Isabella was unrepentant. “Princesses do what they want; anyway, we don’t have a goat on the roof.”
Conor did not waste his time arguing. There was no winning an argument with someone who could have you executed. He ran to the roof door, swishing his sword at imaginary troops. This door, too, was open. Incredible good fortune. On the hundred previous occasions when Isabella and he had ambushed King Nicholas, every door in the place had been locked, and they had been warned, by stern-faced parents, never to venture onto the roof alone. It was a long way down.
Conor thought about it.
Parents? Flag?
Parents? Flag?
“Some pirate you are,” sniffed Isabella. “Standing around there scratching yourself with a toy sword.”
Flag, then. “Arrr. I go for the flag, hostage princess.” And then in his own voice: “Don’t touch any of the experiments, Isabella. ’Specially the bottles. Papa says that one day the king is going to blow the lot of us to hell and back with his concoctions, so they must be dangerous.”
Conor went up the stairs fast, before his nerve could fail him. It wasn’t far, perhaps a dozen steps to the open air. He emerged from the confines of the turret stairwell onto the stone rooftop. From dark to light in half a second. The effect was breathtaking: azure sky with clouds close enough to touch. I was born in a place like this, thought Conor.
You are a special child, his mother told him at least once a day. You were born in the sky, and there will always be a place for you there. Conor believed that this was true. He had always felt happiest in high places, where others feared to go.
He climbed on top of the parapet, holding tight to the flagpole. The world twirled around him, the orange sun hanging over Kilmore like a beacon. The sea glittered below him, more silver than blue, and the sky called to him as though he actually were a bird. For a moment he was bewitched by the scene, then the corner of the flag crept into his vision. Arrr, he thought. Yon be the flag. Pride of the Saltees.
The flag stood, perfectly rectangular, crimson and gold with its tower so white it glowed, held rigid by a bamboo frame so that the islands’ emblem would fly proud no matter what the weather. It struck Conor that he was actually standing on top of the very tower depicted by the flag. This might have caused a tug of patriotic pride in an older islander, but to a nine-year-old, all it meant was that his image should be included on the flag. I will draw myself on after I steal the flag, he decided.
Isabella emerged onto the rooftop, blinking against the sudden light. “Come down from the parapet, Conor. We’re playing pirates, not bird boy.”
Conor was aghast. “And leave the flag? Don’t you understand? I will be a famous pirate, more famous than Barbarossa himself.”
“That wall is old, Conor.”
“Pirate Captain Crow, remember.”
“That wall is old, Conor. It could fall down. Remember the slates came off the chapel during the storm last year?”
“What about the flag?”
“Forget the flag and forget the goat. I’m hungry, so come down before I have you hanged.”
Conor stamped down off the wall, sulking now. He was about to challenge Isabella, say that she could go ahead and have him hanged for all he cared, and she was a rotten hostage. Whoever heard of a hostage giving the orders? She should learn to weep and wail properly instead of threatening to execute him a hundred times a day.
He was about to say all of this when there came a dull thump from below that shook the blocks beneath their feet. A cloud of purple smoke oomphed through the doorway, as though someone had cleared a tuba.
Conor had a suspicion bordering on certainty. “Did you touch something?” he asked Isabella.
Isabella was haughty even in the face of disaster. “I am the princess of this palace, so I am quite entitled to touch whatever I wish.”
The tower shook again; this time the smoke was green, and it was accompanied by a foul smell.
“What did you touch, Isabella?”
The princess of the palace turned as green as the smoke. “I may have removed the cap from the wooden box. The one with the pretty lenses.”
“Oh,” said Conor. “That could be trouble.”
King Nicholas had explained the lense box to Conor once, delighted to find that the boy’s passion for learning equaled his own. The lenses are arranged in a very specific order, he had said, squatting low so that his own eye appeared monstrous through the first lense. So when I remove the cap and light comes in one end, it’s concentrated by successive lenses until it can set paper alight at the other. With this little gadget, it might be possible to start a fire from a distance. The ultimate safe fuse.
Conor remembered thinking at the time that you could leave the box by the window and have it light the fire for you each morning, a chore that he was none too fond of. And now Isabella had removed the cap.
“Did you move the box?”
“Mind your tone, commoner!”