The Secret Prince Part 34

Henry snickered, but then forced himself to be serious, as there was nothing funny at all about the "restricted reading section." Do you reckon this used to be the library?" he asked. "Before the revolution?"

Adam nodded.

"It's brilliant," Henry said.

Beneath the stained-gla.s.s window was the perfect bench for reading on a rainy afternoon, and the ceiling was painted with angels and men-scenes from holy Scripture.

The library was a relic of the Partisan School's former glory, and Henry could almost imagine the rivalry between Knightley and Partisan as it had once been: The boys in old-fas.h.i.+oned frock coats competing to see which school had better imparted knowledge to their students. And before that, so very long ago, the boys in bowl haircuts and tunics, breaking their lances in the jousting ring.

Henry examined one of the bookshelves. It held heavy tomes on physick and biologie and astronomye, the spellings as antiquated as the books' crumbling spines.

"Henry," Adam whispered.

"What?"

"Come and see this."

Henry reluctantly left the books to see what Adam had found. It turned out to be a wall of faded tin daguerreotypes, each of them small enough to fit into his hand. They depicted a dozen or so schoolboys standing proudly behind a banner proclaiming them the INTER-SCHOOL TOURNAMENT CHAMPIONS, with the year engraved at the bottom. The last of the pictures was dated just two years before the revolution.

Henry squinted at the pictures in the dimness. Suddenly there was a flare of light.

Adam had found a candle and a match, and he was looking rather pleased with himself as he held the light toward the wall of pictures. Henry stared at the tiny images of the boys-from both Knightley and Partisan, he supposed, though the banner obscured their uniforms.

"Poor blokes," Adam said sadly, shaking his head.

Henry rather agreed. The wall was a haunting reminder of how few of these boys had lived to see their hair streaked with gray.

"Is that? Nah, it can't be," Henry said, squinting at a boy who bore a strong resemblance to Fergus Valmont.

"Well, I think I've found Compatriot Erasmus," Adam said, pointing at a picture in the middle of the collection.

Henry looked. He supposed it could have been, but the daguerreotype was old and faded, and there weren't any names on the pictures. And then another face in the picture made Henry freeze, because the boy holding the left side of the banner could have been his twin.

At first Henry thought he must be seeing things, but the boy in the picture with his old-fas.h.i.+oned slicked-back hair had the same square jaw and large dark eyes as he did. A corner of the boy's mouth was quirked up, as though he'd just thought of something terribly clever and couldn't wait to share the joke.

"Blimey," Adam said, leaning in to investigate. "Is that ...?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

Henry's heart pounded. He couldn't look away. The date on the picture was 1871, more than twenty-five years before.

It was possible. Henry held on to this knowledge. When they got back to Knightley, he could go through the cla.s.s registers for 1871. He could know the one thing he'd always told himself didn't matter-because they'd never come back for him-the ident.i.ty of his parents.

And then they heard voices in the corridor. Adam cursed; they'd left the lights on in the library. "Come on," Adam said, tugging insistently on Henry's sleeve.

Henry gave the picture one last tortured glance before following Adam back through the velvet curtain and into the dreary library dominated by the portrait of the chancellor.

They each turned down a gas lamp and stood with their backs pressed against the wall, trying to catch their breath.

The voices and footsteps pa.s.sed.

The boys waited a few minutes, and then Adam opened the door and they crept into the hall. To the left was the main stairs, and beyond that was the servants' stairs, which would eventually take them up to the attic. To the right was a long, dark corridor-and the secret room Frankie had found on the map.

For Henry it wasn't a choice. He nodded in the direction of the corridor.

"Our beds are that way," Adam whispered, pointing in the opposite direction. And then he sighed. "But who needs sleep?"

They headed down the corridor, Adam still holding the candle to light the way. The castle was drafty at night, and the candle flickered, casting wiry shadows along the stone walls.

And then they heard footsteps. Adam blew out the candle, and he and Henry pressed their backs against the wall, trying not to breathe.

It was Garen. He held a dark lantern and wore a dressing gown as he crept down the corridor, pa.s.sing within an arm's length of Henry and Adam.

They watched as Garen stopped next to an ancient stone fountain carved into the wall of the castle, and reached his hand into the basin. The slab of wall groaned and swung aside, revealing a doorway.

Garen stepped primly through, and the slab of stone swung back into place, once again an innocent decoration.

"Come on," Henry whispered.

"It might be dangerous. We don't know what's behind that wall."

"One way to find out."

Henry laid his ear against the wall, listening.

He heard voices inside.

Was this it? Had the combat training room been moved here?

Henry motioned impatiently for Adam to join him.

Adam sighed and ambled over. And then his toe hit an uneven patch of the stone floor, and the candleholder tipped, spilling hot melted wax onto his hand.

"Aahhh!" Adam cried, and then clapped a hand over his mouth.

But it was too late. The hidden door creaked open, and this time it was Florian who peered into the hallway, holding a lantern.

He grabbed Henry by the arm. "Got ye," he sneered, hanging the lantern from a peg and grabbing a handful of Adam's s.h.i.+rtfront. "Now both of ye come inside and explain yerselves." Florian marshaled them through a short pa.s.sageway that quickly widened into a large, echoing chamber.

A moth-eaten Partisan School banner hung from the wall, but the chamber held no weapons. Instead there was an enormous round table encircled with a motley a.s.sortment of chairs appropriated from different parts of the castle. The table was covered with dozens of candles that formed an equal-armed cross. And seated around this table were Garen, the bespectacled boy who had tripped over the polish bottle, Compatriot Erasmus, and five others whom Henry didn't recognize. Two were teachers, one looked like a member of the serving staff, and two were students.

Henry tried not to panic.

"Found them spying in the corridor," Florian said with a painful twist of Henry's arm. "What shall I do with them?"

Compatriot Erasmus held up a hand. "Search them. And then they will tell us everything."

Adam whimpered at Compatriot Erasmus's statement-or threat. Either way, it sounded ominous.

Before Henry could react, Florian was patting him down, as though suspecting that Henry kept knives sheathed to the backs of his legs. Garen had taken hold of Adam and was roughly doing the same.

"Nothing," Florian said.

Garen nodded in confirmation.

"Henry, wasn't it?" Compatriot Erasmus said. "Have a seat. I dinnae think I know your friend."

"That's Adam," Garen said. "They arrived together."

"Did they now?" Compatriot Erasmus's eyes gleamed at this news as Henry and Adam nervously took seats at the table. "And, Alfrig, can ye fetch a bottle of acid from the science laboratories?"

The bespectacled boy nodded and hurried from the room.

"Acid, sir?" Henry asked weakly.

"Yes, lad. I wonder if ye have ever seen the effect of acid poured onto an open wound. It is not pleasant, but sometimes it is necessary."

Henry gulped.

"Now," Compatriot Erasmus continued, "who sent you?"

"Sorry?" Henry frowned.

"Don't play games with me, lad. Are ye one of the chancellor's men? Do ye report to Yascherov's secret police? ANSWER ME!"

Henry shot Adam a look of horror. They were in far over their heads.

And then Adam put a hand over his face and began to pray. "s.h.i.+yr lamm'aloth esa eynay el-hehariym-"

Henry elbowed him. Adam gulped and slid down in his chair until his eyes were level with the table. He looked ready to faint.

"Please, sir, no one sent us," Henry said in his true accent. "We're students at Knightley. We came with the envoy last weekend as servants. We'd heard rumors that the boys at Partisan were being instructed in combat and preparing for war, and we wanted to see if it was true. But then we missed the train back and wound up stuck."

"Ye *missed the train'?" Compatriot Erasmus asked with a deadly smile.

Adam explained about Frankie being a stowaway, and how they'd stayed because of her. "And then her blasted grandmother left us here to rot," he said indignantly. "I knew I didn't like that woman."

At that moment the boy called Alfrig returned with the bottle of acid. Henry noticed a gold ring glinting on his hand as he placed the bottle of acid on the table with a curt bow.

"I believe that is no longer necessary, but I thank ye for gettin' it," Compatriot Erasmus said.

"Aye, my-Aye, Compatriot Erasmus," said Alfrig.

"Ye boys have seen nothing here," Compatriot Erasmus continued, turning to Henry and Adam. "It was an empty room ye found. Ye may leave, provided ye hold your tongues, or else they may be taken from ye as recompense."

"Yes, sir," Henry said. "We understand. Come on, Adam."

Adam pushed back his chair, and Henry could see that he was still praying, his lips moving silently.

"Just a minute there," a boy said. He was older, perhaps eighteen, and terribly good-looking. He spoke as though he expected to be obeyed, and sure enough, every head in the room turned in his direction. "I'm not satisfied that they are who they say. What kind of Knightley students would pretend to be servants? I think they were sent to spy on us."

"Who would send us?" Henry retorted. "We're first years and commoners."

"Commoners?" Compatriot Erasmus asked with a frown.

Henry supposed that, with the difficulty of getting anything through the border, news of Knightley's accepting common students had not made it to the Nordlands.

"There are three of us this year at Knightley," Henry said, quickly explaining the circ.u.mstances of how he had come to sit the Knightley Exam, and how Adam and Rohan had also been admitted.

"Yer Nordlandic accent was very convincing, lad," Compatriot Erasmus said, his expression inscrutable. "As though you were raised in ... Manorly, perhaps?"

"Little Hawks.h.i.+re, more like," Alfrig grumbled under his breath.

"Right, well, we should be going," Adam said nervously. "We'll leave you blokes to your secret society-er, sorry, empty room where nothing at all is happening."

"What kind of secret society do you imagine this to be?" Compatriot Erasmus asked, leaning across the table with a wolfish grin.

Adam gulped. Henry could tell that he was about to start praying in Hebrew again.

"I want them gone!" the older boy demanded. "Erasmus, see to it!"

"Wait!" Henry said. "Can't we join?"

Everyone looked up.

"Join?" Adam asked, as though that were the very last thing he wanted to do.

But Henry pressed on, without quite knowing what he was going to say. The words spilled out, a tumble of everything he'd seen and thought over the past six days at Partisan Keep.

"Adam and I are stuck here for another three weeks. We could help with-well, whatever it is you're doing. You have the school banner on the wall there, with the old motto, so I take you to be honorable men, and perhaps we're after the same thing. Adam and I want to make certain that we are not forced to lead schoolboys off to battle if there's another way. South Britain is afraid of an invasion, of Chancellor Mors seeking to rule not just the Nordlands but the whole of the Brittonian Isles. I saw those pictures in the restricted section of the library, and it was a wall of ghosts. I don't want to be haunted by the ghosts of my cla.s.smates, and I don't want to be haunted by the possibility that I didn't do everything I could to find a way for there to be peace."

Henry sat back down in his chair, though he couldn't recall how he'd come to be standing. He was dizzy with the momentum of what he'd just said, and the realization that he'd meant it. His heart pounded like a drum, and the candles flickered in their equal-armed cross, casting eerie shadows across the faces of everyone at the table.

Finally Compatriot Erasmus spoke. "Ye may return here tomorrow night, if ye speak the truth."

Henry shakily climbed to his feet, realizing they'd been dismissed. "Yes, my lord," he said without thinking.

Compatriot Erasmus nodded slightly. "Ah, ye know me. But do ye know yerself?"

25.