Free Robin Jarvis-Jax 02 Freax And Rejex by Robin Jarvis Page A

shoved the rest of the minchet in his mouth and chewed it urgently. Then he wiped his hands and took hold of Dancing Jax .
    “Don’t do it, Sam!” Kate pleaded. “Please don’t.”
    The fair-haired man swallowed the fibrous lumps in his mouth and grinned. “It’s all right, Kate,” he assured her. “It’s just like they said. We were dead wrong. This place, this crap – it isn’t real. We belong in Mooncaster. You’ll see.”
    He lowered his eyes and began to read.
    “ Beyond the Silvering Sea, within thirteen green, girdling hills…”
    The assembled crowd muttered along with him, following the words as he read them aloud. The Jacks and Jills came to join them and everyone began to nod their heads in time to the rhythm of the sentences.
    Kate Kryzewski felt the day darken around her. The sunlight dimmed and a faint buzzing sounded in her head. She tried to think of something else, anything – it didn’t matter what.
    The hairs on the back of her neck prickled and the skin crept on her scalp as something drew close to her.
    She blotted out Sam’s voice and flooded her mind with her most vivid memories: a child searching the rubble of Haiti for her mother, the smoking wreck of a bus after a suicide bomb in Gaza, a rocket attack over Baghdad that made the night bright as day, pouring a glass of Merlot over Harlon Webber’s hair plugs when he made a pass at her atthe Emmys, the crooked smile of the Ismus…
    Frantically she shook that last image out of her head. Sam’s voice filled her ears. She couldn’t blot it out any more. She couldn’t fight any longer. She had to listen. There was nothing else.
    Before the darkness rushed in, one final thought of her own flickered briefly.
    “Poppa, I’m so sorry!” she cried.
    The Ismus’s stark white face reared in her mind. His lean, hungry features were triumphant and she felt her will, her spirit, everything she was, spiralling out of her – till there was nothing left. She threw back her head and her eyes fluttered open. The tall white towers of a magnificent castle stood against the bright blue sky. She gasped in amazement. Then the Black Face Dames let go of her arms and she sprawled on the ground. The grass tickled her hands like feathers.
     
    Columbine looked up from the goose on her lap and wiped her brow, leaving a faint smear of blood behind. Her fingers returned to the dead bird and she continued to mechanically rip the snowy feathers from its body. The goose’s head dangled and jerked to the motion of her hands.
    The kitchen was unusually quiet that wintry afternoon. Mistress Slab was in the slaughterhouse across the courtyard, elbow deep in a basin brimming with a bloody mixture. That pink, sticky mash of minced pork, breadcrumbs and herbs would soon be fed into empty lengths of pig intestine. The Mooncaster cook would not permit anyone else to learn the secret recipe of her sausages and always barred the slaughterhouse door when she was busy at this task.
    Ned and Beetle, the kitchen boys, were in the village, bringing fresh loaves from the miller’s wife in a barrow. Columbine was completely alone.
    It was a huge kitchen, much larger than the four others that prepared the meals of the Royal Houses. It was kept at a constant summer heat by two great fires. Their flames shone in every copper pot that hung on thelimewashed walls and sweat splashes were an ingredient in every dish that Mistress Slab prepared.
    Columbine was used to the fires by now and she dressed in loose, ragged garments, patched and mended with more squares of cloth than a quilt. She was a young, red-haired girl whose face was only clean on high days or when the pranking kitchen boys carried her to the horse trough and threw her in. She went about her endless chores barefoot, for it was good to feel the cool flagstones under her soles and trail her grubby toes through the straw or cinders.
    She never complained when Mistress Slab beat her with the largest wooden spoon if she