The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon (best books for students to read .TXT) 📗

Pip watched as the first man brushed himself off, cursing, and patted his pocket with an almost automatic gesture. Then, with growing anxiety, he felt inside it and turned it inside out.

“It’s gone,” he said, turning to his companion. “The treasure’s gone.”

“Gone? Are you certain? He couldn’t have taken it — he didn’t have . . .”

“It’s not here.”

“Maybe you dropped it,” said the second man.

Neither of them spoke like commoners. They had the slight lisp of nobles. They looked at each other, and Pip read their thoughts as clearly as if he had heard them. We’re dead men, they were thinking. Unless we find the treasure.

With a panic they had not shown when they were attacked, the two men searched the ground around them. Pip waited for his moment and slipped soundlessly out from behind the casks when both of them had their backs turned. He stole out of the alley and started running. He was long gone by the time the men gave up their search.

All that fuss over a black, ugly thing that looked like the leavings from a butcher? He had expected some marvelous jewel, at least: a diamond, a rare pearl. He felt cheated.

He folded his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember a time when life hadn’t felt like a cheat. He had been little more than a toddler when their parents had died of typhus and he and El had been sent to live with an aunt in a small village in the country. Their aunt had taken what little money they had, fed them grudgingly, and given them only the barn to sleep in. They were used as servants and beaten if they didn’t properly attend to their duties. In the end they ran away and were drawn into the inexorable gravity of the city of Clarel.

After nearly starving to death on the street, they were rescued by Amina, the mother of El’s closest friend, who found them lodgings with Missus Pledge. Missus Pledge was old and cranky, but underneath she was kind. They cared for her in her final illness, and when she died, she left them her few belongings, including her apartment, having no one else to leave it to. They kept the faded parchment document that proved it was theirs under a loose plank in the floor. It was their most precious possession.

Pip knew too many worse stories to feel sorry for himself. He and El were lucky: they had somewhere to live, and mostly they had something to eat. And now they had a treasure. Only it didn’t seem like a treasure at all.

All his instincts told him the box was trouble. Perhaps he ought to throw it in the river and pretend he had never seen it.

No.

The word was so clear that for a moment he thought someone else had spoken, and he sat up and looked around the room before he decided it was his own thought.

No, he decided. It was his and El’s fortune. It was their chance, if only they could figure out why those men thought it was precious. They might never get such a chance again.

For a while he indulged in a daydream. He would buy a new jacket — green velvet, probably — and a cocked hat, and boots with shiny buckles. And he and El would have a slap-up dinner at the Crosseyes.

“Your good menu, my fine fellow. A leg of ham, with pickles, and a dish of lights, if you please, and your pig sausage. A jug of your finest, and to follow”— here Pip perused the imaginary menu again, although he could not, for the life of him, read a single word —“a selection of your best cheeses.”

He would lift his eyebrow at El. “Will that do, my dear?”

And El, in a new dress of yellow silk and muslin, in her new shoes with little bows on the toes, with ruby-red earrings dripping from her ears and a ruby necklace at her breast, would giggle and nod, glowing with the fun of it all. And together they would eat the best meal in the house while the landlord fawned and cringed at their elbows.

It was an attractive dream, but underneath Pip’s fantasies ran a thick vein of streetwise common sense. The problem was turning his find into money. Pip had no idea how to do this.

Still, the box troubled him. It was strange, the way it had just opened like that when he asked, and he still had a faint feeling of pins and needles in his fingers. Did that black, shriveled heart have something to do with magic?

Even to breathe that word in Clarel could mean death by fire. He’d have to be careful.

GEORGETTE NEVER ENJOYED PRIVATE MEALS IN THE royal apartments, but this occasion was worse than usual. Like most of his subjects, she kept her opinions of her father to herself. Axel was loud, vain, and touchy, as perhaps was permissible in a king, but in Georgette’s opinion, he was also a fool. After five heavy courses and countless goblets of wine, he was even louder than usual, and his face was flushed and shiny with sweat.

She had no fondness for her father, who had never shown his daughter a single sign of affection. At first, optimistic that he would soon have a son, King Axel chose to forget that he had a daughter. Georgette had spent her early years running wild with the servant children in the Old Palace, in what she realized now was delicious freedom. She had shared their lice and fleas and childhood illnesses, their games and secrets and colorful folklore.

When she turned twelve, her father brought her to Clarel Palace to be educated as a proper princess. She had been heartbroken, but after initial rebellion she had bowed her head to the inevitable. She was never beaten, but transgressions resulted in her being locked