Deep Secret (Magids 1) - Page 72

“Hang on. Here’s another thing I don’t get,” Will put in. “Why are you so worried about this Kris? You didn’t turn a hair when Rupert told you the three kids you were brought up with had had their throats cut.”

“You didn’t bother much about Maree either, did you?” I said. “It doesn’t seem to mean anything to you that she sewed you up.” I said it much more angrily and bitterly than I had expected to. I had to gulp back a sob as I said it. It took me by surprise.

Rob was taken by surprise too. “But,” he said, bewildered, “why should I care? None of them was our bloodline.”

Will was – spontaneously and totally – disgusted. He got up, he kicked the frilly chair aside and he shot Rob a look of sheer contempt, and then turned his back on him. The quack chicks picked up on Will’s feelings and scooted for cover under the wheelchair. Will said, “Of all the – the – the – I can’t think of a vile enough word, frankly!”

Rob stared at Will’s back. I could see dismay growing in him. He had, as I thought, very much taken to Will. “You mean,” he asked huskily, after a moment, “you think I should care?”

Will whirled round. “Of course you should bloody well care!” he yelled. The force of it made the tiny flames on the candles flicker. “What kind of a way have you been brought up? Three kids and a young woman get murdered and all you can say is they weren’t your bloody bloodline! And damn it all, that’s not even true! The Emperor was their father as well as yours! They were your brothers and sisters, Rob!”

Rob flinched and looked down at the duvet. After another pause, he said, “Yes, I suppose they were.”

“Hark at him!” Will said to me. “He supposes they were! That’s accessory to murder talking, that is!”

The

whole of Rob shook with a sudden deep sob.

“You do cry easy!” Will began again. “You—”

“Give him a break, Will,” I said. We seemed to have changed roles, Will and I, me to the soft man, Will to the hard. “He’s been brought up to consider only the offspring of Knarros’s two sisters, as I see it. And Janine as White’s sister, I imagine, with the Emperor linking them again. Is that right, Rob? You consider Nick’s the next Emperor, don’t you?”

Rob nodded. He clearly could not speak.

“Gah!” said Will. “Upbringing nothing! He’s got a mind. He’s mage-trained. That means he’s got to have a mind of his own. Come to that, why doesn’t he consider himself as the next Emperor? He’s the Emperor’s eldest surviving son, isn’t he?”

Rob looked up in genuine, huge astonishment. “But I’m a centaur!”

“So? said Will. “Racist too, are we, as well as conniving at murder?”

“I—” said Rob. He swallowed, and the gold pendant bobbed on his smooth throat. “I didn’t see it that way. I swear.”

His wonderful features were twisted with sincere misery. I could see he really had not, before this, considered his part in today’s horrors. Well, neither had I. I hadn’t done so well either. I had contrived to keep Dakros away from the colony so that White could do his dirty work in peace. Rob and I had both been manipulated. “You might as well,” I said, “tell us what you really did say to Nick and Maree in the lift.”

Rob shrugged. “I said we were all the Emperor’s children, of course. I knew Nick because he looks like me, only paler. And he was wearing his medallion under his shirt, so there was proof. Maree said hers was somewhere in the junk in her room. She—” He was beginning to look happier, talking around and beside the actual message he had been sent to give. I coughed, to remind him. He shot me a look which, to do him justice, was full of sober guilt. “I – I had to tell Maree that Knarros wanted to see her,” he said, “because she was the Emperor’s eldest child and ought to take the throne.”

“What did she say?” I asked with strong curiosity.

“She said she’d go and tell Knarros to get stuffed,” Rob said.

I could imagine that. “For what reason? No, don’t tell me. Because she was going to be a vet.”

Rob grinned, a wondrous, rueful smile, on one side of his mouth. “No. She said she wanted to be a Magid.” Will and I both stared at him. “Honestly,” he said. “We were arguing about that when you pulled the lift down. I said she could be a Magid and—”

His head jerked round towards the far end of the rows of candles.

There were sounds there, from out of sight where the road dipped downhill. Will and I shot one another tense, incredulous looks. This quick? We could hear pebbles clinking, panting and fast footsteps, coming closer. Someone was definitely coming up. We waited, staring at the spot where we thought we might first see that person’s head come into view. We had all been far too preoccupied to have noticed anyone approaching along the more distant parts of the road, but I thought, from memory, that when Will had exploded my eye had been catching a faint flicker of motion out there.

We were all watching the wrong spot. It took us all by surprise when Nick hurled himself between the candles and along the carpet and stood there, bent over, panting like a train.

“What happened?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Where’s Maree?”

I think we all spoke at once, but Nick answered me. “Left – left her at the bridge,” he gasped. “Too far for her – here and back. She’s OK. Livelier – you know.” He stopped and panted loudly. “There’s this bridge,” he said, when he was breathing easier, “and it’s got these rather weird guardians. They won’t let us through because we didn’t – didn’t bring the right stuff. They said go back and find another verse. So I came.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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