Septimus Heap, Book Six_ Darke - Angie Sage [161]
Beetle asked for the Register of Expendable Boy Soldiers. Under the watchful eye of the records clerk (who considered him far too young to be Chief Hermetic Scribe), Beetle turned to the page headed Numbers 400 to 499 Inclusive. He ran his finger down the page until he came to these listings:
409 Mandy Marwick. Status: Forced Conscription. Traitor Family.
410 Marcus Marwick. Status: Forced Conscription. Traitor Family.
411 Matthew Marwick. Status: Forced Conscription. Traitor Family.
412 Merrin Meredith. Status: Foundling. Mother denies child.
The first three entries were what Beetle had suspected—Wolf Boy was one of triplets. He grinned. He hadn’t suspected he’d be called Mandy, though.
Beetle was, however, dismayed by the entry for 412, which he knew had been Septimus’s Young Army number. Surely Sep wasn’t really Merrin Meredith? And then he remembered what Septimus had told him one rainy afternoon in the back kitchen of the Manuscriptorium over a mug of FizzFroot . . .
“I saw it, Beetle. Aunt Zelda was scrying in her pond and we saw moving pictures of what happened. It was weird—and really sad too. . . . The midwife snatched me away from Sarah—I mean Mum—when I was only a few hours old. She told Mum I was dead, but it was a plot. I was wanted by DomDaniel to be his Apprentice—because I am the seventh son of a seventh son. The midwife took me to the Young Army Nursery, where DomDaniel’s Nurse was going to come and collect me. But when she arrived she was in a hurry and really flustered and she just grabbed the first baby she saw—the midwife’s baby. I think because the midwife was cuddling him when the Nurse arrived. The midwife went crazy—really crazy—when the guard stopped her from chasing after her own baby.
“Serves her right,” Beetle remembered saying.
“Yeah. I s’pose it does. But what a horrible thing to happen—to her baby, I mean. And of course the midwife would have told everyone that I was not her child but they wouldn’t have listened. They never listened to anything. As far as they were concerned I was the midwife’s baby who she had suddenly abandoned. And that is how I got taken into the Young Army. I suppose I am in the Young Army register under the name of the midwife’s child, which is weird. But the weirdest thing is I now know that I’ve met the midwife again—she was the landlady of that horrible guesthouse that Jen took us to in the Port. Aunt Zelda found that out and told me.”
Beetle closed the register and handed it back to the clerk—along with the pair of white cotton gloves she had made him put on. So it was true, Merrin Meredith was Nurse Meredith’s—Nursie’s—son.
Beetle walked slowly back to the Manuscriptorium, thinking of those few moments just over fourteen years ago that had affected so many people’s lives. Now he understood Marcia’s reply when he had questioned her about the wisdom of letting Merrin go free. “Everyone deserves a chance to be with his mother, Beetle,” she had said. At the time Beetle had actually spent so long gathering the courage to ask Marcia the question—and was so amazed when she had actually answered him civilly—that he had not liked to ask what she meant. Now he understood.
SNORRI AND ALFRúN
Snorri and her mother, Alfrún, were away for the Longest Night and missed the Darke Domaine. They returned the morning of The Great Undoing.
The previous year, Snorri had rescued her trader’s barge—which actually belonged to her mother—from some boat thieves who had stolen it from Quarantine Dock. She had brought the Alfrún back to the Castle where Jannit Maarten’s boatyard restored it.
Snorri had become unhappy living in the Palace with the Heaps. She missed her home and, she was surprised to find, she missed her mother too. It seemed to Snorri that she and Nicko