Quest for the Sun Gem (4 page)

The day crawled by listlessly. The princess dozed and whimpered in her sleep. Lily bathed her wounds again in the evening. They finished the porridge, sharing it with the princess, who this time reluctantly swallowed some. Princess Roana sipped on water from the flask, grimacing at its unfamiliar taste.

Ethan had been right about the impending storm –
it broke as night fell. Thunder crashed and lightning streaked the sky. The rain poured down, trickling through the rough roof and walls and puddling on the floor. Lily and Ethan slept fitfully, huddled together under their cloaks, trying in vain to keep dry and warm. When the sun rose, they woke stiff and cramped.

‘I feel disgusting,’ Lily complained. ‘I hurt all over and my clothes are damp!’

‘At least all that rain will make it harder for our friend Sniffer to track us,’ Ethan said cheerily.

The princess tossed and turned deliriously at the sound of their voices.

‘She has a fever,’ Lily whispered, as she bathed the princess’s face, neck and ankle in cool stream water. ‘I think there must be an infection.’

The princess took nothing all day except tiny sips of water from the flask and Marnie’s willow bark decoction.

Ethan sat out on a branch gazing over the forest, his mind ticking furiously, while Lily tried to busy herself tending her patient. They ate bread and cheese, saying little. Both their faces were furrowed with frowns of anxiety as the day dragged by.

The next night and day were equally torturous. The princess’s fever abated and she slept better.
Ethan busied himself fetching water from the stream with Aisha, all the while watching the forest anxiously for signs of the invaders. For the moment, the forest was quiet.

Aisha slipped off a couple of times to hunt for food. Lily watched over her patient, bathing her and offering frequent sips of water, and dozing whenever the princess was asleep.

As dusk fell again, Ethan jumped to his feet, swinging his arms. ‘That’s it. I can’t stand this any more. We have waited for three days as Mama asked us to. I have to go and try to find out what is happening. I just can’t sit here any longer while Mama and Dadda …’ He trailed off.

Lily compressed her lips and nodded anxiously. ‘I know. Ethan, please be careful.’

Ethan ran lightly through the forest, flexing his tense and cramped muscles. Aisha bounded along beside him, snuffling the air. Ethan paused when he reached the path, his eyes and ears unnaturally alert. Which way? To the hunting lodge or the village?

After a second’s hesitation he turned right to the village, slipping along the path in the dusk like a ghost. He kept to the hedgerows and walls bordering the fields. As he neared the village he stopped, eyes and ears straining.

All was still. He was just about to continue along the road into the village when Aisha growled low
and deep in her throat. He quietened her with a soft touch to her neck.

In the shadows he could just make out two dark figures lurking on the arched stone bridge across the stream. A moment later a third figure joined them.

‘All well?’ queried a familiar voice.

‘Yes, Captain Malish.’

‘Any more villagers slinking back?’ Captain Malish enquired.

‘None on this watch.’

‘Good then. I think Sniffer must have caught most of them. Tomorrow we will torch the village and withdraw to the coast to join our ships.’

‘Good news, Captain – I’ll be pleased to leave this accursed place. I’ve heard there are ghosts and ghouls, and strange faery people out there in that dreadful forest,’ growled one of the guards.

‘Nonsense, man,’ Captain Malish retorted. ‘There are no ghosts or faeries out there. Get back to duty, and no more talk of magic or you’ll be feeling the stroke of my whip.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir!’

Captain Malish strode away towards the village. The two on the bridge shivered and looked nervously out into the darkness, before melting back into the shadows.

Ethan turned and slipped further downstream. He waded across the stream as quietly as he could and crept towards his cottage. The familiar smell of lavender and roses wafted in the breeze. To his left he could hear the faint buzzing of his mother’s beehives.

He listened carefully. The garden was dark and desolate, but the house, his home, was cheerily alight. Lanterns burned in every window. From the open casement of the dining room came a raucous noise of laughing, swearing, bragging and singing.

People were in his home and it was not his family, or even their neighbours. They were dark strangers from another land, and they were sitting at his mother’s dining room table.

Hot red anger bubbled up like lava. Ethan saw himself charging up the garden and screaming at these interlopers to get out! Get out of his home!

But before he could move he sensed Aisha stiffen beside him, her hackles rising, her right paw lifting in the classic hunting pose and her tail lifting like a flagpole. He put his hand on her neck to quieten her before she growled and gave them away.

He sank down to hide in the shadows behind the beehives. Aisha’s warning had been timely. So quietly that Ethan could not have heard them, he
saw two darker shadows slip through the darkness of the garden. One tripped on something and cursed softly. Then they slipped away.

Guards on patrol
, thought Ethan.
I will have to creep past them
.

Ethan had a huge advantage over the Sedah guards. To them, the terrain was unfamiliar. But Ethan had grown up in this garden – weeding the vegetables, spreading compost, playing hide and seek with Lily and Aisha, picking the fruit. He knew where everything was.

Because of Willem’s favoured position as Royal Master of Horse, their house was one of the larger cottages in the village, with sprawling gardens and several outbuildings.

Ethan sat quietly for a minute while he visualised the garden in his mind’s eye.

Then he dropped to his knees and started to crawl. Aisha padded quietly behind him. He crawled under the fruit trees, smelling the sweet scent of the blossoms above his head and feeling the soft tufts of grass under his palms. He paused at the end of the orchard and listened intently. No sign yet of the patrol.

He crawled on past the smaller open sheds and the bigger barn that usually housed their animals,
melting deep into the shadows. Next was the vegetable garden with long rows of lettuce, spinach, potatoes, carrots and strawberries, and trellises for beans, peppers and tomatoes.

The noise from the house was getting louder. Ethan had nearly reached the dark shadow of the house when Aisha stiffened again, her raised hackles warning Ethan that someone was close by. He calmed her and quickly slithered the last few metres into the deepest shadow. He silently prayed that the noise of the festivities inside would mask his own noise.

Again he felt rather than saw two shadows cautiously prowling through the night.

He lay still, scarcely breathing, with his hand warningly on Aisha’s neck. The shadows disappeared once more. All that was left was the strong smell of bruised thyme where they had stomped through Marnie’s herb garden. His mother would have been furious.

When Ethan was sure they were gone, he carefully stood up to peek through the kitchen window. There was no-one in the room, just a lantern burning on the table. Ethan gasped. He had never seen his home like this. The kitchen was chaos. Herbs had been tipped all over the floor, the
furniture had been overturned, china was smashed.

He crawled on to the next window – the dining room where all the noise was coming from. He carefully peeked.

Sitting around the table were a number of soldiers, happily toasting their good fortune with Marnie’s homemade cherry wine. The invaders had removed their helmets and their skin was pale and sallow, yet slightly flushed with fire, good food and fine wine.

Ethan crouched beneath the window, hoping to overhear something useful.

‘Here’s to our last night here, comrades,’ cheered one soldier. ‘Tomorrow we will burn this forsaken village and return to our ships with all our plunder. The day after tomorrow we take to sea to sail to the infidel’s capital of Tira. In a week we will be standing on the palace walls of Tira, lords of all Tiregian!’

Another soldier joined in. ‘Then we shall fill the holds with treasures and slaves to send home to Sedah – and we shall set sail, leaving the horizon burning with the fires of a dozen villages. Our priests will chant prayers against the unfaithful. It will be the dawn of a new age, the age of our powerful Emperor Raef. Krad be praised.’

All the soldiers lifted their mugs and clanged them together in a celebration oath. ‘Krad be praised!’ they repeated.

‘If only my mother could see me now, she would be so proud,’ sighed another soldier, sinking lower onto his bench.

‘The infidel queen and her son have been moved to the
Glory of Sedah
this evening with most of the so-called Royal Guards. Not that they were much use at guarding royals!’ The soldiers all laughed and drained their cups in another toast.

‘The rest of the slaves will be moved to the ships in the morning. All is in place. Let us drink to sweet victory,’ pronounced the first speaker, sloshing more dark cherry wine into his mug.

The mugs were clashed together again, with dark wine spilling over the table.

A loud voice silenced the celebration. Ethan recognised the voice of Captain Malish.

‘That’s enough, you scoundrels,’ the captain barked. ‘We have much work to do in the morning. What would the priests say if they could see you now – drinking and laughing instead of praying and fighting! You are all too soft. I have a mind to report you to Governor Lazlac and watch his cat-of-nine-tails whip wipe the grins off your stupid faces.’

There was a loud noise of chairs scraping and apologies mumbled. ‘Sorry, Captain, won’t happen again. Just retiring, sir.’

Ethan turned away in disgust. His mind seethed with indignation, anger, desperation and fear. His parents and most of their friends were being taken as slaves in the morning. There must be something they could do to save them.

He and Aisha crept back through the gardens and down to the stream. He sat in the shadow of a stone wall and tried to think. Half-formed plans started whirling through his mind.

It’s no use
, he thought angrily.
We are just one boy and one girl, with no weapons, no help, no hope against an army of soldiers that even the Royal Guard could not repel
.

But we must do something!
the other half of his brain retorted.
We can’t just sit in a tree house doing nothing while our parents are taken away
.

Then an idea came to him. He remembered the barn and crept back to check on his handiwork.

Inside the barn nearly everything was gone – the feed, animals, barrows and tools. All that was left was a mound of straw and manure. In the back of an empty stall he found a broken pitchfork and started work shovelling away the manure.

After several minutes, sweat was pouring down into his eyes. He wiped it away with his shirt sleeve and kept shovelling. A dull thud and a painful shiver up his arm told him he had struck timber. Scrabbling down in the muck, he found an old iron ring.

When Ethan pulled it, a trap door swung up, revealing a cellar below. He scrambled down the ladder into the darkness. With his fingers he found the familiar shape of the tinderbox on the shelf, and struck a flame to light a lantern.

The cellar leapt into life in the light of the flame. Ethan sighed with satisfaction. The invaders had not found the cellar. He had hidden the trap door well.

Down here were the family’s stores for the winter – crates of onions and potatoes, strings of garlic, jars of amber honey, bottles of preserved fruit, cherry wine, wheels of cheese, boxes of apples, racks of dried herbs, cured slabs of bacon and bottles and bottles of his mother’s herbal tinctures.

On the wall were hung several hunting bows and quivers of arrows. There were two longbows – almost as tall as a man, for shooting in the open meadowland – and several shortbows for close-range shooting in the forest.

Ethan touched his own shorter bow. Like all the bows Willem made, it was a beautiful weapon – carved from a single piece of yew timber, with a leather grip and a bow string of flax-linen. Ethan had painted the arrows green and yellow, decorated with his own design so that they were easily recognisable. The arrows were fletched with finest grey goose feathers, which Willem believed gave the greatest flight precision.

Ethan’s mind flashed back to happy summer days spent with his father and Lily in the forest, learning how to shoot his arrows accurately. They had spent long hours practising – shooting over and over again at an old sack stuffed with rags.

Competition among the village boys was fierce and many an afternoon was spent daring each other to hit targets that were increasingly smaller and further away. But these practice shots were nothing to the thrill of creeping through the forest, eyes and ears peeled, hunting for rabbits and deer.

It was much, much more difficult to hit a small moving target like a rabbit. Ethan remembered his elation the first time he shot a small deer and proudly carried it home for dinner. That roasted venison was one of the best meals he had ever eaten.

Ethan took his bow, with its quiver of arrows,
lovingly down from the wall. He deftly strung the bow and tucked it over his shoulder. The familiar weight of the bow and quiver made him feel stronger and more confident.

He shook himself mentally and made a quick list of what else they might need – food, tinderbox, rope, daggers, water bottles, candles, soap, cooking pot, blankets. On a low shelf he found leather saddle bags, which he packed to the brim with food and supplies.

Finally Ethan gathered up Lily’s bow and quiver and added these to the pile. He hauled the bags up into the barn, closed the trap door, and carefully replaced the mound of dung and straw.

With a new resolve and a heavy load, he decided to return to the tree house to make plans with his sister.

Lily was sitting up anxiously, peering through the darkness, when he returned carrying the saddle bags of supplies. Ethan swung up into the branches of the tree, his jaw set and his mouth grim. In low murmurs the two discussed what Ethan had seen and heard. The princess lay still in the corner.

‘So we must go to the royal hunting lodge tonight, in the very deep of the night when most of
the soldiers will be in their heaviest sleep,’ Lily whispered. ‘We need to find out where everyone is being kept.’

‘I’m not sure where they would put them,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s just a hunting lodge, not a proper castle, so there are no dungeons. The Sedah soldiers will probably be sleeping in the royal quarters and courtiers’ rooms, with some in the guards’ quarters. They would probably put their prisoners somewhere easy to guard, somewhere all together.’

‘Perhaps the stables, or the storehouses?’ Lily wondered.

‘Yes, that would be perfect,’ Ethan exclaimed, eyes shining with hope. ‘Especially as we know the stables like our own cottage. I’ve mucked out the stalls there plenty of times!’

‘We have a few things in our favour,’ Lily said, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘You learnt a lot tonight from spying on those Sedahs. The invaders sound cocky. They expect no resistance. The last people they would expect to defy them are a couple of children.