Beyond the Stars

by Sarah Webb

  “Cass, can you check some of the boxes upstairs? We need to find the good dinner plates and cutlery, and the white duvet-cover set for Granny and Granddad’s bed. I’ll put them in Robbie’s room and he can sleep in the bunk room with Ted.”

  I know that the movers put some boxes in the small storage room near where I sleep, so I go to check there.

  One half of the room is taken up with the cardboard boxes. I open one or two but they are mostly filled with clothes and shoes and summer stuff – beach towels and swimsuits and the parasol – though there’s also a box of books.

  From the storage room there are steps leading up to the attic – maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for there. The light isn’t working and it’s gloomy and almost black as I walk up the stairs.

  I leave the door open wide. The attic smells musty. There is an old lamp and a crate or two, a rolled-up carpet and some old furniture. I watch a big spider scuttle along the floorboards. I am about to go back downstairs when I see her … the girl in the red dress. She is very faint, shimmering, and snowflakes fall around her as she sits on an old wooden chest watching me. I should be scared but I’m not. She smiles at me and I feel like we are friends. It’s as if she wants me to look around the attic.

  As I turn around I almost fall over a big brown box. It has ‘Dinner Set’ written in black marker on it.

  “I’ve found the plates and cutlery!” I yell and Mum comes upstairs to join me in the attic.

  “It’s cold up here but at least it’s good and dry,” she says, looking round in the gloom at what is stored and hidden up here. Suddenly she spots the old couch and footstool.

  “Look at these, Cass!” she says, excited. “They must have been left behind when the house was sold.

  “They used to be in the drawing room,” I blurt out, recognising the plum-coloured couch.

  “Imagine that,” says Mum, smiling. “Hidden away up here, they’re worn and threadbare but otherwise perfect. When we get some money we’ll get them reupholstered and covered and use them back in the drawing room.”

  Mum and I carry the heavy box downstairs and unpack it and wash all our good plates and bowls for Christmas dinner tomorrow. Robbie and Ted and I spend the rest of the day helping Mum and Dad. I wrap my presents and put them under the tree. We stay up late watching Christmas movies and Dad makes popcorn.

  There is a full moon when I am going to bed, which makes the street and the river outside my window look like silver. Without thinking, I pick up my snow globe and ever so slowly turn it upside down, watching the snow gently fall, covering the tree and the deer and the girl … There is something so weird and strange and special about it. I give it a really good shake and the snow falls faster as the tree is iced with white and the girl’s fingers try to grasp it and the deer has snowflakes on his nose.

  I look at the girl. She’s just a girl in a glass bubble, I tell myself over and over again. I wish that I could stop missing my friends and our old house so much.

  The snow falls … and the room gets colder and colder.

  When I open my eyes the girl in the red dress is standing near my window looking at the moon, the robin perched beside her.

  “Don’t be scared,” she says. “I’m your friend.”

  I watch as the room fills with snow.

  “You will not be lonely here in this house!” she says and laughs, her breath cold as ice.

  When I wake she is gone.

  *

  On Christmas morning there is a new bike for me, a phone for Robbie, and Ted gets a huge Lego castle with a dungeon and dragons and soldiers. Then, after a big breakfast, we all walk to church.

  “What a beautiful old house,” says Granny, when she and Granddad arrive later on, laden down with presents and wine and a big plum pudding. “It must be full of history and memories.”

  Granddad admires the bay windows and the stairs and the fireplace, and Granny loves their bedroom with its tall windows and high ceilings, and the old-fashioned bathroom with the long flush toilet chain.

  We all gather round the tree to open our presents. The fairy lights sparkle, the fire is blazing and the house is warm at last as the plumber came late last night and fixed the heating. Robbie and I cut down branches of holly and ivy from our garden to decorate the hall and stairs and the mantelpiece and dining room.

  Robbie gives me the cute pink hat from the market, and a set of biscuit cutters. Dad puts on his new tie and Mum loves the scarf I gave her and Ted calls his dragon puppet Max! Granny and Granddad have got presents for us too, with a really big one for Mum and Dad. It’s a pair of silver candelabras.

  “They’ve been in the family for years,” confesses Granddad, “but we thought with an old house like this they would be perfect.”

  “Thank you,” says Mum, “they are beautiful. I’ll put them on the table.”

  Ted’s given a remote-control car and Robbie a really cool pair of earphones that he has wanted for ages.

  Then Granny passes me a box.

  Curious, I open it. Inside there are six perfect glass Christmas ornaments. I lift them out carefully – two robins, a rabbit and a deer, and a star and moon, each threaded with a loop of red ribbon. I can’t believe it!

  “Granny, they are beautiful! Where did you get them?”

  “I saw them in a shop window and thought they were so pretty I couldn’t resist them.”

  It’s like some kind of strange magic is happening as Ted helps me to hang each one on our tree.

  Mum is busy getting the dinner ready and Robbie and I set the oak dining table with our Christmas tablecloth and the china serving dishes and Dad puts the tall white candles in the candelabras in the centre. The room looks just the way I saw it before …

  Sitting down to Christmas dinner the candles flicker and are reflected in our big mirror as we eat plates of turkey and ham and stuffing followed by mince pies and some of Granny’s pudding.

  Afterwards we play charades and watch TV as Granddad dozes in the armchair. I can’t believe that we have had our first Christmas in the new house … I almost phone Alanna and Sophie but decide to wait until tomorrow.

  “It’s snowing!” Dad calls and we all run to the window to watch.

  It’s coming down really heavily, covering the path and the street outside.

  “The weather forecast says it could last for days,” he tells us, and it does, lasting all week.

  Everything looks so different, icy and white – our house and the garden and the street and the town. We make snowmen and have snowball fights with some of the neighbours. Granny and Granddad stay until after the New Year, our house crowded and noisy, beginning to feel like home.

  Now I am getting ready for bed, the night before I go to my new school. I’m really nervous about it.

  I shake the snow globe hard so the snow is almost like a snowstorm, watching it swirl and move so I can barely see the girl in the red dress and the deer and the rabbit.

  “I wish that school will be OK.”

  I wake in the middle of the night feeling cold. It’s like I am in a blizzard and I can see inside a big building with corridors and classrooms. I see desks and a whiteboard and rows and rows of students. I feel scared. Then I hear voices floating up in the air, singing …

  I hold my breath. She is there again – the snow at her feet, the deer standing nervously beside her. I knew she would come …

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispers slowly. “I am always here …”

  In the morning I get dressed and put on my new school uniform. I wish that I didn’t have to go to school but Ted is starting too. Mum is taking him as she wants to settle him in with his new teacher and class.

  I am standing at the front door waiting for them when I see a girl coming out of the house a few doors away from us. She is wearing the same navy-and-grey uniform as me. She smiles at me and walks over.

  “You starting at St Paul’s?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “I’m in class six; whic
h class are you in?”

  “Six.”

  “You just move into the house? I knew the old lady who lived there – she died last year.”

  “We moved in a few days before Christmas. My dad’s got a new job here.”

  “We went to my nan’s in Scotland for Christmas but with the bad weather we only got home three days ago,” she explains. “By the way, my name is Ella.”

  “And I’m Cass.”

  “Are you ready to go now?”

  “I have to wait for my little brother.”

  “Well I’d better go but I’ll see you later.” She smiles. Ella’s got braces and has short curly hair and I immediately like her.

  Ted is taking ages and Mum has his lunch box in her hand as she locks the front door.

  “You OK?” I ask him. He must be scared too.

  “I couldn’t find him,” sighs Mum. “Do you know where he was? Upstairs in your bedroom playing with your snow globe thing.”

  “I just wanted to shake the snow,” he protests. “I didn’t break it, Cass – I just wanted to see the rabbit again.”

  “The little rabbit in the snow is cute!” I agree.

  “I just needed to see him again before school so he’d make everything be all right.”

  “See the rabbit?”

  He’s walking beside me with his Transformers schoolbag.

  “When you shake the glass it’s magic,” he whispers, so Mum can’t hear. “I see him sometimes when my room is snowy. The rabbit hides under my bed so I won’t be scared in the new house. He showed me our garden with a big swing and said he’ll be there when I get home to tell him all about school.”

  I can feel my heart beat fast … thinking of the snow globe, thinking of the swirling snowflakes and the girl in the red dress … waiting for me …

  Michael Scott writes for both adults and young adults. He is considered one of the authorities on Celtic folklore and his collections, Irish Folk & Fairy Tales, Irish Myths & Legends and Irish Ghosts & Hauntings, have been in print for the past twenty years. His New York Times bestselling YA series, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, is available in over twenty languages and thirty-eight countries.

  Chris Haughton is an Irish designer and illustrator. His first book, A Bit Lost, is available in nineteen languages and has won many awards including the Dutch Picture Book of the Year. Chris’s latest and third Picture Book is Shh! We Have a Plan and was published in 2014. Chris’s aim is to create children’s books that can be read without words, so that children from across the world can understand everything just by looking at them. Chris lives in London.

  In Ireland, December 26th is called Wren Day (La an Dreoilín), and the tiny bird has always occupied a special place in Irish mythology. Although the wren is the smallest of birds, it is sometimes called the King of the Birds.

  There is a song that begins, “The wren, the wren, the king of all birds …”

  But how did such a tiny creature become the ruler of all the birds of the air?

  In the still pre-dawn air, the bare frost-speckled winter trees were lined with birds.

  Every glittering branch bowed beneath the weight of flocks that had gathered from all across Ireland, and the trees were alive with the whispering rasp of their feathers. The birds had kept to their own kin: the blackbirds and cuckoos clustered together, while the smaller birds – the sparrows, robins and thrushes, starlings and swallows – swarmed the upper branches. The lower branches groaned beneath the weight of some of the bigger birds – the falcons and ospreys – while gulls, cormorants and the other seabirds moved across the hard-frozen earth, feet rasping on the thin covering of ice.

  It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and the birds of Ireland had assembled to choose their ruler.

  Boar, oxen, cats and dogs and even the deer had their rulers, but no one had claimed kingship over the birds, and for generations they had been ruled by a squabbling Parliament, mostly composed of black-eyed crows and nervous irritable robins. They could never agree on anything. Finally, the Parliament had turned to Relige, the ancient barn owl, for advice. No one knew how old he was. It was rumoured he had actually seen the birth of the world when it was pushed up from the ocean floor and that he had carried the first seeds to plant the great forests of oak, ash and yew that now blanketed the land. Even the fearsome two-legged humani acknowledged the owl’s wisdom.

  Relige had spent months flying from flock to flock, listening as each one claimed the right to rule. He knew if he simply picked a ruler it would solve nothing: the other bird flocks would not acknowledge them as their leader. Finally, he decided that the only way to choose a king would be by a trial of flight that would be open to all.

  Thousands of sparrow messengers had flitted across the country carrying the news: the king would be chosen on the day of the winter solstice. Any birds interested in challenging for the leadership were to gather at Eo Mugna, the Great Oak at the mouth of the River Shannon and one of the Five Sacred Trees of Ireland.

  “Only a few will contest the kingship,” Eala, one of the two snow-white swans, said to Relige. “A lot of the smaller birds will not even bother trying.”

  The swans, like the owl, had no interest in the kingship, and would act as judges.

  “No, there will be more,” Aela, her mate, said. “Everyone believes they can be the king.”

  “All the birds of Ireland will come,” Relige said with a solemn nod. “If not to take part, then tooo observe and simply tooo be able to say that they were there when the king was chosen. Thousands will come,” he hooted.

  The day of the solstice dawned bitterly cold, the air from the ice lands at the top of the world carrying flecks of ice and the promise of snow. The birds started to gather just before the dawn. They arrived singly and in pairs, in long trailing V’s across the grey sky or in huge wheeling flocks that moved as one.

  Relige sat in the heart of the ancient Eo Mugna with all the flocks around, above and below him. He opened his huge eyes and blinked at the gathered birds. He had been right: there were thousands – no, there were tens of thousands gathered in the vast and ancient tree. The owl would referee the race and make sure that everyone observed the rule: to fly high and outlast all the others. But Relige, Eala and Aela were looking for more than strength and endurance. The king of the birds would have to be cunning and wise and, more importantly, would have to be respected by all the others.

  Relige flapped his wings a few times, and gradually the muttering, chattering and twittering died down. Thousands of pairs of eyes – small, hard and black or big, bright and luminous – turned to look at him.

  “Now, youuu all know the rules,” he hooted. “Whooever outlasts all others and flies the highest will be crowned the king of the birds. We are looking for courage and heart. We want a king who is both clever and strong. We are looking for a leader.”

  A feathery rustle of excitement rang through the trees.

  “Aela, Eala and I will crown the king when the race has run its course,” Relige continued. “Anyone found cheating will immediately be disqualified,” he added sternly. Although his body remained still, his huge head spun to look over at the magpies and rooks. They shuffled back and forth on a branch, suddenly deciding to preen their blue-black feathers as they tried, and failed, to look innocent. The two huge swans on the ground beneath Relige turned to glare threateningly at them. The spectacularly plumaged black-and-white birds were extremely unreliable and notorious thieves.

  “Now, are youuu all ready?”

  Wings opened and closed and for a moment it looked as if the Great Oak and the surrounding trees had come alive with splashes of colour as a multitude of feathers shone and glistened in the grey morning light.

  “Any last questions?” Relige asked, head swivelling left to right and back again.

  There was a sudden cracking snap above and a twig, heavy with acorns, dropped through the higher branches of the ancient oak to the ground below. The assembled
birds gasped: it was forbidden to break any leaves or branches from the sacred tree. Silence fell over the forest. Then, bronze feathers appeared through the leaves above and a sharp-beaked head thrust forward. Bright golden eyes looked down on the assembled birds, before finally turning to fix on Relige.

  “I have a question.”

  “The assembly recognises Iolar,” Eala honked loudly.

  “What is your question?” Relige asked.

  Iolar the Golden Eagle ruffled his magnificent feathers and spread his wings to their fullest extent. “Why are we even having this contest? Everyone knows I am the king of the birds. Why not just crown me now?” he demanded. For such a big bird, he had a high and shrill voice, and it made him sound rather petulant.

  “We will crown you if you win,” Relige said patiently. He knew that the Golden Eagle already considered himself the king of the birds, and that he had bullied some of the smaller flocks into acknowledging him as their ruler.

  Snag, the one-eyed Lord of the Magpies, hopped to the end of a branch and glared upwards, his single black eye fixing on the huge eagle. “How do you know you’ll win?” he demanded.

  A murmur of agreement ran through the flocks.

  Iolar’s laugh was a discordant squawk. He spread his wings wide again and they stretched almost the length of the branch he was perched on. “I am a Golden Eagle,” he said. “I am the largest, the most powerful and the most beautiful bird here. I deserve to win.” He closed his wings with a cracking snap and the wind buffeted a few of the smaller birds from the branches above his head, sending them spinning to the ground.

  “Being big, powerful and beautiful does not give you the right to win.” The owl raised one smoothly feathered wing. “Remember, Iolar, a king must be kind and considerate: speed, power and beauty alone do not make a ruler.”

  “But I will still win,” Iolar insisted defiantly. His big head turned, eyes darting at the smaller birds as if defying them to race against him. “There are none here who can compete with me. And none who should compete against me,” he added threateningly.