Kenneth Oppel - This Dark endeavor

I dangled. With my feet I kicked at the window, but its leaded panes were very strong. Even if I could’ve cracked the glass, I doubted I could swing myself inside from such a position.

More important, I knew I could not hold on for very long.

With all my might I tried to pull myself back up. My head crested the roof, and I managed to hook my chin over the lip of stone. My flexed arms trembled with fatigue, and I could do no more.

Directly above me came a great clamor, and I glimpsed a throng of people peering over the balustrade, their faces ghastly in the torchlight. I saw Elizabeth and Henry, my mother and father-but it was Konrad onto whom my gaze locked. Around one of the balustrade’s posts, he had tied his cloak, so that it hung down like a rope. And then I heard my mother’s shrieks of protest, and my father’s angry shouts, as Konrad swung himself over the top of the balustrade. He grabbed hold of the cloak, and half climbed, half slid, down to its very end.

Even as the strength ebbed from my arms and hands, I watched, enthralled. Konrad’s legs still dangled some six feet from my little roof, and his landing spot was not generous. He glanced down, and let go. He hit the roof standing, teetered off balance-to the gasps of all the onlookers-and then crouched, low and steady.

“Konrad,” I wheezed. I knew I had only seconds left before my muscles failed and my fingers unlocked. He reached out for me.

“No!” I grunted. “I’ll pull you off!”

“Do you wish to die?” he shouted, making to grab my wrists.

“Sit down!” I told him. “Back against the wall. There’s a stone ledge. Brace your feet against it!”

He did as I instructed, then reached for my hands with both of his. I did not know how this could work, for we weighed the same, and gravity was against us.

And yet… and yet… with our hands grasping the other’s wrists, his legs pushing against the stone ledge, he pulled with all his strength-and then something more still-and lifted me up and over the roof’s edge. I collapsed on top of my twin brother. I was shaking and crying and laughing all at once.

“You fool,” he gasped. “You great fool. You almost died.”

It’s a terrible thing,” I said, “To be crippled in the prime of one’s life.”

“You’ve sprained your ankle,” said Konrad wryly. “Elizabeth, why on earth do you keep pushing him around in that wheelchair?”

“Oh,” said Elizabeth, laughing, “I find it amusing. For now.”

“Dr. Lesage said it mustn’t bear any weight for a week,” I protested.

Afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows of the west sitting room, one of the many large and elegantly furnished chambers in the chateau. It was a Sunday, four days since my brush with death. Father had gone into Geneva to tend to some urgent business, and my mother had accompanied him to visit an ailing aunt in town. My two younger brothers, Ernest, who was nine, and William, who had scarcely learned to walk, were with Justine, their nanny, in the courtyard, planting a small vegetable garden for their amusement.

“Honestly,” said Konrad, shaking his head, “it’s like a nurse-maid with a pram.”

I turned to Elizabeth. “I think our Konrad wants a turn in the chair. He’s feeling left out.”

I glanced back at my brother, hoping for a satisfying reaction. His face was virtually identical to my own, and even our parents sometimes had trouble telling us apart from a distance, for we shared the same brooding demeanor: dark and abundant hair that had a habit of falling across our eyes, high cheekbones, heavy eyebrows, a square jaw. Mother often lamented what she called the “ruthless turn” of our lips. A Frankenstein trait; it did not come from the Beaufort side of the family, she was quite certain.

“Victor,” my brother said, “I’m starting to doubt that your ankle’s even sprained. You’re playacting. Again. Come on. Up you get!”

“I’m not strong enough!” I objected. “Elizabeth, you were there when the doctor examined me! Tell him!”

Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. “I seem to recall he said it might be sprained. Slightly.”

“You should be ready to hobble about, then!” Konrad proclaimed, trying to haul me from the chair. “You don’t want to get sickly!”

“Mother will be vexed!” I said, fighting back. “This could leave me permanently lame.”

“You two,” said Elizabeth with a sigh, and then she began giggling, for it must have been a comic sight, the two of us wrestling while the wheelchair rolled and skidded about. At last the chair tipped over, spilling me onto the floor.

“You madman!” I cried, getting to my feet. “Is this how you treat an invalid?”

“A little diva is what you are,” said Konrad. “Look at you, standing!”

I hunched, wincing for effect, but Konrad started laughing, and I did too. It was hard to watch oneself laughing without doing the same.

“It’s still sore,” I said, testing the foot gingerly.

He passed me the crutches that Dr. Lesage had brought. “Try these,” he said, “and let Elizabeth have a rest.”

Elizabeth had righted the wheelchair and arranged herself gracefully on the cushioned seat. “You little wretch,” she said to me, her hazel eyes narrowing. “It’s very comfortable. I can see why you didn’t want to get out!”

Elizabeth was a distant cousin of ours, from Father’s side of the family. When she was only five, her mother died, and her father remarried and promptly abandoned her to an Italian convent. When Father got word of this, some two years later, he traveled at once to the convent and brought her home to us.

When she’d first arrived, she was like a feral cat. She hid. Konrad and I, seven years old, were forever trying to find her. To us it was a wonderful game of hide-and-seek. But it was no amusement to her; she just wanted to be left alone. If we found her, she became very angry. She hissed and snarled and hit. Sometimes she bit.

Mother and Father told us she needed time. Elizabeth, they said, had not wanted to leave the convent. The nuns had been very kind to her, and their affection had been the closest thing she’d known to a mother’s love. She hadn’t wanted to be torn away from them to live with strangers. Konrad and I were told to let her be, but of course we did nothing of the sort.

We continued to pursue her for the next two months. Then, one day, when we found her latest hiding place, she actually smiled. I almost yelped in surprise.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered us. “Count to a hundred and find me again.”

And then it truly was a game, and from that moment the three of us were inseparable. Her laughter filled the house, and her sullenness and silence disappeared.

Her temper, however, did not.

Elizabeth was fiery. She did not lose her temper quickly, but when she did, all her old wildcat fury returned. Growing up together, she and I often came to blows over some disagreements. She even bit me once, when I suggested girls’ brains were smaller than boys’. Konrad never seemed to infuriate her like I could, but she and I fought tooth and claw.

Now that we were sixteen, all that was far behind us.

“Well, then,” said Konrad, grinning wickedly at Elizabeth, “you shall finally have your turn in the chair.”

At top speed he propelled her out of the sitting room and down the great hallway, me hurrying to keep up on my crutches, and then tossing them aside and running after them on my miraculously healed ankle.

Great portraits of our ancestors looked smugly down at me as I ran past. A full suit of armor, brandishing a sword still stained with blood, stood sentry in a niche.