The Book from Baden Dark Read online

  Dedication

  For Gus and Lucy

  Contents

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1: Where No Humans Dwell

  Chapter 2: The Dominie

  Chapter 3: Squirrel Men

  Chapter 4: Under the Mountain

  Chapter 5: The Sages’ Circle

  Chapter 6: A Message by Sea

  Chapter 7: Weather Magic

  Chapter 8: King Pelham and his Daughter

  Chapter 9: Gadfly

  Chapter 10: Fingertips on the Tapestry

  Chapter 11: A Lone Figure Standing in the Bracken

  Chapter 12: Reunion

  Chapter 13: The Use of Spies

  Chapter 14: Into the Dark

  Chapter 15: Baden Dark

  Chapter 16: A Puzzle Bound in Emerald Green

  Chapter 17: Guardians of the Pledge

  Chapter 18: Return to Baden Dark

  Chapter 19: Mortregis Reborn

  Chapter 20: The Last Cavern

  Chapter 21: Gannimere

  Chapter 22: Spirits of the Dead

  Chapter 23: A Hundred Feet Above the Ground

  Chapter 24: A Call to War

  Chapter 25: Arminsel

  Chapter 26: The Book from Baden Dark

  Chapter 27: The Most Popular Spell in the Mortal Kingdoms

  Chapter 28: The First Spell of a Guardian

  Chapter 29: A Princess as Brave as a King

  Chapter 30: The Wisdom of a King

  Chapter 31: The Flight of an Arrow

  Chapter 32: Daylight and Shadows

  Epilogue

  Want more?

  Praise

  Copyright

  Map

  CHAPTER 1

  Where No Humans Dwell

  HIGH ON THE SLOPES of a great mountain where no humans dared wander, a solitary figure settled herself comfortably onto a rock and watched through the trees as the distant plains of Elster danced in the noonday heat. A slim finger of sunlight angled its way through the forest canopy to point her out amid the one hundred greens and almost as many browns of the bark and the bracken and the fallen leaves. She knew she shouldn’t let the light find her like this, could feel her elvish blood urging her to stay out of sight, but she was half-human too and never more aware of this than when she stared out at the shimmering farmland below.

  Untying the dark hair she’d started to wear in plaited ropes like Nerrinder and the other elf-women, she shook it free into untidy, girlish tangles that stretched down to her waist. Was she a girl or a young woman these days? Was she elf or human?

  Something in between was the only reply she could manage for such a question. This rock was the place she came to whenever she needed to search for a better answer. From the pocket of her dull brown dress, she took a headband she had woven from the feathers of forest birds and slipped it into place to hold back the tangles from her eyes. There was blue and yellow, even a touch of pink, among the feathers, bright colours, the kind no elf should ever wear; not if she wished to stay hidden. A guilty smile curled her lips as she let the forest’s silence soothe her, the way a human listens to a song, until movement in the bracken close by chased away her solitude.

  If she were only human, she wouldn’t have noticed, or else dismissed the disturbance as simply a breath of wind. But the elf in her knew she had company: little bodies scurrying about in the undergrowth, slithering over logs, lingering in shadows, too clever to be seen. They’d followed her all the way from the Hidden Village most likely. She hadn’t seen them yet, and wouldn’t unless she put her mind to it, but she knew they were there in ways she didn’t quite understand. It had always been like this, for she might have been born only half an elf, but somehow she’d been granted twice their skills.

  She sighed at the lost tranquillity, and when a fern brushed too forcefully against a sapling she located the culprit instantly.

  ‘I can see you, Frances, beside that little tree. You’ll have to do better than that if you want to fool me.’

  Marigold wouldn’t be far away, since the two young elves went everywhere together. A little patience and a quick eye soon found her.

  ‘Behind the boulder. I know you’re there, Goldie,’ she cried.

  She used to enjoy this game; she’d even taught this pair the best of her tricks; but that was last year, or was it the year before? Hiding in the forest just so you could be found didn’t seem like much of a game any more.

  Of course, staying hidden was more than a game to elves. The forest was their home and such stealth helped them hunt. Most of all, it kept them out of sight if any clumsy, troublesome humans blundered into their realm, and that was more important than anything to her grandfather and the rest of his kind. Recalling this now brought a dull ache below her heart that she couldn’t explain any better than her uncanny skills.

  ‘Come on, you two, admit it. I’ve won,’ she called.

  Moments later the two elf-girls stood up, giggling, until suddenly they were aware of the sunlight on their skins. The giggling stopped and instinctively each pulled back into shadow.

  There it was, the very thing she found so disheartening. She loved the elves — they had been so good to her, so caring — but they were secretive and suspicious by nature and she had grown tired of their ways.

  ‘Nerrinder’s been asking for you, Bea.’

  The girl winced as she heard her name announced to the vastness of the forest. She was called Bea, or Beatrice if she insisted on her full name, yet it wasn’t the elves who’d given it to her. How she had come by that name was another reminder, and immediately her heart stirred with the restlessness that had brought her here.

  She stood up with a sigh, letting her eyes linger on the patchwork of fields made pale by distance and the sun’s bleaching glare. When her companions slipped silently, like forest ghosts, into place at her side, she barely noticed.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Marigold asked.

  ‘The humans I remember,’ she answered languidly.

  ‘Humans! You can’t see anyone from here,’ scoffed Frances.

  ‘Can’t you? Oh, I can,’ said Bea, teasing them, though it wasn’t entirely a lie.

  The elf-girls were still young enough to be fooled and began to squint with the extra effort of staring.

  ‘There!’ said Bea, pointing. ‘Can’t you see Elstenwyck? Isn’t it huge? Thousands of people all in the one place. There’s nothing like it up here.’

  Frances was starting to smell a rat but Marigold persisted. ‘Where?’

  ‘You must see it. Look, there’s the palace with its four high towers. The first time I saw them I thought they held up the sky. And there,’ she went on, more wistfully now, ‘if you search very hard, you’ll see a window in one of those towers, with a prince’s face in it. I wonder what he’s thinking about.’

  ‘You’re speldriggen,’ said Marigold at last, using an elf word for which there was no human translation. It meant something between foolish and downright mad with a touch of dark magic thrown in to send a shiver up the spine. Marigold would never use it in front of the elders unless she wanted a serious talking-to, but here it brought cheeky smiles.

  ‘Sounds like you wish you were down there,’ said Frances.

  ‘Does it?’ Bea gave a little shrug and, turning away, led her companions deeper into the forest. ‘Don’t know why I’d want to be. You’ve seen the scar on my shoulder from the arrow that almost killed me. Now that I think about it, that wasn’t the only time a human being tried to kill me. When I lived among them I nearly died three times.’

  She swivelled on her heels suddenly to look at Frances and Marigold and the view still visible behind them. ‘And that doesn’t count th
e time a crazy horse carried me over the highest cliff in Elster.’

  CHAPTER 2

  The Dominie

  FAR FROM THE MOUNTAINSIDE where an elf-girl sat dreaming, a prince’s face was, indeed, staring out through an open window. But it wasn’t the window she had pictured and what the young man saw wasn’t the courtyard and stables that lay below his chamber in Elstenwyck’s royal tower. No, for three months now, Marcel, son of Elster’s King Pelham and Master of the Books to all his subjects, had inhabited much more modest lodgings on the top floor of a rather draughty stone building a week’s sailing to the east of the kingdom. As Marcel looked down with the faintest of scowls, it was the main square of Noam that greeted his eye; normally a tranquil spot to sit and talk with the other fresh-faced sorcerers who’d come to the island to study their art, but today was market day and the place was a crush of bodies. He was looking for one body in particular, who was late.

  His impatient gaze fell on another sight: a black cat taking advantage of its camouflage in the shadows to creep close to a flock of pigeons. When it pounced though, the extra weight the cat carried around the middle slowed her down and the birds escaped. Marcel’s hand rose to his face, ready to work the magic that would let him speak to the cat and she back to him, even at this distance, but when he imagined the foul words she would send in reply to his taunts, he dropped his hand and made do with a chuckle.

  One of the pigeons fluttered and flapped its way to a ledge close to Marcel’s window where it fixed him boldly with its tiny eye. For an instant his heart quickened when he saw a dab of white at the tips of its wings, but a closer look soon proved it wasn’t the pigeon; it hadn’t been touched by his enchantments and so carried no message for him from a far-off mountain.

  How could it be when he was in Noam, not Elstenwyck. He’d given the pigeon’s cage to his sister, Princess Nicola, before he’d left and taught her to use the magic. ‘Close your hands around the creature and let your thoughts seep into it with the warmth of your skin. When the bird lays its special egg on Bea’s palm, those same thoughts will come to her.’ The spell was an easy one to teach, even to a young woman with no gift for magic at all, and girls were better at that sort of thing: talking, sharing news.

  ‘When are you going to ask Bea to join us here in the palace?’ Nicola had asked him when he brought the cage to her room. ‘You said you would, on the journey home from Cadell, and that was more than a year ago.’

  He didn’t tell her of the many times he’d held the pigeon in his hands yet never managed to speak the words.

  Why?

  He heard the blunt question in Nicola’s voice, which made it easier, for to ask the question of himself was too confusing. Either way he had no answer, and with a cry of ‘Shoo!’ and a sudden sweep of his hand he chased the bird away.

  In doing this, his head knocked painfully against the lintel, for he was as tall as his father now and still growing; some said he would be a full head taller by the time nature was finished with him. Like most who shot up suddenly, he was as slim as a willow’s branch and occasionally his limbs seemed to flap around him like the wings of a drunken albatross. He was getting used to them though, and to his deeper voice which could still embarrass him by breaking into a childish squeak at the wrong moment. Although he didn’t care enough to be grateful, he’d been lucky with his skin too, which remained smooth and unblemished over his cheeks and chin. The price he paid for this good luck was the blushes and whispers he provoked whenever he strode along Noam’s narrow streets. From wizards’ daughters to scullery maids, there wasn’t a girl on the island who could keep her eyes off him.

  His own eyes returned to the busy square. Ah, there was the portly figure at last, squeezing his way through the crowd. Even from here Marcel could make out the symbols of magic sewn onto the man’s robe: stars, crescent moons, pentagrams, magic squares with their numbers in rows. There was barely a space left from neck to hemline and all the way down both sleeves, as though the man was afraid that passers-by wouldn’t know what he was. Beside one of the market stalls the dominie stopped briefly to bow as a member of the Sages’ Circle swept by without so much as a glance towards him.

  I should be thankful he takes a bit of pride in his appearance, Marcel thought with a sigh. Not all sorcerers do. At least the dominie washed regularly and kept his long greying hair tied like a horse’s tail behind his head.

  Marcel returned to his desk to await the man’s arrival. A book bound in soft blue leather lay close to his elbow, but he ignored it and instead re-read the letters that lay scattered in front of him. They had come with welcome notes from the king and from Nicola, but these others, sent on by the lord chancellor, were petitions from Elster’s subjects seeking help from his magic. A spring had dried up in a village to the south; a woman was afraid that wild cats had hexed her hens and stopped them laying; a boy had run off to join a troupe of minstrels and his parents wanted him home again. Marcel had spells for the first two, but he’d already decided that magic was of no use to the boy’s parents. If their son wanted to play music that made others happy, then maybe they should let him go.

  None of this was the kind of magic that made his heart race, and a restlessness took hold of him, making him shift in his chair.

  The most perplexing letter lay at the bottom of the pile. As he picked it up, the knock finally sounded on his door. Opening it, he found the dominie, red-faced after climbing the stairs.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Marcel. I stopped by the library to bring you this book,’ and he held up a heavy tome bound in green leather. Where the leather remained supple and smooth it shone like emeralds, but in patches the binding had begun to crack with age and the effect was to make the whole book appear grubby.

  Marcel barely gave it a glance. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to help me with this,’ he said, holding up the last letter. ‘A woman wants me to cast a spell so the man she loves will love her in return.’

  ‘Is that so difficult? There is an enchantment you can use. The most popular spell in the Mortal Kingdoms, I’m told.’ He began to recite the verse:

  Figures standing all alone

  Cool of eye and touch of stone

  A heart in pain and cruelly blighted

  Love so full yet unrequited —

  ‘Yes, yes, Dominie. You made me copy it into my blue book,’ Marcel cut in, nodding towards the desk. ‘But should I conjure it? Is she worthy of his love? Is he the man for her?’

  ‘Ah, I see your problem.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  The dominie stood pondering for a moment. ‘Perhaps you should meet this woman and the man she loves when you return to Elster.’

  Marcel sighed. Like so much of the dominie’s advice, it sounded wise but didn’t solve the problem.

  ‘I see you frowning, Marcel. This talk of Elster makes you homesick, does it?’

  ‘No, not homesick. Oh, I miss my father and Nicola, of course I do, but I’m not in any hurry to return, not when there are things like this waiting for me. I wonder sometimes whether the chancellor sends these petitions just to make fun of me.’

  ‘But he was the one who suggested you come to Noam in the first place.’

  Yes, that was true, and no one had been more surprised than Marcel. Elster’s lord chancellor was an old bear who usually stood in the way of anything Marcel wanted to do, yet, despite the enmity between them, the chancellor had spoken boldly to Marcel’s father, King Pelham. ‘A few months with Lord Tironel will make him a better Master of the Books,’ he’d said in the loud and pompous tones he enjoyed so much. ‘Then he’ll be a better servant to your people.’

  When his father agreed, Marcel had jumped at the chance. He’d arrived in Noam just over a week later, though so far he’d seen little of the Grand Master, Rhys Tironel. Instead he’d been put in the care of a dominie, like all the other young sorcerers, and for Marcel that meant Suskin, who was a rather poor sorcerer, he’d discovered.

  With the question of lov
e spells settled, however inadequately, Dominie Suskin held up the book he carried beneath his arm. ‘You have progressed so quickly, Marcel, I’ve brought this to challenge your skills.’

  A challenge! That was different. He took the heavy tome from his teacher and placed it on the desk in front of him. Immediately the odour of unwelcome memories rose up from the pages and it was all he could do not to throw the book across the room in revulsion.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ he snapped.

  ‘I told you, from Noam’s great library. It’s been on the shelves for decades, though no one’s quite sure who lodged it there in the first place.’

  Alerted by the smell, Marcel took a closer look. Same size, same leather binding, even if the colour was different. Three years ago, a book like this one had almost brought down his father’s kingdom.

  ‘Lord Alwyn,’ Marcel whispered under his breath. Had that stern-faced wizard created a second book? Did the same powers reside in the pages of this one, transported here to Noam for safekeeping, perhaps?

  ‘Does it … are all the pages blank?’ he asked.

  ‘Blank, goodness, no! They tell the tale of a sorcerer’s adventures in unknown lands. For many years it was thought to be just an entertainment, a fantastical story not to be taken seriously, then the young Rhys Tironel came to Noam to study the sorcerer’s arts and, taking it up to read of these wild adventures, he sensed magic in it. A second story is hidden beneath the first.’

  ‘Beneath. What is this hidden story about?’

  ‘No one is quite sure, Marcel, for even Lord Tironel finds his eyes tangled up in knots if he reads more than a few lines. That’s why I took the liberty of borrowing this book in your name. The old sages are saying you’re the most promising sorcerer since Rhys himself, twenty years ago.’

  That was a challenge then. Marcel would be pitting his magic against the Grand Master of Noam. He opened the front cover and immediately recognised the long, looping strokes he remembered from the Book of Lies. So there was some link between the two. It wasn’t too late to refuse the challenge.