Into The Mist (Land of Elyon) (20 page)

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slowly touch each of the paintings Thomas Warvold had made.

"You'll find I've scratched a few notes in there along the margins, but not many," said Roland. "Mostly I just look at the pictures. But I've looked at them long enough.

"If you want to know what Alistair told us that day on Mount Laythen," he said, "all the facts are written down in the back of that book. Since the book is now in your possession, maybe you could read it to us and give an old man a moment to gather his thoughts of what remains. "

I lifted Into the Mist from my chest and quietly turned to the back, flipping rapidly and glancing away as my finger fanned the edge of each painted page. Yipes leaned in close and kept putting his hand out in the fanning pages, trying to stop them from turning so fast, but each time he did, I moved the journal away where his short arms couldn't reach. I wanted an hour or a day with each page; I wanted to imprint each image in my mind, to savor the book. I arrived at the very last few pages and, from the corner of my eye, could see that there were only words and tiny sketches, as if Thomas had taken a moment here and there in the telling to scribble in the margins. I cleared my throat and held my hands a little closer to the candlelight. Then I read what was written in the back of the book, and it began with a single name on a line all its own.

Grindall

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Grindall.

To know your past you must hear this name, for it is he who set you on the way to yesterday, into the secret realm of Mount Lay-then. He ruled Castalia, the land your father lived in. His descendants rule it still.

Grindall was a cruel man. Through cunning and deceit he attained supremacy over the race of giants and used them to force his will on the people of Castalia. He used trickery to achieve his throne, and violence to keep his power. He did not love the people he reigned over, and this turned his heart small and black over time.

But your father was not the kind of man who scared easily, and he was compelled to lead a secret rebellion intent on removing Grindall and the giants from power. There were three years of quiet planning in dark corners of dark rooms, gathering weapons and plotting every detail. It was during these three years that the two of you were born.

When you, Thomas, were three, and you, Roland, were two, revolution came to Castalia. Your father led every detail of the uprising. He was at once a man of great courage and astounding intellect, a leader of the kind from which legends are made. But there are times in which a legend is made not on the battlefield, but in the desperate hour of defeat. And so it was with your father.

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He failed in his attempt to seize the throne, though he very nearly succeeded. There came a moment in the conflict in which your mother and the two of you, though hidden well, were discovered by the enemy and taken to the Dark Tower. It was said that you -- his only children -- would be spared if only your father would lay down his sword and end the uprising.

And it was here -- in the hour of defeat -- that your father changed the course of history. I am very sorry to say that your father and mother were not spared, but were made to climb to the very top of the Dark Tower and walk a narrow plank until, together, they slipped and fell into the open air. All of Castalia stood below and watched them descend, but all turned away as they reached the bottom. All but one.

You sit now in the presence of that one, the giant Armon, for he is the one giant who has always secretly been the enemy of Grindall. In the end it is he who has made all the difference.

With the death of your father, the rebellion was put down. Grindall had learned an important lesson: There would be others who might try to rise up against him, but they could be stopped before their time, if only he knew who they were. From then on, every Castalian boy and girl was brought before Grindall in the Dark Tower at the age of five and again at the age of seven. Grindall eyed them carefully, gave them sweets, asked them questions. He was looking for certain traits -- boys or girls who had it in them

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to become leaders of some distant rebellion, if they were unusually smart, he kept them, if they were rude and boisterous, he kept them. If the other children seemed to follow them about, he kept them. These children were never returned, and they became known as the lost children, gone forever.

But even Grindall had his limitations for doing evil, and it fell to Armon to get rid of the lost children. It was Armon's responsibility -- his sworn duty to Grindall -- to do away with all of them. Grindall chose them, but he sent them immediately to the underground realm of Armon, in the dark beating heart of the tower.

You were the first, the two of you. The first lost children. And you were by far the youngest -- at only two and three -- to ever have such a heartbreaking name. Before any of the other lost children knew their fate, you were already gone! Seeing your father and mother destroyed by Grindall had made Armon think dangerous thoughts. How could he get rid of two boys, and yet not do away with them ? There was one place that struck him -- one place where two small children might not be found.

By cover of night, Armon took you out past the great lake, to a secret place known only to a few. He took you up Mount Lay-then -- by the way of yesterday -- to the very place you find yourselves in now.

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"How many lost children are there?" asked Yipes. "How many have there been?" He was very curious about children being taken from their parents and hidden away.

Roland didn't seem to know or didn't want to tell. He only said there were many, and that as far as he was aware, all of them had been saved by Armon.

"How long did this go on?" I asked, adding the years up in my mind and coming to a bigger number than I thought possible.

"Through all of the last five reigns of the line of Grindall, to the very days leading up to your own encounter with the last of them."

"Victor Grindall," whispered Yipes. "The worst of them all."

"Not true," said Roland. "All the others were as bad or worse. Victor Grindall was a madman, and that set him apart from his ancestors, but those that came before him were as cruel as he was. They wanted only to have power, as much as could be had, and it was the power itself that eventually did them in."

I thought about this idea for a moment in the quiet of the night, listening to the ancient wooden boards of the Warwick Beacon creaking on the soft waves. A quest for power ends in despair. There is no other way.

"Shall I go on?" said Roland. "And tell you about our time with Sir Alistair Wakefield? There are things we learned there that I think you'll find interesting."

Yipes and I both nodded vigorously, and I clutched the

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precious logbook to my chest. I felt I hadn't really paid for it with something of my own, and there was only one thing I possessed that seemed a worthy gift in return.

"Roland," I said, pulling something from my own pocket, something I'd carried with me all the way back in the days of walled cities and visits to Bridewell. "I want you to have this."

I held my mother's spyglass out over the candles. She had etched and painted it so perfectly, with all the colors and paisley patterns I loved to look at, but I knew then that it hadn't always looked that way.

"This is the spyglass you retrieved from the Wakefield House, isn't it?" I asked.

Roland looked longingly at it, as though he were back in the twisting halls with his older brother, trying to find his way out. "It is the very same one."

"Did Thomas Warvold give it to my mother?" I asked.

"He did," Roland answered, taking it carefully from my hand. "And now it comes full circle, back into my possession. It's no small thing, you giving me this."

I had the feeling then that he'd always wanted it back but hadn't been able to ask me for it. It was hard to let it go, because it was something that took me dancing into the past whenever I held it or looked through it. I always expected to see something exciting when I put it to my eye, and this was a feeling I'd come to long for.

Roland put the spyglass in his pocket, and in a way it

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was gone forever. He would let me use it, but it would never be truly mine again. Looking at the logbook in my hand, I knew Roland felt just as I did. We'd both lost something, and had both gained something.

"Off we go then," said Roland, suddenly full of vigor. "I don't mind telling you, my memories of our time with Sir Alistair Wakefield are among my favorites. And we must finish within the hour if you two are to get any sleep at all tonight."

He began again, taking us back to a time and a place of deep magic I hadn't anticipated.

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***

CHAPTER 23

The Past and the Future

At some point between all the questions and the eating of too much good food, I became exhausted in that special way in which a great task is complete and rest comes naturally. All my senses started to shut down at once as late afternoon crept over the terrace. It felt as if the tremendous strain of the previous days had caught up to me all at once.

I slept for a few hours, then woke briefly as night was coming on, and I saw Thomas lying next to me. Armon was gone.

"He'll be back soon enough," said Alistair, who sat close by rocking in an old chair he'd brought out from somewhere. "Go back to sleep. You need rest more than anything."

And so it was that we slept through the night, awakening in the morning to the sharp smells of ripe berries and the wonderful aroma of fresh baked bread floating over the terrace. For some reason my mind drifted away from the lost children and the story we'd been told of our past. The idea of my parents falling to their deaths hung over me, but I must say it was like a distant haze, as though time

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were drawing the memory out on a piece of thread and I could only grasp at it. I realize this sounds strange, but we were drawn into Alistair's world in a way that made time seem less meaningful.

"You come now to a time of training and of reawakening your past," said Alistair. We did not fully appreciate what this meant the first time we heard it, but within a few days under the guiding hand of Sir Alistair Wakefield, it became very clear what he'd meant. In the morning hours he focused all of his considerable knowledge directly on the two of us, as though he'd been awaiting our arrival for a long time and had planned out an entire curriculum for us to learn. There was a brief time of learning together, and then he would single one of us out while the other tinkered on some project he'd assigned.

To Thomas fell the vast storehouse of Alistair's architectural genius. He taught Thomas how to build all kinds of things, beginning with small scale models of the terrace and the Wakefield House. I was astounded to find that Thomas seemed to already have the knowledge stored somewhere inside him, and that Alistair was only awakening it with the lessons he taught. Such was Thomas's extraordinarily rapid mastery of complicated subjects. Soon they were talking of vast walls miles

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and miles long, of catapults and towers, of all sorts of things I found no interest in whatsoever.

My lack of interest might have been a problem had this been a school we were attending, where building unimaginably complicated structures and objects was the only thing to learn. I believe I would have been removed from such a school and regarded by everyone as a student of catastrophically limited ability. Thankfully, Alistair seemed fully aware of my limitations from the start, and in fact had not the slightest problem with it. If anything, it pleased him, for his plans for my education were as different from those he had for Thomas as one could possibly imagine.

On that very first day - and every day after in our time with Alistair -- he spoke to me almost exclusively of the ways of water. My time was divided between the lake and a certain room on the terrace. The room was hard to find at first, and I often became lost looking for it. The terrace wound through the trees in such a confusing v/ay that I never felt as though I could know all the places it went. I always used the tree in the middle -- where we'd eaten on the first day -- as my point of reference. But I still became lost now and then and had to slowly wind my way toward the water until I knew again where I was. The room had a sign over

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the door that read The Warwick Room, and the inside was filled with things I came to love. There were piles and piles of charts and diagrams of places I'd never seen, all of them on the water. There were complicated plans for a boat much larger than the one in the lake, and there were books with instructions on sailing and nautical science. I devoured everything I saw, spending hours poring over the books, the charts, and the plans.

While I was busy learning the ways of water, Thomas was spending most of his time in the modeling room. From the moment he laid eyes on the modeling room, it was his favorite place in the entire world. It was here that he and Alistair built scale versions of all sorts of things. There was a complete model of The Land of Elyon with every imaginable detail. The two of them would explore every nook and cranny, speaking of how the land might change, where new things could be built, and what places could be explored. They used every kind of tool one could imagine -- saws and clamps, boxes and devices, measuring instruments, brushes, glues, paints, and papers of all kinds and sizes. It was a treasure trove of creative implements, and the mere thought of going there set Thomas to smiling and dreaming of what he might build next.

And there was something more, something that is harder to describe, though I will venture an