Wednesdays in the Tower (6 page)
“What was that?”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Celie said. She sidled around her mother and grabbed the door latch. “Shall we?”
“Oh, yes,” the queen said, though she did throw a puzzled look at Celie’s water-closet door. “Perhaps someone ought to—”
“I think that noise is coming from the corridor,” Celie said. “Must have been one of the maids passing by.”
She heaved a sigh of relief when her mother finally came out of her room. Celie made a pretense of having her sleeve catch on the latch in order to lock her door without her mother noticing. Feeling sweat still trickling down her
back, she turned around to follow the queen and let out another little scream. Lilah was standing directly in front of her, holding out a ruined dancing slipper.
“When I find out who—or what—did this, I will make new slippers out of their hide,” Lilah said in a dangerous voice.
When the holiday feasting hall appeared, Celie began to worry about the Castle.
Normally it appeared during the winter holidays, coming into being at sunset and disappearing again at dawn. They would feast and sing and dance among beautiful decorations that were provided and changed every year, and then the Castle would take it all back. But the Tuesday after the roomful of fabric had appeared, the arch into the holiday dining hall stretched open and stayed that way.
Since the king was hearing petitions and Ma’am Housekeeper was on the far side of the Castle overseeing the counting and sorting of some linens, a maid showed up at Celie’s door to ask for help. None of the maids wanted to set foot in the holiday feasting hall for fear it would disappear again with them inside it, she explained, and they wanted someone that the Castle respected to have a look.
“I’ll come right away,” Celie said loudly.
She hurried out of her room, pushing the maid ahead of her, and locked the door. When the maid had knocked, Celie had shoved Rufus under her bed, and she could hear him squawking and trying to work his way out from beneath the trailing bedclothes. She was a little annoyed that the spell Bran had put on her door hadn’t worked on the maid, or on her mother a few days before, and now she worried that the spell only worked on maids coming to clean.
When she got to the archway that led to the holiday dining hall, however, she did stop to feel flattered for a moment. There were several maids gathered there, and they all brightened when they saw Celie coming. One of them nodded as though to say that Celie was just the right person to take care of things.
“Has my father been told?” she asked, though she guessed the answer.
“No, Your Highness,” the maid who had fetched her said. “We didn’t want to disturb him during court.”
“If someone would please fetch the Royal Wizard,” Celie said.
“Wizard’s in the Armor Gallery, Highness,” one of the maids said. “And we en’t supposed to bother him, either. ’Specially when he’s lookin’ at them things.”
Celie pursed her lips. She pointed to the maid who had come to her room. “Go into the throne room and signal to Prince Rolf. He can leave the petitions easily, and if there’s need for my father to come, he can get him.”
The girl nodded and hurried across the main hall to the double doors of the throne room. Celie steeled herself to step through the archway, hoping, as the maids had, that it wouldn’t whisk her away somewhere.
She could of course see into the room, which looked musty and disused. The long feasting table was shoved against one wall, and there were a number of large crates in the middle of the room. It had never occurred to her before, but there were no windows, and naturally there were no candles lit inside. The room was cavernous and gloomy, and there was dust on everything, even though it was barely two months past the holidays.
The maids were all watching her anxiously. Celie straightened her spine. The Castle had never removed a room with someone in it; it certainly would not start with her. Not while she was raising Rufus for it. She took a step forward.
“What in the name of— Isn’t that the holiday feasting hall?”
Pogue Parry’s voice carried across the main hall.
“Cel! What are you doing?” Rolf chimed in a moment later.
Celie turned and saw her brother coming out of the throne room with the maid in tow, and Pogue hurrying across the stone floor, hair windblown and cheeks ruddy from being outside.
“Today’s new room is the holiday feasting hall,” Celie said, feeling strangely relieved. “But it’s all gloomy and
boxed up. I was just going inside to see what is in those crates.”
“Excellent, and very strange,” Rolf said. He took her arm. “Let’s go together, shall we?” He looked at the maids, his eyes glinting. “Anyone else coming?”
“I’m coming,” Pogue said. He put a large hand on Celie’s shoulder. “No one else needs to come,” Pogue said quietly to the maid hovering nearby.
The three of them took deep breaths and then stepped through the archway together. They stopped just inside the feasting hall. Nothing happened.
“It’s safe,” Rolf said sharply over his shoulder to the maids.
“Don’t be rude,” Celie whispered.
“I am not pleased that they got you to take the risk for them,” he retorted. “You’re not to be the official Castle poison taster, as it were.”
“It’s fine,” Celie said. She slipped out of Rolf and Pogue’s grip and went to the first of the crates. Pogue followed, and together they got the lid off. Inside, nestled in straw, were the golden baubles that had hung from the ceiling at the winter feasts. In another crate they found silk streamers carefully wound around spools, and so on. Each crate contained a treasure trove of beautiful things that had been used to make the holiday feasting hall appear magical. But now, packed away like this, they all seemed tawdry and faded.
“Why is this happening?” Celie wanted to know.
“You know what I want to know?” Rolf asked in a hushed voice. The other two looked at him. “I want to know who it is that puts up these decorations every year, then takes them down and packs them away.”
Celie looked at him blankly. “The Castle does it,” she said finally.
“The Castle would just leave it all up, wouldn’t it?” Rolf argued. “It’s people who would bother to pack all these things in straw.”
A weird, queasy feeling was growing in Celie’s middle. She thought about the dusty rooms, the faded tapestries. She’d always thought that the new rooms came to entertain the Glower family and the other people who lived in the Castle. When the holiday feasting hall wasn’t in Sleyne, where was it? Were there people feasting on the golden plates every other day of the year? She looked at the crates and the stacked chairs with growing horror.
“What has happened?” Bran swept into the room, looking even more wizardly than usual in formal robes and a round hat. He stopped short. “It’s the holiday feasting hall,” he said in a hushed voice. He locked gazes with Pogue. “This isn’t good,” he said.
The sick feeling in Celie’s middle grew even worse. What was happening to her Castle?
How serious is it?” King Glower asked.
The family, plus Lulath and Pogue, were sitting around the table in the winter dining hall. They’d just finished dinner, and Bran had asked to address them all. Celie had hurriedly sketched the newest changes to the Castle and had copies made that afternoon, which she was passing around.
“Well,” Bran hedged. “There are a lot of factors to consider, and we’re still gathering information.”
He tried to put on his mysterious wizard voice to make it seem like he wasn’t concerned, but none of the family was fooled. That was the trouble with being both the Royal Wizard and a member of the Glower family, Celie thought.
Bran continued. “But the truth of the matter is … we just don’t know.”
Everyone blinked at him.
Celie, who was just behind Pogue, stopped in her tracks. Pogue froze, too, with his hand up for the map she was giving him. After a moment she remembered herself and gave him the parchment before hurrying to take her place beside Rolf once more.
“What has surprised me since I was old enough to care,” Bran continued, “is that in all the years the Castle has been sitting in this valley, almost nothing has been written about it.
“We know the original name of every King Glower, but little to nothing about their lives, and certainly nothing about their dealings with the Castle, other than legends and rumors. There are no maps of the Castle but Celie’s, no record of the rooms that have come and gone. The only clues are small mentions here and there in journals or histories, notes about having lunch in the new solar, or holding court in the round tower, that seem to indicate there are rooms that are no longer here.”
“We’ve all seen rooms come and go,” King Glower said, but the uneasiness in his voice belied his casual words. “It’s the nature of the Castle.”
“Of course,” Bran said. “But what worries me, other than the lack of information on the Castle—which is strange enough—is that in the last few months the nature of the Castle has changed. We can’t vouch for the Castle’s behavior prior to, say, fifty years ago, but we can say that within those fifty years, this is the longest the Castle has gone without removing a room.”
“How long has it been?” Queen Celina asked, frowning. She tapped her fingers on the table as if counting.
“Two months,” Celie said.
Bran nodded. “The last rooms to disappear were the guest rooms used for the winter holidays,” he reported. “According to Ma’am Housekeeper, the guest rooms used by Uncle Rupert and Aunt Zelda disappeared the morning after they left for Sleyne City. The maids cleaned them the evening before, put dust covers on the furniture, and the next morning they were gone. Just like they always are.”
Celie knew that she couldn’t tell them about the hatching tower, which came and went depending on whether she was alone, but she raised her hand as she slid back into her seat. When everyone looked at her, she pointed out that the nursery was gone.
“Actually,” Bran said, “it’s still here. It’s behind the schoolroom; it’s just hard to get to.”
Celie made a face. She hadn’t known that.
“For several months after the unpleasantness last summer with Prince Khelsh,” Queen Celina said, “I noticed that the Castle was a great deal more responsive. But that seems to have changed again.” Her brows drew together in a frown.
“It’s true,” King Glower said. “I definitely felt that it was listening to me. It moved things around when Ma’am Housekeeper or I asked. But not only are the odd little rooms and corridors building up, but they seem to be much more … inconvenient than before.”
“That room full of fabric isn’t inconvenient,” Lilah interrupted. “It’s
fantastic
.”
“But it’s essentially bisecting the Castle,” Pogue argued. “And from the way it’s situated, I’m expecting two more rooms and possibly another corridor to join it, making what’s now the central part of the Castle into two distinct sections.”
Everyone looked at Pogue in surprise, and his brown cheeks turned pink. Lilah gave him a skeptical look, but the king’s expression was thoughtful.
“I’ve been helping Bran,” Pogue muttered.
“He’s been invaluable,” Bran said, shuffling through some notes. “He remembers everything. And from the way that sewing room is situated, and the way the corridor shifted around it, he’s right.” Bran made some marks on one of Celie’s maps with a charcoal pencil and held it up to show them where they could expect the new rooms. “Pogue thinks they’ll be here and here, and I agree.”
Pogue turned even pinker under his tan.
“And you’ve looked in my father’s journals?” Queen Celina asked. Her father had been the Royal Wizard before Bran. She looked from Bran to Pogue, as though she valued both their opinions equally, to Celie’s surprise.
“Many times. He comes the closest to recording the Castle’s history,” Bran said. “That’s why I say we can go back fifty years: Grandfather’s journal is our main source of information. But even so, he only makes casual mention of new rooms, though he does note the date.” He made a
face. “But I still find it very strange that a wizard, living in this Castle, didn’t think to make clearer notes.”