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The old Necromancer may be here, thought Alther grimly, and there may be nothing I can do about that, but he’s not going to enjoy it. Not if I can help it.
It was well into the early hours of the morning, after DomDaniel had gone upstairs to bed and had had considerable trouble sleeping due to the fact that the sheets seemed to be intent on strangling him, when the Apprentice returned. The boy was white with tiredness and cold, his green robes were caked in snow and he trembled as the Guardsman who had escorted him to the door made a quick exit and left him alone to face his Master.
DomDaniel was in a foul temper as the door let the Apprentice in.
“I hope,” DomDaniel told the trembling boy, “that you have some interesting news for me.”
Alther hovered around the boy, who was almost unable to speak from exhaustion. He felt sorry for the boy—it was not his fault that he was Apprenticed to DomDaniel. Alther blew on the fire and got it going again. The boy saw the flames jump in the grate and made to move over to the warmth.
“Where are you going?” thundered DomDaniel.
“I—I’m cold, sir.”
“You’re not going near that fire until you tell me what happened. Are they dispatched?”
The boy looked puzzled. “I—I told him it was a Projection,” he mumbled.
“What are you on about, boy? What was a Projection?”
“Their boat.”
“Well, you managed that I suppose. Simple enough. But are they dispatched? Dead? Yes or no?” DomDaniel’s voice rose in exasperation. He had already guessed the answer, but he had to hear it.
“No,” whispered the boy, looking terrified, his sodden robes dripping on the floor as the snow began to melt in the faint heat that Alther’s fire was giving off.
DomDaniel cast a withering look toward the boy.
“You are nothing but a disappointment. I go to endless trouble to rescue you from a disgrace of a family. I give you an education most boys can only dream of. And what do you do? Act like a complete fool! I just do not understand it. A boy like you should have found that rabble in no time. And all you do is come back with some story about Projections and—and drip all over the floor!”
DomDaniel decided that if he was awake, he didn’t see why the Supreme Custodian should not be awake too. And as for the Hunter, he’d be very interested in what he had to say for himself. DomDaniel strode out, slamming the door behind him, and set off down the static silver stairs, clattering past endless dark floors left empty and echoing by the exodus of all the Ordinary Wizards earlier that evening.
The Wizard Tower was chill and gloomy with the absence of Magyk. A cold wind moaned as it was drawn up as if through a huge chimney, and doors banged mournfully in the empty rooms. As DomDaniel descended, becoming quite dizzy from the never-ending spirals of the stairs, he noted all the changes with approval. This was how the Tower was going to be from now on. A place for serious Darke Magyk. None of those irritating Ordinary Wizards prancing around with their pathetic little spells. No more namby-pamby incense and plinky-plonky happy sounds floating in the air, and certainly no more frivolous colors and lights. His Magyk would be used for greater things. Except he might fix the stairs.
DomDaniel eventually emerged into the dark and silent hall. The silver doors to the Tower hung forlornly open. Snow had blown in and covered the motionless floor which was now a dull gray stone. He swept through the doors and strode across the courtyard.
As DomDaniel stamped angrily through the snow and made his way along Wizard Way to the Palace, he began to wish he had thought to change out of his sleeping robes and slippers before he had stormed out. He arrived at the Palace Gate a somewhat soggy and unprepossessing figure, and the lone Palace Guard refused to let him in.
DomDaniel struck the Guard down with a Thunderflash and strode in. Very soon the Supreme Custodian was roused from his bed for the second night running.
Back at the Tower, the Apprentice had stumbled to the sofa and fallen into a cold and unhappy sleep. Alther took pity on him and kept the fire going. While the boy slept, the ghost also took the opportunity of Causing a few more changes. He loosened the heavy canopy above the bed so that it was hanging only by a thread. He took the wicks out of all the candles. He added a murky green color to the water tanks and installed a large, aggressive family of cockroaches in the kitchen. He put an irritable rat under the floorboards and loosened all the joints of the most comfortable chairs. And then, as an afterthought, he exchanged DomDaniel’s stiff black cylindrical hat, which lay abandoned on the bed, for one just a little bigger.
As dawn broke, Alther left the Apprentice sleeping and made his way out to the Forest, where he followed the path he had once taken with Silas on a visit to Sarah and Galen many years ago.
18
KEEPER’S COTTAGE
It was the silence that woke Jenna in Keeper’s Cottage the next morning. After ten years of waking every day to the busy sounds of The Ramblings, not to mention the riot and hubbub of the six Heap boys, the silence was deafening. Jenna opened her eyes, and for a moment thought that she was still dreaming. Where was she? Why wasn’t she at home in her cupboard? Why were just Jo-Jo and Nicko here? Where were all her other brothers?
And then she remembered.
Jenna sat up quietly so as not to wake the boys who were lying beside her by the glowing embers of the fire downstairs in Aunt Zelda’s cottage. She wrapped her quilt around her as, despite the fire, the air in the cottage had a damp chill to it. And then, hesitantly, she raised a hand to her head.
So it was true. The gold circlet was still there. She was still a Princess. It hadn’t been just for her birthday.
All through the previous day, Jenna had had that feeling of unreality that she always got on her birthday. A feeling that the day was somehow part of another world, another time, and that anything that happened on her birthday was not real. And it was that feeling that had carried Jenna through the amazing events of her tenth birthday, a feeling that, whatever happened, it would all be back to normal the next day, so it didn’t really matter.
But it wasn’t. And it did.
Jenna hugged herself to keep warm and considered the matter. She was a Princess.
Jenna and her best friend, Bo, had often discussed together the fact that they were in fact long-lost Princess sisters, separated at birth, whom fate had thrown together in the form of a shared desk in Class 6 of East Side Third School. Jenna had almost believed this; it had seemed so right somehow. Although, when she went around to Bo’s rooms to play, Jenna didn’t see how Bo could really belong to another family. Bo looked so much like her mother, thought Jenna, with her bright red hair and masses of freckles, that she had to be her daughter. But Bo had been scathing about this when Jenna had pointed it out, so she didn’t mention it again.
Even so, it hadn’t stopped Jenna wondering why she looked so unlike her own mother. And father. And brothers. Why was she the only one with dark hair? Why didn’t she have green eyes? Jenna had desperately wanted her eyes to turn green. In fact, up until the previous day, she had still hoped that they might.
She had longed for the excitement of Sarah saying to her, as she watched her do with all the boys, “You know, I do think your eyes are beginning to turn. I can definitely see a bit of green in them today.” And then: “You are growing up fast. Your eyes are nearly as green as your father’s.”
But when Jenna demanded to be told about her eyes, and why they weren’t green yet like her brothers’, Sarah would only say, “But you’re our little girl, Jenna. You’re special. You have beautiful eyes.”
But that didn’t fool Jenna. She knew that girls could have green Wizard eyes too. Just look at Miranda Bott down the corridor, whose grandfather ran the Wizard secondhand cloak shop. Miranda had green eyes, and it was only her grandfather who was a Wizard. So why didn’t she?
Jenna felt upset thinking about Sarah. She wondered when she would see her again. She even wondered if Sarah would still want to be her mother, now that everything had changed.
Jenna shook herself and told herself not to be silly. She stood up, keeping her quilt around her, and picked her way over the two sleeping boys. She paused to glance at Boy 412 and wondered why she had thought he was Jo-Jo. It must have been a trick of the light, she decided.
The inside of the cottage was still dark apart from the dull glow cast by the fire, but Jenna had become accustomed to the gloom, and she began to wander around, trailing her quilt along the floor and slowly taking in her new surroundings.
