Heir Apparent (15 page)

The servants were cleaning up the remains of the meal, and we were the only ones still sitting. The guards I'd sent in pursuit of the barbarian raiding party returned, having lost the trail in the woods. Another set of guards were sent to find the barbarian camp to offer official regrets for Grimbold's death. Meanwhile, I needed to wait for Rawdon's return to make a decision about the peasants, and I needed to wait for the magic-users to do anything about tracking down the dragon who had Brecc the Slayer's crown.

"Well," I said, looking at my filthy sheepherder's dress, "maybe now is the time for me to clean up."

"Oooo," Sister Mary Ursula said, "I have an extra dress you could use."

Since she looked as though she wore Feordina the Knitter's hand-me-downs, I said, "Maybe something from one of the ladies-in-waiting would be more appropriate."

"I can arrange that," she told me.

She showed me to one of the second-floor rooms, but it wasn't Lady Cynthia's. This lady's name was Bliss. One glance told me that if Bliss shopped at the mall, she would need clothes whose size included at least a couple of Xs.

"Oh, this is such an honor!" Bliss giggled, so pleased, her feet practically fluttered off the ground. "Thank you, thank you, thank you for choosing me."

"Well ..." I started.

"I have
so many
clothes," she told me, "because"—she leaned forward to whisper as though we shared a secret—"I do have a bit of a weight problem."

OK,
I thought.
This might work.

But as she flung dresses out of her clothes chest onto her bed, I saw that her size varied from big to very big.

"Isn't this a pretty red?" she asked.

"It is," I agreed. I couldn't ask for Lady Cynthia by name because I had never been introduced to her in this lifetime. And I hated to ask for just any other lady, because Bliss was
so
enthusiastic.

Did Rasmussem want me to be nice to her and make her my friend for a particular reason? Or were they only intent on making me look like a fool?

Still, I couldn't look any worse than I did now.

So I chose the red velvet dress, and—after I finally got my bath, and with a lot of tucks and gathers and a belt—eventually got the dress around me. I had just fastened the magic ring around my neck with a length of ribbon when someone knocked at Lady Bliss's door.

"Captain of the guard," Penrod announced from the hallway, "looking for Princess Janine."

Bliss opened the door for him. "And doesn't she look exquisite?" she asked.

I think
clean
was really the best we could say in all honesty, but Penrod didn't have time to quibble. "Bad news, Highness," he announced.

"Regarding the messengers dispatched to try to make peace with the barbarian camp?" I asked, though it seemed too soon for them to have had any result yet.

Penrod shook his head. "Regarding Counselor Rawdon."

Now what?

"The man I sent to Fairfield just returned. He said there is no one in Fairfield answering the description of Penrod's mother."

"But you're sure it was Fairfield that Rawdon said he was going to?" I asked.

"Positive," Penrod said.

I tried to work this out. "Rawdon said Fairfield, and he carried bundles of food for his family..." It suddenly struck me that when I'd asked the servants carrying the pig if they'd seen Rawdon, one of them had said something about Rawdon getting field rations for his trip.

Surely field rations weren't carried in great bundles?

"How long has Rawdon been bringing supplies to his mother?" I asked.

"About three months."

"And how long has it been since you've been having trouble getting paid?"

Slowly, Penrod said, "About three months."

I was beginning to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. "Did I hear somebody say something about the king having a treasure room?" I asked.

Penrod took me there, a locked chamber off the king's own bedroom. Guards had to kick in the door because Rawdon had the key. It was an enormous room, bigger even than the king's bedchamber.

And, of course, the room was totally empty.

The next door we broke down was the one to Rawdon's room. I hoped to find some nice clues indicating where he'd be likely to head now that he'd made off with all the loot from my treasury. But we found nothing—no handy map where
X
marked the spot, no travel brochures from sunny Aruba, no abandoned diary with the crucial page ripped out (but that a clever detective could read by studying the impressions on the page beneath). Rawdon had left behind the rugs on the floors, the tapestries on the walls, and all the furniture; but his clothes were gone and there were no personal items or papers—nothing to show this wasn't simply a spare guest room.

"Any thoughts?" I asked Penrod.

He gestured his men out of the room, then closed the door for privacy. In a low voice he told me, "The news is spreading already—there's no way to contain it."

It took a moment for his meaning to sink in. The guards had not been properly paid for the last couple months, and even now those who knew about the theft were telling the others that the new king had no money left with which to pay them.

"What are the men likely to do?"

"Leave," Penrod said, "most of them. They'll try to find employment elsewhere."

Sure, there was that nice barbarian camp in the vicinity that could probably use some new recruits, being down a few men since morning.

And even if my guards didn't join the barbarians, how long could the castle stand without anyone to defend it?

"I'll stay," Penrod assured me, "of course." It was nice to have him feeling indebted to me. He continued, "I'll try to convince the men to give you a day or two. I'll tell them you're tracking Rawdon down, that it's just a matter of time before you recover the treasury."

"You need to practice saying it with a straight face, or no one will believe you," I warned him. "Where do you think I should start looking?"

Of course it wasn't that easy.

"I don't know, Princess."

Obviously that was part of the fun of the game, figuring that out.

"Maybe I should start in Fairfield," I said. "You said Rawdon always headed off in that direction. Just because the people there never heard of Rawdon's mother, that doesn't mean they didn't see
him.
And wherever Rawdon was taking those bundles of money, it was within a day's journey of here. I'll take men with me, and wagons to carry the money should we recover it." Talk about optimism.

"Do you want me to accompany you or to stay here?" Penrod asked.

He was the only friendly one I'd met—besides Lady Bliss. Well, and Rawdon had been friendly, but now I saw that didn't count. Still, Penrod was more useful here. "Stay," I advised. "Try to talk the men into remaining here. Explain that if they leave now, they've already worked the majority of the month without pay. The worst that can happen if they stay is a couple more days of work without pay. On the other hand, if things work out, they'll get paid when we get back. Bonuses for anyone who stays."

"I'll assign loyal men to accompany you and to guard the treasure on its way back." This time he managed to keep his skepticism from showing on his face.

My good friend, my carefully chosen ally, Abas, refused to come with me, saying if I was just leaving now, I'd be away half the night, and he'd miss his weightlifting exercises for the evening. But he promised if I
did
get back in time, he'd let me watch.

As for my advisers, Sir Deming told me to ask my officially chosen adviser, and Sister Mary Ursula was going to be busy with her soul-cleansing skinny-dipping-in-the-moonlight routine. As my official adviser, she advised me to join her.

So off I headed to Fairfield.

I rode ahead with five men, leaving the rest of the squadron to accompany the slower-moving wagons. Guessing I'd need all the time I could get to find Rawdon's stash, I hadn't even bothered to switch out of Bliss's extravagant dress and into more sensible clothes.

Fairfield was much bigger than St. Jehan, which was no surprise: Some of my friends at St. John the Evangelist School
have families
that are bigger than St. Jehan. But Fairfield had a few hundred people, which doesn't sound like much until you begin to think about questioning every one of them.

We arrived at dusk, and our first stop was a tavern. The red dress got a few whistles from having worked its way down so that it revealed more than I wanted revealed, but nobody remembered seeing anyone fitting Rawdon's description.

We stopped at Fairfield's three other taverns. Some of the people had been around that afternoon when my messenger had been looking for Rawdon's mother. They remembered the messenger but not Rawdon. "Isn't there anyone in Fairfield," I asked the tavern keeper at the last place, "who's a bit of a busybody, who sits around watching people, and always likes a bit of gossip?"

"Information costs," the tavern keeper said, "and you and your group haven't spent a penny here yet."

"I'm the new king," I said. "I'm the one who'll be setting your taxes next year—are you sure you want to talk to me about paying for things?"

He directed me to his mother-in-law, who thought she'd seen a man who might have been Rawdon, but she couldn't be sure when or where. She suggested I talk to a friend of hers—a guy who couldn't help but said he got a lot of his news from the goose girl. The goose girl's mother complained that it was past her daughter's bedtime, but she got the child up when one of my men—the only one of us with any cash at all—loaned me a copper penny to pay her if the information was good.

Wiping sleep from her eyes, the eight-year-old assured me that she had seen Rawdon.

"When was the last time?" I asked, suspecting the mother might have coached her so that they could keep the penny.

"Today," she said. "He was carrying big bundles of something or other, bigger than he usually does."

Which was exactly how I had described him to her.

But then she added, "He was looking even more fidgety than usual."

Fidgety.
How else would a man who'd just made off with a king's treasury look? Except I hadn't said
who
Rawdon was or why we were searching for him. Still, it could have been clever reasoning on the girl's part. Seeing that we were pursuing someone, she might guess that that someone had been worried about pursuit.

"How do you mean, 'fidgety'?" I asked.

"Looking over his shoulder to see if anybody was watching," the girl said. "Pretending to be just sitting there in the shade, eating his bread and cheese, until no one was looking."

"Except you," I guessed.

She snorted. "Grown-ups don't even
see
children unless we're bothering them."

Well, that was certainly something I'd experienced.

"And then?" I asked. "Once he thought no one was looking?"

"He went into the old church."

Church? A man who was making off with the entire assets of a kingdom?

"What church?" I hadn't seen any church in Fairfield.

"The one the barbarians burned down during the time of my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother."

At least it wasn't anything
I
had caused to happen. "But you said—"

"It's mostly ruins," the gid said. "The timbers burned, and the roof caved in, and the walls collapsed. But the way the stones fell, there are tunnels. And if you can find it, one of the tunnels leads down to the catacombs."

Catacombs might be useful for hiding stuff.

"Have you ever been down to these catacombs?" I asked.

The girl glanced at her mother. "No."

Neither the mother nor I believed her. The mother twisted the little girl's ear until the poor child squealed. The mother said, "I told you to stay away from there. That's no place to be playing—it's too dangerous."

"Yes, Mama," the girl squealed.

"You wait until your father gets home," the mother warned. "You are in
so
much trouble."

"Excuse me," I said. "We're not finished yet. Are you saying children play in the catacombs?"

"No," the girl said, but her mother still had a grip on that ear and warned, "Better not."

"
Other
children," I clarified.

Still, the girl said, "No. It's too scary. We peeked in once or twice.
Owl
The boys sometimes dare each other to run in, circle the marker, and run back out again.
Owl Mama!
But they always run as fast as they can, in case of ghosts. Nobody ever goes past the first room.
Out!
"

"How many rooms are there?"

The girl shook her head that she didn't know. The mother shrugged. "The church is in front of the hill, and the hill is where we buried our dead before we started the cemetery."

I said, "We're willing to pay if you can show us how to get to that first room."

"Pay with what?" the mother asked. "You had to borrow for what you've promised us already. Speaking of which..." She held out her hand.

I glanced at the guard to see if he had any more coins with him. He shook his head.

"Can you describe the way to us?" I asked the girl.

She nodded, and I handed over the penny to her mother.

T
H
E
G
U
A
R
D
S
didn't have any money, but they
did
have the supplies to fashion the torches we'd need if we were going to be exploring underground.

The church was, as the child and her mother had indicated, in ruins. I could see why the mother was frantic to keep her daughter away.

We found the larch tree she said marked the opening that led under the rubble. Crawling in was the tightest squeeze. After that, the pathway, though cramped, was well-worn enough by hands and knees, that we easily found our way through: right turn at the Men and burned beam; right turn at the darker stone that was shaped like a round loaf of rye bread; ignore the wide way, which looked like where you should go but dead-ended a few feet beyond; left turn under the slab of rock as long and wide as a man.