by Angie Sage
And it never rang again.
Life after the Hauntings
THE BIG PUFFER
Danny, Francina, Jay, his girlfriend Bella and Ratchet set up and ran the new Lemon Valley Train Company. They built one, then two, then three new passenger carriages for the increasingly popular service that ran from Luma Station, via Reed Cutters Halt, Salt Oak Stop, Netters Halt and Oracle Halt to Rekadom City. They began to lay new track along Lemon Valley up to the old stations at High Plains Halt and Seven Snake Forest. They hoped one day to replace every inch of the track that King Belamus had torn up.
Ratchet took great pleasure in making sure the train always ran on time.
ALEX RAVENSTARR
Alex decided to live with Hagos. It was a tough decision. She missed Benn and Nella at the roundhouse, but she felt she belonged in her old home with her father at the top of the Silver Tower.
Slowly, Rekadom woke from what became known as the Curse of the Oracle, and Alex began to discover the city where she was born. The old school was reopened and many families who had fled over the years returned so that very soon Alex met new friends, although they were never quite as special as Benn. Which is why every other Friday—and more often during school vacations—Alex would catch the four o’clock train to Reed Cutters Halt, on the riverbank across from the roundhouse. There, Benn would be waiting for her in Merry, just like the old times.
LOUIE D’ARBO
Louie stayed at the roundhouse with Nella. He loved picking lemons and helping out on the farm. He went with Benn to the little school in Santa Pesca, and sometimes after school he had to go with Benn to the scary house where Benn’s father lived and where—for some reason Louie did not understand—his mother now lived too. Although it was nice to see Momma, Louie was always relieved when it was time to go back to the place he now called home with Benn and Gramma Nella. And the pokkle.
BENN MARKHAM
Benn went back to helping Nella on the farm—he realized it was what he enjoyed most. Sometimes he took the train to Rekadom to stay with Alex, but he much preferred it when Alex came to stay with him, Nella and Louie.
DEELA MING
Deela Ming left Oracle Rock and moved into the Silver Tower. Although her rooms were on the floor below Hagos, she spent much of her time on the top floor with him and Alex. She loved seeing Hagos’s delight in being able to pass on his knowledge of Enchantment to his daughter. She taught Alex to knit and was almost as proud as Alex was of her first knitted lobster.
BARTLETT
Some three days into the celebrations that swept through Rekadom in the aftermath of King Belamus’s demise, one of the guards remembered to let her out of the dungeons. Bartlett was horrified to discover the fate of the king and was appalled to see how happy people were. When the citizens of Rekadom gathered in Star Court and voted not to appoint another ruler but to govern themselves, Bartlett left in disgust. She took a horse and the best peregrine falcon and, after writing a very rude note to Ratchet, she rode away and was never seen again.
RATCHET AND MAVIS
After the departure of Bartlett, Ratchet and Mavis moved into the mews together. Mavis loved the birds as much as Ratchet did, and if he was away with the Puffer she happily ran the falconry. Hagos gave Mavis the partly Enchanted Hawke egg and she tended it with great care. After it hatched, Ratchet loved to see how the ungainly, gentle bird followed Mavis everywhere. Ratchet spent many days away on the railway with Merle, but he always loved returning to the mews and his Mavis.
ZERRA
Zerra had trouble settling. She stayed for a while with Hagos and Alex, and then, after a big argument with Hagos, she moved downstairs to Deela’s new rooms. That did not go well either. She tried helping out on the train, but hated shoveling coal, and no one would let her drive. She stayed with Nella but decided that lemons were “the most boring fruit in the whole world.” After a heated discussion with Nella one day about how she hadn’t done the dishes again, Zerra stomped off to see her mother in Santa Pesca. And there she stayed. She particularly liked helping Benn’s father in his new position as judge in the Santa Pesca courts of law, and she loved the smart uniform she got to wear, and the complicated regulations that became her job to enforce. But the best thing was when, to her amazement, Mirram told her she was proud of her.
PALLA LAU
Palla was pleased that she was now in charge of the Oracle, and even more pleased that hardly anyone came to hear the Oracle anymore—people now considered the Oracle to be bad luck. But Palla was not entirely alone on Oracle Rock; the young guard seemed to have forgotten to go home. He made himself useful by bringing the coal up the hundred steps from the harbor, and he was good at cooking fish too. Palla decided it was worth letting him stay.
SOL’S SPIDER
At the moment of the Disenchantment, Sol’s spider suddenly found that everything around it had become enormous. But it didn’t mind at all, because it realized that at last it was back home. It scurried up the drainpipe and took refuge in its old hiding place—inside the cannon under the bed in Sol’s old room. And there it stayed. Except occasionally, when it ventured out to terrify Benn.
ENCHANTERS
With the Twilight Hauntings gone, many of the surviving Enchanters returned to their old homes. Hagos set up a small Enchanters’ Academy at the top of the Gold Tower; its motto was: Do Only Good. It took Hagos some time to work out why people referred to it as “Dog School.” When he did figure it out, he didn’t mind at all. Hagos had learned that when people can at last laugh about things, they are no longer Haunted.
Acknowledgments
Thank you.
It is true that books don’t write themselves, but they also don’t get themselves all sorted out with fabulous illustrations and glitch-free text, and then beautifully packaged and ready to sit on a bookshelf somewhere. They need, as Zerra would say, “a whole ton” of people to do that.
So I’d like to thank everyone who has made these two Enchanter’s Child books happen. First, huge thanks to my publisher, editor and friend, Katherine Tegen. Thank you for your wisdom, your insight and your fun sense of humor. Since I’ve been with you at HarperCollins I have learned so much about writing from you. Thanks to Sara Schonfeld for your valuable insights, careful reading and great blurb skills—also for making things go so smoothly too. And to the amazing editors and proofreaders: Megan Gendell, Kathryn Silsand, Sonja West, Bethany Reis, Daniel Seidel and Jaime Herbeck—who all worked on these two books—I have no idea how you manage to hold a whole new world in your head and at the same time remember the exact words someone said about something obscure in the previous book. I can only imagine it’s a bit like riding a unicycle (backward) while juggling cupcakes. And a banana. So thank you. You never even dropped the banana.
I also want to thank Amanda O’Dwyer, to whom I am very grateful indeed for her eagle-eyed ability to spot the smallest of glitches and for her particular talent in Jackal counting. Thank you so much for tracking me down and spending so much of your time on this.
One of the best bits of finishing a book is seeing the characters through other people’s eyes. So huge thanks to the fabulous artist Justin Hernandez for making the amazing images that added so much magic and fun and made the characters sing. And especially to Amy Ryan and Joel Tippie at HarperCollins, who not only hunted down Justin to begin with but also put his amazing images into such a perfect package. Thank you so much.
Massive thanks too to the wonderful narrator, Fiona Hardingham, who made every single character come alive so evocatively on the audio. Wow. Thank you!
To my agent, Eunice, whose theme song surely is “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” thank you for just being there at the end of the phone, always.
And last but never, ever, least—thank you to those who put up with the grouchy author every day, make great coffee and listen to all the awkward bits; you know who you are. Huge hugs.
About the Author
Courtesy Angie Sage
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Books by Angie Sage
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Enchanter’s Child
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
ENCHANTER’S CHILD, BOOK TWO: MIDNIGHT TRAIN. Text copyright © 2021 by Angie Sage. Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Justin Hernandez. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Cover art © 2021 by Justin Hernandez
Cover design by Joel Tippie
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945259
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-287518-1
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287517-4
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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