Mist & Whispers (33 page)

THEIR EXCITEMENT BUBBLING
, the Four quickly decided to talk with Theone.
The next ingress the moonlight brings,
By Lunaris jewel in time with Kings
–
Anya was sure
in time with Kings
meant the sundial the Weaver had built for Harrion’s dedication day. Somehow, the Lunaris Jewel and the sundial would help them find their way home. She didn’t know how, but she couldn’t wait to find out.

The King instructed them to gather their things and meet him by the castle gates where he would escort them to the sundial. He gave them an hour to find everyone to say their goodbyes.

Saying goodbye to the Stragglers was emotional. They had been through so much together and learnt so much from them, it was hard to move on when they knew the Kingdom needed more time to grow.

‘We’ll never forget you guys.’ Tim said after a sea of hugs and manly back-pats.

Anya’s hand reached for the newly healed tattoos on her arm. ‘We’ll carry you with us from here on out.’

Tears filled many eyes in that moment.

‘You know where we are if ever you need a saviour or two,’ Cael offered. He had been Gavriel’s second, and had inherited the rank of first in command after his death.

‘Or eight,’ Bear smiled.

‘What do you wager these guys will be back for help? I’ll give great odds on two weeks,’ Basra said, which began a whole run of different bets between the soldiers.

‘Come on,’ Harrion said. ‘We better get you out of here before they start taking odds on where it is you’re actually going.’

As they left the Grand Hall, Michael whispered to Anya, ‘Have you considered where we might actually end up next? We’re all thinking this might take us home, but what if it doesn’t?’

‘I think if it doesn’t, we’ll be one step closer at least.’

THE HOUR PASSED
by too quickly and they didn’t get round to saying goodbye to half as many people as they had hoped. They hadn’t seen Joliver, or Feiron and Trace, but more pressingly so, Anya couldn’t find Lorcan anywhere.

‘We can’t keep Theone waiting any longer,’ Michael pushed after she’d been looking a good fifteen minutes extra for the Dragon-Boy.

‘I can’t leave without saying goodbye.’

‘Michael’s right, Anya,’ Steph said, her lips pressing together in sympathy. ‘And anyway, we’ll probably get down there and the sundial will just say
“Come back tomorrow, when the moon is at its brightest,”
or something daft like that. Knowing our luck, we’ll probably have to wait a year before we can go home.’

She didn’t really want to, but she gave in and agreed to leave, though the whole way to the castle gates she kept her fingers crossed tightly in the hope that Steph was right.

THEY MET THEONE
and he walked them out of the grounds and around the walls to a little garden high up on the islands edge. From there, they could see most of Thule in the distance.

‘I hope it doesn’t take too long for the city to thrive again,’ Anya said to Theone as they entered the garden through an iron gate, cast with butterfly wings and shooting stars.

‘Had it not been for you four, I doubt it ever would have again. You’ve done us a great honour.’

The garden was bare compared to the blossoming grounds within the castle walls. The Royals had yet to get this far in their endeavours to make the land flourish again. The trees were stark and still that deathly shade of white from when the Darkness had taken them. There was, however, one small sign of life in the little garden. The grass was on the verge of turning from a limp yellow colour of straw to a healthy shade of green. It was a small sign, but a hopeful one.

The sundial stood at the edge of the garden, looking out over the City as if it could keep time for the entire Kingdom. It was a beautiful structure, engraved with all sorts of cursive words and details. The central design reminded Anya of a Celtic knot, twisting and twining around itself.

   ‘What did the riddle say to do, again?’ Steph asked, looking on at the sundial as if it was the cause of a great pain inside her head.

‘It just said
the moonlight will bring the next gate,
by Lunaris jewel in time with Kings
.’

Tim was on his knees, reading the words engraved into the stone, mumbling them under his breath as he thought each one through.

Anya noticed some writing ascending the outer edge of the gnomon, the single hand of the dial.

The midnight trail will see you on

At the tip of the gnomon was a triangular hole, and it occurred to Anya that the jewel was roughly the same size. ‘I wonder...’ She popped the powder blue stone out of its silver entrapment and placed it into the gnomon.

The moon’s light shone boldly down on the dial, and as Anya stepped back, a beam of light shot from the jewel and right into her stomach. Stepping out of its path, the beam stretched right across the lake, falling on a steep mound west of the City.

The King was astonished.

‘All this time...’ he began, but he didn’t finish his sentence.

‘Where is that?’ Tim asked, peering out over the cliff’s edge.

‘That’s Wargrave. It’s where our ancestors buried those who died in the Great Battle of 1443.’

‘Why did they bury them all together like that?’ Steph said, crinkling her nose. It seemed she didn’t like the idea of a mass grave.

‘Myth and legend. In those times, the people believed it to be a gateway to the afterlife.’

The Four looked at each other, their eyes all sharing the same sense of knowing. A gateway to the afterlife? Once again she crossed her fingers, but this time it was in hope that the next place they were headed was not Damnare. She’d had quite enough of the God of the Damned for a lifetime, let alone an after-lifetime.

Anya pointed out the words on the gnomon to the others and Tim looked at his watch. Now that it was working again, he’d set it in time with the castle’s clocks.

‘We have twenty-three minutes to get there.’ He turned to Theone. ‘Any chance we can borrow a few of your horses?’

‘Anything you need.’

Theone instructed Harrion to untie four of their fastest horses and within minutes Anya and her friends were saddling up.

‘I didn’t get chance to say goodbye to Lorcan. If you see him, can you tell him I was thinking of him when we left?’

‘Of course, Child,’ Theone said, and he placed a kiss on Anya’s forehead. ‘Take care of yourselves, and good luck with the rest of your quest.’

Shortly after, they were in the air. The winged horses were fast before, but now with their bellies full of real feed, they were positively supersonic. The Four made it to the mound in Wargrave within a few minutes, giving them enough time to ready themselves and send the horses back to the Castle.

When they reached the peak of the mound, they found a circle of stones, standing tall out of the ground. They agreed it made sense to wait within the circle.

‘Three minutes,’ Tim announced after looking at his watch for the hundredth time.

Standing there, the anticipation of the unknown churning in the pits of their stomachs, Anya felt her chest grow hot.

The sound of wing beats followed, and she knew. A giant smile filled her face as she saw him land in front of her. ‘Lorcan! I was so worried I wouldn’t get to say goodbye! How did you know we were here?’

‘The King told me. It was weird, he wasn’t in the room or even outside. His voice just kind of came into my head.’

‘Yeah, he has a habit of doing that,’ Anya laughed.

‘Anya, I didn’t come here to say goodbye. Theone said it, and I’m sure you feel it too; there is a connection between us, and I don’t know why, but I think I’m supposed to help you. Take me with you and I can help keep you out of danger. All of you.’

‘Oh, Lorcan. I can’t ask that of you; I don’t even know where we are going.’

‘You’re not asking, I’m offering. And all the more reason I should come. What if you end up somewhere far more dangerous that Virtfirth?’

Anya looked around at her friends. Michael rolled his eyes into a scowl, but with that fast becoming his go-to-expression, she ignored him and turned to Steph and Tim.

‘It makes sense, if you want to, Lorcan. Don’t feel you have to come with us out of duty,’ Tim said, most fairly.

‘The more the merrier, I say!’ Steph smiled at both Anya and Lorcan.

‘I want to come. What have I got here? My family are dead and most people rush in the other direction when they see me coming. I don’t want to spend all my life in hiding if something good can come of me being... being like this.’

‘One minute,’ Tim called again.

Anya looked at Lorcan. He was right, whatever the connection was, it had saved her life once before and had made storming the castle possible. It did make sense to keep him close. But she was worried that she was only saying yes because deep down, the feelings that had both her heart and her head muddled didn’t want to let him go.

‘Thirty seconds. It’s now or never, Anya.’

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ she said quite firmly, looking him straight in the eye.

‘Never been more certain of anything in my life.’

She smiled at him and took his hand. ‘Then brace yourself. You’re in for a quite a ride.’

‘Three, two, one.’

Her body rushed with the same tingling feeling she had felt at Burrow Mump, and for the second time her body seemed to collapse into its centre, as if she was a black hole in outer space. The world around her melted away, and then everything shot back in the direction in which it had fallen.

A new world landed around them with quite the bump, and, their legs like jelly, they collided with the rocky ground.

When the sensation finally passed, the five friends just lay on the ground, looking at one another, laughing.

Lorcan looked a trifle stunned. ‘What was that?’

‘We’ll let you know when we find out ourselves,’ Anya said. She began looking around at their surroundings and quickly realised they were on some kind of a mountain peak, though how high up they were she couldn’t tell. Turning onto her knees, she crawled to the edge and looked out over the landscape.

They must have been a good few hundred feet in the air, as she could see for miles and miles. A vast majority of the landscape looked like a jungle, or rainforest, with a beach and ocean to the east. Far, far into the distance, a castle rose out through the trees, and along the edge of the land, bordering the sands, stood a row of enormous stone statues.

A few of the statues were clearly human, each one wearing a crown and all standing next to one another, as if guarding the land on which they stood. But the rest... they had the head, arms and body of a human, but the lower halves of the crowned statues were not human at all.

They were peacock.

The others gathered around Anya as she looked out over the new world.

‘Are we... in Annafora?’

I
T IS SURREAL
to be writing this. Five and a half years ago I had this tiny little idea about a girl who loved a bookshop and now, here I am with the first novel in the series complete and ready to publish! It just goes to show that if I can do it – me, a kid from Canterbury with nothing more in her arsenal than a head full of dreams – then anyone can. So if you’re reading this and you’ve been holding yourself back from writing, please give it a go. I implore you. Write until your words turn into worlds and you discover that magic truly does exist inside us all. It is a remarkable experience and I’m so thankful to everyone who has supported me on this journey.

I’d like to thank my mum and dad for raising me to believe that dreams are boundless to the determined. Even when the doubts whisper in my ear, you are always there to reassure and guide me, and for that I am truly blessed.

Steph and Tim, I am and will be forever grateful that you let me borrow your names and a few of your characteristics. I can’t think of two better people to inspire the characters that are essentially Anya’s rock throughout this series.

My first ever beta reader, Nicola O’Leary. You are my first fangirl (which is unreal to even have one!) and you’ve become a dear friend. Thank you for reading my book when it was in its most roughest of stages, and thank you for loving the characters as much as I do. (And sorry for playing with your emotions. I’ll never forget that day you pulled up outside my house, marched to my front door and demanded to know what happened to Lorcan after Faust lost his mind. Your face was a picture!).

To Hannah Rowe, Laura Roberts and Jennifer Aqualaney (aka Jason Jetson) – thank you for all your help, with proofreading, with answering my questions and generally helping me refine my beta drafts. To Remus Nocte and everyone at TPM for giving me confidence in my work and spending many nights helping me hone my skills through RP. I love you all!

To Joe Payne and Niki Valentine for the countless advice you have given me during the whole process. To Aiden Goodman, who sparked my love for the written word. To all my friends and family who have put up with me over this last half-decade, smiling and nodding at all the right times when I was harping on about ‘book stuff’ that, although fascinates me, probably bored the pants off of you! You’ve all been such wonderful support and have all kept me going, even when I wanted to jack the whole thing in!

To Sarah Van Rose for illustrating such an awesome cover, and Kim at Kim_G Designs for doing an incredible job with the text and layout. I love it so much and am already looking forward to the next one!

To all the OfTomes crew! I’m truly honoured to be a part of such a wonderful, supportive family. Ben, thank you for everything that you do, and thank you for taking a chance on Anya. I’m so excited that I get to share the rest of this journey with you! Esther, I really couldn’t have wished for a better editor! Not only have you helped make this novel stronger, but you have been amazing support since our publishing journeys began, and I cannot thank you enough!

And last, but certainly not least, my biggest thanks go to Chris and my babies. Macy, Alyssa and Riley, thank you for everything. The way you look at me, like I’m far more amazing than I am, the way you make me smile and the way you make me feel. I don’t think I understood emotion until you came into the world. Mummy loves you more than you’ll ever know (well, at least until you have your own babies one day, then you’ll know). Thank you for giving me something to write for.

And Chris. Not just my husband but my best friend. You give me strength and courage, and you understand me like no one else could. You’ve never once rolled your eyes at me, even when I’ve reread a sentence to you for the hundredth time or talked your ears off about scenes that I’ve rewritten again and again – you’ve always remained enthusiastic and without you, this book wouldn’t exist. You help give my ideas colour and life, and you bring things out in me that I didn’t even know were there. Thank you for being with me every step of the way, and thank you for just being you. Like Erac and Toldess, we are two souls in this life, one beyond.