Midnight in Everwood(32)
‘Have you quite finished divulging palace secrets to a wanderer?’ the butterscotch-eyed soldier asked, his voice crisp as snow.
Marietta stole a look at him. His focus was on the moose he guided between fir trees, an immense ice gate crystallising before them. He radiated strength and quiet power, a knife in the dark. If Danyon was not to be underestimated, then Captain Legat was to be avoided altogether.
‘Sorry, captain,’ Claren and Fin said, snapping to attention.
‘She ought to know a little of our world if she’s to accompany us to the palace,’ Danyon said. His jacket bore similar gold epaulettes to the captain’s, more ornate than Claren and Fin’s. Marietta failed to understand the embroidered pattern of swirls that marked them. Though she was well versed in the strategy of warfare through her meandering studies from the Greco-Persian Wars to the Warring States, she held not a scrap of interest in the pomp and trivialities that accompanied such battles. But she did observe that the captain’s held a tiny embroidered mouse holding a golden sword.
The captain’s knuckles paled around the reins. ‘She ought to be returning whence she came,’ he muttered under his breath.
Marietta’s own misgivings at heading towards the palace melted away into defiance at his attitude, which seemed an echo of her father’s. ‘Well, I do apologise for my most unwelcome presence, but it isn’t as though I intended to linger in your world, or indeed enter it in the first place,’ she said stiffly.
‘You wanderers never do, yet still you seem to drift about our town like aimless snowflakes until your fate calls for you,’ he said.
Marietta turned her curiosity on him. ‘Whatever do you mean?’
Fin cleared his throat. ‘You are not the first wanderer we’ve rescued from the Endless Forest. Everwood oft seems to be a beacon for those that have lost their star’s shining path.’
‘The Grand Confectioner seems to welcome them, though I cannot think why he should,’ the captain said. Marietta didn’t know how to respond. After a silence thick as clotted cream, the captain spoke again, over his shoulder. ‘Someone pass her that blanket.’
Fin handed it forward. ‘Don’t mind Captain Legat; his head whirls with concerns the rest of us couldn’t see through a snowstorm.’
She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. Matching the sleigh’s rich garnet, it was lined with soft white fur and warmed her chilled flesh at once.
The sleigh hurtled through the ice gate and onto a marzipan-cobbled path, frozen and slippery enough to grant them passage. A soft sigh escaped Marietta’s lips in a puff of sugared air.
A delicate ice bridge arched over the lake she’d glimpsed earlier, extending to the frozen mountain the palace topped. Ice cliffs encircled it, the waterfalls suspended in time, sparkling in sapphire and opal and moonshine. The palace was a meringue, piped impossibly high. It held no windows, instead the walls glowed and shimmered with light. Blush pink, pearl and mauve, layers of creamy pastels swirling up and up and up, to the peak, gleaming the same hue as Degas’s Blue Dancers in the distance.
‘What a beautiful sight,’ Marietta breathed. ‘I cannot comprehend how it was constructed from sugar alone.’
‘All sugar and frozen solid, too. The Grand Confectioner designed it himself.’ Claren draped his arms over the back of the front bench, gazing up at it with Marietta.
‘Who is the Grand Confectioner?’ The term seemed self-explanatory yet the god-like reverence afforded him gave Marietta pause.
Legat coughed under a white-gloved hand.
Marietta slid a look to the captain. ‘If you do not wish me to educate myself on your world, why are you escorting me to the palace?’
‘I’m not.’ Legat’s clipped tones severed her argument. The huffing moose approached the beginning incline of the ice bridge.
Marietta caught the puzzlement that swept across Fin’s face before he appropriated the same soldier’s mask Captain Legat wore. Danyon passed no remark. Claren, his uniform as lapsed as his attitude, was sole in his protestations. ‘The ball will be in full enchantment at this hour. Think how beguiling a sight that would be for her!’
‘I have not a granule of doubt she will survive missing it,’ Legat said. ‘Once I’ve had the moose stabled, I shall send a guard to escort you to your door, wanderer.’
They slid onto the ice bridge, fine as spun sugar. It looked as if it would shatter beneath the weight of the moose and the grand sleigh hurtling across it. Marietta gripped the blanket, pulling it tighter around herself to ward off the glacial breeze. To either side, the view swept down to the snow-coated valleys below, gigantic firs reduced to doll-sized proportions. The sheer plummet was dizzying and Marietta tore her eyes away. ‘I’m failing to understand for what purpose you brought me to the palace if you’re having me escorted directly back to the forest?’ she asked. His motives confused her, though the confirmation she hadn’t been an unwitting volunteer in her own kidnapping sent her darker thoughts scuttling away.
‘You were in immediate danger; I removed you from the situation. I am the Captain of the King’s Army, I do possess more important tasks than cavorting about the forest searching for a wanderer’s door,’ he said wryly. His expression was calm and measured. It rankled Marietta.
They soared over the final stretch of the ice bridge. The palace doors loomed, a lattice of silverwork set into the thick-walled sugar. Legat called a command to the moose and they banked right, swerving round the thin loop of a path wrapped around the palace, a precipitous drop on one side, the ice cliffs towering above them. Marietta suffered a swoop of vertigo and clamped a hand down on the side of the sleigh. A low doorway materialised and they plummeted into it, skidding to a stop.