Chapter 4: Thou Doth Protest Much
Four Years Later…
"King Logan is the bane of Albion! He extorts extraordinary taxes from the people, yet our people receives NONE of his extorted profits!"
"We starve on the streets while he eats fine bread and drinks the best wine behind the castle walls!"
"My children go hungry while he entertains dozens of nobles in a garden party!"
"Down with Logan!"
"Yeah, down with Logan!"
The crowd exploded into raucous cheering. Page peeked over the edge of the roof on which she slept and almost yawned from boredom. 'Another gathering of unhappy factory workers, to protest King Logan's taxes? It won't be long before the town guards come and arrest them all for suspicion of treason or for illegal gathering or some other nonsense.'
Still, Page watched. The man at the front of the crowd, the obvious leader of the gathering, motioned with his hands for the crowd to fall silent. "Our people are crushed beneath the burden of his tyranny. It is high time that we, the people of Albion, take back our power from this tyrant!"
"Yeah!"
"No taxes without consent!"
"Better wages for the poor!"
Page shook her head with mildly concealed resentment. Since her escape from Bowerstone Castle, Page had grown taller and leaner. Her skills as a thief were sharper than they were when she was a mere child: she could see and hear better; she could sneak behind and around others more stealthily; and she blended into crowds more easily, despite her Samarkander skin. Since her escape from Bowerstone Castle following King Sparrow's death, she had lived a hard life among the people of Bowerstone Quarter and Bowerstone Industrial. Sometimes she slept in alleys; sometimes she slept in cemeteries. The year in the kitchen of the Castle had been luxury by comparison.
She shivered at the shouts of the crowd. Page's stomach rumbled. 'He's a convincing rebellion leader, but he's not promising food. It's time I find something to eat.'
Page stood up, brushed off her shabby clothes, and stepped back to the two chimneys atop the roof. Then she ran to the edge and leaped through the air. She landed flawlessly on top of the roof of the next house and slid down the icy rain gutter to land at the back of the protestors. A factory manager in a blue buttoned-up shirt and brown overalls pushed past her and shoved his way through the crowd to the platform on which the speaker stood.
"It is high time that we…"
The factory manager mounted the stage and shoved the speaker—a large, ruddy faced man with wavy dark brown hair—aside. The crowd immediately began booing. "Get back to work, the whole lot of you! Lazy disgruntled filth! The King doesn't care about your wellbeing or your protests!"
"We won't take orders from the likes of you much longer!" a woman yelled.
"Yeah! The people's day is coming, and when it comes, people like you will be on the outs, Mister Brown!"
Mister Brown put his hands on his hips and sneered. "Well lucky for me that day isn't today! Now, get back to work. Or I'll report you to Reaver, and he'll deal with you!"
The crowd began to disperse. Page shook her head. 'I'm tired of people like them. They always complain but they never do anything. It's time somebody did something. If only there was a way to tell someone to do something, but without making it obvious. They wouldn't listen to me. I'm just a sixteen-year-old girl.'
Page slipped into the crowd and matched its pace. The crowd passed a vendor's gift shop stall, offering boxes of chocolates, glass bottles of exotic perfumes from foreign lands, and even bouquets of roses. Page could easily grab a box of chocolates while walking without the vendor noticing. She did exactly that. As she snacked on her pilfered chocolates, Page listened to the conversations of the people around her.
"'I'll report you to Reaver?'" The man ahead of Page scoffed. "Of course he would. Brown has been a sellout and a swine since he got promoted to factory manager. Since when did he stop working with the common man?"
"Better to deal with Brown than to deal with that upstart noble, Commodore What's-His-Face? He's always snooping around the factory, asking all sorts of upstart questions. I'm surprised Reaver doesn't kill the git."
"Those Millfields stuffed shirts, they're going to need more of us soon!" another protestor exclaimed. "That land out there isn't what it used to be. It's getting smaller all the time. They need factories and mines. And we're the ones to give it to 'em, if they start to treat us better. Not like animals."
"That's what we're going to talk to the King about today," said the brown-haired man who had been on the -stage earlier. "We're going to stage a peaceful protest and convince the King to…"
"Convince him? This will not be a peaceful talk, Lazlo!" a woman with curly blonde hair and a sharp voice snapped. "We are going to storm the castle, take possession of His Highness the Prince, and let him rule Albion with us as his benevolent advisers."
"Do you really plan to storm the Bowerstone Castle and take possession of Prince Lark, despite all those troublesome town guards that just might get in the way, Lucy?"
"It's a good deal better than your plan, Lazlo!"
Page suddenly realized that the protestors were approaching the Bowerstone Castle region of the city. They had already crossed into Bowerstone Market, which was a much more affluent area of the city than Bowestone Quarter or Bowerstone Industrial. The stores were more upscale, housed in actual buildings with square cut glass windows and displays and painted wooden doors. Houses had stairs with wrought-iron railings and carved knockers on the doors. Guards congregated around them as the protestors walked the road along the Bower River.
'We're going to encounter Logan? What if Logan sees me? What if he recognizes me?'
Using her sneaking skills, Page deftly removed the scarf from the neck of one of the women ahead of her. She draped it over her head so that the scarf shrouded her eyes and concealed her grime-encrusted dreadlocks. The guards posted at the Castle's wrought-iron gates scowled at Page the same as any other protestor. 'Either my disguise works, or they really don't recognize me after all these years.'
Stone crenellations over the gate made the castle walls dark and forbidding, like a death knell from a church bell. The castle's front courtyard was vastly different from what Page remembered. When King Sparrow was alive, the front courtyard had flowering bushes, colorful and delicate tea roses, and merrily singing birds, even in the midst of winter. Now the courtyard had an unearthly gray pallor over it, like a storm had descended upon the bare bushes and frozen flowers. Albion was on the verge of spring, yet icicles clung to the eaves of the castle's walls and crept down the stone walls.
The massive ebony doors were bolted shut. "Skorm! Those doors are too heavy to batter down!" Lazlo exclaimed.
From her position near the front of the crowd, Lucy took out a glass flask of ale and took a swig. Then she hurled the flask at the castle door. "If they won't open the door for the people, then we will burn them out! Ha!"
"You can't be serious!"
A town guard approached Lucy. "Ma'am, we can't be allowing you to start any fires on the castle doors."
"You're not under any orders to stop me, are you?" Lucy sneered in his face.
"Seeing as my commanding officer is currently indisposed inside the castle, I would have to say, no ma'am."
Page shook her head as the guard stepped away from Lucy. 'And I always thought the town guards in Industrial were lazy and incompetent.'
"Who's got a fire? I'll show you just how serious I am!" Lucy scanned the crowd behind her. "A torch, a flame, any sort of fire, I need a light! By Skorm! We're supposed to be a mob, a torch-carrying, rabble –roused mob, and we don't have a bloody torch?"
'I could help this woman set fire to King Logan's castle. It would be the sort of thing he deserves for how he's treated all of Albion. And I can throw a fireball just that far. But there's no promise that Lark, who's always been a faithful friend to me, would be safe. What should I do?'
A rabble built in tempo and volume, until Page felt drowned by the noise. Then, from over her left shoulder, she heard, "Each course seems the wisest to go, until we have lost our way. When we look back, our mistakes become clearer."
Page turned and stared into Theresa's shrouded, blind face. "Theresa! What are you doing here?"
"I came to you when you needed direction."
"I thought you had abandoned me all those years ago. I could have used direction long before now! I could have used food, clean clothes, and even a place to sleep!"
"Do not let your fury consume the best of your faculty of reason. I never abandoned you. I have faithfully been a friend and ally to you. When you needed a hand to guide you five years ago, I was there. Now, I am here again."
"Why now?"
"Although you do not know it, the actions you take today—whether you decide to join with the crowd, or to choose your own course of action—it will have a lasting impact. Do what seems right."
Theresa stepped backward and disappeared into the crowd. Page felt a slight warmth in her left hand. She looked down and realized there was a spinning fireball resting in her open palm. Page curled her fingers around it and snuffed out the fireball, then looked around in fear. No one else had seen her power on display.
"If you choose not to attack the Castle, there is a more discreet way inside. One that make use of your skills," Theresa suggested from behind Page. Page's eyes darted around the courtyard and landed on an open window on the second floor of the Castle, just above the sloping shingled rooftop. The window was only slightly ajar. Yet there was a rain gutter running down the wall only inches from the window. And no one was paying Page any attention.
Page quickly scaled the rain gutter to the window, opened it, and somersaulted inside the Castle. She peeked out the window. Lucy was only inches from the face of a town guard and the crowd behind her was only becoming more incensed. Page turned from the window and studied the room in which she stood. In the center of the room, there was a huge gold-rimmed table with a map inlaid. Even with gas lamps adorning the tables, the map in the center of the room seemed to illuminate the rest of the room. Drawn by the strange power of the table, Page approached it.
"….this sort of insolence is intolerable! I will not stand for it from these filthy upstart peasants! My word is LAW! I am King!"
'That's Prince—I mean, King—Logan!' Page gasped. She frantically scanned the room for a hiding place as footsteps approached the door; her eyes settled upon a massive globe in one corner of the room. As fast as a gust of wind, Page ran across the room and squeezed her small frame behind the globe.
The doors opened. Page's breath caught in her chest. Four town guards and Logan strode into the room. Over the four years since she had last seen him, Logan had grown taller and slimmer. His skin practically glowed with paleness. In fact, his complexion seemed to darken when he stood within the illuminating glow of the map table.
"This is my Albion. I will not tolerate the willful who seek to undo what I have created. If they will not respect their king, they will fear me." Logan turned to one of the soldiers. "Captain, give the guards the order to open fire on the crowd."
"You cannot do that, Logan!"
The doors to the room burst open. A grizzled, gray haired man burst through the door. From his attire, Page would have guessed the man was a buccaneer and not a member of the royal court in a velvet gentleman's coat, explorer's pants and boots, and carrying a mug at his waist.
"Guard, deal with Sir Beck." Page couldn't see what happened but there was a thumping sound followed by a gasp of air. Sir Beck, as Logan had referred to him, doubled over in pain. Logan loomed over the old man like a victor in battle. "I do not tolerate anyone who challenges my commands as ruler of this kingdom. Know your place, Sir Beck. Captain, deliver the orders."
The doors to the room burst open again. Page barely had time to glimpse a finely dressed, handsome young man and a blonde woman escorting him before a brilliant blinding burst of light filled the room. By contrast, the rest of the room turned gray. "You may come out now, Page," Theresa said.
Page crawled out from her hiding place and stood up. Theresa stood beside a swirling portal of gray mist. Everyone else in the room was immobile. Page took in the room around her, including the more mature figure of young Prince Lark. Then she turned to the blind seer. "Theresa, what's going on?"
"As you have seen, much has changed about the Albion you knew as a child. The young Prince is about to embark on a course that will take him much further than he could imagine. Like you, the decisions he must make will either shape a much better Albion or plunge the kingdom into Darkness. You must be at his side, ready to do your part to lead the people and their prince. Step through the portal, Page, and begin to face your destiny."