Syren (19 page)

“Is that one of the rude ones?” asked Beetle.

“No way,” Septimus said with a laugh. “Can you see Marcia letting one of
those
through the door? The water comes out of his watering can. See?” Septimus tipped the figure and, sure enough, a small spout of fresh water came out of the WaterGnome’s tiny watering can. Jenna picked up one of the leather cups and held it under the spout until it was full, then drank it down in one gulp.

“Tastes good,” she said.

Using an assortment of packets labeled
WizDri
, Septimus put together what he called a “Young Army stew, only much better.” They sat and watched the stew bubble in the pot on the stove until the aroma made it impossible to just watch it anymore. They ate it with Marcia’s StayFresh bread and
washed it down with hot chocolate—made by Jenna with the help of her ChocolateCharm, which she had used on some seashells.

As they sat around the flickering FlickFyre stove, silently drinking the hot chocolate, each one of them felt surprisingly content. Septimus was remembering another time on another beach—the first time he had ever tasted hot chocolate or ever sat around a fire and not had someone yelling at him. He looked back with a feeling of real fondness for that time; it had been the very beginning of his new life—although back then, he remembered ruefully, he had thought it was the end of the world.

Jenna felt happy. Nicko was safe. He would be sailing home soon, and all the trouble that had begun with her taking Septimus to see the Glass in the Robing Room would be over. It would not be her fault anymore.

Beetle felt amazing. If anyone had told him a few months ago that he would be sitting on a deserted beach—well, deserted apart from a snoring dragon and his best friend—in the moonlight with Princess Jenna, he would have told them to stop fooling around and go and do something useful, like clean out the Wild Book Store. But here he was. And right
next to him was Princess Jenna. And the moon…and the gentle
splish-splash
of the sea and…
eurgh
—what was
that
?

“Spit Fyre!” Septimus jumped up. “Oof, that was
bad
. I suppose his stomach is a bit upset. I’d better go and bury it.”

Marcia had thoughtfully provided a shovel.

J
enna, Beetle and Septimus awoke
the next morning under a makeshift shelter of HeatCloaks that they had hastily rigged up beside Spit Fyre when fatigue had finally set in. They crawled out and sat on the beach, breathing in the soft, salty breeze and soaking up the warmth of the sun, gazing at the scene before them. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

The storm had left the air feeling washed clean, and there was not a cloud in the brilliant blue sky. The deep azure sea sparkled with a million dancing points of light and filled the air with the sound of its gentle ebb and flow as the tiny waves crept up the beach and then retreated, leaving gleaming, wet sand behind. To their left stretched a long, gentle curve of white sand with hillocks of sand dunes behind, which opened onto a plateau of rock-strewn grass that led to a tree-covered hill. To their right were the round-topped rocks they had so narrowly missed the night before—and Spit Fyre’s rock pool.

“Isn’t it fantastic?” Jenna whispered in the small hiatus that occurs after the waves wash onto the shore and before they swish back into the sea once more.

“Yeah…” said Beetle dreamily.

Septimus got up and went to check on Spit Fyre. The dragon was still asleep, lying in a dip behind the rocks, sheltered from the sun. He was breathing steadily and his scales were pleasantly warm to the touch. Septimus felt reassured, but when he walked back to the rock pool he felt less so. The water in the pool was a dull reddish color, and through the murky water Spit Fyre’s tail did not look good. There was a definite downward kink, and the barb was
resting on the sandy bottom of the rock pool. This worried Septimus—Spit Fyre always held the barbed end of his tail high, and the natural curve of the tail would normally have led to the barb sticking up out of the water, not lying limp and lifeless. With a sinking feeling, Septimus realized that the tail was broken.

But worse than that, the part of the tail past the break—or the distal part, as Marcellus would have called it—was not a healthy color. The scales had gone a darker green, had lost their iridescence, and the barb, from what he could see of it below the water, looked almost black. Flakes of dead dragon scales were floating on the surface of the water, and when Septimus lay down on a rock and leaned over for a closer look, he realized that the whole pool had a whiff of decay about it. Something had to be done.

Jenna and Beetle were daring each other to go for a swim when Septimus rejoined them. He felt a little like Jillie Djinn breaking up a gaggle of giggling scribes as he emerged from the rocks and said, “His tail looks really bad.”

Jenna was giving Beetle a push toward the sea. She stopped dead. “Bad?” she said. “How bad?”

“You’d better come and take a look.”

The three of them stood on the edge of the rock pool and looked at the water in dismay.

“Yuck,” said Beetle.

“I know,” said Septimus. “And if it gets any more yuck he’s going to lose the end of his tail…or worse. We’ve got to do something fast.”

“You’re the expert, Sep,” said Beetle. “Tell us what to do and we’ll do it. Won’t we, Jenna?”

Jenna nodded, shocked at the sight of the mucky-looking water.

Septimus sat down on a rock and stared at the pool in thought. After a while he said, “This is what I think we should do. First we collect some seaweed and find a long, straight piece of wood. Then—and this is not going to be nice—we get into that pool and we heave his tail out. Then I can get a proper look at it. I’m going to have to clean away all the yucky stuff, and that won’t be nice for Spit Fyre, so you’re going to have to stay up by his head and talk to him. I’ll pack the wound with seaweed because that’s got a lot of good stuff for healing in it. If the tail’s broken, which I’m pretty sure it is, we’ll have to splint it—you know, bind it up with the piece of wood so that he can’t
move it. And after that we will just have to hope that it gets better and that it doesn’t…” Septimus trailed off.

“Doesn’t what, Sep?” asked Beetle.

“Fall off.”

Jenna gasped.

“Or worse, get what Marcellus used to call, ‘the deadly stinking black slush.’”

“Deadly stinking black slush?” asked Beetle, impressed. “Wow, what’s
that
?”

“Pretty much what it sounds like. It gets all—”

“Stop it,” Jenna said. “I really don’t want to know.”

“Look, Sep,” said Beetle, “you tell us what to do and we’ll do it. Spit Fyre will be fine, you’ll see.”

Two hours later Jenna, Beetle and Septimus sat soaked and exhausted on the rough grass above the rocks. Below them lay a dragon with an extremely odd-looking tail. It looked, Beetle observed, like a snake that had swallowed a boulder, with the added interest that someone had wrapped the bump where the boulder was in a large red cloth and tied it in a bow.

“It’s not a bow,” Septimus objected.

“Okay, a big knot then,” said Beetle.

“I had to make sure the HeatCloaks stayed put. I don’t want sand getting into it.”

“Spit Fyre did really well, didn’t he?” said Jenna.

“Yeah,” Septimus agreed. “He’s a good dragon. He does listen when he knows it’s serious.”

“Do you think it still
is
serious?” asked Beetle.

Septimus shrugged. “I dunno. I did my best. It looked a lot better when I cleaned all the grunge out, and…”

“Do you mind not mentioning
grunge
, Sep?” asked Jenna, looking queasy. She stood up and took a deep breath of air to clear her head. “You know,” she said, “if we’re going to be stuck somewhere for a few weeks, I can think of worse places to be stuck in. This is
so
beautiful.”

“I suppose we
are
stuck here until Spit Fyre gets better,” said Beetle. The amazing possibility of long, lazy weeks in such a beautiful place in the company of Princess Jenna—and Sep, of course—washed over him. He couldn’t quite believe it.

Jenna was restless. “Let’s go and explore a little,” she said. “We could go along the beach and see what’s on the other side of those rocks right at the end.” She pointed to a distant rocky outcrop that marked the boundary of the far left side of the bay.

Beetle jumped to his feet. “Sounds like a great idea,” he said.
“Coming, Sep?”

Septimus shook his head. “I’ll watch Spit Fyre. I don’t want to leave him today. You go ahead.”

Jenna and Beetle left Septimus sitting beside his dragon and set off down the beach, wandering along the line of seaweed, driftwood and shells that had been thrown up by the storm.

“So…what
do
you remember about the islands from your Hidden Histories?” Beetle picked up a large, spiky shell and held it up to see what was inside. “Like, does anyone live here?”

“I don’t know.” Jenna laughed. “I guess you’ll have to shake it and see what comes out.”

“Huh? Oh, funny. Actually, I don’t think I’d like to meet what lives in here. Big and spiky, I bet.” Beetle put the shell back on the sand, and a small crab scuttled out.

“Actually, I was thinking about that this morning before all the yucky tail stuff,” said Jenna, picking her way through the pile of seaweed to reach the firmer sand below. “But I don’t know if anyone lives here. I remember now—I only read the first part of the chapter about the islands. It was when all that stuff with the Glass happened and then we lost Nicko…and when I got home, my tutor was annoyed that I’d missed so much and she made me start straightaway on the next subject, so I never read
the rest. Bother!” Jenna kicked a tangle of seaweed in irritation. “All I can remember is that there are seven islands, but they were once one island, which got flooded when the sea broke through and filled up all the valleys. But there must be some kind of secret here, because the chapter was called ‘The Secret of the Seven Islands.’ It is
so
annoying. I have to read so much really dull stuff; it’s typical that the one thing that would have been useful is the one thing I didn’t get to read.”

“Well, we’ll just have to find out what the secret is.” Beetle grinned.

“It’s probably something really boring,” said Jenna. “Most secrets are, once you know them.”

“Not all,” said Beetle, following Jenna through the seaweed and down toward the sea. “Some of the Manuscriptorium secrets are incredibly interesting. But of course, I’m not supposed to tell—or rather, I wasn’t. Well, actually I’m still not supposed to tell—
ever
.”

“So they’re still secrets, which means they’re still interesting. Anyway, Beetle, you like stuff like that—you’re clever. I just get bored.” Jenna laughed. “Race you.”

Beetle raced after Jenna. “Whoo-
hoo
!” he yelled. Jenna thought he was clever—how amazing was
that
?

Septimus was sitting on the warm rocks, leaning against Spit Fyre’s cool neck while the dragon slept peacefully. There was something very relaxing about the breathing of a sleeping dragon, especially when in front of him lay a deserted strip of white sand and, beyond that, a calm blue sea. The only sounds Septimus could hear, now that Jenna and Beetle had disappeared over the rocks at the far end of the bay, were the slow
swish-swash
of the waves, punctuated by the occasional snuffling snore from Spit Fyre. The weariness from the last week began to catch up with Septimus. Lulled by the warmth of the sun, his eyes closed and his mind began to drift.

“Septimus…” A girl’s voice, light and melodic, wandered through his drowsiness. “Septimus,” it called softly,
“Septimus…”
Septimus stirred, and he half opened his eyes, looked at the empty beach and allowed them to close once more.

“Septimus, Septimus.”

“Go ’way, Jen. I’m ’sleep,” he mumbled.

“Septimus…”

Blearily Septimus opened his eyes and then closed them
again. There was no one there, he told himself. He was dreaming….

A slim girl in green stood in the sand dunes above the rocks looking at the dragon and the boy below. Then she slid down the dunes and padded silently over to a warm, flat rock, where she sat for a while and Watched Septimus as he slept, exhausted, in the sun.

S
eptimus slept on, and the
sun reached its midday zenith. Fascinated by sleep, the girl in green sat motionless on her rock, Watching. After some time the feeling of being Watched began to filter through even to Septimus’s deep sleep, and he stirred. Quickly the girl got to her feet and slipped away.

The heat was slowly warming Spit Fyre’s chilled dragon blood, and as his circulation began to quicken, his tail started
to throb with pain. The dragon let out a long, low groan, and instantly Septimus was awake and on his feet.

“Spit Fyre, what is it?”

As if in reply, Spit Fyre suddenly twisted around, and before Septimus could stop him, he had his tail in his mouth.

“No! No, Spit Fyre. Stop,
stop
!”

Septimus raced back to the tail. He grabbed hold of one of Spit Fyre’s nose spines and pulled as hard as he could. “Spit Fyre, let go,
let go
!” he yelled as he struggled to wrench the dragon’s curved fangs out of the carefully wrapped HeatCloaks, to no effect.

“Spit Fyre,” Septimus said sternly, “I command you to let go of your tail.
Now!
”

Spit Fyre, who was not feeling quite his normal confrontational self that morning—and did not like the taste of his tail at all—let go.

Much relieved, Septimus pushed the dragon’s head away. “Spit Fyre, you must
not
bite your tail,” he told him. He rewound the shredded HeatCloaks while the dragon regarded his bandaging attempts with a baleful eye. He finished knotting the cloaks together, looked up and met Spit Fyre’s stare.

“Don’t even
think
about it, Spit Fyre,” he said. “You must
leave your bandage alone. Your tail will never get better if you keep biting it. Come on, move your head this way. Come
on
.” Septimus grabbed hold of the large spike on the top of Spit Fyre’s head and pulled him away from his tail. It took ten minutes of persuasion, pushing and shoving to get the dragon’s head to a safe distance from his tail once more.

“Good boy, Spit Fyre,” said Septimus, crouching down beside him. “I know it hurts, but it will get better soon. I promise.” He fetched the WaterGnome and poured a long stream of water into Spit Fyre’s mouth. “Go to sleep now, Spit Fyre,” Septimus told him and, to his surprise, Spit Fyre obediently closed his eyes.

Septimus felt hot and sticky after his exertions with Spit Fyre’s tail. The sea looked cool and inviting and he decided to dip his toes in the water. He sat down on the edge of Spit Fyre’s rock and, unaware that Spit Fyre had opened one eye and was regarding him with some interest, he undid his laces, pulled off his boots and thick socks and wiggled his toes in the warm sand. Immediately Septimus felt a wonderful feeling of freedom. He walked slowly down the gently shelving beach toward the water and across the line of firm wet sand left by the retreating tide. He stood at the edge of the sea, watching
his feet sink a little into the sand as he waited for the next tiny wave to meet his toes. When it did, Septimus was surprised at how cold the water felt. He waited for the next wavelet and, as he breathed in the clean salt air, he felt, for a fleeting moment, indescribably happy.

There was a sudden flash of movement behind him.

Septimus spun around.

“No, Spit Fyre!”
he yelled. The dragon had his tail firmly clamped in his jaws once more and this time he was chewing. Septimus raced back across the sand, leaped onto the rock and proceeded to drag the dragon away from his tail.

“You are a
bad dragon
, Spit Fyre,” Septimus told him sternly as he finally managed to pull the dragon’s jaws off the now-shredded bandage. “You must
not
bite your tail. If you do, it won’t get better, and then…” Septimus was about to say, “and then we’ll be stuck here forever,” but he stopped. He remembered something Aunt Zelda used to say—that, once spoken, things come true more easily—and he changed it lamely to, “and then you’ll be sorry.”

Spit Fyre didn’t look like he was about to be sorry for anything. He looked, thought Septimus, extremely grumpy. Ignoring his dragon’s bad-tempered stare, Septimus bound up
what was left of the tattered HeatCloaks and stood on guard while he tried to figure out what to do. He wished that Beetle and Jenna would come back; he could do with some help—and some company. But there was no sign of them. He had to do something about Spit Fyre biting his tail, and he had to do it now—he didn’t think the tail would survive many more attacks like the last one. He maneuvered Spit Fyre’s head away from his tail once again, and then, keeping a firm hand on Spit Fyre’s nose, he sat down and began to think.

Septimus remembered an incident with Beetle’s mother’s cat some months earlier. The cat—an aggressive creature that Beetle had never taken to—had also had trouble with its tail after a vicious fight. Beetle’s mother had lovingly bound up the tail, only for the cat to do exactly what Spit Fyre had done—over and over again. Mrs. Beetle had had more patience than Septimus and had sat with the cat for three days and nights before Beetle insisted she get some sleep and promised that he would watch the cat. Beetle, however, was not as devoted as his mother. He cut out the bottom of an old toy bucket and stuck the bucket over the cat’s head so that the creature had to wear it in the manner of a bizarre necklace. But the bucket had solved the problem beautifully—the cat could no longer attack the bandages around
its tail, as it was unable to reach its head past the sides of the bucket. Mrs. Beetle was horrified when she awoke and saw her beloved cat with a bucket on its head, but even she had to admit that Beetle’s idea worked well. She had spent the following weeks apologizing to the cat while the cat studiously ignored her. But the tail healed, the bucket came off and the cat eventually stopped sulking. Septimus thought that what worked for a grumpy cat was likely to work for an equally grumpy dragon—but
where
was he going to find a giant bucket?

Septimus decided he would just have to make his own bucket. He took a leather cup from Marcia’s saddlebag, cut out the bottom and also cut along the seam that ran up the side of it. Then, telling Spit Fyre very firmly that he was
not to move an inch or there will be big trouble
, he laid the small, almost crescent-shaped strip of leather on the sand and performed seven Enlarging Spells—allowing the leather to grow slowly and avoiding the risk of collapse, which can so often happen with an over-enthusiastic Enlarging Spell. Eventually he had a piece of leather about ten feet long and four feet wide.

Now came the hard part. Septimus approached Spit Fyre, dragging the Enlarged sheet of leather across the sand; Spit Fyre lifted his head and eyed him suspiciously. Septimus
caught the dragon’s gaze and held it, then very formally he said, “Spit Fyre, as your Imprintor, I hereby command you to
stay still
.” The dragon looked surprised but, to Septimus’s amazement, obeyed. Septimus was not sure how long the dragon’s obedience would last, so he quickly set to work. He wrapped the unwieldy piece of leather around the dragon’s head and Sealed it along the line where he had cut it a few minutes earlier.

When his Imprintor at last released him from his command and stepped back to view his handiwork, Spit Fyre was wearing what looked like an enormous leather bucket on his head—and an extremely irritated expression.

As Septimus stooding watching Spit Fyre, he became aware that he himself was being Watched.

“Septimus.”

He spun around. There was no one there.

“Septimus…
Septimus
.”

The hairs on the back of Septimus’s neck rose. This was the voice he had heard calling to him when he had flown out to the Trading Post.

Septimus stood beside his dragon for protection. Keeping his back to Spit Fyre, he turned slowly in a circle and
scanned the rocks, the beach, the empty sea, the sand dunes, the rocky scrub grass behind the dunes and the hill beyond—but he saw nothing. He repeated the circle once more, using the old Young Army technique of detecting movement by looking ahead but paying attention to what was at the edge of his field of vision; and then—there it was. A figure…
two
figures…walking across the scrub grass behind the dunes.

“Jenna! Beetle!” Septimus called out. An immense feeling of being released from something came over him, and he ran up the dunes to meet them.

“Hey, Sep,” said Jenna as she and Beetle scrambled down the last dune toward him. “You okay?”

“Yep.” Septimus grinned. “I am now. You two have a good time?”

“Lovely. It’s such a beautiful place here and—hey,
what’s that on Spit Fyre’s head
?”

“It’s a cat bucket,” said Beetle. “That right, Sep?”

Septimus grinned. It was so good to have Jenna and Beetle back. There was no denying it—the island was a creepy place to be on your own.

That afternoon, Septimus made a hideout.

The feeling of being Watched had unsettled him, and Septimus felt himself slipping into his Young Army way of thinking. The way he was beginning to see it, they were trapped in a strange place with unknown, maybe even invisible, dangers, and they needed to act accordingly. This meant having somewhere safe to spend the nights.

Using the contents of Marcia’s Young Army Officer Cadet Hostile Territory Survival Pack, and with rather reluctant help from Jenna and Beetle—who liked sleeping on the beach and didn’t understand what he was bothering about—Septimus constructed a hideout in the dunes. He chose a spot overlooking the bay but near enough to Spit Fyre to keep an eye on him.

He and Beetle took turns digging a deep hole with sloping sides and strengthened it with driftwood to avoid any danger of collapse. Septimus then pushed Marcia’s set of bendy telescopic poles deep into the sand around the hole and covered them with a roll of lightweight Camouflage canvas, which he found wedged at the bottom of the bag and which blended into the dune so well that Beetle nearly stepped on it and fell in. Septimus then covered the top of the canvas with a thick layer
of grass pulled from the dunes, because that was how they had always done it in the Young Army, and it felt wrong not to. He stood back to admire his handiwork. He was pleased—he had constructed a classic Young Army hideout.

The inside of the hideout was surprisingly spacious. They lined it with more long, coarse grass and placed the opened-up saddlebags on top as a rug. Jenna was won over—she pronounced it “really cozy.”

From the outside, the entrance was hardly visible. It was no more than a narrow slit that looked out through the dip between two dunes to the sea beyond. Septimus was pretty sure that, once it too was covered with grass, no one would ever guess they were there.

That evening they sat on the beach and cooked fish.

The Young Army Officer Cadet Hostile Territory Survival Pack did, of course, include fishing line, hooks and dried bait, which Marcia had naturally remembered. And as the evening tide came in over the warm sand, bringing a shoal of black and silver fish with it, Beetle had sat on a rock and caught six in quick succession. Fish held high, he had waded back triumphant and worked with Jenna to make a
driftwood fire on the beach.

They cooked the fish in the approved Sam Heap style, by threading them onto wet sticks and holding them over the glowing embers. Marcia’s StayFresh bread and dried fruit provided the rest of supper, and the WaterGnome fueled so many FizzFroots that they lost count.

They sat late into the night, chewing Banana Bears and Rhubarb Lumps, and watched the sea as it began once again to retreat, leaving the sand shining in the moonlight. Far across the bay they saw the long line of dark rocks that led to a lone rock standing tall like a pillar, which Jenna named the Pinnacle. To their right, past Spit Fyre’s rocks, they saw the rocky summit of a tiny island at the end of the spit, which Jenna declined to name, as she had an odd feeling that the island knew its own name and would not take well to being given another. The island was, in fact, called Star Island.

But for much of the time they looked neither right nor left but gazed straight ahead to the distant lights of the lighthouse, the lights that had drawn them to the island and saved them. They talked about the little man at the top of the lighthouse and wondered who he was and how he had gotten there. And then, much later, they squeezed into the hideout and fell fast asleep.

Sometime later, in the early hours of the morning, the thin shadowy figure of a girl in green wandered back down the hill and stood over the hideout Listening to the sounds of sleep.

Septimus stirred. In his dreams someone was calling to him; he dreamed that he put a bucket on his head and heard no more.