Wintersmith

child?” said a muffled voice peevishly.
    “Nothing, Aunt Danuta,” said Roland, without turning around from his desk. One of the advantages of living in a castle was that rooms were easy to lock; his door had three iron locks and two bolts that were as thick as his arm.
    “Your father is calling out for you, you know!” said another voice, with even more peeve.
    “He whispers, Aunt Araminta,” Roland said calmly, carefully writing an address on an envelope. “He only cries out when you set the doctors on him.”
    “It’s for his own good!”
    “He cries out,” Roland repeated, and then licked the flap on the envelope.
    Aunt Araminta rattled the doorknob again.
    “You are a very ungrateful child! You will starve, you know! We will get the guards to batter this door down!”
    Roland sighed. The castle had been built by people who did not like to have their doors battered down, and anyone trying to do that here would have to carry the battering ram up a narrow spiral staircase with no room at the top to turn around, and then find a way to knock down a door four planks thick and made of oak timbers so ancient, it was like iron. One man could defend this room for months, if he had provisions. He heard some more grumbling outside and then the echo of the aunts’ shoes as they went down the tower. Then he heard them screaming at the guards again.
    It wouldn’t do them much good. Sergeant Roberts and his guards * were edgy about taking orders from the aunts. Everyone knew, though, that if the Baron died before the boy was twenty-one, the aunts would legally run the estate until he was . And while the Baron was very ill, he was not dead. It was not a happy time to be a disobedient guard, but the sergeant and his men survived the anger of the aunts by being, when their orders justified it, deaf, stupid, forgetful, confused, ill, lost, or—in the case of Kevin—foreign.
    For now, Roland kept his excursions for the small hours, when no one was around and he could pillage the kitchen. That’s when he went in to see his father. The doctors kept the old man dosed with something, but Roland held his hand for a while for the comfort that it gave. If he found jars of wasps or leeches, he threw them into the moat.
    He stared at the envelope. Perhaps he ought to tell Tiffany about this, but he didn’t like to think about it. It would worry her and she might try to rescue him again, and that wouldn’t be right. This was something he had to face. Besides, he wasn’t locked in. They were locked out. While he held the tower, there was a place where they couldn’t poke and pry and steal. He’d got what was left of the silver candlesticks under his bed, along with what remained of the antique silver cutlery (“gone to be valued,” they’d said) and his mother’s jewel box. He’d been a bit late finding that; it was missing her wedding ring and the silver-and-garnet necklace his grandmother had left to her.
    But tomorrow he’d get up early and ride over to Twoshirts with the letter. He liked writing them. They turned the world into a nicer place, because you didn’t have to include the bad bits.
    Roland sighed. It would have been nice to tell Tiffany that in the library he’d found a book called Sieges and Survival by the famous general Callus Tacticus (who invented “tactics,” which was interesting). Who’d have thought such an ancient book could be so useful? The general had been very firm about having provisions, so Roland had plenty of small potatoes, large sausages, and heavy dwarf bread, which was handy to drop on people.
    He glanced across the room, where there was a portrait of his mother that he had carried up from the cellar where they had left it (“waiting to be cleaned,” they said). Right beside it, if you knew what you were looking for, an area of wall about the size of a small door looked lighter than the rest of the stones. The candlestick next to it looked slightly lopsided, too.
    There were lots of advantages to living in a castle.
    Outside, it began to snow.

    The Nac Mac Feegles peered out at the fluffy flakes from the thatch of Miss Treason’s cottage. By the light that managed to leak out from the grubby windows below, they watched the tiny Tiffanys whirl past.
    “Say it wi’ snowflakes,” said Big Yan. “Hah!”
    Daft Wullie snatched a spiraling flake. “Ye gotta admit he’s done the wee pointy hat really well,” he said. “He must like the big wee hag a lot.”
    “It