knew that he was lost somewhere within the miniaturized world that was the Prison. And since then nothing here had worked. Jared had spent months studying the controls of the desk, infuriating Finn with his care and delicate probing, but no switch or circuit had even lit.
‘What happened?’ She jumped up from the chair, suddenly afraid she might disappear.
Jared pulled a blue feather from his hair. ‘I placed it on the chair. For the last few days I’ve been experimenting with replacing broken components with various substitutes; the last was an illicit plastic I acquired from a trader in the market.’ Claudia said immediately, ‘Did anyone see you?’
‘I was well cloaked, so I trust not.’ But they both knew that he had probably been followed.
‘Well?’
‘It must have worked. Because there was a flash and a . . . shiver. But the feather did not disappear, nor did it miniaturize. It multiplied. They’re all perfectly identical.’ He looked round with a wan helplessness that suddenly struck Claudia; the smile went from her face. Quietly she said, ‘You mustn’t work yourself too hard, Master.’ He glanced up at her, his voice gentle. ‘I am aware of that.’
‘I know Finn is always prowling here, bothering you.’
‘You should call him Prince Giles.’ He stood, wincing slightly. ‘Soon to be King’ They looked at each other. Claudia nodded. Glancing round, she found a sack that held tools; she emptied them out and began to stuff the feathers in, handful by handful.
Jared sat on the chair and leant forward. ‘Can Finn cope with such a pressure?’ he asked quietly.
She paused. He saw how her hand stayed in the sack; when it came out she worked harder and faster.
‘He’ll have to. We brought him out of Incarceron to be King. We need him.’ She looked up. ‘It’s strange. All I cared about when this started was not marrying Caspar. And getting the better of my father. All my life I’ve plotted and planned, been obsessed with those things...’
‘And now you’ve achieved them you are not satisfied.’ He nodded. ‘Life is a series of stairs up which we climb, Claudia.
You’ve read Zelon’s Philosophies. Your horizons have moved.’
‘Yes, but Master, I don’t know. .
‘You do.’ He reached out his delicate hand and gripped hers, stopping her. ‘What do you want of Finn, when he becomes King?’ For a long moment she was still, as if thinking. But she said exactly what he knew she would. ‘I want him to overturn the Protocol. Not the way the Steel Wolves want, by killing the Queen. I want to find a way peacefully, so we can start time again, live naturally without this stagnation, this stifling false history’
‘Is that possible? We have few reserves of energy.’
‘Yes and they’re all wasted on palaces for the rich, and keeping the sky blue, and trapping the poor and forgotten in a Prison run by a tyrannical machine.’ Savagely she swept up the last feathers and stood. ‘Master, my father is gone. I never thought it possible, but I feel like half of me is gone with him. But I am his successor, and if anyone is Warden of Incarceron now, it’s me. So I’m going to the Academy. I’m going to read the Esoterica.' She turned, not wanting to see the alarm on his face.
Jared said nothing. He gathered up his coat and followed her out, and as they crossed the threshold of the door they both felt again that strange shift; as if the room straightened itself out behind them. Turning, Claudia stared at its white purity; the place that existed both here and at home, as her father’s study.
Jared swung the gates closed and fastened the chains across. He clipped a small device to the bronze. ‘This is just a safeguard. Medlicote was down here this morning.’ Claudia was surprised. ‘My father’s secretary?’ Jared nodded, preoccupied.
‘What did he want?’
‘He had a message for me. He took a good look round. I think he’s as curious as everyone else in the Court Claudia had always disliked the tall, silent man who worked for her father. But now she said, quietly.
‘What message?’ They had reached the stairs. She dumped the sack of feathers for some servant to clear; Jared stepped back with perfect Protocol to let her go first. For a moment, as she swished up under the cobwebs, a silver of fear came to her, a fear that he would lie, or evade her question. But his voice was normal. ‘A message from the Queen. I’m not sure what it’s about. She wants to meet with me.’ Claudia smiled sweetly into the dimness. ‘Well you should go. We need to know what she’s up to.’
‘I have to say I find her terrifying. But yes, you’re right.’ She waited for him at the top; as he emerged from the doorway he caught the frame and breathed in sharply for a moment, as if a spark of pain had stung him. Then he caught her eye and straightened. They walked along the panelled corridor in silence, turning into a long hallway lined with hundreds of blue and white vases each as high as a man, filled with ancient potpourri that mouldered mustily. Under their feet the wooden boards creaked.
‘The Esoterica are kept at the Academy,’ Jared said.
‘Then I’ll have to go there.’
‘You’ll need the Queen’s permission. And we both know she does not really want the Portal reopened.’
‘Master, I’ll go, whatever she says. And you’ll have to come with me, because I won’t understand any of what I find.’
‘That will mean leaving Finn here on his own.’ She knew that. She had been thinking about that for days.
‘We’ll need to find a bodyguard for him.’ They had reached the Honeysuckle Court. The sweet scent of its tangling flowers was like a wave of summer, it made her feel happier. As they walked out into the maze of formal paths the evening sun lit the cloisters of twisted crystal and gold; tiny mosaic pieces glittered, and a few bees hummed in the clipped rosemary and lavender.