The Prince of Lies (Night's Masque, #3)(109)

CHAPTER XXIX



The storehouse door creaked open and Kit blinked against the light.

“Come out of there, both on yer!”

Kit clambered to his feet, expecting to see the schoolmaster again, but this was a different man. Clean-shaven like the other but younger, with long mouse-brown hair tied back from his face. He wore a plain brown doublet and hose, very neat and tidy apart from a ragged scarlet cloth tucked into his belt. He regarded the two boys with solemn hazel eyes.

“I’m Master Fox,” he said, as if guessing Kit’s next question before he had even thought it. His accent reminded Kit of his father and uncle. “Master Shawe sent me to fetch you two to breakfast.”

“Breakfast?” Sidney whimpered, stumbling out behind Kit.

“Aye. Now come along.”

“Are we in Derbyshire, sir?” Kit asked him as they walked back round the house.

“Nay. You see any hills round here, lad?”

“We came through some, yesterday.”

Fox snorted. “Pimples. Nowt like back home.”

The front door led directly into a large whitewashed chamber that looked like a cross between a classroom and a chapel. Fox showed them through a door on the far side and down half-a-dozen steps into a long gloomy stone hall with a vaulted ceiling like a wine cellar. A table ran the length of the room, and boys of varying ages sat along either side, the oldest at the far end. The scent of food met Kit’s nostrils and he breathed in deeply, feeling a bit faint.

“Breakfast’s on sideboard,” Fox said. “Help thysens and sit down.”

The two boys stammered their thanks and raced over to the trestle table, where baskets of bread and a vast tureen of pease porridge were laid out. Kit filled an earthenware bowl and took it to the end of the table nearest the door. Half the end bench was occupied by a couple of boys a bit older than him. Both had cropped hair and were dressed in blue-grey doublet and hose, as were the rest of the boys at the table.

“Excuse me? May I…” Kit inclined his head towards the seat.

One of the boys looked up from his breakfast with faraway eyes. Kit noticed he wore an earring in his left earlobe: a hoop of dull grey metal onto which had been threaded a bead of bright blue glass. It looked incongruously dandyish against his plain attire.

“You’re new,” the boy said slowly.

“Yes.” Kit put down his bowl and held out his hand. “Kit Catlyn, if it please you.”

The boy stared at his hand as if it were some exotic creature in a menagerie, then grinned up at Kit.

“Heron,” he said.

“I…”

“This is Shrike,” the boy continued, indicating his companion, who just stared at Kit with an unpleasant glint in his eye. He too wore a blue glass earring; was it some kind of badge of the school?

“Those are your names?” Kit asked.

Heron nodded. “We all have our brotherhood names. You’ll get one too, once you’ve been tested.”

Kit didn’t like the sound of that, but he took the introduction as permission to sit down. For several minutes he ignored his new friends and stuffed his face with bread and porridge as fast as he could without choking. No one commented on his manners or even seemed to notice him. He glanced up at Sidney, who had taken the seat opposite.

“What is this place?” he whispered across the table.

Sidney shrugged and popped another chunk of bread in his mouth, chewing it determinedly. Kit scraped the last spoonful of porridge from his bowl. Not a moment too soon; a bell rang and the other boys got up from their places and began filing towards the sideboard with their empty bowls. Kit followed them.

After they had deposited their bowls in a stack, the boys skirted the far end of the table, making towards a spiral staircase halfway down the room.

“Not you two,” Master Fox said, barring Kit’s way with a calloused hand. “Sit down.”

Kit and Sidney did as they were told. Fox went to a chest at the far end of the room and sorted through piles of clothing. At last he returned with two of the blue-grey suits, two pairs of shoes and a couple of changes of linen apiece.

“Well? Get ’em on, quick now.”

Kit stripped under the cold gaze of the… what was Fox, anyway? He didn’t dress like a schoolmaster but the way he ordered them round, he was no servant either.

Once they were both changed, Fox led them through a side door and round the back of the rear wing. Crumbling walls projected from the back of the house, as if it had once been part of a much bigger building. Master Shawe had called it a priory, which meant that monks had once lived here, before old King Henry, the prince’s great grandfather, had sent them all away.

They followed Fox through a kitchen garden, past more ruins to a low outbuilding that looked cobbled together from more of the priory’s old masonry, though its roof was of new red tiles. Its narrow windows were stopped with sheets of horn rather than glass. Smoke drifted up from the chimney, along with a few greenish sparks. Fireworks? Perhaps that was why all the ground around the building had been cleared and covered with a thick layer of crushed stone.

They crunched across the yard and Fox knocked on the door. Whilst they waited he turned and glared down at the boys.

“Touch nowt, understand?”

Kit nodded.

They were kept waiting for ages, but eventually the door opened to reveal Master Shawe. The headmaster was dressed in a long leather apron and tucked under his arm was a strange sort of helm with a visor made of glass. Kit took a step backwards, but Fox caught him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him over the threshold.