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Authors: Joan Lennon

The Seventh Tide

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The Seventh Tide

‘I am the Queen of the Kelpies,’ she hissed, ‘and he is
mine
.
He opened the way and his soul is ours to feed on,
according to the Rules.’

 

Joan Lennon lives in the Kingdom of Fife in Scotland, on the River Tay. She has a husband, four tall sons, two short cats, and a miscellaneously sized group of piano pupils. Joan was born in Canada.

joanlennon.co.uk
joanlennon.blogspot.com

Books by Joan Lennon

QUESTORS
THE SEVENTH TIDE

The Seventh Tide
JOAN LENNON

PUFFIN

PUFFIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
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Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

puffinbooks.com

First published 2008
1

Copyright © Joan Lennon, 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-132667-2

For my mum, Jean Lennon, who would have had those
Kelpies dressing warmly, using good reading lights and
eating vegetables before they knew what had hit them.

I’d like to thank Kathryn Ross and Lindsey Fraser, my
agents, and Yvonne Hooker, my editor, for their help –
there’s many a creek up which (paddle-less) I would
certainly still be without you! Special thanks to
Lindsey and my sister Maureen for hand-holding
provided above and beyond the call of duty, during
the ridiculously difficult year in which this book was
being written. And thank you also to Sally and Colin
for letting me write in their spare bedroom while
various of my sons restructured their garden, and
Tyrella Nash at Milton Cottage for the very
productive times I spent there, writing with one
hand and guzzling her cooking with the other.

Contents

There are places they call ‘liminal’ – where the divisions between present, past and future are thinner than normal. Even the walls between universes aren’t always up to scratch. Things blur and leak into each other in places like that. Connections are made between peoples and times that are against all the rules. Things… break through, good things sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the things that break through are evil, and relentless, and driven by terrible hungers.

The Western Isles of Scotland is a place like that.

Dark worlds, bright worlds, worlds (like our own human one) that are peculiar combinations of both – so many realities include this stretch of islands and seas and sky, heart-breakingly beautiful at one moment and deadly the next, full of softness and hardship and terror, and a hundred shades of purple and green, blue and grey.

In the sixth century, on the island of Iona, there was a boy called Adom. In the twenty-fourth century, in a suburb of Greater Glasgow, there will be a girl called Jay. And in the universe of the G there is Eo, a young shape-shifter-in-training. You’d think there couldn’t be three more different specimens of life in existence, and yet they do have two things in common.

One – they all live in the same place, in this landscape of chance and change, where the tides are powerful and strange, and the walls of a thousand worlds are thin.

And two – they don’t always pay attention.

Professor Pinkerton Hurple’s Answers to Your Most Pressing FAQs
appear in boxes scattered throughout the text. They are taken from an ongoing manuscript which the Professor is writing, and which he keeps with him at all times. It is on the subject of pretty much everything. The pages have become quite disreputable-looking over the years, marred by paw prints, stained with rabbit blood, and almost all with the edges thoroughly chewed. (Composition isn’t easy, even for a mind as agile and at the same time cram-packed as the Professor’s.) It is only with the greatest reluctance that he has allowed access to his unfinished masterpiece, but as it’s anybody’s guess when the work will finally be published, he could hardly have expected us to wait.

1
Eo

A basically human shape is the default appearance of the G. In fact, before they reach fully trained adulthood, human is all a G
can
do. So it wasn’t surprising that Eo should look like a boy, since his training still had a long way to go. (His full name was Eo Gofer-Baroque, but that is another story.) According to his current teacher, Professor Pinkerton Hurple, the point at which Eo’s training would finish was actually
receding
rather than getting closer.

‘It’s hard to believe that anyone
could
know less at the end of a lesson than they did at the beginning – but
you
manage it. If it weren’t so AGGRAVATING, it would be an interesting phenomenon.’

At fifteen, Eo gave the impression of being a master of self-confidence and complete bone-idleness – at one and the same time. Having said that, he often did
plan
to be attentive, but then he forgot partway through. The things going on inside his head were so much more interesting.

Any self-doubts he had, he kept well buried. If the work threatened to become difficult, he didn’t wait around to find out. He slid out from under such things as neatly as possible, with charm and his own personal brand of deviousness.

Some of the time, Eo pretended to be more stupid than he really was, just for the fun of it – particularly during lessons with Professor Hurple. He enjoyed watching the Professor’s fur get all bunchy with irritation. The Professor was a ferret and his emotions clearly showed in the state of his coat. A more dapper beast at the beginning of a lesson would be hard to imagine; by the end, he was dishevelled and unkempt and fit to be tied – and Eo would have had an enjoyable afternoon, learning not a lot.

Confusingly, Professor Hurple was not a G. He couldn’t shape-shift. He actually
was a ferret
(though an exceptionally intelligent one, as he was quick to point out), coming originally from the early twenty-first-century Scotland of the humans. How he came to be in the G universe at all is a story in itself, but not one that Eo had yet managed to wheedle out of him. (Of course,
all
ferrets are astonishingly good at squeezing through the tiniest cracks or down the most unobvious holes, and all ferrets are enormously curious, so finding a way from one universe to another is not the challenge to them that it would be to most life forms.) And although Professor Hurple had never
been
human, he had, as it happened, spent more time in their company than any of the G themselves.

He had also read a great deal, which helps.

Why would the G need to be educated at all, you may ask, since surely all they have to do is shape-shift
into
something else to know everything about it, from the inside out, as it were. In fact, the truth is exactly the reverse.
Before
a G can shift, they have to know as much as possible about the life form they are changing into.

For example, a G can’t become a clam (at least not for long) without knowing about clam predators, or what to do when the tide goes out, or even (if so inclined) how to tell girl clams from boy clams. But, not surprisingly, individual G then find themselves more comfortable in some shapes than in others. And the more time they spend in that form, the more they learn and the deeper their understanding becomes. Then, as specialists, they pass on their knowledge to trainees. For example, Eo was taught about pack dynamics, how to organize herbivores and the joys of digging by Hibernation Gladrag, currently Head of the G and, most of the time, an extremely handsome Border collie bitch. (Eo paid
close
attention to these lessons because he quite fancied shifting into some kind of canine, and also because every time his teacher smiled he remembered she was capable of ripping his throat out.)

Very few of the adult G chose to spend time as human, however. This could be because they got enough of it as children, when human was all they
could
do. Or it could be because, as a species, they rated fun as the highest goal and being human was often just not fun enough. So the G tended to use the shape only for formal occasions or boring ceremonies or rare moments of unpleasantness with other universes. Which explains why, when a Professor of Human Studies was needed to teach a young G, they were grateful to be able to turn to Pinkerton Hurple.

FAQ 998:
Do the G have horrible, embarrassing parents like mine?

H
URPLE’S
R
EPLY
:
The G like their young, and are always friendly to their own particular offspring when their paths cross, but not to the point of letting this interfere with their own pursuits. Parenting is seen as pretty much a communal affair. Take our friend Eo, for example. His parents were both ocean birds most of the time – usually gannets – so they were frequently far out to sea, riding the Atlantic storms and diving at wing-ripping speed into frantic shoals of fish. On the upside, this means that when they
were
around, Eo was in for some fabulously exciting bedtime stories. On the downside, there was always the danger of one or other parent absent-mindedly trying to shove a fish down his throat.

BOOK: The Seventh Tide
8.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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