“Palace,” Nicko said, grinning. “Another one.”
Jenna stuck her tongue out at her brother. “Yes, Nicko, another Palace. One needs at least three. So anyway, rude boy, I decided to head for the huge window at the end of the hall and see what was outside. I tiptoed past beautiful paintings hung all over the wall—all of people who looked a little bit like me, I thought. But they weren’t Queens or anything special, just people in all kinds of old-fashioned clothes. And as I went by I felt like they were all looking down at me, kind of saying hello. It was weird, but nice too because I began to feel that I belonged, that somehow I was part of this place just as much as I was part of the Castle back home.
“So I got to the huge window—which had rows of little circles of glass in it—and I looked out. It was amazing. Outside there was a river, not very wide compared with ours, but totally different. It had houses all along it on both sides and there was no riverbank because all the houses went straight down into the water. And they were really, really old. Some were kind of falling into the water, some were wrapped up in what looked like shiny paper and others were just about okay. There were lights on and I could see people moving about inside them; I could look right into their rooms. But no one noticed me and I just watched and watched. A few boats came down the river; some were quite big and made a strange noise. And they moved without sails or oars too. There weren’t many because I could tell it was really late, but I could still hear the sounds of people laughing and talking and having fun.”
Jenna continued. “So there I was, watching from the window, feeling quite happy, really, when I heard a soft, smothered cough from somewhere way back in the big room behind me. I decided to act like I had known whoever-it-was had been there all the time—which I was suddenly sure they had been. I swung around and stared into the dark. I could see nothing in the middle, just the edge of the room in the low lights of the little candles on the tables and the soft shine of the walls, but I wasn’t going to let the watcher know that.
“‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe we have been introduced.’ My voice sounded weird in the dark and I realized that this was the first time I had spoken in that place.
“‘Good evening,’ came a reply. The voice surprised me—it was a girl. She had a really weird accent and she sounded a bit like that stupid witch Marissa. So I wasn’t about to like her.”
“You and Marissa fallen out, have you?” teased Nicko.
“She’s a two-faced cow,” said Jenna.
“Fair enough.”
“Anyway, I told this girl that it was rude to hide away in the shadows and stare. By then I could see better in the dark and I saw that she was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. I saw her get up and walk toward me. I decided not to move. She could come to me.” Jenna smiled. “I guess I was already picking up some Queen stuff.
“As she came closer I could see that she looked nothing like Marissa at all, so I felt a lot better about her. She turned out to be really nice. She came up and kissed me on both cheeks—that’s what they do there to say hello—”
“Sounds fun,” Nicko said with a grin.
“Nicko, you have become so rude recently,” Jenna told him sternly. “You spend too much time in the Port.”
Nicko looked sheepish.
“Actually, if you had been there you would never have met any girls at all, because it turned out that girls pretty much weren’t allowed out. If they did go somewhere they were never on their own. I wasn’t allowed out, that was for sure. If it hadn’t been for Julia—that was her name—I wouldn’t have seen anything but the inside of that crumbly old Palace and what I could see from the window. All the time that I spent there I was with my mother and grandmother.” Jenna sighed. “Gosh, I was so bored sometimes. They droned on and on about our family and where they came from, all the things I was expected to do when I got home, blah blah blah.”
“So if girls weren’t allowed out, how did you and Julia get away with it?” asked Nicko.
“We wore masks. At night anyone could go anywhere with a mask on. All you needed was a long cloak and a pair of boy’s shoes. As long as you didn’t speak, everyone thought you were a boy. It was brilliant. Julia took me to all kinds of places. It was a beautiful city.”
Jim Knee finished his last potato. Very quietly he got to his feet and moved away into the shadows. He felt sick, not because he had eaten nearly two pounds of roast potatoes and half a greasy chicken, but because he had spent thirty years of a life in the place that Jenna described—and fifteen of those had been in a prison just below the waterline that had flooded with every high tide. The dank, nasty smell of it had suddenly washed right over him.
