Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (14 page)

151

adventure came from abandoning ourselves to the desperate needs of others. And this, more than anything, gave us happiness."

"It must have been something else to see Thorn with her mother and father again after so long," I said quietly. Roland, the battered old man of the Lonely Sea, turned away and I had to wonder if he was wiping away a tear.

"A terrible childhood like the one Thomas and I endured can be redeemed," he said over his shoulder, "if only we can hold on to a few good memories. A few moments of joy overcome a thousand lonely nights at sea."

Sitting on the deck of the Warwick Beacon, I could imagine how thoughts such as Thorn's release from captivity and reunion with her parents could keep Roland going through untold days and nights at sea, even if he was made to take the journey alone.

"And now we turn to the Wakefield House and the great mystery it revealed to me," said Roland.

"Wait just a minute." Yipes, quiet and reflective up to that point, was suddenly alert and questioning. "You can't jump all the way down the side of the mountain and out of the wild just like that. That's not fair! What about Thorn? What happened to her?"

"She was home, and we were but a day's journey from our destination," said Roland. "We needed only to make our way down the side of Mount Norwood and walk along the cliffs at the edge of the Lonely Sea. We stayed on in the aspen grove for a night and a morning, but it wouldn't have

152

been right for us to stay there longer than that. And besides, we were eager to find the Western Kingdom and see the Wakefield House. Thorn and her parents walked with us down the mountain, but when we reached the bottom it was time for us to part ways. There was no question that Thorn would stay home. She had waited too long to return to it."

There was a silence in the night as Yipes and I both thought about leaving Thorn behind. It was one of the troubles with journeys and adventures -- we were always finding new friends and leaving others behind in the wake of our movements. I came to realize something then that I hadn't thought of before. Someday I would have to stop leaving and start staying, or I might find myself old and gray with an exciting life behind me and no one to remember it with on a porch with a cup of tea. It was something of a curse -- this need for always going farther, deeper into the wild. I wondered if I would someday outgrow it.

"Did you ever see Thorn again?" I asked.

"I did not," said Roland. "But I see her every day in my memory. I see her standing at the foot of the mountains, restored to her parents and her home. She said she would watch over us, from a distance, and that she would never forget what we'd done for her. And I do feel her watching over me, sheltering me as she once did on that first perilous journey into the wild. Without her, the rest of our story would have gone unwritten."

153

Roland sat down upon a three-legged stool we'd brought out for him hours ago.

"Her spirit remains," he concluded, "ever watching, ever protecting an old man at sea."

"I'm ready then," said Yipes, surprising both Roland and me with his quick and unexpected resolve. "Let's leave her behind if we must, but do go on with the story. I'm wide-awake and it's so still on the water tonight. You must tell us the rest. You must tell us right now!"

"How right you are," said Roland, laughing momentarily at the enthusiasm of our companion. "I must tell you the rest before dawn comes to the Lonely Sea, whether you like it or not."

154

***

CHAPTER 17

The Wakefield House

As we drew farther away along the cliffs, I felt Thorn watching us from somewhere atop the mountain, and I felt that other set of eyes watching us -- the ones that were larger and scarier -- from somewhere in the hidden realm of the wild. Whatever it was had stopped moving with us, and it seemed as if it was watching us from a hidden place in our past, not wanting us to escape into a new day. For a long time I had wondered when it would choose to pounce on us. Now, with the feeling of its presence weakening on each step out of the mountains, I began to think the feeling of being watched had been only a dramatic figment of my imagination. As much as I'd loved the thrill of our flight through Fenwick Forest and over Mount Norwood, I was glad to be free of this unseen fear that had haunted our movements.

Out in the open along the cliffs it seemed far less wild, as though we were at a threshold between the tamed and the untamed world. We'd come only a short distance away from the base of the mountain and were without Thorn to protect us. Thomas

155

and I walked that way and stopped many times so that he could paint pictures of what he saw. He painted the forest and mountains from memory and the clouds over the Lonely Sea and the Dark Hills off in the distance. From that point on, he was most fond of using a brush made from Thorn's fur rather than any from the children at the House on the Hill.

"You'd better slow down," I said, watching him busy at his work. "If you keep it up you might run out of pages."

He scowled at me, but he knew it was true and couldn't help flipping his fingers through the remaining pages of the journal... as if he didn't already know the exact number that remained. He put his things away and looked off in the direction we were heading.

"Do you see that?" he said, pocketing his journal and box of supplies.

"What?" I didn't know what he was talking about.

"Don't you see it there? That tall thing. It's the same color as the things behind it, but it sticks up high in the air."

I still couldn't see what he meant, and thought he might be either making it up to play a trick on me or seeing some sort of mirage in the rising heat of the morning. But as we walked on I, too, began

156

to see the extraordinarily high, thin structure in the distance, as well as the small houses scattered at its base.

The Western Kingdom was before us, and we couldn't help but believe that the tall spire that rose into the sky was the Wakefield House. We had come at last to the place we'd been searching for.

We quickened our pace and talked nervously about what we would do when we arrived at the edge of town. I was convinced we should wait until dark, then go in for a look around. But Thomas didn't understand the logic of such an idea.

"Why would we want to do that?" he asked. "We're so far from home, nobody will have a clue where we've come from. We've endured a lake of fire, a swarm of giant bees, a pack of hungry wolves, and a monstrous bear, not to mention all the blisters on my feet. I'm going right in there. You can stay back if you want."

Of course, I wasn't about to stay behind and let him go alone. His mind was made up, and I knew better than to try and change it. So we walked the rest of the way with a heightened exhilaration, knowing we were about to stand at the foot of the Wakefield House. We stopped only once, about a quarter of a mile from the Western Kingdom, so that Thomas could paint the rising house from a

157

distance. It was an extraordinary sight, as much for its height as its location. The Western Kingdom, it turned out, had been improperly named, probably by someone living there who wished it were worthy of such a title. It would be hard to refer to this place we'd stumbled upon as a town, let alone a kingdom, because once you got past the grandeur of the Wakefield House there wasn't much of anything else to see. It was like looking at a single gray tree trunk soaring into the sky, surrounded by a scattered collection of pebbles and dirt clods at its base.

When Thomas was finished painting, we quietly walked the last of the cliff-side trail into the Western Kingdom, watching the Wakefield House get taller and taller as we went. There was no gate to pass through, and I noticed right away there couldn't have been more than a hundred stone houses in all. There were no cobblestone streets, only dirt pathways with cart-wheel gutters worn into them.

There was a horse tied to a fence post outside the first house we came to, and there was a woman sitting in its doorway eating something soft, squishy, and yellow out of a bowl. She looked up at us uninterestedly and spoke as if we were nothing special.

158

"Come a long way, did you?" she asked, slurping some of the contents of the bowl from her spoon. My stomach growled.

"A very long way," answered Thomas, saying the words in a way that conveyed a craving for something to eat. "We've come to look at the Wakefield House."

"Figured as much," the woman said. "Same reason everyone else comes here."

She had a detached way about her, as if she'd endured this conversation before, and we weren't making it any more interesting than the last time she'd had it. My stomach growled again, and she looked up from her bowl.

"You might as well come over here and get some soup," she offered. "It looks like you two have been living on berries and river water and not much else."

I wasn't entirely sure I wanted what the woman was offering, but she'd spoken the truth about our recent breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Anything at this point would be better than a bowl of berries. She stepped through her front door and acted like she expected us to follow her.

"If you want something to eat, you'll have to come inside," she said. "That's the way it works."

Thomas barely hesitated before making his way past the horse, down the very short path that lay

159

before the house, and through the door. I reluctantly followed, though I had a feeling we were making a mistake following someone we didn't know into a house we'd never seen before.

"Mine's the first house people find in their search for the Wakefield House," she said, dropping a ladle into a small pot sitting on a table and pouring the thick soup off into two bowls. I didn't want to say it, but it looked an awful lot like the stuff Thomas blew out of his nose in the morning without the aide of a handkerchief, aiming for a tree and laughing his head off while everyone around him including me cried eeeeeewwwww.

We took the bowls and the spoons, and Thomas -- always the more reckless between the two of us -- had the spoon filled and into his mouth before I'd finished giving the yellowy, thick soup a good sniff.

"Saaaaaaay," he said, drawing out the word as he filled his spoon again. "This is very good."

"Better be," said the woman. "I got the recipe from a well-to-do chef who traveled all the way over here from the Northern Kingdoms to try his luck at the Wakefield House."

There was a deep pause, and then she said something more.

"He failed, just like all the rest."

I slurped up a spoonful of soup and couldn't help letting out a soft mmmmmmm. It was creamy

160

and sweet, with a tang at the end that made me smack my lips as I drew another spoonful out of the bowl. I looked at the woman across the table and found that it was hard to say how old she was. She was of a sort that no matter her age you couldn't help imagining what she'd looked like when she was nine or ten. She had the bright eyes and pug nose of a child, but the crow's feet and graying temples of a woman of fifty or more. She wore a white, sunny-looking dress that left her long brown arms bare. They were arms of summer, of days in the garden baked by the heat.

"Why did he give you the recipe?" my brother asked. It was a logical question, one that had eluded me for some unknown reason as I gulped down spoonful after spoonful of the wonderful soup.

"When you fail to find the top of the Wakefield House, there is a price to pay," she said. Then, after a slow slurp of her own and a drawn-out pause, she added, "I set the price, and the price for the chef was his most secret recipe, one that had been handed down to him by his mother and her mother before, one that was a family treasure of great worth. The only recipe he wasn't supposed to share with anyone. That's the kind of price I like."

The image of the paper we'd found on the hill of garbage flashed in my mind.

161

Western Kingdom -- Wakefield House -- Miss Flannery -- FAILED!

"You don't by any chance know of a woman named Miss Flannery?" I asked. "We're looking for her, because of a piece of paper we found back home."

The woman reached behind her and pulled a piece of paper off a stack an inch high. It was in the form of a certificate, clean and laced with gold ink. The same four words and the circle and square image we'd seen on the piece of paper from the hill were now before us on the table.

"I'm Miss Flannery," she said, holding out the paper. "Was the sheet you saw one of these by any chance?" she asked.

"It was," I answered. "We found it in a saddlebag attached to an old dead horse. The saddlebag had the name Mingleton branded onto it."

"Mingleton?" she asked, very nearly sounding interested ... but not quite. "I remember Mingleton. That was years ago."

She went back to her soup. It was maddening how she remained so detached, so uninterested.

"So he tried to reach the top of the Wakefield house, but failed?" asked Thomas, trying to draw her out once more.

"He did," said Miss Flannery, flipping a chain