‘I’m not sure we need a bad fairy,’ murmured Serendipity.
Serendipity continued crafting the story of Tuesday’s first days in the world. But no matter how much Serendipity typed, how fast her fingers flew across the keys of the typewriter, how many ideas swam into her head, or how quickly Denis offered new thoughts and memories, no words curled up off the page. No silvery threads swirled about. She tried harder and harder, and discarded page after page, beginning again and again. Denis recounted the first word that Tuesday had spoken at nine months (‘Up!’) and the first word she had written in the sand at the beach aged two (‘Up!’), and Serendipity remembered the first story Tuesday had brought home from school when she was in kindergarten (‘The Girl Who Flew Up’).
But nothing they thought of was enough to catch Serendipity up and fly her out the window into the sky that was pale with dawn.
‘We can’t. We’re not allowed,’ whispered Serendipity at last.
‘What do you mean?’ Denis whispered back, though nobody could hear them.
‘I think that this is her story and she’s going to have to find her way through it alone,’ said Serendipity.
‘Will she be all right?’ Denis asked, peering out the window. ‘What age were you when you first…?’
‘About the age that Tuesday is now.’ Serendipity smiled uncertainly.
‘Then she’ll be fine,’ Denis said reassuringly, putting his arms around his wife and leading her to the windowsill. ‘Who knows what adventures our girl might be having right now?’
‘Yes,’ said Serendipity, looking anxiously into the sky. ‘That’s precisely what worries me.’
Chapter Eight
Deep in the Peppermint Forest, the creatures of the night had returned to their burrows, nooks and nests to rest. Other forest inhabitants were shaking themselves awake and clearing their throats. Soon, the air would ripple with birdsong and the forest would take on the soft green glow of daytime. Fronds would unfurl, small footprints would appear on damp pathways, worms and caterpillars would begin their steady progress along stems of grass or the branches of trees. Spider webs would catch the first light, and maybe an early morning fly for breakfast. But in one particular towering, ancient peppermint tree, someone had no intention of waking up.
Every tree in the forest was beautiful in its own special way, but this particular tree held a house high in its broad branches. It was a small, octagonal house surrounded by a wide verandah. It had oval windows and a thatched roof. The woven timbers of the verandah railings were intertwined with a red creeper that attracted the attention of brightly coloured butterflies. From the verandah, suspended walkways disappeared off between other trees and into the forest canopy.
Lying in a hammock slung from the branches above, Vivienne Small was sleeping with her blue wings folded beneath her. Her hair was wild, dark and curly, held back from her face with a circlet of plaited leather. Her right ear, but not her left, was pointed like an elf ’s. Except for the fact that she was very small, about half the size of an ordinary girl, she looked the way girls look when they’re asleep – that is: mostly harmless and somewhat unkempt. If her eyes had been open, you would have seen that they were grey-green, and capable of looking completely ferocious. And if her wings had been extended, you would have seen that they were more like the wings of a bat than those of a butterfly, since they were jagged and leathery.
Vivienne had gone to bed just a few hours before, still wearing her knee-high boots, though she had taken the time to loosen their laces. Her face was smudged with what might have been soot, but was in fact gunpowder, and her hands were covered in scratches from a desperate climb.
It was unlike Vivienne to sleep in, but she had come to the end of a particularly long and gruelling adventure only the day before. Her elbows and knees wore the savage grazes that she had sustained during her final battle with Carsten Mothwood, and her chest and back were blotchy with bruises. Her ribs ached, one wing was painfully torn, and she had a colossal bump on the back of her head. She flicked one hand at the air beside her ear, as if to brush away an annoying, buzzing fly. But the sound that had woken her did not go away. Vivienne’s pointed right ear had discerned the thud of a heavy footfall on the forest floor. The noise echoed through the roots of the trees and rustled up through the leaves. She opened her eyes and leapt out of her hammock, wincing at the pain in her ribs and her wing. She heard the snapping of twigs, the crushing of leaves and the toppling of toadstools as feet pummelled the earth. Vivienne sniffed and her nose filled with the unmistakable smell of revenge.
‘Mothwood’s men, blast them,’ Vivienne said under her breath.
After the final defeat of Mothwood, Vivienne had made her way home across the Restless Sea in her little sailboat Vivacious. As she had rounded the last point into Nautilus Cove – the closest landing point to her tree house – she thought she had glimpsed a small, shadowy boat pursuing her in the moonless night. But she had been so utterly exhausted that she had dismissed it as a phantom of her imagination, and continued on her way home.
‘Followed! How could I have been so careless?’ she whispered crossly.
Vivienne made her way noiselessly around her tree house, making preparations. She filled a quiver with turquoise-feathered arrows, slipped the strap of the quiver over her shoulder and leaned her bow against the verandah railings in readiness. She fetched her Lucretian blowpipe and strapped a pouch full of poisoned darts around her waist. She peered over the railing, down through branches and plumes of leaves. Mothwood’s men had circled the base of her tree. There were eight of them. Vivienne cursed herself again for being so careless. After years of infinite trouble to keep her tree house concealed, she had let its location be known.
‘Vivienne Small!’ called a pirate with a skull tattooed across his face.
Her only reply was to take careful aim.
‘This is for Mothwood!’ the pirate roared.
No sooner had he buried the sharp head of his axe into the trunk of the tree than Vivienne’s arrow sped towards him, weaving through the branches and leaves, striking the pirate through his thick neck.
Whooping and laughing gave way to cries of outrage and fury as the pirate dropped to the ground. His comrades swung their axes in unison, metal biting into ancient timber. But Vivienne Small was not overly concerned. The tree was enormous and the timber of its trunk was as hard as iron, and there were only eight pirates below. She lifted her Lucretian blowpipe to her lips.With deadly aim, she let fly, and a dart buried itself deep in the eye of the pirate she had already wounded with her arrow. She watched as he fell instantly unconscious, the poison in her dart’s tip coursing through his body. He would not wake until nightfall, and by that time, Vivienne would have him and his shipmates bound and safely deposited where they could do no further harm.
The remaining pirates roared in anger and redoubled their efforts, hacking at the tree trunk with all their might.
‘For Mothwood!’ they chanted, landing blow after blow.
The birds that had made their homes in the tree raised a chorus of disquiet, abandoning their nests and branches. The tree noted a mild vibration through its trunk and leaves, but remained unperturbed. Then, into the clearing, came another eight pirates. They were carrying a giant four-man saw. The tree shivered.
Vivienne lifted her bow in rage and fired at another pirate, then another and another. One she struck in the chest; another in the back of the neck. None of the fallen got up again but lay on the ground, howling in pain. Soon she would silence them all with her blowpipe, but first her arrows would work faster to disarm her attackers. She was about to release another turquoise-feathered bolt when she heard an ominous sound: the whoosh of wings beating the air.
Vivienne swung around, ready to release the arrow poised in her bow, but it was too late. Mothwood’s enormous crow was upon her. He was the size of an albatross, with a gleaming black beak. He had wrinkled grey skin around his small black eyes and a body that was a mess
of unkempt feathers and bald patches. He may have been almost three hundred years old, but this was a bird of uncanny strength and wit. Baldwin was his name, though Vivienne had another name for him.
‘Bald One,’ Vivienne Small hissed.
‘Vivienne Small,’ the crow shrieked as he fell upon her.
With his powerful beak, Baldwin grabbed Vivienne’s bow, tearing it from her hands and flinging it away into the forest below. Vivienne reached for her blowpipe, snatching a new dart from the pouch at her side, but the bird was too quick. Flying at her face, he aimed his claws at her eyes. Instinctively, Vivienne slapped her hands to her face to protect herself, and in that one swift movement the dart she had in her hand grazed her cheek. It was only a graze. It barely sliced the first layer of skin, but it was enough for the powerful poison to take effect. She fell instantly to the floor of the tree house and lay there quite still. The crow cawed in victory while, below, a giant saw rasped into action.
The vicious metal blade of the saw gnawed and bit as the pirates sweated at their task. Soon it had sunk through a quarter of the enormous trunk, then half and then a full three-quarters of the ancient tree. Still, that tree refused to fall. The pirates continued, pairs of exhausted men taking turns to work at either ends of the saw. As they worked, they looked up cautiously from time to time into the web of branches above. Every man wondered what had become of Vivienne Small and her arrows.
‘Done a runner, is what,’ said one of the pirates.
‘Not her, not likely,’ said another.
‘She’ll have something up her sleeve. We know that.’
‘Heave to, yer blackguards, before she springs a trap.’
‘Maybe Baldwin has pecked out her eyes,’ someone suggested, and all of the pirates chuckled.
High above them, Vivienne Small lay unconscious as the effects of the tiny scratch from the dart slowly worked their way through her body. Baldwin the crow was sitting on her chest, staring right at her as if he did indeed intend to pick out her eyes and eat them.
‘Vivienne Small is dead,’ he squawked.‘Vivienne Small is dead.’
If the dart had gone deeper, she might have been unconscious for a whole day and a night. As it was, Vivienne woke as the tree was starting to tilt in final anguish.
‘No, crow, Mothwood is dead!’ Vivienne yelled as she flung herself up, spread her injured wings painfully and knocked the bird away. She felt the tree quiver beneath her. There was a shriek of splitting wood. The tree and the tree house pitched sidewards as the saw sliced clean through the trunk. Vivienne clung to the railing. The crow flew at her again, claws swiping at her eyes. Then it gave a shrill cry and fled. Vivienne braced herself for the inevitable plunge to the ground but, for one moment, as if in a final embrace, the nearby trees held her tree and her home. It was all the time she needed. Vivienne leapt onto a railing, her leathery wings swelling as they captured the air. Despite the searing pain in her torn wing, she managed to fly the short distance to a nearby walkway. Behind her, the wooden path sheared away as the mighty tree succumbed. Vivienne’s ears filled with the scream of splintering branches.
It hit the forest floor with a crescendo that shook the ground for miles around. In the aftermath, there was no sound at all. No birds called nor grasshoppers sang, no crickets chirped nor bees hummed. The forest was utterly silent. And then a great cheer went up from Mothwood’s men.
Chapter Nine
The sun was high in the sky by the time Tuesday and Baxterr reached the edge of the Peppermint Forest. They were hot and tired and footsore and hungry, and glad to leave behind the heat of the day and the open grassland for the fragrant shade of the forest. Tuesday would have loved nothing more than to flop down on the ground and rest for a few minutes, but Baxterr whined, his ears flattened. Suddenly the ground beneath their feet trembled and there was a distant rumble. Had it been a roll of thunder – or an earthquake? Tuesday waited but there was nothing more.
Baxterr barked.
‘It’s okay. We’ll be there in no time now,’ she said to him. ‘If we go straight into the forest, then we’ll come to a stream. We follow it downstream until we find the Twining Bridge. We cross that and then follow the golden moss beds until we reach a line of tree ferns that looks rather like a front fence.’
Tuesday was showing off a little, but it was only to her dog, and she was sure that he didn’t mind. In the many hours she had spent studying the little maps that were drawn on the inside covers of the hardback editions of all the Vivienne Small adventures, she had never imagined that it would be so useful to have those maps memorised.
Tuesday had never been in a forest before. At home there was City Park, which had plenty of trees, some of which were very big and very old, but it was still nothing like this. Here the trees clustered thickly together, their branches growing high overhead. The light in the forest was almost like twilight, but with a golden-green glow to it. And with every step there was something new to wonder at – a new fern frond uncoiling, a strange leaf pattern, a flower in a shade of blue she’d never seen, the sparkle of a spider’s web across the path. There were moss beds growing tiny yellow and white flowers, and on the trunks of the trees were curling fungi with little frilled edges like the lace on a ball gown. At the bottom of the tree trunks were toadstools: some orange, some brown, and even some that were red with large white spots.
As it turned out, the stream was easy to find. But the Twining Bridge was quite difficult to cross because of all the branches that stuck out from it, and the fact that the wet trunks that had grown together to make the bridge were as slippery as ice. The golden moss beds too were beautiful but spongy, and walking on them was like walking on damp feather pillows. By the time they reached a glade of towering tree ferns, growing in an orderly row, Tuesday was exhausted from the morning’s efforts. And she had noticed something unusual. It was too quiet in the forest. Since they had entered the trees she had heard not a single bird call.Yet she knew the Peppermint Forest rang with birdcalls. This silence made her cautious.
Tuesday knew they would find Vivienne’s tree beyond the ferns. Then she would somehow have to get Vivienne’s attention – if she was home – and have her throw down the rope ladder she used for visitors. Tuesday’s heart was beating fast from the excitement of soon meeting Vivienne Small, and from an increasingly uncomfortable feeling that things were not right.
She pushed her way between the tree ferns and her breath caught in her throat. Bright sunshine was flooding into the forest and the effect was as shocking as if someone had turned on the light in the middle of the night. The gentle gloom of the forest was shattered. Instead of a vast tree reaching so high you’d have to drop your head right back to see the branches soaring into the canopy, and a trunk so wide that you could take a whole minute to walk around it, there was only clear blue sky and the freshly sawn stump of a giant peppermint tree.
She and Baxterr gazed in shock at the massive trunk that had fallen, crushing everything in its path. She understood what Baxterr had been sensing all morning and the cause of the eerie silence that had settled on the forest. Tuesday held back tears. Together she and Baxterr scrambled up and made their way along the length of the fallen trunk, stepping over broken limbs and clearing away smaller branches, surveying the chaos of flattened trees and bushes caught in the fall. At last they came to what had been the upper branches of the tree and there they discovered the wreckage of Vivienne’s house. The thatched roof, the oval windows and the arched front door were all in pieces. The wooden ladders and curved verandah railings were familiar to Tuesday, as were the flowering creeper and woven bird-feeders that hung from them. In among the splintered timbers were shards of smashed glass, broken crockery and furniture.
‘Vivienne!’ Tuesday said. Her heart hammered inside her body again, this time in panic. ‘Vivienne! Baxterr, you don’t think she … that she might have been here when whoever did this? She might be under here, she might be crushed – Baxterr, we have to find her!’
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Tuesday swung into action, pulling away broken branches and lifting shattered walls. Baxterr, his nose quivering, tried to catch a trace of Vivienne’s scent. Together they searched, and though they found pieces of Vivienne’s life – her leather shoes (very small), her spyglass (broken), and her Lucretian blowpipe (intact but without darts), there was no sign of Vivienne.
When she was quite sure that Vivienne was not buried beneath the wreckage, Tuesday sat down with her head in her hands.
‘Perhaps Vivienne wasn’t here when it happened,’ she said to Baxterr. ‘Or maybe she’s been captured by … well, by whoever did this. And maybe Mum is with her. Maybe that’s what’s happened. Maybe they’ve been captured together. And there’s only one person who would do this kind of thing. Mothwood!’
Baxterr continued to forage in the fallen branches as if he were looking for something specific. At last, he looked up and barked excitedly. Tuesday leapt to her feet and dashed over to Baxterr. What he had found was not Vivienne Small. Instead, he was nosing at a glass bottle that was nestled – quite unbroken – under a splintered shelf. Inside the bottle was a miniature sailboat with a gleaming red hull and white sails the size of daisy petals.
‘Oh, you good dog!’ Tuesday said, as she gazed at the tiny boat in wonder. It was Vivienne Small’s boat, Vivacious.
‘You know, Baxterr, if Vivienne Small and Mum have been captured by Mothwood, then they are almost certainly on The Silverfish. Perhaps that’s why I saw The Silverfish through the binoculars! Because that’s where we have to go! To The Silverfish. So, of course, we’re going to have to set sail too, aren’t we?’
‘Ruff,’ said Baxterr, tipping his head to one side and looking concerned.
‘You’re right,’ said Tuesday, peering into the bottle where the tiny vessel lay. ‘It is a bit small. What we need, doggo … what we need is …’ Tuesday searched about in the crushed leaves until she found a small object, which she held out triumphantly for Baxterr to see. It was a tiny glass marble. One side of it was silver, the other gold.
Finding Serendipity Page 7