Tuesdays at the Castle

For Melanie:

Editor extraordinaire!

Chapter

1

W
henever Castle Glower became bored, it would grow a new room or two. It usually happened on Tuesdays, when King Glower was hearing petitions, so it was the duty of the guards at the front gates to tell petitioners the only two rules the Castle seemed to follow.

Rule One: The throne room was always to the east. No matter where you were in the Castle, if you kept heading east you would find the throne room eventually. The only trick to this was figuring out which way east was, especially if you found yourself in a windowless corridor. Or the dungeon.

This was the reason that most guests stuck with Rule Two: If you turned left three times and climbed through the next window, you’d end up in the kitchens, and one of the staff could lead you to the throne room or wherever you needed to go.

Celie only used Rule Two when she wanted to steal a treat from the kitchens, and Rule One when she wanted to watch her father at work. Her father was King Glower the Seventy-ninth, and like him, Celie always knew which way was east.

And also like him, Celie truly loved Castle Glower. She never minded being late for lessons because the corridor outside her room had become twice as long, and she certainly didn’t mind the new room in the south wing that had a bouncy floor. Even if you could only get to it by climbing through the fireplace of the winter dining hall.

King Glower the Seventy-ninth, on the other hand, valued punctuality and didn’t enjoy being late for dinner because the Castle had built a new corridor that ran from the main hall under the courtyard to the pastures, and all the sheep had wandered inside to chew the tapestries. He also didn’t particularly like waiting for hours for the Ambassador of Bendeswe, only to find that the Castle had removed the door to the ambassador’s room, trapping the man inside. Of course, the king had to admit that there was usually some strange logic to the Castle’s movements. The Ambassador of Bendeswe, for instance, had turned out to be a spy, and the sheep … well, that had all been mere whim; but there was still logic to be found if you looked hard enough. King Glower admitted this freely, and he made it clear that he respected the Castle. He had to; otherwise he would no longer be king.

The Castle didn’t seem to care if you were descended from a royal line, or if you were brave or intelligent. No, Castle Glower picked kings based on some other criteria all its own. Celie’s father, Glower the Seventy-ninth, was the tenth in their family to bear that name, a matter of tremendous pride throughout the land. His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had become king when Glower the Sixty-ninth’s only heir had turned out to be a nincompoop. Legend had it that the Castle had repeatedly steered the old king’s barber to the throne room via a changing series of corridors for days until the Royal Council had him declared the next king, while the young man who should have been Glower the Seventieth found himself head-down in a haystack after having been forcibly ejected from the Castle through the water closet.

King Glower the Seventy-ninth, Lord of the Castle, Master of the Brine Sea, and Sovereign of the Land of Sleyne, knew when to leave well enough alone. He married the beautiful daughter of the Royal Wizard when the Castle guided them into the same room and then sealed the doors for a day. He paid attention when the Castle gave people larger rooms or softer chairs. When his older son, Bran, kept finding his room full of books and astrolabes, while his second son Rolf’s bedroom was moved next to the throne room, King Glower sent Bran to the College of Wizardry, and declared Rolf his heir.

And when little Celie was sick, and the Castle filled her room with flowers, King Glower agreed with it. Everybody loved Celie, the fourth and most delightful of the royal children.

Chapter

2

E
veryone hates me,” Celie grumbled.

“No one hates you,” her sister, Lilah, said soothingly. “But you do have a tendency to bounce.”

“There’s nothing wrong with bouncing,” Celie insisted.

“Very true,” her brother Rolf said, coming into the room. “Let’s bounce right now!”

Grinning at Lilah in a way that was sure to irritate her, he took hold of Celie’s hands and they began to jump up and down in place. Celie forgot to pout, and laughed as they jumped. Rolf could always make her laugh.

Lilah tossed her dark hair to show Rolf that he was being silly, and went to the window to look out. They were in Lilah’s room, which was quite large and grand, and straddled a narrow bit of the north wing. There were windows on one side that looked out on the main courtyard, and on the other side was a balcony that hung over a sort of atrium with a fountain in the center of it. Lilah was at the courtyard windows, checking on their parents’ travel carriage, which was being stocked with lap rugs and novels, prior to the king and queen taking a journey.

Celie stopped jumping.

“Done, then?” Rolf collapsed on Lilah’s bed, knocking several of the many small cushions onto the floor. “You do like to bounce, don’t you, Cel?”

“Not anymore,” Celie muttered.

“I’m going to have to start climbing through that fireplace into the new room,” Rolf went on, not having heard her. “Get in some practice.” He held his chest and panted.

Celie watched a trunk the size of a coffin being carried out by two burly footmen and loaded into the luggage cart that waited beside the carriage. It would indeed be a long journey her parents were taking, and they weren’t taking her with them. Which is why she had been in the throne room, getting underfoot, until Lilah had lured her upstairs with the promise of caramel apples. “And there’s no caramel apples,” she griped.

“Caramel apples!” Rolf leaped back off the bed. “Where?”

“There will be,” Lilah said with great patience. “Once Mother and Father are gone. Cook said we could make them ourselves tonight after supper.”

“Excellent,” Rolf said. “I do like a caramel apple. Also, with chocolate on. And cinnamon sugar.” He rubbed his hands together eagerly. He was tall and blond, with endearingly crooked front teeth.

Celie, who was also blond but small (she was only just eleven), gave her brother a dark look. “I’d rather go with Daddy and Mummy,” she said, knowing she sounded like a brat. “But if you just want to fill your stomach, you can stay here.”

“Cecelia!” Lilah’s voice was sharp. She was tall, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder with Rolf their resemblance to the king and queen was both striking and intimidating. “You know very well that we cannot go to the College of Wizardry, so there is no need to be rude about it.”

“I know that
Rolf
can’t go,” Celie grumped. Her tutor had explained that a king and his heir never traveled together, in case of an accident. “But I don’t understand why
I
can’t go and see Bran graduate.”

“Because Father said no, and Father is the king,” Lilah said.

“Well, it’s a silly reason,” Celie said, knowing that she sounded even more childish but not caring.

She ducked between them and out of the room. She paused for just a moment in the hallway, but she heard Lilah say, “Oh, let her go, Rolf. She’s determined to be difficult.”

So Celie stomped off down the hall. She found some stairs, and climbed them, and then a hallway and more stairs and just kept going. She didn’t have her atlas with her, and wasn’t sure she’d ever seen this particular staircase, but she was trying too hard to hang on to her disagreeable mood and told herself she didn’t care if she got lost.

Not that she thought she’d get lost. All of the royal children knew the rules very well, and besides, it was fairly obvious that the Castle liked them. But Celie was trying to make an atlas of Castle Glower, the first ever, and normally carried colored pencils and paper with her to sketch anything she hadn’t seen before. So far she had three hundred pages of maps, and could get to most of the major rooms (winter and summer dining halls, chapel, library, throne room) in record time as long as the Castle wasn’t bored and looking to stretch.

But all she found at the top of the stairs was a small round room. Still, she didn’t want to stomp back down the stairs just yet, so she stayed to explore. The room had windows that looked in all four directions, and she could see the mountains around Castle Glower’s small, bowl-shaped valley. There was a gold spyglass mounted in each of the windows. She peered through the eastern one and saw the slopes of the Indigo Mountains, dotted with small villages that were populated mainly by goatherds.

She looked to the south, where the main road wound between the mountains toward Sleyne City, where the College of Wizardry was. It made her sad all over again, so she turned to the center of the room.

The only thing in the room, other than the spyglasses, was a large table with some things scattered across it. She found a coil of rope, a book, a compass, and a large tin that proved to be full of hard ginger biscuits. Celie took one of the latter. It was the kind of sweet that often got passed around at Midwinter, when guests would show up unexpectedly and Cook didn’t have time to make fresh biscuits.

“How long have these been here?” Celie frowned at the biscuit. She had nearly broken a tooth biting into it. It could have been there for a hundred years, and would probably be edible for a hundred more.

She went to the window and tossed it down to a flat section of roof a little ways away. It broke into pieces, which some sparrows pounced on and then wittered off a moment later in disgust. She looked down into the main courtyard, and saw her parents standing before the travel carriage. Rolf and Lilah were there, and the steward and others of the Castle staff.

“Oh, no!” Her parents were leaving, and she wasn’t there to tell them good-bye! She had thought about hiding until they left, to make them regret leaving, but now she wanted very badly to hug both her parents. She raced out of the round room and looked down the twisting staircase in despair.

She leaned against the wall, suddenly tired from all the emotions of the day, and realized that she was leaning against another door. Had it always been there? It was narrow, and she pushed it open listlessly, certain that it would just prove to be a small cupboard, and then she would have to hurry even faster to catch her parents.

But to her delight it was a slide. A stone slide that curved down, following the path of the staircase. Celie sat at the top, tucked her skirts around her knees, and pushed off.

The slide curved and spun and Celie laughed as it whizzed her down through the Castle and deposited her right at the edge of the courtyard, no more than a dozen paces from where her parents were standing.

Celie scrambled to her feet and tidied her gown and hair, not sure if her parents would be angry with her or not. She had been hanging around the throne room, and their private chambers, all morning, hoping that if she got in the way often enough, they would relent and take her along. Finally, her father had yelled to Lilah that she needed to “do something with that little sister of hers.”

“Come here, darling,” said Queen Celina now, holding out her arms.

Celie ran to her mother and hugged her tight. The queen always smelled like strawberries, and everyone said that she was as beautiful at forty as she had been when the king had married her. Tall and slender and stately, with her long dark hair pinned up with gold combs, she wore a travel dress of soft green that set off her eyes.

“I’ll miss you,” Celie mumbled into her mother’s waist.

“I’ll miss you, too,” said the queen. “I’ll miss all my darlings. But we won’t be gone long. We’re just going to see Bran graduate, and then we’ll all be home again.”

“Bran, too?”

“Bran, too,” Queen Celina assured her. “He will be the new Royal Wizard when we return.” She smiled sadly. The old Royal Wizard, her father, had died two years before.

Then the queen turned Celie around and pushed her gently toward the king. King Glower was trying to look stern, but his face soon melted and he held out his arms to his little girl. “Come on, then, Celia-delia,” he said.

Celie jumped into his arms and buried her face in her father’s neck. His travel robe had a fur collar, and it tickled her nose. “I still want to go,” she said.

“Not this time, sweetheart,” her father said. “When you are older, I will take you to Sleyne City to see all the sights.”

“I could see the sights now,” Celie said reasonably. “With you and Mummy and Bran.”

“Another time,” her father said. He set her down on the cobbles and disentangled her arms from his neck. “Besides, the Castle needs you. I wouldn’t want to make it angry by taking you away for too long.”

“Oh, pooh!” But Celie couldn’t help being a bit flattered. She liked to imagine that the Castle really did like her, and it was nice that her father had noticed.

“Besides, somebody’s got to keep me in line,” Rolf said easily, putting an arm around her shoulders and drawing her to his side.

“Don’t worry, Mother,” Lilah said, kissing the queen’s cheek. “I’ll look after both of them.”

Celie and Rolf shared an eye roll. They knew what that meant: Lilah would act queenly and matronly by turns, and order them to eat in the summer dining hall in full court dress every night. But she’d also admonish them constantly to eat their vegetables and not slurp their soup. Celie wondered how long it would take her parents to reach Sleyne City, see Bran graduate, and bring him home. More than two weeks of Lilah’s mothering and they should all run mad.

But now her parents were in the carriage, and waving, and the carriage was moving out of the Castle gates and down the long road to Sleyne City. They waved until the luggage cart and the ranks of soldiers on horseback blocked the royal traveling coach from view.

“All right, both of you,” Lilah said briskly. “Back into the Castle. It’s a bit chilly out, and I don’t want you to catch cold.”

“Lilah,” said Rolf.

“Yes, dear?”

“Tag! You’re it!” Rolf whacked her on the arm and took off at a run.

Lilah shrieked in outrage, but Celie didn’t wait around to see what happened next. A well-played game of tag could go on for days in Castle Glower, and Lilah had been known to cheat.