The Children of the King (27 page)

“Jem!” cried his sister, scandalised.

“And then he must have sensed me in the room, because he opened his eyes. Immediately he was Fa again. He sat up and said,
What a welcome visitor.
He said,
I hear you’ve come home to win the war.
And what could I do, then, but love him? You know how he is: you
must
love him. You have no choice in the matter, it’s impossible to resist. Around Fa, some things just have to be.”

Jeremy had discarded his socks by now, revealing bony feet which he looked at as though he could choose others if these ones didn’t appeal. “I have to take my bath,” he said, “before the water goes cold.”

“All right,” muttered Cecily. “Goodnight, Jem.”

“You’re not going to run away again, are you?” asked May.

“No.” He smiled. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Thus dismissed, the girls went into the hallway and drifted toward their bedrooms. Cecily’s chest felt as if a band of iron was bound around it: every time she tried to breathe she remembered her brother’s description of her sleeping father, and the air seemed to jam in her lungs. She loved her father,
loved him,
and he had a perfect right to sleep . . . but how she wished that he had been awake that night. How she wished it. She felt a forlorn sadness and didn’t yet know it was just the sadness of growing up.

At her door, she touched May’s sleeve. “Wait,” she said. “I’m sorry about your daddy, May.”

May’s eyes flashed. They had not yet spoken of this. Cecily had been muted by guilt — so often she had bragged and reminisced about her father, and never once thought to ask why May kept such a soft silence about her own — and had hoped the subject would be lost amid the peculiarity of the past days; but it wouldn’t. “Thank you,” said May.

“Did he die in a battle?”

The girl shook her head. “He was missing. Then we got a telegram saying he’d been killed.”

Cecily nodded. “He must have been very brave,” she said.

May glanced at the rugs, the balustrades, the ivory walls. She drew a deep breath and let it out. “Sometimes I can’t remember his face,” she admitted. “Sometimes I can hardly remember anything about him.”

“Well . . . you remember the names of birds and trees. You remember what he taught you about history and paintings. You remember the stuffed animals at the museum, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I think that means you can remember your dad.”

May considered this. “Thank you,” she said again.

“We’ll win the war,” said Cecily, “because of him.”

“Yes.” May smiled. “I know.”

They did not know that the war would lash the world for nearly six long years, scraping millions into its maw; they didn’t know that May would spend these years in the embrace of Heron Hall, becoming a daughter of the house and a precious almost-daughter to Peregrine; or that, long after her mother had taken her to live on the opposite side of the world, May would write letters to Peregrine, and often think about him; nor that, after he died, she would receive a delicate gold locket inside which was the portrait of a sombre man wearing a fine cloak and many jewels, whose eyes seemed full of regret. They didn’t know that Cecily would grow up to have three good sons of her own and that she would live a long and sunshine-filled life, growing frail and forgetful only in the last months of it, like a butterfly closing its wings. But that night, the two girls stood on the landing and nodded, sure in the knowledge of this one thing. They would win, because of him.

And during those years when Cecily and May grew up, what was left of Snow Castle crumbled and fell gently to pieces, and disappeared into the ground.

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