Ranger's Apprentice 12: The Royal Ranger Read Free Page B

guards.
    ‘You’d never pick it now. She’s so calm and dignified, isn’t she?’

‘ WHERE THE BLIND , BLUE, BLITHERING BLAZES HAVE YOU BEEN?’ the calm and dignified Princess Cassandra demanded.
    Maddie froze in shock as her mother’s words echoed round the living room of the royal apartment.
    She had tiptoed up the tower stairs and crept silently into the room, unlatching the door carefully, then opening it quickly to prevent any long, lingering squeaks from the hinges. The interior was in darkness, with heavy drapes across the window and only a few glowing embers in the fire grate.
    She had paused just inside the door, senses alert for any sound or any hint of another’s presence in the room. She had taken off her boots before climbing the stairs and now held them in her left hand. Satisfied that her parents were still asleep in their chamber, she had begun stepping carefully across the thick carpet towards her own suite of rooms.
    Then her mother – as skilled in the art of ambush as most mothers are – had startled her with her furious, echoing roar.
    Maddie froze in mid-stride, one foot poised above the carpet. She looked frantically around the room. She had been convinced that it was empty. Now she made out the dim form of her mother seated in a large, high-backed armchair.
    ‘Mum!’ she said, recovering quickly. ‘You startled me!’
    ‘I startled you?’ Cassandra rose from the chair and crossed the room to face her daughter. She was in her nightgown, with a heavy robe over it to protect her from the chill. An observer would have remarked on the similarity between the two women. Both were small in stature, slender and graceful in their movements. Both had green eyes and attractive features. And both had the same determined tilt to their chins. In times past, people had mistaken them for sisters and it was no surprise that they had. They shared the same mass of blonde hair, although there were occasional grey streaks in Cassandra’s now – testament to the strain that she had been under, managing the Kingdom for her invalid father these past three years.
    ‘I startled you ?’ she repeated from closer range, her voice rising a few tones with incredulity.
    ‘I thought you were asleep,’ Maddie said, trying an innocent smile. In fact, she was sure her mother had been asleep when she had left the apartment, several hours before. She had peered into the royal bedchamber to make sure of it.
    ‘I thought you were asleep,’ her mother replied. ‘I seem to recall that at the ninth hour you made a big fuss about how tired you were.’
    She feigned an enormous yawn. Maddie was uncomfortably aware that it was an excellent impersonation of her own performance the previous evening.
    ‘Oh, I’m soooo tired!’ Cassandra said, still mimicking her in an exaggerated little girly voice. ‘I’m afraid I’m off to bed right away.’
    ‘Ah . . . yes,’ Maddie said. ‘Well, I woke up. I was starving, so I went down to the kitchens to get something to eat.’
    ‘Carrying your boots,’ Cassandra observed. Maddie looked down at them, as if seeing them for the first time.
    ‘Um . . . I didn’t want to get mud all over the carpet,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. Speaking quickly often results in a mistake.
    ‘That would be mud from the kitchen,’ Cassandra said evenly.
    Maddie opened her mouth to reply, but could think of nothing to say. She shut it again.
    ‘Madelyn, are you crazy?’ Cassandra said, her anger finally bursting like water gushing through a fractured dam. ‘You’re a princess, the heir to the throne after me. You can’t go gallivanting off in the forest in the dead of night. It’s just too dangerous!’
    ‘Mum, it’s just a forest. It’s not dangerous. I know what I’m doing. I saw a badger,’ she added, as if that would excuse what she’d been doing.
    ‘Oh well, if you saw a badger, that makes it all right!’ Cassandra’s sarcasm cut like a whip. ‘Why didn’t you mention