The Princelings of the East

by Jemima Pett

  Chapter 2: Consequences

  In which George loses his Engine, the castle reveals a Secret, and Fred has an Idea

  For the next two days the Princelings kept well hidden but used every secret passage they knew to listen to everything that was going on in the castle. Recriminations were everywhere. Everyone was accusing everyone else of ruining the King’s birthday gathering. Their best source of information was from their favourite hidey-hole, a little space behind the chimney in their uncle’s apartment. They could hear what he said to anyone when he was there. They couldn’t hear his thoughts though.

  “I don’t like it, Fred, it seems that anything that uses energy is being examined and destroyed unless it’s vital. I’d better go and hide my wind engine. But where should I put it?”

  “We could move it up to the tower. No-one knows how to get into it.”

  “How on earth will we get the machine in there though?”

  Fred paused, imagining the wind engine, the entrance to the tower, and the difficulty of lifting it through the gap.

  “Let’s get it there now, and then take it through piece by piece if necessary.”

  They slipped out of the little room and along the corridor, then into the room beyond the entrance to Uncle Vlad’s apartments. They closed the door quietly behind them, went to the third wooden panel and leaned against it. The panel slid aside, the brothers slid through and were off down some narrow stairs with the panel shutting with a gentle hiss behind them. They emerged in the basement, just along from the kitchen, and crept along to the door down to the cellars. After a couple of twists and turns, George turned into the alcove where he did his work. He stopped dead with an anguished cry, which he stifled immediately.

  Fred looked over his shoulder. The wind machine lay in pieces on the floor in front of them, wooden struts broken, cloth sails ripped, cogs torn from their spindles, the casing smashed in. He put his hand on George’s shoulder.

  “Can you rescue anything from this?”

  George nodded, tears welling in his eyes. He always kept everything, never knowing when he might just need a piece of wood such a length, or a cog sized just so. They gathered it all together, putting it in a bag that had somehow escaped the wreckers' attention, and hauled it up with them, back up stairs, along corridors, and up to their favourite tower.

  George stood looking out of the window and Fred busied himself with the making of a soothing drink. He couldn’t understand why anyone would smash George’s work up; everything George did was for the benefit of the castle. Only an amazingly ignorant person would imagine otherwise. He would probably have to give up any hope of getting George to help him with mapping the wind. He did so much want to understand why it blew the reeds this way and that around the castle.

  At length George turned back from the view and came to sit beside Fred.

  “Well, we did say we’d bring it through piece by piece if necessary,” he said with a weak grin and a sniff. “They are just smaller pieces than I’d anticipated.”

  Fred smiled at him and gave him a hug. “That’s the spirit, George, chin up and all that. I’ll help.”

  That brought a slightly firmer smile to George’s lips. Fred’s help when building things was not usually of great value, but he didn’t want to hurt his feelings so he said nothing.

  “The only trouble with staying up here out of sight,” said Fred, “is that we might miss something important.”

  “I got the impression that Vlad is building up to some sort of announcement,” George said.

  “Yes, although I don’t understand what as he really doesn’t know what’s causing it.”

  “Have you had any ideas about it?”

  “No, although I don’t think it’s anything we’re doing in the castle somehow, there’s no reason for it.”

  “I wonder if it’s happening everywhere then, and what other people do about it?”

  George and Fred both sat and thought on that. ‘Other people’ as in persons from other castles, did not usually figure much in their thoughts.

  “When did we last see a messenger here?” Fred asked.

  “Last winter there was the person who came from Castle Wash. He was a good chap.”

  They grinned as they remembered an entertaining evening they had with the messenger that had brought greetings from the nearest castle to their own king. The brothers had waylaid him on his departure. They had persuaded him to stay the night after a few ales, a lot of gossip, and by the thought of a nice bed in front of a warm fire rather than a dark journey in the freezing marshes.

  “He didn’t tell us much about the outside world though.” Fred sighed. “There was that stranger who came by coach a year or two ago, the one we never actually saw, only spoke to Vlad and the King.”

  “The lady, you mean?”

  “Well, you thought she was a lady.”

  “I bet she was.”

  “Well, given we don’t even know whether she was a lady, let alone where she (if he was a she) came from, or what she spoke to uncle and grandfather about all alone, no servants or anything, I don’t know that we can count her as a messenger.”

  Fred stood up. “I’m going back downstairs. It’s good to look at the marshes and Think, but we’re not getting anywhere. I want to know what’s going on, and I won’t find out sitting here. And you aren’t in the mood to build more engines. Let’s go back down and do some more listening.”