The Familiars (12 page)

“There’s another room,” Skylar called out from up ahead. “They must be back there.”

Aldwyn and Gilbert hurried over to Skylar, eager to rescue the wizards and get out of there. But to their dismay, all they discovered was Agdaleen’s sparsely furnished bedroom.

Jack, Marianne, and Dalton were nowhere to be found.

“Where are they?” asked Gilbert.

“You tell us,” replied Skylar. “It was your puddle vision.”

“Maybe she moved them,” said Gilbert desperately.

“No, I don’t smell Jack’s scent,” said Aldwyn. “He was never here.”

“Are you sure you heard that pond say ‘gray hair witch’?” asked Skylar accusingly.

“Yes, I’m absolutely positive,” answered Gilbert. “I think.”

“Why did we ever listen to you?” said Skylar, shaking her head. “You and your stupid puddle viewings. You never get them right.”

Gilbert shrank back at Skylar’s unkind words. It was clear that he felt terrible.

“I’m sure it was an honest mistake,” said Aldwyn, trying to comfort the guilt-ridden frog. “Now let’s get out of here before the old hag comes back.”

The trio returned to the other room—and nearly leaped out of their skins when they saw the gray-haired witch standing beside the cauldron. She flicked her stringy hair from her eyes to reveal a thin face covered in hideous tattoos that looked as if she had etched them herself, perhaps with her fingernails and most definitely without the aid of a mirror. She stared at the intruders, licking her dry, cracked lips.

“Lucky me,” said Agdaleen in a voice that had gone scratchy from a lifetime of breathing in cauldron fumes. “Usually, I have to go hunting for ingredients.” She gestured to a rack of dried frog legs and bird talons.

The familiars made a run for it, but Agdaleen was quick. She stomped down her sandaled foot, screeching out an ancient evil chant, “
Slikts ieeja augt dervis
!”

A wall of weeds spread across the entranceway, blocking Aldwyn’s, Gilbert’s, and Skylar’s escape.

Agdaleen cocked her head, staring intently at Skylar. “Bird, where did you get that? Your anklet.”

Aldwyn hadn’t given a second thought to the jewel anklet since he had first spied it upon meeting Skylar in Stone Runlet. Why the lace of silver and emerald squares was of interest to this old witch was most curious.

“I don’t abide by the rules,” said Agdaleen. “I’ll kill you just the same.”

Aldwyn glanced at Skylar, who appeared to understand the witch’s words far better than he did. What did this all mean?

“Now into the pot with you!” cackled Agdaleen.

She grabbed a beaker stuffed with octopus intestines and flung it into the cauldron. The iron vat shook and eight fleshy black tentacles sprang from its outer surface. The octopot was quick to lash out. Two of its arms reached for Aldwyn, while another tried to swipe Skylar out of the air. Gilbert hopped behind a shelf for cover as three more arms slithered toward him.

“Oh yes, oh yes!” said Agdaleen as she watched the fun unfold. “Cat’s paw, bird’s beak, frog’s legs. You should make a most delicious stew.”

Aldwyn tried to defend himself as one of the octopot’s tentacles wrapped around his tail. He had heard the old saying that a cat has nine lives, but he had no intention of finding out if it was true. He scratched viciously at the attacking arm, but whatever had been born from Agdaleen’s spell seemed immune to feline claws. Across the room, Gilbert had wedged himself into a distant corner, but the octopot’s reach was too great. It tossed aside the wood shelves as if they were made of paper, closing in on the frightened frog. Meanwhile, up above, every time Skylar tried to utter the words of a spell, a rubbery arm covered her beak.

“Let go of me,” shouted Aldwyn as he was pulled up off his feet and into the air. He looked down and saw that he was now dangling over a boiling broth. “On second thought, I take that back. Do
not
let go of me.”

The tentacle began to shove Aldwyn down toward the scalding and bubbling stew, ready to
dunk him under. Aldwyn gripped the edge of the pot. It was hot to the touch, but a few singed paws were better than being boiled alive!

With nowhere to hide, Gilbert was bouncing as fast as he could across the room, ducking and dodging the swinging arms.

“I could use a little help here,” he called out to his companions.

“I know what you mean,” screamed Aldwyn. His claws scraped against the sides of the octopot.

Skylar had dug her talons into one of the ceiling beams but a high-reaching tentacle was still wrapped around her wing and beak, trying to wrestle her free.

Agdaleen picked up a fire poker and walked over to the cauldron’s side, where Aldwyn was clinging on for dear life.

“You’re going to taste good with a little salt and pepper,” she said as she swung the poker down on Aldwyn’s paws.

He winced from the blow and only just managed to hold on. His hind legs burned as boiling bubbles burst below him. Agdaleen tried pushing
him in with the poker’s sharp point, but Aldwyn shifted his weight just before it hit. Instead, the poker pierced Jack’s pouch near its top. Aldwyn looked through the hole in the bag and spotted among the ground glow worm and steel marbles a fistful of clovers, mostly the four-leaf variety, but a three-leaf one was shoved in there, too. Suddenly Dalton’s warning to Jack during their walkabout rang in his memory:
You’re only supposed to take the ones with four leaves. Anything less can curse a whole spell
.

Aldwyn’s eyes lit up, and his attention immediately focused on the single three-leaf clover buried at the bottom of the pouch. He stretched his neck and managed to pluck it out with his teeth. Then he exhaled, blowing it from his mouth down to the potion.

“Please work, please work, please work,” he hoped aloud.

But before the clover reached the mustard-colored liquid, a bubble of steam popped and blew it against the inside wall of the cauldron, where it got stuck. Aldwyn’s eyes went wide. “No!”

He reached out his front paw, but the clover
was just too far away. Another tentacle came and grabbed him around his neck, attempting to force him into the stew. Agdaleen had turned her attention to Skylar, swinging her poker wildly at the bird, who was being suffocated by one of the pot’s arms as she fluttered back and forth, trying to escape. Gilbert played leapfrog over the swinging arms, but it was clear he was growing tired.

Aldwyn stretched out his tail as far as he could until the very tip touched the three leaves of green. In Bridgetower, street cats had to learn to use all four of their paws with equal skill, but the truly smart ones trained their tails, too. With one strained flick he sent the clover into the vat, and this time it landed squarely in the broth.

In an instant, the yellow liquid turned bright blue and began swirling counterclockwise. The tentacles that had sprouted from Agdaleen’s spell let go of Aldwyn, released Skylar, and stopped their pursuit of Gilbert as well. It only took Aldwyn a moment to climb over the cauldron’s edge and leap to freedom. Then something unexpected happened. The octopot turned its deadly attacks on Agdaleen. With alarming speed, the
thick arms closed around the old witch’s ankles and wrists.

“What’s going on?” she squealed in panic and disbelief. “I command you, release me at once!”

Aldwyn, Skylar, and Gilbert watched as she was lifted off the ground and the tentacles dragged her kicking and screaming over the cauldron.

“How dare you disobey me!” screamed Agdaleen.

The octopot’s tentacles dunked the crone headfirst into the scalding soup, and as her gray hairs melted from her scalp, she let out a terrifying wail. Within seconds, only her sandaled feet stuck out above the whirlpool of boiling broth. And that’s when Aldwyn noticed it: around her bony, shriveled foot there was a silver and emerald anklet identical to Skylar’s. It disappeared into the pot before the others could see.

The weeds blocking the hut’s entryway fell to the ground, and the three familiars didn’t wait to see what would happen next. They beat a hasty retreat, and no one said a word until the straw-and-bone hut was just a dot in the distance.

“What was that all about back there?” Aldwyn
asked Skylar, finally breaking the silence. “That business about your anklet?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It was given to me as a gift when I graduated from the Aviary.”

Aldwyn wasn’t certain he believed her, and for a moment considered mentioning what he had seen on Agdaleen’s ankle. But if he confronted Skylar about her lies, then he might be confronted about his own. So he stayed quiet.

“I’m afraid we’re left with no choice but to travel to the Ocean Oracle,” said Skylar. “It will be a long and dangerous trek to get there, but I don’t know who else has the certainty of vision to tell us where to find our loyals.”

“Well, there is somebody closer,” said Gilbert, a bit reluctantly, “but he scares me even more than Agdaleen.”

Aldwyn and Skylar both looked at him.

“My dad.”

9

THE TREE FROGS OF DAKU

I
t turned out Gilbert wasn’t exaggerating. He truly was terrified of his dad. All the way from the edge of the Weed Barrens to the nameless marshes through which they were now walking, Aldwyn and Skylar had listened to how Gilbert’s demanding, perfectionist father had always criticized him, starting with the crooked gills he was born with as a tadpole. Gilbert went on to tell how every parent of a tree frog raised in the swamps of Daku had high hopes for their young, but none had higher expectations than his
own father, the clan leader and master seer.

“And as if it wasn’t bad enough having a dad who made me feel terrible about the mistakes I made,” said Gilbert, “he scolded me for stuff I hadn’t even done yet!”

“I guess that’s one of the disadvantages of having a parent who can see into the future,” said Aldwyn.

“That does sound unfortunate, Gilbert. I can see why you wouldn’t want to return,” Skylar said. “So, how quickly can we get there?” she added, cheery and upbeat.

Gilbert scrunched up his face, squirming with dread.

“Don’t give me that look. If your father is as wise as you make him out to be, we just might have a chance of saving Dalton, Jack, and Marianne yet,” said Skylar.

“I know, I know,” Gilbert said. “You’re right.”

As the sun dropped toward the horizon, midday turning to late afternoon, the familiars traveled farther, the ground becoming more moist with every step. Aldwyn’s pace slowed. He was unable to walk as briskly; and his paws were dripping
with heavy, foul-smelling mud. He more than once found himself knee-deep in peat bogs, a sure sign that the swamplands were close.

“Home sweet home,” said Gilbert with what sounded like genuine nostalgia as he happily inhaled the scent of swamp grime and mildew.

Swarms of mosquitoes had begun to follow the familiars. While Gilbert was lapping up mouthfuls of them, Aldwyn couldn’t keep them away and soon was covered in bites, most of them on his hindside.

It wasn’t long before the murky water had become so deep that Gilbert, Aldwyn, and Skylar had to climb onto a log floating in the swamp. The familiars paddled past some muck vines and four chameleon crabs building a dam out of tree branches. The magical crabs were recognizable to Aldwyn from the shopkeeper’s demonstration during his brief stay in the familiar store. The three animals continued toward two cypress trees that Gilbert said marked the entrance to the frog village where he had once lived.

“My brothers and sisters and I used to play hide-and-seek right over there,” said Gilbert, pointing
to the muck below the trees. “They never were able to find me. Of course, now that I think about it, I’m not sure they ever bothered looking.”

“Did you have many brothers and sisters?” asked Aldwyn.

“No, we were a small family. There were just the sixty-two of us.”

As they steered closer to the cypress archway that welcomed visitors to Daku, two slender lengths of wood glided out from beyond the hanging vines. Each was guided by a pair of tree frogs using bamboo spears to push through the water.