Fyre (37 page)

“My mother looked a little annoyed, I thought, but she nodded and said, ‘Very well, Mama, I am sure you know best as always. I shall see you in the morning . . .
Jenna
.’ She always said my name like it made a bad taste in her mouth.

“My grandmother took me to a long narrow room that led off from the big upstairs hall. She was really sweet and told me not to worry and that ‘everything is just as it should be, Jenna dear.’ The bed was cold and lumpy, and when I lay down it smelled damp, but I didn’t care. I was
so
tired and I just longed to be back home with Mum and Dad and wake up to find that this was all a dream.

“When I did actually wake up, I thought for a moment that I
was
in a dream. But it smelled so different from home—so damp and old—that I soon remembered. I tried to get back to sleep but I couldn’t, so I decided to explore. Someone had lit a candle and left it on a table by the door, so I took it and crept out of the room.

“Once I was out of my stuffy room and in the upstairs hall, I felt quite excited. It was much nicer being on my own and not feeling upset all the time about my mother. So I decided to look around. It was dark and my candle didn’t shed much light but I could see delicate old chairs and tiny sofas, each with a table, set along the walls between the massively tall double doors that opened off. On every table burned a candle so I could see the walls really clearly, especially as they were covered in gold leaf, which shone even though I could tell it was very old. It was a beautiful place.”

“
Pa
lace,” Nicko said, grinning. “
Another
one.”

Jenna stuck her tongue out at her brother. “Yes, Nicko, another Palace. One needs at least
three
. So anyway, rude boy, I decided to head for the huge window at the end of the hall and see what was outside. I tiptoed past beautiful paintings hung all over the wall—all of people who looked a little bit like me, I thought. But they weren’t Queens or anything special, just people in all kinds of old-fashioned clothes. And as I went by I felt like they were all looking down at me, kind of saying hello. It was weird, but nice too because I began to feel that I belonged, that somehow I was part of this place just as much as I was part of the Castle back home.

“So I got to the huge window—which had rows of little circles of glass in it—and I looked out. It was amazing. Outside there was a river, not very wide compared with ours, but totally different. It had houses all along it on both sides and there was no riverbank because all the houses went straight down into the water. And they were really,
really
old. Some were kind of falling into the water, some were wrapped up in what looked like shiny paper and others were just about okay. There were lights on and I could see people moving about inside them; I could look right into their rooms. But no one noticed me and I just watched and watched. A few boats came down the river; some were quite big and made a strange noise. And they moved without sails or oars too. There weren’t many because I could tell it was really late, but I could still hear the sounds of people laughing and talking and having fun.”

Jenna continued. “So there I was, watching from the window, feeling quite happy, really, when I heard a soft, smothered cough from somewhere way back in the big room behind me. I decided to act like I had known whoever-it-was had been there all the time—which I was suddenly sure they had been. I swung around and stared into the dark. I could see nothing in the middle, just the edge of the room in the low lights of the little candles on the tables and the soft shine of the walls, but I wasn’t going to let the watcher know that.

“‘Good evening,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe we have been introduced.’ My voice sounded weird in the dark and I realized that this was the first time I had spoken in that place.

“‘Good evening,’ came a reply. The voice surprised me—it was a girl. She had a really weird accent and she sounded a bit like that stupid witch Marissa. So I wasn’t about to like her.”

“You and Marissa fallen out, have you?” teased Nicko.

“She’s a two-faced cow,” said Jenna.

“Fair enough.”

“Anyway, I told this girl that it was rude to hide away in the shadows and stare. By then I could see better in the dark and I saw that she was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room. I saw her get up and walk toward me. I decided not to move.
She
could come to
me
.” Jenna smiled. “I guess I was already picking up some Queen stuff.

“As she came closer I could see that she looked nothing like Marissa at all, so I felt a lot better about her. She turned out to be really nice. She came up and kissed me on both cheeks—that’s what they do there to say hello—”

“Sounds fun,” Nicko said with a grin.

“Nicko, you have become so
rude
recently,” Jenna told him sternly. “You spend too much time in the Port.”

Nicko looked sheepish.

“Actually, if you had been there you would never have met any girls at all, because it turned out that girls pretty much weren’t allowed out. If they did go somewhere they were never on their own. I wasn’t allowed out, that was for sure. If it hadn’t been for Julia—that was her name—I wouldn’t have seen anything but the inside of that crumbly old Palace and what I could see from the window. All the time that I spent there I was with my mother and grandmother.” Jenna sighed. “Gosh, I was
so
bored sometimes. They droned on and on about our family and where they came from, all the things I was expected to do when I got home, blah blah blah.”

“So if girls weren’t allowed out, how did you and Julia get away with it?” asked Nicko.

“We wore masks. At night anyone could go
anywhere
with a mask on. All you needed was a long cloak and a pair of boy’s shoes. As long as you didn’t speak, everyone thought you were a boy. It was brilliant. Julia took me to all kinds of places. It was a beautiful city.”

Jim Knee finished his last potato. Very quietly he got to his feet and moved away into the shadows. He felt sick, not because he had eaten nearly two pounds of roast potatoes and half a greasy chicken, but because he had spent thirty years of a life in the place that Jenna described—and fifteen of those had been in a prison just below the waterline that had flooded with every high tide. The dank, nasty smell of it had suddenly washed right over him.

No one noticed Jim Knee get up. Jenna continued her story. “If it hadn’t been for Julia I would never have met the Alchemists.”

“There were
Alchemists
there?” asked Septimus.

“You bet. I know so much more about Marcellus now. That’s where they come from, Sep. The same place as I do—or my family did once, a very,
very
long time ago. They are from an island in the Lagoon.”

“The Lagoon?”

“Yep. That’s what the whole place was called. It was full of islands. We were on the biggest one, but there was another where the Alchemists lived—where they made a special kind of dark Glass. You know, Sep, like the one that Marcellus made.”

“Oh.
That
.” Septimus grimaced. He still had nightmares about being pulled through Marcellus’s Glass.

Jenna looked around and lowered her voice. “There was loads of Castle stuff there, Sep. I wished so much that you could have been there to see it all too. In fact, there was so much I—
what was that
?”

There was a loud
crash
behind them. A hidden door in the paneling sprang open and from it two wild-eyed Heap uncles came screaming into the hall.

32

H
EAPS VERSUS
H
EAPS

T
here was a moment of
stillness while the opposing Heap camps stood staring at each other, both equally shocked. With their typically Heap straw hair awry, their old multicolored robes hanging from them, wet and filthy with mud, it looked like it was just daft old uncles Edmund and Ernold who had crashed out of the wall. A pang of pity went through the four genuine Heaps at the sight of them. Jenna had to fight back a desire to rush over and ask them to come and sit by the fire. For some moments no one moved. The invaders took stock, their gaze traveling around the hall, eyes like searchlights, alighting on each occupant, noting them and moving on to the next as if checking off a list.

Those on the list stared back, like frozen rabbits. Time slowed; the moment seemed to last forever until—
crash!
—the door in the paneling slammed shut. In a flash Simon threw himself in front of Jenna but Nicko shoved him away. Simon swung around angrily. “I’m not going to hurt her, Nik!”

“I
know
that. But you’re needed. You gotta stop them. You and Sep. Use your
Darke
stuff, Si—
anything
!”

Simon grinned—Nicko had called him
Si
. It was all Heaps together now, just like it used to be. Heaps against the world, although right now it still felt like Heaps against Heaps. It was hard not to believe Ernold and Edmund were playing a bizarre practical joke.

Suddenly any lingering doubts evaporated—they spoke. Switching seamlessly from one to another, in voices cold and empty as if they came from the bottom of a deep, dark cave.

“We have.”

“Come for.”

“The.”

“Princess.”

Their voices had a bad effect on Jenna. It was as if some ancestral memory had kicked in. Fighting off the urge to run screaming from the room—which she guessed was exactly what the Wizards wanted—Jenna steeled herself to reply. Maybe, she thought, if she answered calmly, they would merely pay their respects and leave. Jenna took a deep breath to steady her voice only to find, to her irritation, that Simon was answering for her.

“She is not here,” he said.

The Wizards exchanged knowing smiles.

“Nomis.”

Simon flinched at the mention of his
Darke
name.

“You are.”

“One.”

“Of us.”

“No!” said Simon. “I am—”

“Not,” Septimus finished for him, deliberately echoing the Wizards.

“You.”

“Lie,” snarled the Wizards.

“We see.”

“The Princess.”

“And you
are
.”

“One of.”

“Usssssss.” The last word was hissed like a snake rearing up to strike.

With that, the Heap uncles lurched forward, like a pair of automatons. This odd gait was mainly due to their utter exhaustion, but it was also because there was still just enough of Ernold and Edmund Heap left to resist the
Darke
Wizards’ intentions.

Septimus, Nicko, Jenna and Simon backed away toward the door. In the shadows behind the approaching Wizards Septimus could see the nervous wobble of a yellow stack of doughnuts, but he put Jim Knee out of his mind. Right now he needed to focus on one thing. He had to raise a
SafeShield
—something he had never done before.

Deciding to
Shield
only Jenna and Nicko—the less people
Shielded
, the more effective the
Shield
—Septimus put his arm around Simon’s shoulders and walked him sideways out of the
Shield
space and then he spun around, clenched his fists and threw them open. To Septimus’s relief a bright band of purple light shot out from his raised hands and, to Jenna and Nicko’s surprise, dropped over them to form a small, cloudy dome. It was a very basic
SafeShield
, but it did the job. Jenna and Nicko stared out like a couple of mice trapped under a bell jar. The
Darke
Wizards laughed.

“How very.”

“Quaint.”

There was a sharp
snap
like bones cracking, a flash of light, and suddenly Edmund and Ernold Heap were each holding a gleaming black stave, smooth as glass.

Simon stared at the staves in horror. He had never seen one, but he knew at once what they were:
Volatile Wands
. He knew that within them, concentrated in the tiny silver spine that ran through the length of the
Wand
, lay a distillation of
Darke
power.
Volatile Wands
were powerful, accurate and incredibly dangerous. Simon felt sick—they didn’t have a chance.

There was a thunderous
craaaack
. The walls of the hall shook and from the ends of each
Wand
a bullet of light emerged, z
ub zub
, heading straight for the
SafeShield
. Jenna and Nicko threw themselves to the ground but the bullets never reached the
Shield
—Simon twisted his cloak up into the air and caught them. His cloak burst into flames and, unperturbed, as though his cloak caught fire on a regular basis, Simon threw it to the floor and stamped on it.

“Come on,” he dared the Wizards. “You can do better than that.”

Septimus thought Simon was being a little rash. He had no doubt that not only could the Wizards easily do better than that, but they were about to prove it.