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CHAPTER 9
Only Pegeen knew of the secret passage leading from her private chambers to the top of the maze. She and her brothers were children when she'd discovered the passage during a holiday with her family. Her father. King Finbar, had used the cliff castle for a summer retreat, a sanctuary from the demands of his court. Pegeen had found the passage while hiding from her brothers, lively little boys who thought teasing their sister was the best sport available when their father and tutors were too busy to take them gaming or help them play at jousting. The Princess was delighted with her find, and liked to imagine that her passage had been carved by the great worm for the express purpose of delivering her from her tormentors.
Not that she still believed that could be true. The worm's last great emergence had been decades before Pegeen first came to
Worm's Roost. The passage was the trail left by the worm's great body and hot breath, and the thick substantial walls forming the maze were the residue of the glacier's original pre-worm surface. Legend had it that the worm still slept deep within the maze of turnings and looping paths it had carved into the heart of the ice mass sweeping up the mountain behind the castle. The servants had always tried to scare their small royal charges into submission with tales of the worm, threatening in low, whispery voices (they said it that way partly to sound like the worm and partly to keep Her Royal Highness, Mama, from hearing) that the worm would slither hissing and steaming out of his maze and into their very bedchambers if they weren't well-behaved. Secretly, she had rather wished it would. It would have been exciting to see that, and being the youngest and only Princess in the royal family was seldom very exciting.
When she was little, she had fearlessly walked upright along the edges of the wall closest to the castle. Snow drifting close to the castle's back wall had shored the maze's walls in places, making them quite thick, in places easily an arm's length wide. Of course, they were still slick and precarious, but although she was older now, and larger and less agile, she felt sure that with the aid of the light that was part of her illuminating magic, she could easily find the chamber where the unicorns were being confined.
Close by the rear wall, the half-snowfilled impressions left from the worm's undulations formed several good-sized culs-de-sac. icy rooms with only a single, easily blocked opening accessible from the door at the back of the castle. Three such chambers lay between her secret exit and the back door to the great hall Fearchar had turned into a barracks for his garrison. Beyond the barracks door on the other side were several similar rooms. Those particular rooms had once made convenient freezers for perishable foods. Pegeen had not been adverse to purloining a snack now and then from those stores in the course of her youthful adventures.
No one would see her, not even the guard on the tallest turret, since his post was in front of the castle and her route would be shadowed by the castle itself and the foot of the glacier where it met the back wall. Though that front guard post was a good vantage point for seeing the terrain clear to the sea on clear days, one could hear very little there of what went on inside and to the rear of the castle, because that topmost sentinel tower was situated directly above the noisy rushing waters of the Blabber- mouth River, which kept up an endless, senseless stream of chatter day and night. On the other hand, from the back of the castle one could hear almost everything said from the guard towers in the front, because the sound carried well from that height, and also because anyone speaking in that tower usually had to shout to make himself understood over the river. Pegeen had learned to differentiate between the river's noise and human sounds but Fearchar's new guards were still leery of the river. Many who had stood watch in that tower had had to be reprimanded for turning in false alarms and sending arrows into the noisy waters below. Now they were inclined to attribute all - distant noises to the river, and trust their eyes alone.
Pegeen donned an old pair of woolen britches once belonging to her father. They were tight through the hips, but would keep her knees and shins warm above her kidskin boots. Girding her cloak above her knees, she crawled through the tunnel, whose entrance was concealed by the tapestry in her chambers, rolled the packed snow door with which she blocked the outlet away from the back wall of the castle, and crawled out onto the portion of the maze wall butting against her secret exit.
She'd come out here to smoke often lately, but had never tried to negotiate the walls since her girlhood. She searched for a moment the vast expanse of shadow and glittering ice before her.
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