The Princelings of the East Read online

The Princelings of the East

  By Jemima Pett

  Princelings Publications presents:

  The Princelings of the East

  © J M Pett 2011-13

  This edition revised and extended 2013

  Cover illustration by Danielle English https://kanizo.co.uk

  Chapter illustrations by the author

  Other books in this series

  The Princelings and the Pirates

  The Princelings and the Lost City

  The Traveler in Black and White

  The Talent Seekers

  Bravo Victor

  .

  The right of Jemima Pett to be identified as the author and co-illustrator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The names and characters in this story are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Many of the names are inspired by guinea pigs owned by members of the Rodents With Attitude online forum, to whom I am eternally grateful. These may be similar to other fictional characters but no plagiarism is intended.

  Contents

  Principal Characters

  Chapter 1: The Castle in the Marsh

  Chapter 2: Consequences

  Chapter 3: The Tunnel Network

  Chapter 4: At the Inn of the Seventh Happiness

  Chapter 5: Strawberry Juice

  Chapter 6: The Energy Hunter

  Chapter 7: A Close Shave

  Chapter 8: Food for Thought

  Chapter 9: Relativity

  Chapter 10: Castle Vexstein

  Chapter 11: Messages

  Chapter 12: The Adventures of Victor

  Chapter 13: A Question of Timing

  Chapter 14: Return to the Inn

  Chapter 15: Epilogue

  End

  Principal Characters

  At Castle Marsh:

  Princeling Fred – A natural philosopher by inclination, and an adventurer at heart

  Princeling George - Fred’s twin brother, an engineer with lofty ideas

  King Cole XIV – a king with a lot on his mind

  Prince Vladimir (Uncle Vlad) – Cole’s natural successor and second in command

  At the Inn of the Seventh Happiness:

  Victor – a harried barkeeper who doesn’t waste words except on royalty; there’s more to him than meets the eye

  Gandy – his ancient assistant

  Argon – an absentee landlord, not by choice, and Victor’s father

  Hugo – a travelling business person selling Wozna Cola, who is definitely not what he seems

  At Castle Buckmore:

  Prince Lupin – a playboy at heart, but a king in truth

  Lady Nimrod – the wisdom behind the throne

  Baden – the castle’s steward

  At Castle Hattan:

  Lord Mariusz – King of his castle, and adopter of pseudonyms

  Professor Saku – mad inventor, or just a genius

  Raisin – one of many employees, but who takes his job more seriously than most

  At Castle Vexstein:

  Lord Smallweed – a nasty piece of work, second in line to the throne, who’s looking forward to absolute power

  Baron (Lord) Darcy – Smallweed’s elder brother, who enjoys leaving the hard work to him

  Pogo – an unspecified relation, possibly in line for the throne some day, making the most of his opportunities

  This book is dedicated to

  Dawn Cavalieri

  Chapter 1: The Castle in the Marsh

  In which we meet the young Princelings and a good feast is ruined

  George was suspended in mid-air, his legs dangling from the ceiling of one room while his arms scrabbled furiously for a hold on the floor of the room above. He was trying very hard to do it silently, but it was a bit difficult.

  He had jumped up through the trap door in the ceiling as usual, then realised his brother Fred was gazing out of the open window. So he had stopped in mid-jump, but now gravity was taking over. They were in this top-most tiny room in the turret of the castle, their ancestral home. If Fred was gazing out of the window across the miles of marsh that surrounded them, that meant he was Thinking. Fred was apt to be grumpy if disturbed in the middle of a Think. So George had a dilemma: to hold on tight and keep quiet, or drop back again and risk making a noise landing on the accumulated junk in the room below him.

  Fred was often found gazing out of the window, any window would do, but this one was his favourite. He was also much given to Thinking, and at present he was thinking about the wind in the reeds. If the wind is blowing in my face, he thought, why is it blowing the reeds in different directions around the castle? If anyone asked his occupation, Fred described himself as a Natural Philosopher, a person who thinks about the whys and wherefores of nature, trying to understand how the world works. I need to explore the nature of the wind. If only I can persuade George to devise some way of mapping what the wind is doing as it blows across the marsh and into the castle. Yes, he thought, that is the way forward, and he sighed.

  An answering sigh met his and George clambered the rest of the way into the room. He looked rather relieved that he had found a way to attract Fred’s attention without interrupting him mid-Think.

  “We might be in trouble, Fred,” he said. “My latest engine stopped working. The trouble is everything in the castle stopped working at the same time. Uncle Vlad is not happy.”

  “Does he blame you?” Fred asked, with a frown, as he was sure it couldn’t be George’s engineering experiments causing the problem. This Energy Drain had been happening every now and then for years now, and he had Thought about it a few times. There was no relationship with any of George’s experiments. Nor with Young Boris’s either, although Young Boris had been banished for causing it over three years ago. He was one of their many cousins, all grandchildren of the present King, but there were few of them left in the castle now.

  “I don’t think so,” replied George, “but Ludo keeps telling him he ought to root out the troublemakers before the King starts blaming him for the problem.”

  “Ludo can’t have anything to do with it. He’s always off sailing that boat of his down at the Big Water.”

  “No, of course not. He meant the King blaming Uncle Vlad.”

  “Uncle Vlad is the King’s right-hand man. He does all the work round here. I’m sure he wouldn’t blame Uncle Vlad,” said Fred, but he paused and thought about it all the same.

  He considered the way his cousins had left the castle; one by one they had set out for the great unknown. Sometimes they were escorted off the premises by the king’s henchman, sometimes they had slipped out in the middle of the night. He and George had been out of the castle of course; they had travelled the marsh extensively and knew all the little side tracks and alleyways well. They even knew which ones were wet at different times of day; he and George had worked out a few years ago that while the wetness didn’t coincide with the high tides at Summernot, on the coast, they did follow a similar pattern. George had engineered an ingenious measuring and timing device for this project, with a ball that floated up in a column of the rising water, and marked the height on a circular card that revolved with the clock as it did so. George was clever at that sort of thing. Fred wanted to get him to engineer something to measure the wind direction. He wondered how he could ask him. He looked out of the window for inspiration, and George joined him leaning on the windowsill.

  “What do you make of the wind, brother?” Fred asked.

  “Well, I was making an engine to use the wind to make some more energy for the castle,” George complained. “But i
t’s a bit difficult to test it when I have to do it inside, with no wind, and the energy runs out any time I try to use it to make some wind.”

  “Why don’t you do it outside?”

  George sighed, and didn’t reply.

  Fred looked sideways at him. “What’s wrong, brother?”

  “I’m getting worried about drawing attention to ourselves. I’m sure this engine would be really useful for the castle, but with the disappearances and so on, I just think we should keep ourselves hidden from view.”

  “Do you mean we should stay clear of all the castle gatherings as well?”

  “Yes, I do. I mean, most people don’t know who we are anyway and, apart from the food, the gatherings are a waste of time. I could be working on one of my projects and you could be Thinking. What I don’t want is for people to interfere with my engines or take them over to make them useful for some other purpose.”

  Fred nodded. That had happened a couple of times when George had been making something with a Grand Plan in mind, and bits had been taken by other people for makeshift solutions. Take the water-lifter that George had designed as an integral part of an irrigation system for the castle gardens. It had been commandeered and was now used at the castle entrance to move water from one side of the gate into buckets on the other. It was a complete waste of time. Then someone had wanted to put their names onto the rota to move the buckets! If they had used George’s project as he’d designed it there wouldn’t be any need to move buckets. Fred wondered whether this was how it had happened with the other princelings before them. Either they left of their own accord when they weren’t useful in the community, or they kicked up a fuss and were kicked out.

  “We keep ourselves pretty well hidden these days, though,” he mused, his thoughts going full circle to the problem of being seen about the castle.

  “It’s very comfortable living in the castle but it is getting far more difficult to keep hidden. And I can’t make my engines and test them without going outside. People see me, and they push into my little cellar and want to use it for other things,” George was in complaining mode now.

  “Yes,” Fred said, to stop George getting the Grumps. “The longer King Cole reigns, the more people seem to live here. Someone asked me who I was the other day.”

  “What did you say?” George smiled.

  “I looked very snooty and said ‘Don’t you know?’ and walked off quickly,” Fred replied. “Then I got behind the tapestry in the next corridor very fast and scampered up here, I think, making sure no-one was following.”

  Fred and George knew how to take care of themselves: they had plenty of hidey-holes, had a fair knowledge of the labyrinthine secret passages of the castle, and best of all, were extremely quick at thinking of good answers to difficult questions.

  “So you think we should avoid the next gathering completely?” he continued.

  “Yes, we should,” said George. Then he hesitated. “Although…”

  “...it’s the King’s birthday gathering,” completed Fred and it was his turn to sigh.

  The King’s birthday was the highlight of the castle’s social calendar. Apart from the best feast, the best entertainment, and the best of the castle’s wine cellar, it was also where the king gave out favours to anyone that presented themselves in the proper form, and where favours were sometimes bestowed on persons who had no idea they were going to receive them. Fred and George wanted no favours, but it was usually fun to watch people receive them. Especially as some favours were appropriate gifts to the receiver, and ones they might not actually like. Like the new anvil that was given to the blacksmith one year, that took away his excuse for not getting things done in time. The blacksmith was a lazy person, and Fred chuckled to himself at the memory of his face.

  “Could we watch from the gallery?” asked Fred, hoping they could at least see some of the persons he and George least liked getting something they didn’t want.

  “The musicians will be in the gallery,” George responded, “and we wouldn’t be able to get to the food, so we’d be frustrated.”

  “And Uncle Vlad would probably spot us,” Fred agreed gloomily. “When is it, anyway?”

  “Two days time.”