I lost sight of him for a moment as the Whispering soldiers and civilians flew at each other. Fists hammered, nails scratched. Guns were kicked from soldiers’ hands or wrenched from their arms. Rolling, wrestling bodies crashed towards the binding.
The other children had pressed themselves into the forest as far as they could and were watching as Gustav and The Scorpion fought the pirates. They worked together beautifully. As I watched, The Scorpion leapt through the air, knocking out a pirate who was lunging at Gustav. Next moment, The Scorpion herself had been disarmed and Gustav, who was facing the other way, flicked a pirate’s sword high, so that it somersaulted through the air and landed in her hand.
I looked back through the Spellbinding at the Whisperers. There was the King, crawling between the fighters—his long hair had gotten caught under a boot for a moment and he winced. Steadily, he made his way towards the rip in the binding. He reached it. He pushed himself onto his knees, and closed his eyes.
His mouth began to move.
He was Whispering.
He was going to make the same Whisper again, and send it through the tear.
My whole body shook. I clutched my arms to stop the trembling. I knew what I had to do.
I took a deep breath and pictured a table set with twine and tools, just as I had learned at the Spellbinding Convention. My hands began to move.
But the King was Whispering fast, and my arms looked wrong. Flimsy, ridiculous.
Panic built in my chest.
I took another breath and closed my eyes.
And there it was. The King’s Whisper.
I could see it forming. It was like a small black worm, curled in the air. Red-and-black cross-stitch was spreading across its surface, and this seemed to harden the Whisper, making it stronger and sturdier. The Shadow Magic.
I moved my hands and arms, back and forth, up and down, as I had practised with Prattle, and nothing was happening, nothing was happening. The Whisper was stretching and growing, billowing even, and nothing was happening.
Then something.
Faintly, the green-gold of Spellbinding twine. A little to the right of the Whisper—I was making my net in the wrong place.
I shifted slightly, and worked my hands more rapidly.
The net began to form around the Whisper. The Whisper sagged a little.
I was doing it!
I opened my eyes. The King had also opened his eyes and he was staring at me in astonishment.
He scowled. His eyes snapped closed and suddenly his voice was in my head. It was a voice like flames and poison.
I stumbled backward.
Vaguely, I could see the Whisper expanding again, snapping the twine of my net, reaching up and out, but the King’s voice was crawling through my head like stinging nettles, wasps, fire ants.
He was going to win. There was nothing I could do.
I was sinking to the road. The Whisper was growing. I clutched my head, and I heard myself screaming.
‘Bronte,’ said a voice. It was a firm voice, kind. I swung around. The pirates had been defeated, I saw, and Gustav Spectaculo was shackling them with their own chains. But The Scorpion was standing apart, staring at me. ‘Bronte,’ she repeated. But how did she know my name?
‘Bronte,’ said another voice. Faintly, I made out a single Spellbinder, approaching along the road. Her cape dipped so I glimpsed her face, and it was Aunt Carrie—Carabella-the-Great—hurrying towards me. ‘Bronte,’ she said again. Strange that I could hear her at such a distance.
I forced my hands to reach for the twine, wound it around an imaginary loom, twisted and knotted.
A drop of honey, a puff of cinnamon.
A whirl of chilli peppers, a dusting of sugar.
Each gift was a taste in the back of my throat.
The King’s voice loosened its grip. The net began to form again.
Rose petals, cranberries, lavender.
My fingers twisted through the air.
The net wound its way around the Whisper, like pirates winding their chain around children, like me winding my scarf around Alejandro, little Benji winding paper chains around the legs of chairs.
Nutmeg, dried mushrooms.
I tightened the net, pressed it more closely.
The Whisper shrivelled.
It crumbled into pieces. Cloudberry tea washed it away.
I opened my eyes.
I had Spellbound the Whispering King.
He was open-mouthed, astounded. I saw his eyes flicker to somewhere behind me and I turned.
Gustav and The Scorpion were striding towards us, along with the authorities: the local constabulary had arrived, the K&E Security Force, the Anti-Pirate League and, led by Carabella-the-Great, a team of Spellbinders dressed in the usual Spellbinding capes with hoods.
Behind them, came the aunts.
It was going to be all right. The grown-ups were here. At last, it was truly all right.
But when I turned back to the King, rage thundered across his face. He leapt up and shoved through the crowd. He was reaching for something—a glint on the road.
The dagger.
He tore towards the rope that held Billy’s cage.
There was the sound of galloping hooves, and a dog barking.
Midnight tore along the side of the road, Taylor kneeling on his back. She pushed herself to standing position, holding her balance, arms outstretched. Right as the horse passed beneath the tree, she sprang from his back.
Her hands grasped at the branch. She swung her feet against the trunk, and began to climb.
At the same moment, the door to Billy’s cage opened. He clambered out onto the cage’s roof, where he crouched, clinging to the bars.
The King lunged at the rope, dagger raised high.
‘Billy, grab my hands!’ Taylor screamed. She had curled her legs around a branch and now swung forward like a trapeze artist, her arms outstretched.
Billy hesitated, then launched himself from the roof of the cage. His palms hit hers. Their hands clasped.
Taylor swung back again.
The blade sliced through the rope.
The cage smashed to the ground.
Billy and Taylor climbed down from the tree, and the grown-ups took charge of everything.
Spellbinders sorted out the Whispering crowd, binding the soldiers so that the citizens could stop kicking them in the face.
Carabella-the-Great twirled her hands at the King and he stood up and followed her, head bowed. (The other Spellbinders gawped at her the way people do at cinema stars.)
The Anti-Pirate League led the pirates away in carts.
Meanwhile, the aunts rushed to the children. They had woken early, it turned out, and found us gone and my note, so they had alerted the authorities. Aunt Sue hugged her boys, Aunt Nancy scolded her girls, Aunt Alys cried into Billy’s hair, and Aunt Franny gave Taylor a high five.
‘It was the dream!’ Billy said. ‘A dog barked, and it was the dog from my genie dream! Now, the dream dog had told me there was a loose bar at the top of the cage, which I could use to reach the latch, and there was! That’s how I got out! Look! There’s the dog that barked! It’s a stray, I think. Can we take it home?’
‘You’re allergic to dogs,’ Aunt Alys reminded him.
Taylor said the tree she had climbed was the tree from her dream, too. Without the warning from the dream, she would have climbed onto the branch carrying the cage, and it would have cracked. ‘Billy would have crashed to the ground! Dead!’ she said.
‘Oh,’ whispered Aunt Alys.
‘As it was, Billy only just got himself out, and I only just swung him away before the cage crashed anyway!’
‘Oh,’ breathed Aunt Alys.
‘Seconds! Less than that! A millisecond! A breath of a second later and he’d have been smashed to pieces! Like a watermelon trampeled by oxen!’
Aunt Alys looked as if she might faint, and some other aunts hurried over to change the subject.
Of c
ourse, many aunts checked to see that I was all right, and to ask what I’d been thinking, sneaking out like that, or to say, ‘Well done for sneaking out!’—but they were mostly distracted by their own children, or by Whisperers in pyjamas.
Aunt Isabelle and the Butler were not expected in Nina Bay until later that morning, so there was nobody there who especially belonged to me.
The road was crowded, people busy in every direction, and I climbed a little way down onto the rocks. My head was aching. Each time a wave crashed, I felt tiredness from the top of my head all the way to my toes. It was true that I’d been awake all night, but it seemed deeper than that.
‘You were binding the King,’ said a voice behind me. ‘This is why you feel so weary.’
It was Alejandro. Standing on a rock, just above me.
‘You cut through the Majestic Spellbinding,’ he added. ‘The Whisperers could have poured out.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘They could have spread across Kingdoms and Empires controlling everyone and everything.’
‘Mm.’
‘It could have meant doom for all.’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘All right. But they didn’t.’
‘No, it worked perfectly. How did you know the Whispering people would turn on the King’s soldiers in that way?’
I considered. ‘People laugh in different ways,’ I began slowly, ‘and they’re sad in different ways. But they also cheer variously. I was thinking of how the crowd cheered at the elves playing soccer in Livingston. And the passengers cheered my aunts on the Cruise Ship. But every time the Whisperers clapped for the King, it was different. Something was missing.’
Alejandro picked up a pebble and tossed it out to sea.
‘I saw one of them touch his shadow band,’ I continued. ‘And I thought, what if they could be good even with Shadow Magic? And they want to stop the King?’
‘Your grandfather,’ Alejandro said. ‘Did you know that you were half-Whisperer, Bronte?’
‘I only found out yesterday,’ I admitted. ‘When a trumpeter told me.’
Alejandro nodded, as if it was the usual thing to find out you’re a Whisperer from a trumpeter.
‘And you are the heir to the Whispering Kingdom,’ he said next. ‘Now that the King has been arrested, I think you must be its queen.’
That gave me a fright. I didn’t want to be a queen! I wanted to go home to Gainsleigh!
‘Shall we take a look at your Kingdom?’ Alejandro pointed up at the open gate on the road, people still streaming in and out of it.
I took a deep breath. I supposed I had better.
As we walked through the streets of the Whispering Kingdom, we saw some Whisperers running along, singing, some sitting on benches and staring into space, and many gathered together on street corners, talking. We heard bits of what they were saying as we passed. Everyone seemed to have a different opinion.
‘Me?’ said a fierce-looking man with a beard. ‘I’m heading home to pack right away. Get out of here, I say, before they throw up another Spellbinding and trap us all in the Kingdom again.’
‘No, no, they won’t do that now they know it was really the King,’ a woman scoffed. ‘We just need to hand over the shadow thread. It’s all in the treaty.’
‘Not going anywhere until we see the King properly tried,’ a younger woman declared.
‘You can’t trust them,’ the bearded man argued. ‘Get out while you can, I tell you.’
‘I think we should hold a town meeting,’ another declared. ‘And have cake.’
Being queen of this place was going to be extremely complicated. And the people looked so worn-out and faded, even the children. They kept tiredly pushing their hair behind their shoulders. As well as sorting out the political issues, I was going to have to cheer them up.
We found ourselves climbing up the cobblestone street towards the castle. It was a grand castle, white with bright red flags, each flag decorated with a thistle. In the grounds, there were hedges and flowerbeds, and two cats slept in the shade of an apple tree.
Well, that was something. At least my castle would be picturesque and pleasant.
Another gathering of people stood talking in the castle gardens. They were arguing even more urgently than the other groups. Alejandro and I stopped to watch.
‘At least twenty,’ a man was saying. He was wearing striped pyjamas, and he had pushed the sleeves up over his bony elbows. ‘In the castle dungeon.’
‘The King’s prisoners,’ a woman said. ‘We need to get them out.’
I thought maybe that was my job now. ‘Is it safe to let prisoners out?’ I enquired, politely.
The adults turned and looked down at me.
‘It’s her,’ one of them said. ‘The granddaughter. What was her name again?’
‘Bronte,’ I said.
‘Well, good job, Bronte, you’re a hero around here. We owe you. But you know nothing. These are political prisoners. They stood up to the King and he threw them in his dungeon, so they’re even bigger heroes than you. No offence.’
‘Do you need a key?’ Alejandro asked. ‘Is that the problem?’ He was maybe thinking that we’d found three keys for the Whispering Gates and so we were experts in key-finding.
‘Not a key,’ the man with the bony elbows replied. ‘It’s a code. The King has Whispered the dungeon closed. Only if we Whisper the right code, will it open.’
‘They say he always uses the same numbers,’ someone called. ‘Every time he has to choose numbers, he uses the day he met his wife, the day he proposed to her, and her favourite number.’
‘Very romantic,’ somebody said drily. ‘I suppose nobody knows what those days are?’
‘Nobody. He kept it secret.’ There was a silence, and then people began talking again.
But I had stopped listening. I was so weary. I looked across at Alejandro who was frowning along with the conversation.
He was the boy with no shoes running along the river, the boy in the turtle hole, almost dead, and the boy in the Cruise Ship infirmary telling me a story. Now he was a boy who, like me, did not have a family. Only he had never know what happened to his parents, whereas I had received a telegram.
Sleepily, I wondered who had sent the telegram telling us my parents had been killed. Taken out by cannon fire from the decks of the pirate ship, ‘Thistleskull’.
The strangest sensation fell through me. You know when you take a bottle of water from the refrigerator on a hot day, and you see drops of water running down the outside of the glass? Those same ice-cold drops seemed to run through my blood.
‘I think I know the code,’ I said.
The group turned to me, doubtfully.
‘It’s 208,’ I said. ‘103 and 24.’
‘You mean the dates are 20 August, and 10 March, and her favourite number was 24?’
‘I don’t know.’
They furrowed their brows at me.
‘But you’re sure that’s the code?’
‘No.’
They shrugged. ‘We’ll give it a try,’ they said. ‘She did bind the King.’ We all tramped down a ramp until we reached the castle dungeon. It was damp down here, and the stone walls were rotting and mildewy. There was a sort of wheel clamped around the gate’s padlock.
‘208?’ the man with the elbows asked me.
I nodded. ‘Then 103 and 24.’
Click-click-click went the wheel, as the man turned it. Around to the left, to the right, to the left. Click-click-click. Pause. Click-click-click.
Clunk. The gate swung open.
You remember the telegram that Aunt Isabelle received?
Thistles on the flags. A skull on the King’s ring.
Thistleskull, a ship that Alejandro did not know.
It was the King who had sent the telegram.
I did not know why he had done this, I only knew, quite suddenly, that there was no such ship as the Thistleskull, and that the name, along with the numbers in the telegram, h
ad been invented by the King.
I suppose you might find it strange that I remembered the exact words and numbers in the telegram. But that is because you have never received a telegram telling you that your parents have been killed by cannon fire from the decks of the pirate ship, Thistleskull.
Alejandro and I stood back.
The Whisperers rushed in and, after some time, prisoners began to file out through the gates. They moved slowly, blinking in the sunlight. Some held tightly to each other, some wept quietly. The prisoners were thin, weak, and pale. Some stumbled, or limped. They stared around in confusion.
Near the end of the line came a man and woman, dirty and bedraggled, leaning into each other. They paused at the gate, and then both at once turned towards me. Their faces crumpled.
Even with crumpled faces, I recognised them. The whirling pair of dancers from the photograph.
My parents.
As I wasn’t used to having parents, it took me a while to think of them that way. To me, they were Patrick and Lida Mettlestone.
We brought them back to Aunt Franny’s house.
Every single aunt screamed and then burst into tears. I suppose that made sense, but it did become a bit boring. ‘Oh, Patrick! Oh, Lida! You’re alive! You’re alive!’ That sort of thing. And a lot of hugging.
We children stared at the red-eyed, hugging grownups. Some of us even started imitating the adults to each other: ‘Oh, you’re alive! You’re alive! Boo hoo! Oh, me!’
‘But whatever happened?’ Aunt Nancy demanded, eventually. ‘Are you truly the daughter of the Whispering King, Lida? And where have you been all this time! And why did we think you were dead?! Explain yourselves!’
At this point, we were all crammed into the foyer of Aunt Franny’s place and it was getting stuffy. Patrick cleared his throat, and Lida said, ‘Well,’ and then they both turned to each other.
‘Not now!’ Aunt Franny boomed. ‘We all need baths, food and rest. Especially Patrick and Lida. We can hear their story later. For now, let’s have three cheers for the safe and happy return of Billy, and of Patrick and Lida, and for the children who have brought them home to us. Hip hip!’
The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone Page 29