Knock Three Times

by Cressida Cowell

  “No,” said Wish defiantly. “Xar and I are going to show you how Wizards and Warriors CAN work together to fight the Witches!”

  “HA! HA! HA!” Wish’s stepsisters laughed so hard at this that they nearly fell over.

  Queen Sychorax’s eyes hardened into stones.

  “Now she’s in for it,” said Drama, Wish’s sixth stepsister, with satisfaction.

  “YOU, a leader?” spat Queen Sychorax in a voice like an adder strike. “A worm with the flu would make a better leader than you! I have met jellyfish with greater leadership potential! Look at what trouble you’ve already led your wicked and foolish companions into! Covered in wounds, even weaker than you normally are, you haven’t eaten for days, you have NO FRIENDS and nowhere to hide… and I only just saved you from falling into the talons of the Witches! You call this leadership?”

  Wish flinched. Every single poison arrow of a word her mother said was something Wish had already been worrying was true. But Queen Sychorax hadn’t finished yet.

  “Consorting with Wizards and werewolves and other lowlifes! Riding beasts! Performing Magic! I cannot believe that my own daughter is so miserably unworthy compared to my stepdaughters!” said Queen Sychorax.

  The stepsisters giggled smugly.

  “YOU, Wish,” finished Queen Sychorax with magnificent scorn, “are an embarrassment and a traitor and a disgrace to your tribe!”

  Six months ago a speech like this would have crushed Wish. But that was before she met Xar, and Xar had given her courage, and she found that she was no longer afraid of a mother who set fire to forests and imprisoned her beloved vegetarian giant with spears and called her horrible names.

  “I am not an embarrassment or a traitor or a disgrace to my tribe,” said Wish coldly. “Release my giant, release my friends Xar and Bodkin, my sprites, my animals, my enchanted objects, and stop the fire!”

  Queen Sychorax stared in astonishment. But she recovered quickly.

  “It is a great deal easier to start a fire, than stop it,” said Queen Sychorax.

  She reached out and grabbed Wish’s arms so that she could not put up her eyepatch.

  “You are coming back home whether you like it or not!” said Queen Sychorax grimly. “This so-called spell of yours to get rid of Witches isn’t a proper spell. You have to understand that your best hope of survival is to be locked up safe forever. You need to face real life and grow up sharpish!

  “And to help you do that, when we get back home I will put your evil bandit friends in the deepest darkest dungeon I can find, and I will melt down that ridiculous Enchanted Spoon of yours and turn him into hairpins!”

  Now Queen Sychorax probably didn’t mean that—she had just lost her temper—but with that last, bitterly snapped-out comment I think you can safely say that the mother-and-daughter negotiations pretty much broke down for the moment.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…” moaned Caliburn, for with Wish’s arms imprisoned so firmly by the grim hands of Queen Sychorax, there was absolutely nothing Wish could do—she couldn’t reach her eyepatch to use the Magic eye…

  Xar was out like a light; Crusher was entirely incapacitated; the sprites and Bodkin were all tangled up in iron-clad nets; Justice was looking delightedly at the Enchanted Spoon, hoping that she was going to be able to melt him personally; the snowcats, wolves, and bear were too scared of something happening to Wish or the sprites to move; and fire was now reaching the edges of the clearing and was heating up the bottoms of the Warriors at the back of the crowd so fiercely that only the most iron-strict of Warrior training was preventing them from leaping from their saddles shouting “YARROOOOO!” or something similar…

  Yes, I think you could definitely say that this was a crisis, and we’re only at the end of CHAPTER THREE, for mistletoe’s sake.

  And quite a lot had happened already—what with the Witch attack and the capture by Warriors, it had been a very busy half an hour, what with one thing and another. You have to feel for poor Caliburn in this situation. He was the oldest creature in that clearing by far, and this really wasn’t good for his old bird heart.

  “What’s going to happen now????” panicked Caliburn. “I mean, I’m only a bird. I could peck someone, but I’m not sure it would help…”

  4. Exit, Rescued By a Bear

  ROOOOOOOOOAW!”

  Into this scene in which Queen Sychorax appeared to have regained control of the situation—apart from the FIRE of course, for as Queen Sychorax said herself, fires are easier to start than they are to stop, and once started they are difficult to keep in check—there leaped a gigantic brown bear.

  The bear was unimaginably enormous, three times the size of a normal bear. Its ragged fur, upraised either in fury or fright, made it seem even bigger than it actually was.

  It leaped into the clearing, reared to its hind legs, and beat its gigantic chest with its enormous paws. On its entrance, Warriors scattered in all directions in shock. Behind the bear came the thunder and shaking of colossal feet pounding into the ground like mini earthquakes, and one, two, three, four, five Thunderdell giants stormed into the clearing, followed by a little owl with spotted brown wings.

  Whatever Caliburn or anyone else was expecting to happen next, they weren’t expecting this.

  Queen Sychorax was so surprised she relaxed her iron grip on Wish’s arms.

  Wish leaped away from Queen Sychorax and hauled up the edge of her eyepatch with shaking hands.

  One of the many advantages of having a Magic eye is that you can make things happen extremely quickly. Wish had been taught by Caliburn how to make iron things move just by looking at them.

  So she looked across at Crusher and then at Bodkin, Xar, and the sprites, and…

  PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! The spears, daggers, axes, and maces that were pinning the edges of Crusher’s clothes and his hair to the ground rocketed into the air, releasing him. The iron nets entangling the sprites and Bodkin and Xar fell open.

  Then Wish looked across at Justice holding the Enchanted Spoon tight in her hands and… the spoon plunged forward with extraordinary strength toward Wish. For some strange reason, Justice’s hands were now magnetically attached to it, as if by supernatural glue. Justice was dragged, still holding on to the spoon, off her horse and did a swallow dive into the mud of the forest floor with phenomenal velocity. And boing! Boing! Boing! As the Enchanted Spoon jumped toward his beloved Wish with an attraction that was really quite touching to see, boing, boing, boing, Justice was dragged behind him, her nose and tummy and entire front being slammed into the mud at each bounce. The fork jabbed into her bottom to make her let go, and the key rammed her knuckles, and although it was all rather undignified, I’m afraid I’m not a bit sorry for her.

  “ROOOOOOOOOOAAW!” The bear continued to roar on its hind legs.

  The noise woke Xar, who came to, sitting upright abruptly. Bodkin had already scrambled out of the net entangling him and got to his feet.

  “REOOOOOOOOOAW!” The bear crashed back to the ground on all four legs.

  “Get on my back,” said the bear to Wish. And the bear slumped right down on the forest floor on its tummy so that they could climb onto it.

  “Quick, quick!” snapped the bear. “We haven’t got much time!”

  “Bears can’t talk,” said Wish stupidly, because that was the first thing that came into her head.

  “I’m not really a bear,” said the bear.

  “Of course not,” said Wish. “How silly of me.”

  “But I am a friend,” said the bear.

  Now, even in a situation as grim and disastrous as this one, I am not recommending that you climb on the back of a bear who is a total stranger.

  But Caliburn swooped downward, shrieking, “The bear is my sister! She’s definitely my sister! I’d recognize her anywhere!”

  Six months ago, Wish would have found this extremely disconcerting.

  But after spending some considerable time in the world of Magic, the idea
of Caliburn having a bear for a sister suddenly seemed reasonably normal.

  So, shaking with nerves, Wish hauled herself onto the back of the bear, taking hold of her long brown fur as she climbed it like a hillock. The bear generously barely even flinched even though Wish must have been pulling her hair, and Xar and Bodkin climbed up behind her.

  “Hold tight,” said the bear, getting to her feet.

  “Don’t forget the door!” Caliburn reminded Wish.

  “Oh! Yes! Quite right—we can’t leave the door behind!” said Wish. She turned around, lifted up her eyepatch a smidgeon, and focused on the fragments of the door lying all about the clearing in thousands of tiny little pieces, and they rose, whizzing and humming into the air, delighted that they hadn’t been forgotten. There wasn’t time to put all the fragments back in the right places, so they just jammed together any old how, forming a very eccentric impression of a door.

  And then the bear charged straight at the most fiery part of the forest.

  “What is the bear doing? It’s going to burn us all to death!” shouted Bodkin, terrified.

  “Stay close to the bear, sprites!” said Caliburn, landing on Bodkin’s shoulder and gripping so tight with his claws that Bodkin cried out. The sprites landed on the bear and the bear ran right through the flames and they did not burn. “Illusions…” explained the owl, crouched down on the bear’s back just in front of Wish. “Some of these flames are illusions.” Behind the bear ran Lonesome, the snowcats, wolves, and Xar’s much smaller, more-normal-sized bear, followed by the Thunderdell giants, who tore up the burning trees on either side and threw them down behind them, and the flames leaped up and the Warriors could not follow.

  Queen Sychorax was left, mouth open, unable to stop them. One second the children were there, and in her power. The next they were gone.

  5. The Tunnel of Fire

  The bear ran through the fire, followed by the Thunderdell giants. One of the bear’s eyes was gleaming with a bright white star of light, and this starlight seemed to be able to see which of the flames were real and which were illusions.

  Wish’s heart was beating so hard she thought it might jump right out of her chest. What are we doing, trusting this bear that we’ve only just met, and where is she taking us? But somehow she knew she could trust this bear, that this was a bear who was on her side, and she held on to the bear’s long shaggy fur with all her might, and although the brown fur might be gleaming just a little spookily with a blue supernatural light, there was a solidity and power in the bear’s body beneath her that was comfortingly real as she powered through the forest.

  For a couple of terrifying minutes they ran through the inferno, the bear knowing the path to take.

  The heat was so strong that the top of Bodkin’s helmet started to melt. Fire, fire all around.

  And then they were out of the fire and into the quiet forest.

  At least we’re out of the flames… thought Wish slightly hysterically to herself, trying to stay on TOP of the bear, because she wasn’t very good at riding things without falling off.

  The bear kept running, the Thunderdell giants and Crusher and the now-set-alight door following behind them, Lonesome and the wolves in a crazy pack all around, the snowcats with hair all-on-end with fright.

  “This is the place,” said the bear, stopping a moment. The Thunderdell giants halted and with great heaves they pulled up the nearest trees by the roots. Then they turned and carefully put the trees down some distance away, whispering words of thanks to the trees as they did so.

  “Oh! The poor trees!” said Wish. “What are they doing?”

  “They’re creating a firebreak,” said Caliburn. “If there’s a gap in the forest, the fire won’t be able to cross it.”

  The Thunderdell giants were joined by more Thunderdells, and more and more and more, and the giants worked together to pull up the trees and make a gap in the forest that the fire could not cross.

  Meanwhile Crusher knelt by the fallen trees, laying his hands on them and reassuring them that their sacrifice will have been worth it.

  “Man-made fires are never a good idea,” said Crusher, “but the forest will return, trust me, dear trees…”

  “As long as that dreadful Sychorax woman doesn’t try and plant her fields here,” sniffed the bear disapprovingly.

  “Sprite-who-looks-like-a-bright-blue-twig, can you help me?” said the bear to Ariel.

  “My name isss Ariel,” hissed Ariel.

  “Nice name,” said the bear. “Sprite-whose-name-is-Ariel, can you carry a flame of the fire for me?”

  “Of courssse,” said Ariel, flying down to a flaming twig lying on the forest floor and putting a little bit of it in the firebox he carried around his waist. (Warriors carried tinderboxes, but Wizards and sprites carried fireboxes, which had little flames like lighted candles, kept alight by the power of Magic in a tiny box.)

  “I’m a fire-collector,” explained the bear, looking over her shoulder at Wish, and Wish thought, Aren’t all fires exactly the same? But she nodded, as if fire-collecting was a perfectly normal hobby, like collecting books or jewels or money or different-colored spell bags.

  Then the bear looked up at the sky and lightning flashed from her starlight eye, and there were gigantic rolls of thunder and the lightning crisscrossed and zigzagged across the sky, and the clouds opened, and the rain poured down on the forest fire. The flaming Enchanted Door following them was instantly quenched by the water with a damp protesting hiss.

  “Weather spelling…” said Xar, impressed, for controlling the weather was very advanced Magic indeed, and even his own father, the great King Wizard Encanzo, had trouble with it.

  “The rain and the firebreak will stop the fire from spreading,” said the bear.

  They left the Thunderdell giants tending to the firebreak and making sure the fire did not leap across it.

  The bear and the animals and Crusher ran on, leaving the fire behind, and the rain ran into Wish’s eyes so that she could barely see. Eventually the animals came to a part of the forest where the ancient yews had grown so gnarled and bulging over the last three thousand years or so that they seemed to have faces, and their roots had twisted and turned into things that looked like feet, and the sprites had their wands out, for when you are in the presence of the old Magic it makes you feel just… a little bit… uneasy.

  A mist had descended, and the night was full of noises, of will-o’-the-wisps whooping out of nowhere and cooing “Come this way” in a spooky kind of way, and although even a five-year-old knows not to follow a will-o’-the-wisp however longingly they may coo (wisps are harmless, until you follow them, and then they can lead you to Very Dangerous Things indeed) it is still a little unnerving.

  “Oh dear, I think we may be lost!” said the bear, not sounding unhappy at all, but if anything, really rather delighted. The strange blue light that had lit up the bear’s fur as they ran through the fire, and had made it seem like she was from another world, had dimmed, along with the white light of her eye, and she was now just an ordinary (if unfeasibly large) wet brown bear. “Does anyone know the way?”

  “You’re supposed to be taking US somewhere!” Bodkin pointed out. “Caliburn said you had some sort of house?”

  “We’re definitely somewhere near the Lake of the Lost,” said Caliburn with a shiver.

  “Oh good,” said the bear, “because as it happens, I’m looking for a large mound that is currently situated somewhere near the Lake of the Lost. A mound with a great chalk horse drawn on the side of it… I think it’s a horse, or it could be a dragon, I’m never quite sure. Keep your eyes peeled, everyone.”

  On they searched, through territory where the trees seemed to be getting older and older, until eventually they came upon the large mound the bear had described, or rather the mound seemed to come upon them, for it rose suddenly and enormously out of the mist like a gigantic creature creeping up on them.

  The mound was as round as a wheel and
as big as a hill. It was far too large to be man-made, but also far too perfectly circular to be a natural formation, so it was a contradiction of itself even at first sight. A colossal leaping animal was drawn on one side of it, just to their right, made out of paths of chalk in the grass. They were too close up to see whether the tremendous chalk picture looked more like a horse or a dragon.

  By now everyone was as thoroughly drenched as if they had been swimming in the ocean. Wish was wet through and starting to shiver, and dying to get to anywhere that might offer some warmth and food and protection from the rain.

  “What is this? We can’t shelter here. It seems to be just a hill without any trees on it!” objected Xar.

  “That’s why we go INSIDE the hill,” said the bear. “The main entrance is around the other side, but we can get in here too. I just have to remember the password to let us in…”

  But the bear had unfortunately forgotten the password that would let them into the hill. She tried all sorts of words: “Magic… Tuesday… Arctic… tangerine… honeydew…” Loads and loads of lovely words, but none of them seemed to be the right ones.

  “I don’t know WHY they keep on changing the password!” said the bear irritably.

  “You’re the one who sets the password!” the little owl reminded her.

  “Well I don’t know why I keep on changing it!” said the bear. “But how silly of me! We can use the door… whose door is this?”

  They had all forgotten about the Enchanted Door that was following them, but they now turned around and took a good look at it.

  The door was looking thoroughly dejected. It was burned through, still steaming and bursting into the odd flame, and jumbled up in all the wrong places.

  “It’s mine,” admitted Wish.

  “You’re not a very considerate door owner,” said the little owl severely. “This door needs some serious love and attention. But still… use the door to let us in.”

  “But I don’t know how to do that,” said Wish.