The Slightly Alarming Tale of the Whispering Wars

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘We will not explain why we now have super-charged Whispers,’ the Whispering King was saying on the wireless. He sounded a bit miffed now. ‘Why is that anybody’s business? Nor will we explain which of the Shadow Mages are our friends. Again, whose business is that? Do I ask you which brand of toothpaste you favour? Do I demand to know your preferred beer?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Lili-Daisy. ‘Not sure those are quite the same.’

  ‘It hurt our feelings deeply,’ the King continued, ‘when our members were expelled from the K&E Alliance and various security forces. But we have now decided not to mind. In fact, we are going to form our own club. A Shadow Club. We invite any pirate ship to join, along with any Witch, Radish Gnome, Siren, Sterling Silver Fox or other dark mage kingdom or empire.’

  ‘Crikey!’ said Daffo.

  But the King was not finished: ‘It is time for Shadow Mages to come out of the shadows,’ he said, very dramatically. ‘And take their rightful place as rulers of the Kingdoms and Empires.’ ‘Thank you to the Whispering King for that fascinating message,’ the radio announcer declared. ‘And now back to your regular programming.’

  The rugby game had finished, but the announcer apologised for that, and told us that Khatri had scored the try in the last minute, meaning that Raffia had won. Good old Khatri. You beauty, Raffia.

  We switched off the wireless then, to talk about the Whispering King’s promise of a new Shadow Club.

  Lili-Daisy shook her head. ‘So strange! Whyever do they think they are the rightful rulers of all the Kingdoms and Empires?’

  ‘This is brilliant,’ we all said. ‘Hilarious.’

  We thought it was like a comic strip, see? The Whisperers had always been super nice guys and now they were playing at being villains. Nothing to worry about. The good guys—us—would take them down in a flash.

  The next day was a Saturday, and another warm spring day. We all went to the Beach with the Yellow Sand for a swim. While we were in the water, the Boarding School kids stole our towels and clothes. So we had to go back to the Orphanage shivering in our swimsuits. I mean, it was warm, but there was still a leftover winter breeze in the air. Everyone laughed at us again as we came through the Town Square, but their laughter was interrupted because Jean-Pierre, the newspaper vendor, suddenly bellowed: ‘Read all about it! Breaking news! Read all about it! Breaking news!’

  ‘What breaking news?’ everyone asked, turning to Jean-Pierre. But he wanted people to buy his papers and wouldn’t tell us. He quickly turned the papers so we couldn’t even read the headlines. Baker Joe and Motoko-the-Chocolatier both sighed and reached into their pockets for copper coins, handed these over, and bought a paper each. They held them up to their faces, reading fast while we waited.

  ‘It’s the Whispering Kingdom that has been stealing all the children!’ Baker Joe shouted suddenly.

  ‘No!’ everyone shouted back.

  ‘The children are all in the Whispering Kingdom!’ Motoko-the-Chocolatier roared. Her necklaces clinked against each other. When she looked up, her eyes were wild: her niece had been one of the children stolen.

  ‘Read all about it! Breaking news!’ Jean-Pierre called hopefully from his newspaper stand.

  ‘The Whispering King has admitted it!’ Baker Joe cried. ‘He’s proud about it!’

  ‘They’ve been using their super-powered Whispers to steal the children!’ Motoko-the-Chocolatier put in, frantically turning the pages so she could read on.

  ‘The Whispering Kingdom has been sending their own children to other Kingdoms and Empires to lure children away from adult supervision! Then adult Whisperers use super-Whispers to make the children accompany them back to the Whispering Kingdom!’

  ‘The K&E Alliance has given the Whispering Kingdom twenty-four hours to release all the children. If not, an invading force will be sent to rescue them!’ That part the baker and chocolatier read in unison, so it overlapped a bit, and we made them say it again.

  ‘Twenty-four hours,’ a few people complained. ‘They’re always giving the Whispering Kingdom twenty-four hours. Madness. Just attack now.’

  ‘Read all about it!’ Jean-Pierre tried again.

  ‘We just did,’ the chocolatier pointed out.

  ‘Hush,’ everyone else commanded. They were busy reading the baker and chocolatier’s copies.

  So the newspaper vendor sat back down behind his stand, disgruntled.

  By the next day, the Whispering Kingdom had not responded to the demands, so a fleet of K&E Alliance ships sailed on the Kingdom.

  ‘Release the children at once!’ the Admiral demanded from the decks of the flagship, speaking through his loud hailer. ‘Or we attack.’

  The Whispering Kingdom did not reply except to shoot a cannon at the ship and sink it.

  Right away, a fleet of pirate ships rounded on the other K&E ships—they’d been lurking by the cliffs ready to defend the Whispering Kingdom (in exchange for diamonds, most likely)—and there was a mighty battle at sea in which hundreds of K&E sailors were killed.

  The following day, a regiment of K&E soldiers attempted to invade the Whispering Kingdom by land but this turned out to be a tricky thing. You see, the Whispering Kingdom has the sea on one side and an Impenetrable Forest surrounding all the other sides. That’s a magical Impenetrable Forest, by the way: nobody can get through. The only road into the Whispering Kingdom runs along the coast then hits the three Whispering Gates—magic, too. No way through them unless you’re a Whisperer and know how to get the keys.

  Not surprisingly, the K&E soldiers failed.

  ‘How can a forest and three gates stop a thousand soldiers!’ everyone wailed. But that’s the sort of thing that magic does. We knew that really.

  Next, the K&E Dragon Corp flew over the Whispering Kingdom, but of course there’s a Witch-made Mist Shroud pulled right over the place. Very private people they’ve always been, the Whisperers. You can’t even see through this Mist Shroud, apparently, let alone fly through it.

  Another fleet of K&E Alliance ships sailed on the Whispering Kingdom in dark of night, but again, they were roundly defeated.

  And so on.

  In Spindrift, we all said, ‘Never mind; they’ll get it right in the end,’ and we waited excitedly for the K&E Alliance to sort things out and bring the children back. Lili-Daisy gazed at the empty beds and up at the top of the wardrobe with a hopeful smile.

  Meanwhile, we were busy getting revenge on Brathelthwaite by painting WE ARE DAFT GITS on the sails of all their little boats. They take these out each Sunday morning and sail around the harbour.

  They retaliated by painting ORPHANS ARE AWFUL on the Orphanage wall. We found this to be a very half-hearted, lacklustre attempt.

  ‘They’re hardly worth our effort,’ Glim, the twins and I said to each other.

  ‘If they’re not going to fight properly, why bother at all?’

  But that evening I saw the two children again—the Boarding School spies—staring up at us from the Town Square.

  I was staring right back at them through the window, dreaming about how we might trick them into taking false information back to Brathelthwaite. Our false information would somehow make the Boarding School launch an attack on us which would badly backfire on them, leading to the whole school standing in the Town Square in their underclothes—

  But how? How can we achieve this?

  —when I noticed that the dormitory had gone very quiet.

  The others were gathered around the wireless. The Queen was speaking.

  ‘I have made the official declaration,’ she said in a grand tone, as if she was pretty proud of herself. She didn’t know that the wireless was making her voice come out squeaky. ‘They cannot steal our children. They cannot steal our land. The forces of good and right must, and always do, defeat the forces of evil! My people: the K&E Alliance has declared war on the Whispering Kingdom. I have just now sent a telegram stating that the Kingdom of Gusts, Gales, Squalls and Violent Storms will stan
d by the K&E Alliance. My people, we are at war with the Whispering Kingdom.’

  For a moment I thought that a blizzard was blowing through the dormitory, but it was static on the wireless. Also, I guess, the Queen’s words had cast a chill. The chill mingled with the smell of seaweed. (Daffo’s always bringing seaweed back from the beach.)

  Lili-Daisy switched off the wireless. Little Ollie had crawled onto her lap and Lili-Daisy was stroking his head in an absent-minded way, her fingers getting caught in tangles. Glim was frowning at her own fingers, as if she wasn’t sure she recognised her knuckles. The twins had stopped reading their papers and their heads were up like plump meerkats.

  Anita, who has a bedroom along the corridor, where she studies her medical textbooks until late each night, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Are you listening to this—?’ she began, but she stopped, taking in the children’s faces. Glances darted back and forth between Lili-Daisy and Anita.

  ‘Right,’ said Lili-Daisy, standing suddenly so that Ollie spilled to the floor. ‘This is good news! This will put an end to all the nonsense! The Whispering Kingdom will send back the children. Amie and Connor, Bing and Jaskafar…’ She pointed to their empty beds in turn. ‘They’ll all be back at last, and we can return to regular life.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Anita agreed at once. ‘They’ll have a bit of schoolwork to catch up on, won’t they? But I’ll let a few things slide.’

  ‘Will there be a war?’ little Leesa whispered.

  ‘Of course,’ Daffo pronounced. ‘The Queen just said so.’

  ‘Oh Daffo,’ Lili-Daisy sighed, and she spoke to the room. ‘Nobody wants a war. There will not be a war. This will be the end of it—you’ll see—and nothing is going to change.’

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ I said to Glim and the twins, much later that night. The other children were sleeping, but us four were lounging on Glim’s bed, eating toffees that Glim had saved from her last birthday. She had just told us a story about flying stars, exploding comets and a giant, fire-breathing roast potato.

  ‘What do you think?’ Glim obliged.

  ‘I think we need one, final, major attack on the Boarding School. Something that finishes this thing between us.’

  ‘And shows them who’s the boss?’ Eli enquired, glint in his eye.

  ‘Yes.’

  Glim nodded slowly. ‘I agree.’

  And so we made our plan.

  Honey Bee

  Mm.

  I seem to remember Finlay calling me a freight train, and saying I needed to pace myself when I told you about the races at the Spindrift Tournament.

  And here Finlay himself has zoomed through day after day of attack and counter-attack between Brathelthwaite and the Orphanage, not to mention all the news about the Whispering Wars. Like a boy zipping through a fair, whizzing by stalls with scarcely a glance at one.

  Fascinating.

  He must be quite worn out.

  At any rate, yes.

  We fought.

  They attacked us.

  We attacked them.

  And so on.

  Just as Finlay says.

  Meanwhile, my friend Carlos lay half-conscious in the infirmary, tossing and turning and crying out some days, perfectly still, his breath scarcely audible, on others.

  We knew the orphans must have spies keeping an eye on us, for they seemed to know our schedule precisely. And one day we spotted the spies.

  We had just completed our regular sailing expedition around the harbour. Our sails surprised us that day by announcing to the world that we were Daft Gits in huge, messy, painted letters. Very pleasant sailing, then. Guffaws and jeers competed with the sound of seagulls around us. It is marvellous to have pirates shouting and toasting you in their gruff voices; ‘To the Daft Gits!’ swilling their beer on the deck of their ship. We had to rescue one fisherman’s lad when he laughed so hard he tumbled from his boat.

  We ran into town, painted ORPHANS ARE AWFUL on the back of the Orphanage wall and sprinted back to the beach just in time for our carriages, breathless and excited. But then we felt a bit flat. ORPHANS ARE AWFUL wasn’t up to much.

  Riding back to the school—our sails now stowed away ready to be laundered—Victor tapped my elbow.

  ‘There,’ he murmured, pointing to the window.

  Outside, a boy and a girl, both about twelve, were pressed into the trees that line the road to our school. Both were well-dressed: the boy in a dark grey coat, the girl in sky blue. At first this struck me as odd because the weather was too warm for coats, but then I saw what Victor meant. There was something uncertain about them. Anxious. Agitated.

  ‘They don’t belong,’ I said.

  ‘Orphans,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘Disguised as proper people. Probably stole those coats. Spying on us.’

  ‘Eh?’ hissed Hamish, leaning forward excitedly. ‘Orphans, you say? Spying?’

  ‘Hush,’ Victor told him. ‘Usual meeting place tonight.’

  That was the night that war was declared, so we missed our meeting. Sir Brathelthwaite made us stand and salute the wireless, and then we had to sing the Kingdom anthem, followed by the Brathelthwaite school chant, and we had to pledge to do all we could to rally the spirits of our troops.

  ‘For example,’ Sir Brathelthwaite announced, ‘we will send your school blazers away to be starched, and to have their buttons polished.’

  ‘In what way—’ began Rosalind Whitehall, but Sir Brathelthwaite had moved on to the importance of our having good posture whenever we saw a soldier.

  The next few days were thrilling because we scarcely did any lessons. It was all ‘preparation for the war’ this, ‘hunkering down’ that. The school put a rush order on custom-made gas masks—they were striped in the Brathelthwaite colours, with comfortable silk bands—and blacked out all our windows with heavy drapes. The kitchen ordered vast quantities of jams and marmalades, butter and sugar, sherry and chocolate—just in case they ended up in short supply during the war. We would not be caught without our marmalade!

  Spindrift itself was busy setting up look-outs and watchtowers, along with a system of warning bells around its borders and along its beach and wharves.

  ‘Excellent idea!’ Sir Brathelthwaite said, and he arranged the same set-up for our school. He paid a couple of carpenters extra silver to slip away from their work on the town watchtowers, to build for us instead.

  Nevertheless, a number of parents sent servants to collect their children and carry them home. People kept murmuring about how Spindrift would be ‘strategic’ for both sides in this war, since we are on a jutting-out bit of coastline just north of the Whispering Kingdom. We were going to be a ‘key battleground’, apparently. I wasn’t quite sure what all that meant, but I found myself feeling rather proud of Spindrift for being so strategic and key.

  On the other hand, our student numbers halved.

  ‘Preposterous,’ I heard Sir Brathelthwaite mutter to Uncle Dominic. ‘We are better fortified here than anywhere!’ He gave a speech that night about how those students had scurried away at the first sign of trouble, cowardly little weaklings!

  This was rather harsh, as their parents had not given the children any choice. Still, I found myself feeling proud again, this time for not having been scooped up by parents. Here I was! Ready for battle! Or anyway, ready to rally troops with my shiny buttons and excellent posture.

  After a few days, life settled down again. All the excitement began to seem foolish. No doubt nothing would happen, and we’d have to be eating all those extra crates of strawberry jam and chocolate until we turned into jammy chocolate.

  Victor called a meeting of the Anti-Orphanage League to discuss our next attack.

  ‘Isn’t it their turn?’ I enquired. ‘Since we were the last to attack? We painted Orphans are Awful on their wall?’

  ‘That was a half-baked assault and you know it, Honey Bee.’ Victor pursed his lips. ‘I still think we should use my supreme idea of rendering all the
food in their pantry rotten and inedible.’

  ‘Well, that would starve them.’

  ‘Oh blah,’ Rosalind put in. ‘They do that to themselves already. Listen, does one truly take turns in a war? Should we not hammer them until they beg for mercy?’

  ‘Cripes!’ Hamish tched, frowning deeply. ‘I think you may be right, Rosalind. I have no recollection whatsoever about taking turns being one of the rules of engagement!’

  ‘They are clearly making new plans,’ Victor said, stretching his stockinged feet. It was a surprisingly chilly evening, and we were by the fire. ‘I keep seeing their spies—the same girl and boy in their stolen coats. The best form of defence is attack.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Hamish nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve read that somewhere. Makes no sense to me, I mean, how can you call an attack a defence? They’re entirely different things! Here now, this is attack—’ He punched the air. ‘—And this is defence.’ Now he crouched behind the couch. ‘See what I mean? Utterly different. But do go on, Victor.’

  Victor shot Hamish a look. ‘I have an idea,’ he said, turning back to Rosalind and me, ‘for an excellent attack. And this time, Honey Bee, you will not dissuade me. We’ll need about twenty silver pieces, Hamish.’

  ‘Right-ho,’ Hamish agreed.

  ‘It will mean getting up before dawn.’

  ‘Oh, must we?’ Rosalind complained.

  ‘And it will mean taking along our new gas masks.’

  I straightened up, uneasy. ‘It will?’

  ‘We are going to spray poisonous gas through the Orphanage windows.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ Rosalind clapped.

  ‘We’ll kill them!’ I cried.

  ‘Hold up a moment,’ Hamish frowned.

  ‘Not enough to kill them.’ Victor rolled his eyes. ‘Just enough to give them stomach cramps and a nasty rash. Meet you here. 4am tomorrow.’

  FINLAY

  The grass was frosty under the early-morning moonlight, and the wind kept creeping up on me, sliding its fingers down my neck like some kid playing a super-annoying game that the kid itself finds hilarious. I wanted to take a swipe at it.