Читать книгу Charlie Bone and the Castle of Mirrors - Jenny Nimmo - Страница 6

Prologue

The Red King and his queen were riding by the sea. It was that time of year when the wind carries a hint of frost. Evening clouds had begun to appear and where the sun could find a way through the gathering dusk, it struck the sea in bands of startling light.

The king and queen urged their horses home but, all at once, the queen reined in her mount and, in absolute stillness, stared out across the water. The king, following her gaze, beheld an island of astounding beauty. Caught in shafts of sunlight it sparkled with a thousand shades of blue.

‘Oh,’ sighed the queen, in a voice of dread.

‘What is it, my heart?’ asked the king.

In the matter of their children the queen’s intuition was greater than the king’s, and when she saw the island of a thousand blues, it was as if an icy hand had clutched her heart. ‘The children.’ Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

The king asked his wife which of their nine children concerned her, but the queen couldn’t say. Yet when they returned to the Red Castle and she saw her two sons, Borlath and Amadis, the queen had a terrible forboding. She saw black smoke rising from the blue island, and flames turning the earth to ash. She saw a castle of shining glass appear in a snowstorm, and when her soul’s eye travelled over the glass walls, she saw a boy with hair the colour of snow climb from a well and close his eyes against the death that lay all about him.

‘We must never let our children see that island,’ she told the king. ‘We must never let them tread on that blue, enchanted earth.’

The king made a promise. But in less than a year the queen would be dead, and he, bowed down with grief, would leave the castle and his children. The queen died nine days after giving birth to her tenth child, a girl she named Amoret. A girl whom no one could protect.