Septimus Heap 4 - Queste (31 page)

Beetle peered at his timepiece. It was hard to see in the gloom. “It’s half past two,” he replied.

“So why is it getting dark?” asked Jenna.

Beetle looked around, puzzled. Jenna was right—it was getting dark. It was twilight.

“Maybe your timepiece is wrong,” suggested Septimus over his shoulder, increasing his pace. He wanted to get to the top of the hill fast.

“My timepiece isn’t what’s making it dark, is it?” Beetle puffed grumpily, trying to keep up. “The sun going down is doing that.”

“It might be a storm coming,” Septimus called back. “A snowstorm. Feels cold enough.”

Jenna stopped, noticing that Ullr was no longer at her side. “It’s not a snowstorm,” she said flatly. “It’s the sun going down. In fact it has just gone

down. Look.” There, coming toward them through the trees, was the NightUllr, blending in with the black tree trunks, his big panther feet stark against the white snow.

“Oh,” said Beetle. “Bother.”

“Come on, Beetle,” said Jenna, grabbing his hand. “Let’s catch up with Sep.”

Beetle smiled. Suddenly nighttime in the forest didn’t seem quite so bad.

At the top of the hill Septimus stopped and waited for Beetle and Jenna to catch up. He could hardly bear to look down.

He murmured a witchy good luck mantra—the kind that Marcia deeply disapproved of—and forced himself to look. In front of him was a broad, gentle slope much more sparsely covered with trees. And in the distance, shining out of the darkness, was a light. He grinned—sometimes witchy stuff worked. As he watched, and as all around grew ever darker, the pinpoint of light seemed to get brighter. By the time Jenna and Beetle joined him on the brow of the hill, it was shining like a beacon.

They set off down the hill, leaping through the snow. The small pack of wolverines—pursued by a panther—rapidly covered the ground and as they neared the valley floor they heard the sound of running water.

“It’s the stream on the map,” Jenna whispered, afraid to speak out loud in the darkness. “Which means that light…it must be a refuge hut—mustn’t it?” Her voice sounded almost pleading.

“It had better be,” said Septimus. His witchy chant was still going around his head and he felt hopeful—more hopeful than he had felt all day. He linked arms with Jenna and Beetle and together they waded through the snow, which was deeper in the valley and came up almost to their knees. Ullr bounded through it, no longer skating over the icy crust, his black fur sprinkled with white, the snow turning the whiskers on his chin to an old man’s beard.

Jenna and Beetle caught Septimus’s good mood. The gurgling of the stream broke the oppressive silence of the forest, and the yellow glow of the lantern illuminated the frosty snow before them. The combination of snow and lanterns made all three feel happy. For Jenna and Septimus, it reminded them of the time they had spent the Big Freeze together at Aunt Zelda’s—a time they both looked back on with happiness. For Beetle, it recalled Snow Days when he didn’t have to go to school—days full of possibilities when he would wake up to find that snow had completely covered the windows and his mother had lit the lantern and was cooking bacon and eggs over the fire.

As they came closer they could see that the light did indeed come from a small wooden hut with a stovepipe chimney, just like the ones that Snorri had drawn. It shone from a lantern placed in the tiny window above the door, which cast long shadows from the few trees that still stood between them and the hut.

A few moments later they were pushing open the door to the hut. And as they stepped inside a strange, unearthly howl ululated in the distance.

Beetle slammed the door shut and Jenna shut the bolts—all three of them.

“Big bolts,” said Septimus. “I wonder why.”

“Don’t,” said Beetle. “Just don’t.”

THE HUT

T he inside of the hut

was just as Aunt Ells had once described to Nicko and Snorri. It was bare and basic but after the chill of the snow and the bleakness of the forest it felt warm and welcoming. On either side of the hut were three sleeping platforms one above the other, with two neatly folded blankets placed on each platform. Between these was an old table and an iron stove with a good supply of logs piled up on either side. At the back of the hut was a door. Jenna opened it and peered in.

Inside was a tiny room containing a jug, a frozen bowl of water and a scary-looking pit half covered with planks with a bucket of earth beside it. It didn’t smell so great. Jenna quickly closed the door.

Septimus and Beetle set to lighting the stove and soon the logs were ablaze. They left the door of the stove open and all three crowded round the fire, warming their hands while the snow dripped from their wolverine skins and puddles collected on the earthen floor. Once their hands were thawed, they undid the buckles of the backpacks to find them stuffed full of packages that were neatly wrapped in leaves and tied with thin strands of vine. Eagerly, they tipped them out onto the table.

Ullr growled in a hopeful fashion—he could smell fish. Even in panther form Ullr kept a cat’s taste for fish.

“Sam must have been up all night making these,” said Jenna, surveying the pile of treasure heaped on the table. She felt as excited as if it were her birthday.

Septimus could tell that Jenna wanted to open all the packages at once. “We should only unwrap a few at a time,” he said. “I think the leaves preserve things and…well, we don’t know how long we’re going to be here, do we? It could be months.”

“You are an old misery-bucket sometimes, Sep,” said Jenna. “So which ones do we open?”

They decided to open two packages each, which resulted in four fish, a bag of dried leaves that Septimus thought was witches’ brew and a flat, ash-covered loaf of bread that had obviously been cooked in the Heap campfire.

“We could open another one each,” said Jenna, surveying the large pile of unopened packages that still remained.

“All right. Just one more,” said Septimus grudgingly.

There was another fish and another loaf, but it was Beetle who drew the prize—a fat slab of toffee. The boat delivering Ma Custard’s stock had run aground on the riverbank where Sam was fishing, and the skipper had been extremely grateful for Sam’s help in pushing him free on a falling tide.

Beetle unwrapped the thick wax paper surrounding the sticky slab, and they all breathed in the warm, sweet smell of toffee.

“You know,” said Septimus, “I really like Sam.”

An hour later they were lying on the sleeping platforms, warm from the heat of the stove, full of toffee, fish and witches’

brew. The hut was filled with an orange, drowsy glow from the stove and outside the snow glistened in the light of the virtually full moon. But it still felt like the middle of the afternoon—much too early to go to sleep.

“What does your timepiece say now, Beetle?” Jenna asked.

“Four o’clock,” said Beetle, holding it up so that it caught the light of the fire.

“That’s four in the afternoon and it’s been dark for what—two hours?” said Jenna.

“Yerr,” Beetle replied, trying to scrape off the remains of a lump of toffee from his back teeth.

“So that means…”

“Everything’s weird,” said Septimus.

“No, Sep. It means we are either much farther north or much farther east—or both.”

“Which is

pretty weird,” said Beetle, “seeing as all we did was walk into a heap of charcoal. Not what you expect from a heap of charcoal, even though my old art teacher used to say, ‘Charcoal can take you into a whole new world, Beetle.’”

“I wonder which it is?” said Septimus. “North or east?”

“We can work that out tomorrow,” said Jenna. “We can see how long the days are. I reckon it’s east and we’ve just lost a few hours. I don’t think it would be getting this dark so early farther north. It’s getting toward the summer now and the days should be really long.”

Both boys were silent for a moment. Then Septimus said, “How do you know all that stuff, Jen?”

Jenna took a while to reply. “Milo,” she said. “He told me all about his travels. He had a timepiece, too, and before I was born he said he always kept it on what he called ‘home time’ so that he would know what, um…my mother…was doing.

And he said that when he traveled east he found that according to the timepiece the sun was setting earlier and earlier—even though it didn’t feel like that to him. And it was Snorri who told me that in the Lands of the Long Nights in the summer the days are so long that the sun hardly sets.”

Septimus thought about this. “So if we are

farther east,” he said, “that’s a good thing. That’s where the House of Foryx is, isn’t it?”

“I’ll see what Nicko says.” Jenna picked up Ephaniah’s beautifully bound book of Nicko’s notes, which she had put safely on her bunk. She leafed through the notes, some of which were tiny scraps that Ephaniah had fused onto bigger pieces of paper, others were bigger and carefully folded, their edges reinforced. All of them felt smooth, almost resinous to the touch. Nicko’s writing had a tendency to wander around like a lost ant, but Ephaniah had made it appear crisper and clearer and for once Jenna was able to make sense of most of it. “House of Foryx…House of Foryx,” Jenna muttered, leafing through the pages. “Here’s something. There’s a note stuck to it from Snorri to Nicko—‘Nicko, this is for you. For the parts you missed when Aunt Ells spoke in our language. Snorri x.’ I think it’s what Aunt Ells told them.”

“Go on, then, Jen. Read it to us,” said Septimus. Like a couple of children waiting to be read their bedtime story, Beetle and Septimus looked expectantly at Jenna.

She laughed. “Okay. But I’m not doing an Aunt Ells voice.”

A chorus of disappointed protests filled the hut.

“Well, I’m not, so there. Here goes: ‘I was nine years old. I was playing with my sister in my grandmother’s house and we had a fight. I pushed her, she pushed me and I fell through the Glass. I know that now, but then I did not know what had happened. All I knew was that suddenly I was no longer in my grandmother’s little house beside the sea, but in an octagonal room full of dark, heavy furniture. I was terrified.

“‘When at last I dared to venture out of the room I found myself at the top of a long winding staircase. I went down and came to the strangest place you could ever imagine. A great hall full of candle smoke, filled with many people with different ways of speech and strange dress. I felt as though I had walked into a never-ending fancy dress party. People wandered through the corridors talking aimlessly, or sat around the great log fires that burned constantly without ever seeming to consume the logs. No one took any particular notice of me as I roamed the house. I ate my fill in the great kitchens, I found a soft bed in a beautiful room where a fire always burned and the little tub of sweet biscuits was always full—but I was alone and I longed to go home.

“‘There was a great door that opened into the house, but a visitor was a rare event. Some came to stay and Bide their Time but most came searching for lost loved ones, although I do not recall them finding any. I was surprised that so few already there wanted to leave the House of Foryx. I do recall one young woman wearing a beautiful white fur cloak. She wanted to go, but she took pity on me and gave up her place on the dragon chair in the checkerboard lobby by the door.

She said that I was but a child and should leave as soon as I could, that no matter what Time I went into I was young enough to adapt. And she was right—I will be forever grateful to her. So I took her place on the chair sitting between the carved dragonheads, my feet resting upon the tail. I waited for many long weeks while she brought me food and kept me company. She told me stories of ice palaces and snow-swept plains, sleighs and roads of ice until even in the heat of the candles that burned day and night my knees knocked with the cold and I shivered inside my woolen cloak.

“‘At last my chance came one morning when there was a loud knock on the door. To my surprise a little man jumped out of the pillar beside where I was sitting and ran to the door. Waiting outside were a man and a woman. The DoorKeeper would not let them come in and as the door began to close I took my chance and ran out, much to their surprise.

“‘I was, I realize now, amazingly lucky. I do not know why my new mother and father went to the House of Foryx; they would never say. The next thing I remember was traveling across a great pit on a narrow bridge that swayed in the wind.

My new papa led the horse while I rode, sitting in front of my new mama. Later Mama told me she had closed her eyes in terror as we crossed, but I was wide-eyed with excitement. There was a full moon rising through the mists below us and we were so high that I felt as if we were flying among the stars. They brought me here to the Castle and were kindness itself. I grew to love them as much as I had loved my mother and father, but always at the back of my mind was the question, What happened to me?

“‘I did not realize that I was in another Time for many years, until a traveling storyteller told a tale about the House of Foryx and I knew she was telling no story but the truth. I found her and told her my own tale. She told me that the House of Foryx is a place where All Times Do Meet. You can only leave when someone arrives and then you must enter their own Time. So when I ran from the House of Foryx I ran into my new parents’ Time.

“‘I believe the only chance you have of returning to your own Time is to find the House of Foryx and pray that someone from your own Time comes to it. When I was a child I longed to return to my own Time, but when I finally understood what had happened I had already met my dear husband, my adoptive parents were old and frail and I did not wish to return. This is a good Time to live in—you could do much worse. But you are both young and I can see you are brave enough to try. May Odin and Skadi be your guides.’ And then Nik has written…I think this is what he says…‘House of Foryx—here we come.’”

“Sounds like Nik,” said Septimus.

“I wonder if they are still there?” said Jenna.

“Only one way to find out,” said Septimus.

No one found it easy to get to sleep that night.