The Book from Baden Dark Read online

  No, the test appealed to him. Was he as good as Rhys Tironel at the same age? This book wasn’t filled with lies, but tales of daring adventure. What harm could there be in that?

  ‘Can you find the hidden story,’ Suskin asked from behind his shoulder.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Marcel muttered as he raised his hand from the open page where it rested and passed it in a smooth, familiar motion before his eyes.

  He looked down. Nothing had changed.

  He wasn’t about to give up. Magic’s power lay in the will of the sorcerer who wielded it and this challenge would not be conquered easily. He began to concentrate on the page, his hand moving again, and this time when he refocused his eyes the black swirls and squiggles of ink were shifting like frenzied ants. He commanded them a third time, and only then did the marks re-assemble themselves into letters and the letters into words.

  ‘I see it happening,’ the dominie cried, showing greater excitement than his pupil. ‘The old story has gone and a new one has taken its place. Remarkable, truly remarkable.’ He clapped Marcel on the shoulder. ‘Your powers are well beyond any other student I’ve tutored here in Noam. You’re special, Marcel, there’s no doubt about it.’

  Together they read the first line.

  This is the story of my journey into a strange land where night and day have no meaning …

  ‘Try another page,’ Suskin insisted.

  Despite his triumph, the writing still reminded Marcel too strongly of the Book of Lies and he was tempted to slam it shut. However, the dominie was much too pleased with this test he had devised.

  ‘Come on, try a bit more,’ he said again.

  Marcel turned through the pages a little way and worked the magic again until letters swam before his eyes. Picking a sentence at random, he read it aloud:

  I had been amid the darkness for more than a week now and the magic needed to give me light was draining my strength.

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’

  Was it? How did Suskin know Marcel hadn’t made the words with his own magic and left the difficult ciphers untouched? He was tempted to do just that when the dominie insisted he read some more.

  Marcel sighed and flipped over many pages until he was closer to the end than the beginning. Without any deliberate choice his eyes settled in the middle and, once he had worked the magic, his lips moved again.

  The strange gift given to me by the old wizard was heavy and awkward and I wondered if it would be best to leave it behind. It is just as well that I did not abandon that gift for it proved to be the most precious thing I would ever possess in my life.

  ‘A precious gift,’ Suskin repeated. ‘Read on, read on.’

  Marcel worried that he would be asked to uncover page after page; he was quickly coming to realise how exhausting the words were to decipher. It was all too much coupled with the unpleasant memories the book already aroused in him, and he rebelled.

  ‘If you want to know what it says, read it yourself,’ he snapped unkindly.

  ‘But, Marcel, you know I can’t. My powers are humble, which is why it’s such a joy to have a pupil like you.’

  Flattery. Marcel wasn’t in the mood but he needed to get Suskin off his back or the rest of the day would be wasted. Read it yourself. Maybe that was the answer. He turned the book back to the first page and, with a surge of his will, brought new words into view like before, but this time he doubled the intensity of his magic and commanded them to stay in place for any eye to read.

  Had the spell worked? There was only one way to find out and if Suskin had been ready to use flattery on him, then a little in return might be just the thing.

  ‘Don’t be so modest, Dominie. Your powers could be stronger than you think. Close your eyes for a moment, concentrate on the book.’

  Suskin looked doubtful but he did as Marcel urged, and while his eyes were shut Marcel stood up from the desk so the first thing the dominie would see were the pages of the book, decoded and welcoming his eager gaze.

  Marcel couldn’t hold back a smile of satisfaction when Suskin’s gasp gave him his answer. ‘So you can make out the words after all.’

  ‘Er, yes, just a few. I don’t suppose I’ll get far, not when the Grand Master could manage only a few lines before his eyes became muddled.’

  ‘You might be surprised,’ said Marcel, who was already planning what he would do with the rest of the morning now that Suskin had something to distract him. ‘Take your chair over to the window where the light is better.’

  Suskin did just that, and Marcel didn’t hear another word from him until the noon bell sounded in the square below.

  ‘At last,’ said Marcel. ‘I’m starving.’

  He stood up, expecting Dominie Suskin to beat him to the door as usual, but when he looked around, he found the man was still bent over the book.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ he asked. ‘It’s a pie of some kind.’ He sniffed the air drifting in from the window. ‘Lamb, I think.’

  ‘Oh, er, not just yet,’ the dominie replied. ‘You go on ahead. I’ll join you in a minute.’

  It wasn’t like Suskin to miss a meal, but once he was among the noise and the fine smells below, Marcel forgot all about him and the green book, until he returned an hour later to find his tutor still sitting in the same chair by the window.

  ‘I was right about the pie,’ he said. ‘You missed the baked apples too.’

  Dominie Suskin said nothing, didn’t shrug his shoulders in regret, didn’t even look up from his reading. He remained by the window all afternoon while Marcel used up the last page in his blue book to copy notes from a sage’s lesson in how to control the ocean’s waves. Finally, a cat, the same black feline that had narrowly missed a pigeon dinner, leapt into the dominie’s lap. He stopped reading at last and let his fingers glide through the silky fur.

  ‘You wouldn’t stroke Termagant like that if you knew what a bad temper she has,’ said Marcel.

  ‘She can be a terror, can she?’

  ‘You might say that. She’s mellowed a bit now that she’s expecting a litter of kittens.’

  ‘I thought she seemed rather tubby,’ said Suskin, making the cat jump down as he rose to his feet.

  Tubby, mellow. Marcel could just imagine what those words were doing to Termagant’s temper. He worked the magic he’d ignored earlier and immediately the cat’s anger became words in his mind.

  I’ll tear the lazy toad’s tongue out through his neck.

  Marcel let the savage comment go unanswered.

  Meanwhile, Suskin had begun to pace the room. ‘There’s something I have to say to you,’ he said suddenly. Stopping beside the window once again, he couldn’t resist a brief touch of the emerald book. ‘I have taught you all I can, Marcel. It’s no secret that you are a far better sorcerer than I am, and it has been my privilege to serve you in the small way that I have, but the time has come to part our ways. In fact, I’ve decided to leave Noam altogether.’

  ‘But how will you earn a living, Dominie?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll find another use for my powers. You, on the other hand … you have so much potential. Under the best teachers … I’ll speak to them before I go. No, better than that, I’ll insist on an appointment with Rhys Tironel. The Grand Master himself should be your tutor.’

  Termagant stopped prowling between Marcel’s legs and looked up at her master. What’s put a fire under his feet? she said into his mind.

  I don’t know, Marcel thought to himself in reply, but if he convinces Rhys to become my tutor, it’ll be the first decent magic he’s performed since I arrived in Noam.

  CHAPTER 3

  Squirrel Men

  BEA STARED DOWN AT the bird that warmed her hands and wondered why her thoughts were so hard to form. She had used this magic many times; not her own, of course, since she had no talent for such things, but the magic Marcel had conjured inside the pigeon. It would work again now, if she could decide what she wanted to say.

&nb
sp; But how could she decide when she wasn’t sure who would receive her message? The last to come from Elstenwyck had been sent by Nicola, who had once again urged her to leave the mountain and come to share her chamber in the north tower of the palace. ‘There’s plenty of room for two, and you don’t exactly take up a lot of space, Bea.’

  She wondered what Nicola would think if she could see how she’d grown in the years since they’d last seen each other. Even though the message had come by way of a pigeon’s egg, she knew the words had been spoken brightly and that warmed more than just her hands. She couldn’t help wishing they had been Marcel’s words.

  ‘Bea, Bea, Nerrinder’s looking for you.’

  Now there were words she heard more often than any others and never very happily. Clutching the pigeon, she tossed it gently into the air above her head. With no message to carry, it would join the forest’s other birds until she summoned it again.

  It had been Marigold’s voice calling to her. When the elf-girl finally found her, Marigold frowned and patted the top of her head with her hand. Bea was perplexed at first until she remembered the feathered headband in her hair.

  ‘Thanks, Goldie. You’ve saved me from a telling-off,’ she whispered, snatching the offending colours from her head and stuffing the headband into her pocket.

  ‘There you are,’ said Nerrinder when Bea joined her soon afterwards. ‘That grandfather of yours wants a special feast before this afternoon’s test of archery. Any excuse to feed his face, if you ask me, but we’d better get started.’

  Slim-limbed Nerrinder was the closest thing to a mother Bea had ever known. Before coming to live on the mountain, she had been cared for by a human named Mrs Timmins at the foundling home where she had met Marcel, but neither Nerrinder nor Mrs Timmins could quite earn the love that Bea wished she could give to her real mother. She had a name to whisper, Ilona, but no memory of the woman, although the stories she’d been told in these dimly lit lodges had formed a picture in her mind. Somehow, that only made the longing harder to bear.

  The stories were always told as a warning, it seemed to her. Ilona, Long Beard’s daughter, had been coaxed into the human world by her love for a young woodsman, and then left to die an outcast by the cruelty that humans seemed so determined to show one another.

  ‘Nerrinder,’ Bea dared ask that morning as they prepared the feast, ‘would it always be like it was for my mother?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the elf-woman asked.

  ‘Between elves and humans. Could they ever be happy together?’

  ‘We live on this mountain and keep all humans away. Does that answer your question?’

  Not really, thought Bea. She tried again. ‘I wasn’t thinking about all of us, and all of them. I was thinking more about a … friendship, a close friendship, between an elf and a human.’

  ‘Your mother tried that and look what it got her.’

  There was the warning again. Bea sighed. She wouldn’t get any more discussion than this from Nerrinder. The elves were quick to tell her how Ilona’s life had ended, but never whether she had known love among the humans while she was alive. It came to her then, for the first time, that none of them could tell her because none of them knew.

  When the cooking was done and her grandfather’s guests had sat down to eat, Bea was free to wander at last. As the sun started its slow descent towards evening, she settled herself on the familiar rock and dreamed her dreams. Apart from that single visit from her young friends many weeks earlier, she’d been left undisturbed in this pretty glade. That was why it came as such an unwelcome shock when she realised she wasn’t alone.

  Frances and Marigold again, no doubt. Well, if they’d stolen her chance of solitude, she might as well steal victory in their game. Like a shadow, she slipped off the rock and disappeared effortlessly among the bracken.

  A giggle rose from the fronds to her left.

  ‘You’ll give yourself away if you make sounds like that, Frances,’ Bea called.

  She’d let them know her own position by speaking, of course, and so moved quickly to confuse them. In the half-light let in by the leaves, her elf eyes picked out every detail. Her ears began to do their job, even the palms of her hands picked out movements through the pleasantly mouldy forest floor. Two of them. She was right! And one was only a couple of body lengths away. Slowly, patiently, Bea inched forward. When there were no telltale hints of shifting position, she knew her quarry hadn’t sensed her coming. This first capture would be easy.

  Or would it, for when she glided forward there was no sign of Frances or Marigold. They were getting better at this game than she wanted to admit. Oh well, back to the hunt. She followed the tiny snaps, scrapes and brushes of moving bodies, only to find herself on hands and knees in a puddle of rainwater.

  This brought more giggling, as though they had deliberately led her there. Were they taunting her now?

  ‘I’ll fix you two,’ Bea whispered, smiling at her own frustration.

  The smile left her face when a stone bounced painfully off the back of her head. Another found her shoulder only moments later.

  ‘Hey, stop that!’

  The reply was another stone lobbed onto her thick hair. That one didn’t hurt at least, but it had hit its target like the first two, which meant they knew exactly where she was.

  Bea was angry now and eager to tell them off for throwing stones. But to do that she would have to find them. She slipped through the undergrowth using every trick she had learned, searching them out with her entire body. They had got the better of her so far, but she was still the best.

  Finally, one of them carelessly let a twig shift under her knee. Bea closed in. When she was within reach, her hand shot forward and took hold of a bony ankle. It must be Marigold, who was a skinny little thing. Bea had proved herself at last and, feeling more forgiving now, she began to laugh as she stood up into the light, lifting the wriggling leg of her captive as she went.

  A sharp scream suddenly burst from her throat. It wasn’t Marigold at all. Nor Frances. This was something with ugly black fur, large eyes and a snout, urgh, like a rat! Bea had never seen anything like it.

  Despite the shock, she kept her hand locked around the creature’s ankle. It writhed and squirmed in her grasp, trying to break free, but when it saw her determination to keep hold, it reached up with its front paw and calmly jabbed her hand with the pointed tip of an outstretched talon.

  Bea screamed again, in pain this time, and dropped the repulsive thing into the undergrowth where it quickly scampered away. Ten paces to her right, the shiver and sway of the bracken showed that the other one had gone after it.

  She sucked at the puncture wound in the fleshy base of her thumb, then, picturing the beast that had made it, spat out the watery blood. ‘What was that thing?’

  Her grandfather would know. Pressing the tip of her other thumb to the cut, she set off, letting her elf eyes follow paths that no human could ever find. They would never find the Hidden Village either, but when Bea was close, she stopped and let her senses feel the forest around her, worried that the stone-throwers might have followed her for this reason. But there was no sign of them and, fading into shadow as easily as other creatures breathed the air, she passed from daylight to the sombre world of a village blended so perfectly into the green and brown that no one could see it who didn’t already know it was there.

  The first to greet her was Frances. ‘What did you do to your hand?’

  ‘I hurt it looking for you,’ said Bea.

  This made no sense to the little elf-girl, but before she could ask for an explanation, Bea asked a question of her own. ‘Have you seen my grandfather?’

  ‘Long Beard’s shooting at targets with all the rest,’ Frances answered, pointing towards the far end of the village.

  Bea’s grandfather hadn’t always been called Long Beard. He had earned the name for rather obvious reasons; and, since elves judge a man’s wisdom by the length of his beard, he had been th
eir leader for many years now. His beard also helped to disguise a formidable stomach, which was full of the meal she’d helped prepare that morning.

  ‘Ah, Bea!’ he called when he saw her approaching with such purposeful strides. He was standing in a circle of males, all of them with a bow in hand. Bea had watched these contests enough to know they were more than a test of skill; they were an opportunity to show off shamelessly.

  ‘My granddaughter is as good an archer as me,’ Long Beard told the others.

  ‘Better,’ said Bea as she joined them.

  This brought scoffs of laughter, as she knew it would, but she wasn’t entirely joking.

  ‘Better than Long Beard,’ crowed Kertigan, who was an inch taller than any of the other young elves and already stood out as their leader. His beard was the rich brown of the forest loam and still short enough to enhance his good looks. Nerrinder had hinted to Bea that she would do well to catch his eye, and she had certainly done that just now.

  ‘That’s easy to say, harder to demonstrate,’ he said grandly.

  ‘I’m not so sure she’s better than me, Kertigan,’ said Long Beard with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but judging by what I’ve seen today, she’s better than you.’

  It wasn’t just Kertigan who growled in protest, and after shouts of ‘Never!’ and ‘Don’t speak such nonsense!’ two words hung in the air like a ghostly mist: ‘Prove it.’

  Without hesitating a moment, Long Beard passed his bow to Bea who found it in her hands before she’d even realised what he was doing. It was a thing of exquisite beauty, to an elf anyway. Just the feel of the wood worn smooth by her grandfather’s hands was enough to calm the nerves that had quickly taken hold.

  ‘It’s so well balanced,’ she murmured, but by then Long Beard and the others were already choosing a target.

  ‘The squirrel,’ came the cry and the matter was quickly settled. They didn’t mean a real squirrel, for no creature, furred or feathered, was silly enough to hang around when the elves had their bows ready to shoot.