Ella Enchanted - By Gail Carson Levine Page 0,43

back into the hallway and pulling him with me. I shut the door behind us. "I'm fine."

"Good." He stood up.

I think he was grinning, but he may have been scowling. The corridor was too dim to tell. How would he explain my behavior? Why would he think I was hiding?

"I thought you were still patrolling the border. I didn't notice you at the wedding."

"We returned this morning. I arrived here just in time to watch you dash up the stairs." He paused, perhaps waiting for me to explain. I didn't, and he was too polite to ask.

"My father spent his boyhood here," he went on, "before the new palace was built. He says there's a secret passage somewhere. It's rumored to start in one of the rooms on this story."

"Where does it lead?"

"Supposedly to a tunnel under the moat. Father used to search for it."

"Shall we look?"

"Would you like to?" He sounded eager. "If you don't mind missing the ball."

"I'd love to miss the ball." I opened one of the doors in the corridor.

Light flooded in, and I saw that Char couldn't have been scowling. He was smiling so happily that he reminded me of Apple.

We were in a bedroom with an empty wardrobe and two large windows. We knocked on the walls, listening for a telltale hollow sound; we felt for hidden seams. We tested the floorboards, guessing at who might have used the passage and for what reasons.

"To warn Frell of danger," Char suggested.

"To escape a mad fairy."

"To flee punishment."

"To leave a boring cotillion."

"That was it," Char agreed.

But whatever the reason for flight, the means remained hidden. We investigated each room less thoroughly than the one before, until our search became a stroll. We moved along the corridor, opening doors and poking our heads in. If any feature seemed promising, we investigated further.

I thought of a silly explanation for my presence upstairs.

"You've guessed why I shut myself up here," I said.

"I have no idea." He opened a door. Nothing worth examining.

"To avoid temptation.".

"What temptation?" He grinned, anticipating a joke. He was used to me. I would have to labor to surprise him.

"Can't you guess?"

He shook his head.

"The temptation to slide down the stair rail, of course."

He laughed, surprised after all. "And why were you lying down?"

"I wasn't lying down. I was sitting."

"Pray tell why you were sitting."

"To pretend I was sliding down the stair rail."

He laughed again. "You should have done it. I would have caught you at the bottom."

The strains of an orchestra wafted up to us, a slow allemande.

The corridor we were in ended in a back stair, surrounded by doors that opened on more corridors, all more or less alike.

"If we're not careful, we'll go down this one again," Char said. "They're all the same."

"Hansel and Gretel had pebbles and bread crumbs to show them the way. We have nothing."

"We have more than they did. They were impoverished. There must be something...." He looked down at himself, then tugged at an ivory button on his doublet until it came off in his hand. A bit of striped silk undergarment peeked out I watched in amazement as he placed the button on the tiles a foot within the hallway we had just left. "That will mark our progress." He chuckled. "I'm destroying my dignity without sliding down anything."

After we investigated six corridors without finding the secret passage, and after all of Char's buttons were gone, we climbed the back staircase. It ended in an outdoor passage to a tower. We rushed across, facing into a bitter wind.

The tower room had once been an indoor garden, with small trees in wooden pots. I perched on a stone bench. It was chilly, but we were out of the wind.

"Do the king's gardeners come here?" I asked. "Are the trees dead?"

"I don't know." Char was staring at the bench. "Stand up."

I obeyed, of course. He pushed at the seat with his foot, and it moved. "This lifts off," he exclaimed.

"Probably only garden tools," I said, while we lifted it together.

I was right, but not entirely. We found a spade, a pail, and a small rake. And cobwebs, and evidence of mice, although how they got in and out I couldn't tell. And a leather apron. And two things more.

Char twitched the apron aside and found gloves and a pair of slippers. The gloves were stained and riddled with holes, but the slippers sparkled as though newly made. Char lifted them out carefully. "I think they're made of glass!

Here."

He meant