Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody

Author:Isobelle Carmody
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: book, JUV038000
ISBN: 9781742696430
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-05-20T21:00:00+00:00

THE PHOENIX

‘Princess Ragnar?’

Ragnar turned to William and tried to smile, but her hatred was so great that it would allow no other emotion. She did not feel it as heat but as a bitter burning cold flowing through her, freezing her to ice, to stone. Driven by such a rage, a princess might unleash her armies and destroy an entire city to the last person. She might command the end of a world.

‘Princess? Are you cold?’

She barely heard William’s words, but when she shook her head, before he turned away to keep watch for Torvald, she saw in his pale-green eyes the same blaze of devotion that had flared three summers past when he had pledged himself to her.

Her mind threw up an image of him making that pledge, the words as formal as the words from an old Bible.

‘Princess, I, William, am sent by the Gods to serve and guard you in this strange shadowland, until we are shown the way home by such signs and portents as I am trained to recognise. I pledge my life to you.’

Twelve years old, with one slightly turned eye, a broken front tooth, ripped shorts and a too-large cast-off T-shirt advising the world to ‘Be happy’, and here he was pledging his life to her.

He had a collection of T-shirts abandoned by the drug addicts and drunks who came to stay at Goodhaven to dry out. The weird thing was that those T-shirts always seemed to have something pertinent to say about what was happening when he wore them, and in the end, she came to see them as signs, just as William saw as signs a certain bird flying overhead, or a particular rock resting against another.

Hearing his absurd pledge, she had experienced a fleeting instinct to laugh out of nervousness or incredulity. That would have changed everything. Life could be like that sometimes – hinging on one tiny little thing or other. But she hadn’t laughed because underneath the urchin dirt and crazy talk, she had seen a reflection of her own aching loneliness.

‘Are you sure you have the right person?’ she had said, instead of, ‘Are you crazy?’ But it was close. They even started with the same words.

‘You are Princess Ragnar,’ he had said.

Those words sent a shiver up her spine, even after so much time. Because she had never seen him before. Then there was how he said her name – as if he was handling something infinitely precious. No one had said it like that before in her whole life except maybe her mother, though perhaps that was just a memory born of wishful thinking.

‘How do you know my name?’ she had demanded.

He had grinned, flashing the chipped tooth that she later learned had been broken when he’d happened on a drying-out drunk who had managed to drink a whole cupboard-full of cough medicine. The Goodhaven people stocked up on everything because they thought the world was going to end any day now and they wanted to be prepared.

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