Oland ran into the hallway. The last room he passed was the throne room. Oland had never been inside it, never even seen the door opened a crack. Its only keyholder was Villius Ren. All Oland knew of it were its two unremarkable doors. But instinct told him that, like the eyes in Villius’ head, what lay behind them was best left unexplored.
Oland ran into the outer ward and came to an eventual stop at the deserted northeast tower. He made his way up the winding staircase that led to the vast library. Here, always, he would be safe, for behind the tall mahogany bookshelves was a hidden room, filled with the rescued culture of the castle: books, plays, portraits and paintings, musical instruments and costumes from the king’s theatre. Oland did not know who had gathered the relics and kept them so wisely from The Craven Lodge.
He had found the room six years earlier, yet in all that time, had explored only a fraction of its treasures. He had added to it his own creations: drawings and ships, and tiny tin soldiers arranged in mock battles. But more valuable than the room’s contents was the sanctuary it offered. Instead of his damp and miserable bedroom, instead of the rattling cavern of the great hall, or the disarray of his masters’ quarters, Oland could hide away here, by the warmth of a log fire that burned, unseen.
He called his room The Holdings… where everything was held dear. Its only keyholder was Oland Born.
Oland closed the door of The Holdings gently behind him. He went to the small table by the fire and picked up one of his recent finds: a book called The Ancient Myths of Envar that had almost toppled off the shelf as he had been looking for another. He opened the chapter on ‘The Drogues of Curfew Peak’ and read:
One mythic beast was four engulfed: vulture, bull, bear and wolf.
Oland read on:
It was said that hundreds of years ago, as the last fracture opened up on the southernmost tip of Envar, the only creatures that remained were a vulture, a bull, a bear and a wolf. As the ground they stood upon began to crumble into the sea, these four beasts vaulted the huge chasm and landed on the black shores of Curfew Peak. And, alone for years on this island-mountain, miles from the mainland, they were transformed, by breeding, into the Drogues of Curfew Peak.
Drogues were seven feet tall, black as coal, their bull-like torsos tapering into thick hind legs that carried their weight like loaded springs. They had rapid-clenching jaws and sword-like fangs that tore quickly through their victims. Each knotted vertebra of a drogue’s spine was visible, even though the flesh that covered it was thick and unyielding, the surface coated with coarse black hair. As a victim lay dying at the hooves of a drogue, his final indignity was to be drenched in vile secretions vomited from the pit of the beast’s insides; secretions that would quickly dissolve its prey, bones and all, without trace.
Oland wondered whether, simply by living among The Craven Lodge, he too was slowly being dissolved.
One hundred of Villius Ren’s soldiers stood on watch in the outer ward every day, filing in from their garrisons by the ten towers he had commissioned when he took power. He had cobbled together a ragged army of one thousand from all across Envar and the precision of their numbers was because of Villius’ strict belief in the Fortune of Tens.
Good fortune was said to come in tens in Decresian. Ten hills bounded the village, forty silver birch trees bordered its square, ten houses lined each of its fifty cobbled streets. Twenty market stalls crowded Merchants’ Alley, all opening at ten o’clock in the morning and closing at ten o’clock at night. But more important than the superstitious grouping of objects was what someone achieved by their tenth birthday and by every decade thereafter. That was the true meaning of the Fortune of Tens.
King Micah had been born at the turn of a century in the tenth minute of the tenth hour of the tenth day of the tenth month – an unsurmountable Fortune of Tens. In contrast, Villius Ren grabbed wildly at tens, taking them in whatever form he could: his soldiers were all in the last year of their teens, twenties, thirties or forties, men fearful of reaching another decade without having achieved their Fortune of Tens. Villius Ren had been haunted by a similar fear until he overthrew King Micah in his twenty-ninth year.
The ranks that clung to the craven of Castle Derrington stank of ill will, desperation and bitter contest.
Oland walked down the spiral staircase from the library, and across the courtyard into the kitchen. As he reached out for the handle of the back door, he heard a rough choking sound behind him. He jumped. When he turned, he saw Viande curled in the corner, snoring and twitching. Someone had tucked him inside one of the dogs’ blankets. Oland quietly put on his boots then slung his bag over his head, securing the strap across his body. Viande stirred and opened one eye.
“Running from Villius Ren… roxworthy,” he said.
Oland flinched at the insult. Prince Roxleigh was King Micah’s lunatic uncle, sent for his ramblings to an asylum on the eve of his twenty-first birthday. Prince Roxleigh was a tall, skinny man with a long face, a slender neck and light brown hair that sat on his head like tumbleweed. In the sunlight, it shone like a halo. Roxleigh had been a popular prince, happiest in the company of the Derrington villagers, brightening their spirits with his jaunty walk and cheery smile, calling out to them with a sweeping wave of his skinny arm.
Roxleigh’s very best friend was a Derrington man called Rowe, who was as tall as Roxleigh, but moved, as he would himself admit, “with more ballast”. His canted walk was no match for Roxleigh’s loping stride, and he would bound behind him like a giant puppy. Rowe spoke from his warm heart and shining mind, his head swooping down, then up with a flourish at the end of each burst of inspiration. And he had many, as did Roxleigh. Both fiercely intelligent, they were part of a small group of great thinkers who met every month in The Derrington Inn to discuss matters of importance in the Kingdom of Decresian, always with the intention of enhancing the life of its people.
But in the year before he was carried, wailing and flailing, from the castle, something had changed in Prince Roxleigh. Rowe, from whom he had been inseparable, had vanished from Derrington quite suddenly. Roxleigh had begun to pace the dungeon hallways of the arena at night, talking of beasts and monsters, of dark creatures with secret chambers, scribbling his notions on reams of paper that he stacked to the ceiling in the musty cells.
From then until now, if you were called ‘roxley’ or ‘roxling’ or if your actions were deemed ‘roxworthy’, the message was clear: you were as mad as the mad prince that was locked away in the madhouse. Years later, when Roxleigh’s younger brother, Prince Stanislas – King Micah’s father – became King of Decresian, a messenger arrived at the castle to say that Prince Roxleigh did not mind one bit. But everyone agreed: Roxleigh had no mind with which to mind.
Oland left Viande and the sleeping beasts of The Craven Lodge behind. As he walked, he pondered the story of Prince Roxleigh. The year leading up to his descent into madness had been a bleak one for the kingdom, when a bermid-ant plague struck the northern coast. The small black ants moved south, ravaging the land, turning the rich vegetation from vibrant green to barren bronze. No one had ever seen such a beautiful trail of destruction. The bermids poisoned crops and the animals that fed on them. The people of Envar died from eating the produce of the land, the meat of diseased livestock, or they died from eating neither.
Prince Roxleigh’s father, King Seward, a kind, strong leader, vowed to the surrounding territories