Wickham continued: This man, this father of the newborn, had committed many bad deeds, and for this he was bound to be punished. As his wife brought their child into the world, a man in robes of black entered the room and stabbed the childs father through the heart. Then he turned, dagger in hand, to the young mother lying weeping on the floor, clutching the delivered infant to her breast.
As she looked up at this insidious intruder, she was possessed by a fierce love for her child, a child brought into a world of instant cruelty. She reached back and grabbed a poker from beside the fire, striking it hard against the mans face, opening up a bony, bloodied chasm
A tankard fell on to the floor, spilling white wine across the flagstones as it rolled towards Olands hand. He uncurled his little finger and sent it rolling back out. Wickham, candlestick in hand, bent down to retrieve it.
Olands heart started to pound. He was struck with a sensation that enveloped him like a shroud. A fleet of images flashed through his mind, and ended in a vivid scene of dripping blood that quickly fled as Wickham stood up and carried on with his tale:
The terrified mother crawled past the felled man to the door, and through the deserted hallways of Castle Derrington she ran. Door after door was locked. On she ran. Eventually, she stumbled into the kitchen, and there she found a small recess in a brick wall and a teetering tower of crates. She pulled off the topmost, then the next, then the next and, in the crate beneath that, she laid her silent baby. She scrawled his name on a piece of paper, and pinned it to his chest. That boys name was
Oland Born! roared Villius, reaching under the table, grabbing Oland by the ankle and wrenching him out. He pulled him up to standing. Olands eyes were level with Villius chin, and he dared not raise them higher. Being so close to Villius face, and breath, and spite, repelled him. He was so close now, he could make out the tiny raised scars that marked his jaw like the slashes of a tiny blade.
What are you doing, you eerie little runt? roared Villius. Is your bed not comfortable enough, that you prefer to lie on the floor? Or is spying what interests you? Look at me! Is there someone you have taken to spying for?
A treacherous man will forever see treachery in the eyes of others, Oland had once read.
N n no, said Oland. I I
I I what? roared Villius. If you are not here to spy, what is it? What have you been doing all night?
Despite himself, Olands eyes flicked towards the stinking Hazenby, reminding him his earlier work had, ultimately, been in vain.
Why are you looking at him? said Villius, grabbing Olands face, and squeezing it.
N no no reason, said Oland.
This room is in no fit state for our morning revivals! said Villius. The Villian Games take place today! The event of the decade! And youre lying on the floor like a dog!
Like the dog he is! shouted Hazenby.
The Craven Lodge all kicked back their chairs, and staggered up, gathering around Oland, bearing down on him, drunk and roiling.
In the midst of these murky thugs, Oland Born was like a light in the dark. His hair was fair, his eyes pale green, his skin sallow and unravaged by careless living. He had pale, angular lips. As the cheekbones and jawbones of The Craven Lodge had been vanishing under layers of fat, Olands were emerging. And though there were slight flaws in the symmetry of his features, his was a face that drew the eye of many, twice over. His body was long and lean, but hidden by loose tunics and trousers. In contrast, The Craven Lodge wore garments that highlighted their spreading girth. Villius Ren was the fittest of his pack and, even as he aged, his shoulders appeared to broaden, and his chest and torso thickened. He had the build of a warrior, and the vanity to retain a private tailor to proclaim it.
Without warning, Villius hand shot out and he grabbed Oland by the back of the head, pushing him towards a candle at the centre of the table. Oland gripped the edge of the table to try to stop him.
Worried your girl-hair might go up in flames? said Villius, shoving his face closer to the heat.
Oland cried out. He could hear his hair crackle. The smell filled his nostrils. Panicked, he released 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 wont 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.
LAND TOOK GIANT STRIDES ACROSS THE HALL AND out into the courtyard. He knew how Wickhams story ended: the mother fled the castle, never to be seen or heard from again. But she had vowed to the last person she had seen that night, a terrified young maid, that she would return one day to reclaim her son. To reclaim me, thought Oland.
The story would always end with Wickhams 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 kings 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 rooms 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 drogues 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 beasts 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.
OME MORNING, THE CRAVEN LODGE WERE STILL sleeping, most of them having made it no further than the dining chairs of the great hall. The inner ward of Castle Derrington was exclusively their domain, the ten men and their one servant, Oland Born. A guarded barbican connected the inner ward to the outer ward, where a staff of forty worked, led in and out strictly at the times they were required to carry out their duties.
One hundred of Villius Rens 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 oclock in the morning and closing at ten oclock 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 slung his bag over his head, securing the strap across his body. Viande stirred and opened one eye.
Running from Villius Ren roxworthy, he said.
Oland flinched at the insult. Prince Roxleigh was King Micahs lunatic uncle, sent for his ramblings to an asylum on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. Prince Roxleigh was a tall, skinny man with a long face, a slender neck and light brown hair that sat on his head like tumbleweed. In the sunlight, it shone like a halo. Roxleigh had been a popular prince, happiest in the company of the Derrington villagers, brightening their spirits with his jaunty walk and cheery smile, calling out to them with a sweeping wave of his skinny arm.
Roxleighs very best friend was a Derrington man called Rowe, who was as tall as Roxleigh, but moved, as he would himself admit, with more ballast. His canted walk was no match for Roxleighs loping stride, and he would bound behind him like a giant puppy. Rowe spoke from his warm heart and shining mind, his head swooping down, then up with a flourish at the end of each burst of inspiration. And he had many, as did Roxleigh. Both fiercely intelligent, they were part of a small group of great thinkers who met every month in The Derrington Inn to discuss matters of importance in the Kingdom of Decresian, always with the intention of enhancing the life of its people.
But in the year before he was carried, wailing and flailing, from the castle, something had changed in Prince Roxleigh. Rowe, from whom he had been inseparable, had vanished from Derrington quite suddenly. Roxleigh had begun to pace the dungeon hallways of the arena at night, talking of beasts and monsters, of dark creatures with secret chambers, scribbling his notions on reams of paper that he stacked to the ceiling in the musty cells.
From then until now, if you were called roxley or roxling or if your actions were deemed roxworthy, the message was clear: you were as mad as the mad prince that was locked away in the madhouse. Years later, when Roxleighs younger brother, Prince Stanislas King Micahs father became King of Decresian, a messenger arrived at the castle to say that Prince Roxleigh did not mind one bit. But everyone agreed: Roxleigh had no mind with which to mind.
Oland left Viande and the sleeping beasts of The Craven Lodge behind. As he walked, he pondered the story of Prince Roxleigh. The year leading up to his descent into madness had been a bleak one for the kingdom, when a bermid-ant plague struck the northern coast. The small black ants moved south, ravaging the land, turning the rich vegetation from vibrant green to barren bronze. No one had ever seen such a beautiful trail of destruction. The bermids poisoned crops and the animals that fed on them. The people of Envar died from eating the produce of the land, the meat of diseased livestock, or they died from eating neither.
Prince Roxleighs father, King Seward, a kind, strong leader, vowed to the surrounding territories that he would do everything he could to contain the plague within Decresians borders. Yet, despite the best efforts of this honourable king, it was not to be, and the plague spread.