The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Now then,’ the Queen began, in her most queenly voice—but at this point Lili-Daisy did lift her hand from my shoulder.

  She swung around, this way and that. She muttered to herself. She took a step towards the platform. Still peering in every direction. Next thing she was running.

  ‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where’s he got to?’

  ‘Who?’ demanded the Queen, exasperated.

  ‘Jaskafar!’ Lili-Daisy cried. ‘I can’t see him! Where’s he gone?’

  And she stopped still by the platform and screamed: ‘JASKAFAR?!’

  Honey Bee

  He was gone.

  The little boy from the Orphanage who had given the Queen flowers.

  Everybody searched the Green, but he had vanished.

  He’d been right there on the platform, sitting on the table, swinging his legs. So many adults! The Queen, Mayor Franny, Sir Brathelthwaite, Millicent Cadger—they’d all been up there with him. The Queen’s guards had been lined up on the red carpet! Constables all over the place!

  But once again, a child had been stolen and nobody had seen a thing.

  FINLAY

  Day and night, we swept through the streets of Spindrift searching for him.

  Everyone from the Orphanage, crowds of people from right across the town—all of us looked. Plenty knew Jaskafar and loved him, and we marched the streets shouting his name and banging on saucepan lids.

  We turned the place upside down.

  Other children had been taken, and we’d always searched for them, of course, but not like this. This was Jaskafar. Taken right before our eyes! While our Queen was in town!

  We’d had enough.

  We climbed roofs and trees, upturned trashcans and baskets of fish, shone lamps into basements. We crept into the Radish Gnome caves along the coastline and hunted through the ships docked at the wharf.

  The constables ran around the Green with magnifying glasses and box cameras, and interviewed everyone who’d been at the Tournament. The Queen decided to stay in town another fortnight in the Royal Suite of the Ocean View Hotel, the best hotel on the Beach with the Yellow Sand, and she sent for five of her best Palace spies to help out. These Palace spies galloped into town and ran around the Green with their own much fancier magnifying glasses and cameras. They interviewed everyone who’d been at the Tournament again, asking exactly the same questions, only using bigger words and longer, more menacing pauses between questions.

  Randalf the lighthouse keeper aimed his spotlight at every corner of the town to help. This caused a few near-shipwrecks, so he had to go back to aiming it at the sea. Local Witches and Sterling Silver Foxes suggested they dust off their Shadow Magic to help in the hunt.

  ‘We’d never use it ordinarily,’ they all promised. ‘We’ve practically forgotten how!’

  ‘Hmm,’ said the constables suspiciously.

  Friendly pirates dragged out treasure chests from the backs of their closets, and posted notices:

  REWARD

  Used Treasure Chest in Fair Condition

  (few scratches but hinges polished)

  For Any

  Information Leading

  to the Return

  of Little Jaskafar.

  The Siren sisters who live on Danbury Street very kindly shrieked, ‘Jaskafar! Jaskafar! Come back at once!’ in voices so horrible that, if the boy had been hiding, he’d have come running right away to make it stop. Eventually, everybody else asked the Siren sisters to please stop.

  But there was no trace of him, not a single clue. Jaskafar’s bed was empty each night and every morning, the top of the wardrobe was bare. ‘A rat?’ Lili-Daisy murmured hopefully, looking up at the wardrobe each day.

  Now and then, Glim and I took a short break from searching to go see our friend Snatty-Ra-Ra the fortune-teller, in the Town Square. There are six or seven fortune-tellers who sit at card-tables or inside tents around the square, and all of them will tell you the future for a couple of silver. Far and away, our friend Snatty is the best.

  The others all claim to be the best, of course. Some will tell you they trained in Baebelot with the crystal-gazers. Some claim to be part Sibyl. Two of them, a pair of brothers who dress in matching smart suits, swear they are actually visitors from the future who came here to Spindrift through a gap in a hedge. ‘The Time Travel Brothers,’ they call themselves.

  ‘So we can certainly tell you what happens in the future,’ they crow. ‘We’re from there.’

  Now, there is an old story about a hedge in the Oakum Woods where people used to squeeze through a gap and time travel. But most folk are pretty sure that the story is a great big crate-load of crabapple, invented by a local gardener after seven or eight pints too many. My friends and I scratched ourselves to pieces one summer, squeezing between every gap, half-gap, and plenty of actual non-gaps, in every hedge we could find in the Oakum Woods, and reached a solid conclusion: hedges don’t help you time travel. All they do is stand there looking hedgy.

  Still, some do believe the Time Travel Brothers, most probably because their suits are so smart. It stands to reason, people think, that suits in the future will be smart. So customers hand over their silver.

  Not Glim and me. We don’t give our silver to the two in the suits, nor to any of the other fortune-tellers.

  Well, we don’t actually have any silver.

  But let’s say we did? We’d only ever give it to Snatty.

  Snatty has long grey hair, which he wears in a ponytail all the way to his ankles. He also has the best nose you ever saw. Like a sail it is, long and thin, flappy and sharp. When Glim and I were tiny, we used to sneak out of the Orphanage and visit Snatty because he let us pull on his nose. Each time we pulled, he’d make a sound in the back of his throat. Like this: Gong! We thought it was his nose making the noise. We’d crawl around his lap pulling on his nose, laughing our heads off at this guy’s crazy, gong-making nose. He was very patient. Gong, he’d go.

  Gong.

  Gong.

  Gong.

  Anyhow, Snatty is from the Whispering Kingdom where the people can Whisper thoughts into your head. Some of the Whisperers, Snatty amongst them, can also hear Whispers from the future. That’s how he does his fortune-telling.

  He never makes much money, though, because he’s honest. If he can’t hear a Whisper about a particular customer, he’ll give the silver straight back. ‘Nope,’ he says. ‘Sorry. Got zippo here. It’s like you don’t even have a future.’

  Customers don’t tend to like that.

  As I mentioned, Glim and I dropped in on Snatty each day while we were searching. We wanted to know if he’d heard any Whispers about Jaskafar. Each day, Snatty would shake his nose. I mean, he shook his head, but his nose is so long it always seems as if that’s what he’s shaking.

  Snatty loved Jaskafar too, so he was listening to the future as hard as he could, but day after day went by without a word.

  Finally, a week after the Tournament, Snatty told us that he’d heard a very faint Whisper from tomorrow.

  ‘I heard that Jaskafar is a good distance away,’ he said.

  ‘No point looking for him in Spindrift anymore then?’ Glim asked.

  Snatty shook his nose.

  ‘You hear anything else? Like an address maybe? Or if he’s okay?’

  The nose shook again.

  We sighed for a bit.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Snatty said, but he said this in a Whisper. It feels like a tickle in your brain when Whisperers Whisper at you. Feels like you’re thinking to yourself: I’m going to cheer up now, in a scratchy little voice. I gave a little shake and the Whisper fell away.

  ‘Snatty,’ I said sternly.

  ‘Sorry,’ he replied.

  He knows it’s not polite to Whisper.

  ‘I don’t want to cheer up,’ I added.

  ‘Me neither,’ Glim agreed. ‘I want to be sad.’

  Snatty wound his long ponytail around his wrist and offered for us to pull o
n his nose. But we said no, thanks all the same. We’ve pretty well grown out of that. Sorrowful, we walked back across the Town Square towards the Orphanage.

  ‘I want to be sad,’ I said, expanding on the thought, ‘because I feel so bad.’

  Glim nodded. ‘We promised Lili-Daisy we’d keep an eye on Jaskafar.’

  ‘But we were fighting with the Brathelthwaite kids,’ I continued grimly. ‘It’s my fault. I’m the one who punched that boy.’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Glim argued. ‘He deserved it. Right prat, that one. I’d punch him myself this moment if I could.’

  ‘Same,’ I agreed. ‘Nothing would make me happier—’

  ‘—than to lay into those Boarding School kids again.’

  ‘The way they acted at the Tournament!’

  ‘Cream-puff-eating, silk-tent-lazing toffee apples!’

  ‘Snooty bunch of toffee-nosed jackasses!’

  ‘And that crabapple way they stole the victory from us! The trophy!’

  ‘Of course we had to fight them!’

  ‘It’s their fault Jaskafar’s gone!’

  ‘Of course it’s their fault!’

  ‘And have you noticed that every person in town has been searching for Jaskafar, except—’

  ‘—for the Brathelthwaite kids!’

  Suddenly, we were not at all sad.

  We were extremely mad.

  ‘Let’s find the twins,’ I said.

  ‘And attack Brathelthwaite,’ Glim agreed.

  Honey Bee

  For a week after the Tournament, between 6 pm and midnight, the whole school had to march around the courtyard chanting our school motto. This was to remind us of how wicked we had been in almost coming second.

  ‘My dear students,’ Sir Brathelthwaite said, on the night of the Tournament. ‘My dear, dear students. There may come a day, later in your lives, when you experience a crushing disappointment. It will hit you like a steam train in your belly. It will make you want to don boxing gloves and beat your own face.’

  ‘Oh my,’ Hamish muttered, clasping his hands to his face. ‘I just … I find that rather foolish an idea. I mean to say—’

  ‘When that happens to you, dear students—’ Sir Brathelthwaite’s voice rose over Hamish’s— ‘you will get some idea of how I feel right now.’

  We all stared. We were in the Dining Hall but there was no dinner on the table, only empty plates.

  ‘These empty plates will help you understand,’ Sir B continued, ‘the emptiness I feel in my soul. Oh, dear students—’ He had to stop there, as his voice was cracking and he picked up a cloth napkin and buried his face in it, blowing his nose. Uncle Dominic, who was standing alongside and flicking his horsewhip about, reached out and placed a gentle hand on Sir B’s shoulder. When Sir B looked up, he gave Uncle Dominic an emotional nod. ‘Dear students, you almost lost today! Had it not been for the young Duke, Victor, pointing out the Tournament rules—had it not been that the riffraff at the Orphanage had indeed broken the rules—why, we could have—we might have—’

  Again, he had to stop and turn away.

  We all waited. I was awfully hungry. Running all day makes my stomach ache for food.

  ‘We could have lost,’ Sir Brathelthwaite finished hoarsely. ‘And Brathelthwaite students never, ever lose.’

  Then he told us, very sorrowfully, that we would have to march around the courtyard each evening for a week. It was the only thing he could think to do, he said, to help us remember how very wrong, how shameful, it was to lose.

  He hated doing it. Hated it.

  ‘All of us?’ Rosalind Whitehall asked, raising her hand.

  ‘No, of course not all of you,’ Sir Brathelthwaite tched, brightening a little and nodding towards Victor. ‘His Grace may remain indoors with the teachers. It is thanks to him that you only have to do this for a week. Had we, actually… lost … you would have had to march at least a month. Please. A small round of applause for His Grace.’

  We applauded Victor, and he bowed, giving a little shrug as if to say: It was nothing. A mere trifle.

  ‘But all of us?’ Rosalind Whitehall persisted. ‘I mean to say, sir, I did not compete in any events. So I did not lose. It was really just the mixed relay team that almost lost the day for us, so should it not be the athletes who failed us who march?’

  Sir Brathelthwaite sadly shook his head. ‘When one fails, you all fail. That is the Brathelthwaite way. The athletes will learn from your suffering.’

  Many of the students cast irritated glances at me and the other athletes for having failed them.

  ‘Oh, I say,’ Hamish said. ‘Awfully sorry, old chaps. But it will be grand to have you out suffering with us! Thanks for that. And your suffering will help me run faster in the future!’

  This did not improve their glances.

  My friend Carlos raised his hand.

  ‘Carlos?’ Sir Brathelthwaite sighed.

  Carlos had caught a nasty cold a few days earlier and could not speak for a moment as he was shivering violently. Sir Brathelthwaite’s mouth turned into a little pinch as he waited.

  ‘Only,’ Carlos said, getting control of his shivers, ‘I thought we could help search for the little orphan boy? Jaskafar? The whole town is going out with lanterns tonight.’

  Sir Brathelthwaite gave a great shrug. ‘It is a tragedy,’ he said, ‘that another child has been stolen. But my dear students, it is not our tragedy. We must stay well away from the search. What if one of us were to be stolen? If we do not look out for ourselves, we fail the town and the Kingdom. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘No,’ Carlos said.

  ‘You are confused?’ Sir Brathelthwaite enquired.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Sir Brathelthwaite—and Uncle Dominic loosened his horsewhip, but Sir B shook his head slightly. ‘—in that case, Carlos, you will march the courtyard until dawn each night this week. Perhaps that will help clear your mind?’

  Now I should perhaps let you know that my friend Carlos is a foundling. He was left on the steps of Brathelthwaite one frosty morning, a baby wrapped in a shawl inside a cardboard box. There was a note in the box which I have seen because it is pinned to Sir Brathelthwaite’s office wall:

  This is Prince Carlos, heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Joya Amarillo (in the northern climes). Our King has been overthrown by rebel forces! Please keep Prince Carlos safe until our Monarchy is restored! You will be rewarded with mountains of gold.

  When I came to Brathelthwaite, three years ago, Uncle Dominic advised me to stay away from Carlos.

  ‘At first,’ Uncle Dominic confided in me, ‘Sir Brathelthwaite was terribly excited to have a little prince at his school. But years have gone by and it seems the royal family of Joya Amarillo is never going to win back its crown and come for the prince.’

  Sir Brathelthwaite had become fed up, Uncle Dominic explained, and couldn’t stand Carlos anymore—he thought Carlos was actually stealing from the school by promising a mountain of gold and not delivering one.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Carlos was only a baby when he was left here. It’s not his fault that his family are losing their battle?’

  Uncle Dominic rolled his eyes and muttered, ‘How can we be related?’

  Then, of course, Carlos and I became friends.

  I tried to explain to Uncle Dominic that this was truly an accident, but he did not understand at all. You see, Carlos is funny and kind and seems more ordinary than the other children. For example, each Saturday we are allowed a free day to take a stroll outside school grounds, provided we go in pairs and never stray near a local. The other students promenade about the Spindrift Gardens, avoiding the downtown altogether. However, Carlos and I always run directly to the beach or into town, and we break the rule about straying near locals, as we find them so much more fun and lively than Brathelthwaiters.

  Anyhow, by the end of that week, we were all weary, but Carlos especially. Often his cold
s turn to bronchitis, and it had happened again. His face was deathly white, he stumbled often as he walked, and he coughed almost ceaselessly.

  As a special treat, on this final night of marching, Carlos was permitted to stop at midnight with the rest of us. We all walked around to the front of the school and into the school building together. We passed the welcome sign:

  We crawled into our beds, greatly relieved that at last the punishment was over.

  ‘Not punishment!’ Sir Brathelthwaite scolded. ‘I would never punish my dear students. It is merely a reminder, to help you.’

  But just as we began to drift towards sleep, we were startled awake by this:

  Splat!

  Splat!

  Splat!

  Along with angry shouts from our security guards.

  The news flew up and down the corridors. Children from the Orphanage had climbed over the school walls! They were hurling rotten eggs at the building!

  Splat!

  Splat!

  Splat!

  The next morning at breakfast, Sir Brathelthwaite said, very sadly, that this attack was truly our own fault. As we had almost lost the Tournament, we had caused the orphans to forget their place. They no longer went about admiring and being awe-struck by us. Instead, they threw eggs.

  Now, he added, we would have to march the courtyard another week, to remind us of our place as number one.

  ‘I’d like to remind those Orphanage kids of their place,’ Victor muttered, crinkling his nose at the stench of rotten egg. ‘Who’s in?’

  FINLAY

  What a night that was! Cheered us right up, attacking Brathelthwaite.

  First thing that happened was, Glim and I found the twins and made the suggestion. They were in before we’d finished the sentence.

  ‘A Witch’s coven has dumped a cartload of rotten eggs outside of town,’ Eli said.

  ‘Read that in the paper today,’ Taya agreed. ‘They must have had one of their curse battles—ended up with an excess of eggs.’