“Then, maybe you could stay here—see what happens in our chambers the rest of the day—while Chip and Jonah and I go out,” Alex said.
Jonah decided that Alex must not have a younger sister back home in the twenty-first century. Otherwise he’d know that that was exactly the kind of thing that would set Katherine off.
It did.
“And that would be even worse!” Katherine said. “I’d be sitting here with no idea what was happening to the rest of you, with nothing to do except imagine all the worst possibilities. … We don’t even have cell phones to use to stay in touch!”
“We could …,” Jonah started to say. “Or if …”
But Katherine was right. It was amazing how hard not having a phone made everything.
“Maybe if we promise to come back within an hour?” Alex offered.
Katherine shoved against him.
“No!” she said. “Quit trying to get rid of me! I’m going too!”
And Alex, who seemed to understand scientific concepts so well, just sat there mystified by Katherine.
FOURTEEN
They all took turns using the privy room before they left. This made Jonah feel oddly homesick, because of all those times when he and Katherine were little kids and Mom or Dad would insist, “Make sure you go before we go!”
But the privy bore very little resemblance to a twenty-first-century bathroom. The “toilet” was just a single hole in the stones of the wall. And Chip and Alex had a little too much fun telling Katherine, “Instead of toilet paper there’s moss that you can use. See? It’s really useful!”
They also delayed a bit, looking around the room, trying to make sure that nothing was out of place.
“You didn’t leave the Elucidator lying around anywhere, did you?” Alex asked.
“It’s back in my pocket,” Jonah assured him.
“Should we hang the tapestry up again, or just leave it?” Katherine asked. “It was the soldiers or guards or whatever those guys were who pulled it down, but probably they wouldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been for us. …”
The hooks for the tapestry were high above their heads, about twelve feet off the ground.
“Never mind!” Jonah said impatiently. “Let’s just go!”
He grabbed the door and jerked it open—and found himself staring right into the startled face of yet another serving girl, in the hall outside.
“Wh-wh-who’s there?” she called, darting so quickly to peer into the room that Jonah barely managed to step out of the way.
She looked right through Jonah, right through Katherine, right through Chip and Alex. Her eyes didn’t focus on any of them.
“Must have been the wind,” she muttered. “And the princes must already be outside playing. …”
She stepped back into the hall and pulled the door firmly shut behind her.
Jonah stood frozen, his heart pounding in his chest.
“Maybe … you were … right …, Katherine,” he whispered after a few moments, after he was sure the serving girl would have moved on. “Maybe it is too dangerous out there.”
Katherine reached past him for the door handle.
“Silly,” she scoffed. “You just need to be careful.”
She pushed the door open a crack, peeked out, and then slipped out into the empty hall. The others followed.
The hall was dim, with little sunlight reaching in from the high windows. Katherine pointed left, then right, then held her hands up questioningly. When everybody else shrugged, she turned to the right. After a few twists and turns in the hall they found a rounded staircase and tiptoed down. Reaching the door at the bottom, Katherine made a dramatic show of peeking out again, looking around carefully before slipping out.
I guess she’s not so scared if she can make me look like a fool, Jonah thought. But he was just as glad not to be the first one out this time.
He stepped out into the sunshine behind Katherine and Chip, and blinked a few times to let his eyes adjust. The other three looked even dimmer and harder to see in bright light, and as long as he didn’t think about it too much, he found that reassuring.
Beyond them he could see a large courtyard of sorts: grass and greenery and flowering trees. And beyond that he could see soldiers—or maybe guards—standing around. They didn’t look like they thought they had anything to worry about; they weren’t standing at attention. One or two of them even had caps pulled down over their faces, as if they might be sleeping.
“My soldiers never behaved so sloppily,” Chip muttered.
“Maybe if the commanders were away …,” Alex whispered back.
Here was another puzzle, Jonah thought. If the soldiers thought the king and the prince had disappeared last night, shouldn’t they be running around searching everywhere? Shouldn’t they be extra alert, not … comatose?
Jonah stepped through an archway to look for other soldiers, other people who might be more awake and more likely to be discussing last night’s events.
Two men in fancier clothes walked past, one saying to the other, “Hurry! The last barge is leaving for the coronation!”
Coronation?
Jonah peered back at Chip to see if Chip had heard the man too. Chip’s face had gone rock hard with fury.
“So that’s how it is,” he hissed. “They were trying to kill me or kidnap me, and replace me with another boy at the coronation. One who would probably do whatever Gloucester told him to do. …”
“Um,” Jonah said softly, because he thought the men were out of earshot now, but he wasn’t completely sure. “Wouldn’t people notice?”
Alex shook his head.
“It’s not like they have TV,” he said. “Maybe a few people have seen paintings of me and Chip, maybe a few other people know what’s going on. …”
Chip had already spun past them.
“I’m getting on that barge,” he announced, and stalked away without a backward glance.