New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG)

BOOK: New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG)
6.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

NEW LANDS

ALSO BY GEOFF RODKEY

THE CHRONICLES OF EGG, BOOK ONE:
DEADWEATHER AND SUNRISE

NEW LANDS

GEOFF RODKEY

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
An imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group.
Published by The Penguin Group.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, USA.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd).
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India.
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).
Penguin Books South Africa, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue,
Parktown North 2193, South Africa.
Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North,
Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China.
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

Copyright © 2013 by Geoff Rodkey. Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Iacopo Bruno.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of
Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat & Tm. Off. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted
materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. The publisher does not have
any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rodkey, Geoff, 1970–
New lands / Geoff Rodkey. pages cm.—(The chronicles of Egg ; book 2)
Summary: Thirteen-year-old Eggbert and his friends face old and new enemies when they travel
to the New Lands in search of the lost Okalu tribe and its mysterious ancient treasures.
[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Buried treasure—Fiction. 3. Good and evil—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R61585Ne 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012049196
ISBN: 978-1-101-60337-6

For Tal

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Bugging

Chapter 2: Boarded

Chapter 3: Pella

Chapter 4: The Letter

Chapter 5: The Palace

Chapter 6: Chained

Chapter 7: Water and Fire

Chapter 8: In the Reeds

Chapter 9: On the Move

Chapter 10: Uphill

Chapter 11: Flut

Chapter 12: Coming Clean

Chapter 13: The Clutch

Chapter 14: Brought Low

Chapter 15: Moku

Chapter 16: Reunion

Chapter 17: Queen

Chapter 18: News

Chapter 19: Escape

Chapter 20: Choices

Chapter 21: Pembroke

Chapter 22: Darkness

Chapter 23: The Map

Chapter 24: Sentenced

Chapter 25: Sprung

Chapter 26: Away

BUGGING

I
hung my head over the side of the
Thrush
and watched the prow carve the seawater into a hissing spray. Viewed up close, the Blue Sea wasn’t all that blue, and I wondered—for the umpteenth time in the past few days—who had named it that, and why they hadn’t bothered to get it right.

They should have called it the Greenish Blue Sea. Or the Almost Blue Sea. Or the It Only Looks Blue From A Distance Sea.

It was stupid, I know. But it kept my mind off the other stuff.

Like the man who wanted to kill me.

And his daughter, Millicent, who I was in love with.

And the map in my head, which was the cause of all the trouble, and which I wasn’t even sure I was remembering right. Especially the tricky part in the middle.

Three squiggles down left, four dashes up…

Or was it four squiggles and three dashes?

It turns out it’s a bad idea to try and memorize something
written in a language you don’t even speak. I’d been practicing the map twenty times a day, tracing it with my finger on the deck of the
Thrush,
so you’d think by now I would’ve had it hammered into my head pretty good.

But it was getting harder, not easier.

Still hanging over the gunwale, I shut my eyes and tried to imagine the original, its crooked lines of Okalu hieroglyphs painted on the gloomy wall of the Fire King’s tomb.

Dash dot feather, cup, two dash dot firebird…

“Done yet?”

It was Guts. He was standing behind me on the deck.

“Almost,” I said. “Just let me throw up again.”

He snorted. “Wot’s yer problem? Food ain’t
that
bad.”

“It’s not the food,” I said, although the food was awful. The crew were all bone-skinny, and after three days of eating their smelly turtle meat and wormy biscuits, it was no mystery why.

“Seasick?”

“Not that, either.”

“Then wot?”

I’m scared out of my mind and I think we should just forget about finding this stupid treasure and run away.

But I couldn’t actually tell Guts that.

I couldn’t admit that I was terrified we were doomed—that if we set foot in the New Lands, we’d be killed long before we could find an Okalu Native to translate the map, and that the only sane thing to do was to bug out and flee down to the Barkers, or maybe even farther, someplace where nobody was gunning to kill me for an ancient treasure I barely understood and wasn’t even sure existed.

I couldn’t admit any of that.

Or could I?

I retched over the side one last time to make sure I was done. Then I straightened up and turned to face my partner.

Guts was bobbing on the balls of his feet, eyes twitching under his tangled thicket of white-blond hair. He raised his arms in a fighting stance. The steel hook on the stump of his left hand glistened in the morning sun.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s tussle!”

I sighed. “Again?”

“Need to practice!”

He’d bought the hook from a field pirate just before we left Deadweather Island. He was getting pretty handy at fighting with it, which I guess was helpful. Except that I was his only sparring partner, so the fact that he was getting better meant my shirt was ripped in three places, and there were a dozen puncture marks and several deep scratches on my forearms. He kept promising he wouldn’t make contact, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

“Not now,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“’Bout wot?”

“I think we…it’s…I forgot the map.”

“Nah, ye didn’t.”

“I did!”

“Said that yesterday. Then ye remembered it.”

“I thought I did. Then I forgot again. And this time it’s worse.”

“Said
that
yesterday, too. C’mon, ye
porsamora
! Fight me!”

One of the crew had taught him how to swear in Cartager. He was as excited about that as he was about his new hook.

“C’mon! Lucy needs a workout!”

He’d named the hook “Lucy.” I kept telling him it was ridiculous, but he didn’t care.

“I’m serious! We need to talk!” I insisted.

Guts lowered his arms and frowned. His eyes twitched one more time and then went still. When we first met—when Ripper Jones and his pirate crew had made us fight almost to the death, and had done who knows what else to Guts before that—he twitched constantly. Eyes, shoulders, head…sometimes the whole upper half of his body would shudder.

Now it was mostly just his eyes, and sometimes he’d go a good two minutes without a twitch.

Sometimes, he almost seemed normal.

Not me. Not lately. I was a wreck. And the closer we got to Pella Nonna, the worse I got.

I’m scared out of my mind and I think we should just run away.

Guts was still staring at me.

“So talk,” he said.

I took another deep breath.

BOOK: New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG)
6.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

1956 - There's Always a Price Tag by James Hadley Chase
Holiday Horse by Bonnie Bryant
The Midnight Mayor by Kate Griffin
Five Moons of Pluto by Jeter, Andre
Sick by Brett Battles