Izzy watched him glide effortlessly on his broad wings. He folded them back and spun in a tight barrel roll, laughing. Now Izzy understood why Hiron was so serious on the ground. He didn’t belong on the ground at all—he belonged in the air.
A flock of white-throated ducks coasted in alongside them from the east, their muscular bodies bobbing up and down with every stroke. Izzy always thought of ducks as clumsy barnyard animals, but they were actually impressively powerful flyers. She sighed. She couldn’t even keep up with ducks.
Hiron flew back beside the ship, gliding along behind the flock.
“Should you try to talk to them?” Izzy called to Hiron. “Ask for directions or something?”
Hiron shook his head. “I don’t even think they’d talk to Olligan if he were here. Ducks can fly for hours without stopping, and they’re so proud of themselves. They never give me the time of day.”
“Hey, ducks!” shouted Izzy. “Stop being so snobby!”
Hiron laughed. “Yeah, you think you’re better than us or something?” As the ducks put more distance between themselves and the ship, Hiron pointed north with his beak. “Look, we’re getting close now. You can see the Norlorns from here.”
At the horizon, white spires of snow-capped peaks rose up to meet the clouds. Below the mountains, the ground climbed up sheer and steep, as if the entire northern half of Faerie had lifted straight up like the step of a staircase.
The ducks made a sudden sharp turn to the west, flying away from the Muscadine at a fast clip.
“Touchy,” said Izzy. “Was it something we said?”
Hiron was back to his serious self as he searched the skies around them. “I don’t like the way they left so suddenly like that. They must have seen something we didn’t. We should keep our eyes open.”
Izzy turned around to see Tom and Hen frowning worriedly at the controls. Izzy used the rigging to help pull herself along until she stood behind her sister. Hen’s knuckles were white from gripping the steering frame so tightly. “What’s wrong?” Izzy asked.
“We’re too low,” said Hen, who didn’t take her eyes off the view of their course. “If we can’t get higher fast, we’ll run right into those cliffs!”
The Muscadine sped toward the rocky uplift. A deep canyon sliced into the cliff, but it seemed much too narrow for the ship to sail through. A sharp spire of slate guarded one side of the canyon. If the ship ran into it, it could rip the bottom out of the basket.
Hen checked the gauges in front of her. “It’s no good,” she shouted to Tom. “We’re not rising fast enough!”
Tom stood up and jumped behind the air pump. “Selden, Izzy, I need a hand here!”
Selden Changed into his boy form. Izzy joined him, cranking up and down on the wooden pump handles. They could hear the hiss of air but could only hope the invisible balloons were inflating fast enough.
“Hen, how are we doing?” called Tom.
“We’ve gotta get higher!” said Hen.
“All right, Lug…” panted Tom, still pumping air into the balloons. “Time to start earning your keep!”
Lug began heaving the sacks of flour over the side. The basket tilted and rocked as the weight that had held it balanced went overboard.
“Someone is going to see all that stuff dropping out of the sky,” said Selden. “We’re going to give away our position!”
“Can’t be helped,” grunted Lug. “We’ve got to drop weight, and it’s either these flour sacks or me!”
“It’s working!” said Hen. “We’re rising!”
“Are we going to clear that spike?” asked Tom.
“I can’t tell. If we do, it’s going to be close!”
A sudden, sharp crack reverberated through the air. More cracks followed, like ice cubes snapping in a glass of warm water but a thousand times louder.
“What in the name of Faerie was that?” said Tom.
Izzy ran to the rim of the basket and looked down. The cracking sound had come from the spire of rock. As Izzy watched, a layer of slate separated from the rest of the spire. It calved off in a single thin sheet, scraping shrilly against the stone.
Izzy expected to see the sheet fall down into the canyon below. Instead, the slate slid upward. It folded back on itself, and two enormous wings of stone stretched to the sky.
“You have got to be kidding,” whispered Izzy as she watched the rocky spire transform into the largest bird she had ever seen.
A curved beak the length of a cutlass opened wide. The giant bird screeched. The force of the sound nearly knocked Izzy backward.
The bird scrabbled on its massive claws. Every part of it was made of stone—its talons, its belly, its back, even the wafer-thin sheets of slate that covered its body like feathers. It spread its wings and leaped into the air. Clouds of rock dust billowed down as the bird circled over the mouth of the canyon, then climbed high above the ship.
“Hiron!” Izzy called, waving him over. “What is that thing?”
Hiron flew in alongside the Muscadine. “Rock Skyr!” he answered. “But I didn’t think they nested so far south! You think it saw the ship?”
Slowing its ascent, the stone bird hovered directly over them. It twisted its head, and sunlight glinted off its polished eye. With a sharp screech, it began to dive.
“Definitely seen us!” shouted Izzy.
“Tell Tom to try a landing!” said Hiron. “I’ll try to slow it down!”
Hiron, who had seemed so large in his eagle form a moment before, looked small and delicate compared with the monstrous Rock Skyr. He flew at the Skyr, claws bared right at its eye. The beast barely flinched as Hiron slammed against the bird’s skull, his wings crumpling around him.
“Hiron!” cried Izzy.
Stunned, Hiron fell, spiraling down out of the air. Just when Izzy thought he would crash, he thrust out his wings and managed to gain control.
The Rock Skyr circled again. It folded its wings back and sped down at the ship, talons bared like a hawk ready to scoop up a mouse.
“Get down!” shouted Tom.
Everyone on board ducked and covered their heads. But as the Skyr neared the basket, its body jerked to a sudden stop in midair. Hen screamed as the basket jolted. The Skyr had collided with one of the ship’s invisible balloons.
The beast flailed, snared in the invisible rigging. The basket tilted sharply. Tom and Selden clutched on to the ship’s machinery as Hen went sliding toward the rim.
“Hen!” Izzy wrapped one arm around a rope and reached out with the other hand for her sister.
Hen’s backpack slid along beside her. “Oh no!” Hen twisted her body, catching the backpack by one strap but missing Izzy’s hand entirely. She knocked once against the rim of the basket and tumbled out into the empty air.
“HEN!” screamed Izzy.
For one horrible moment, Izzy stared at the space where her sister had fallen. Then a flash of golden feathers appeared as Hiron soared up, clutching Hen in his talons by the back of her shirt. He dropped her into the basket, and she grabbed onto Izzy’s arm.
The basket spun as the Rock Skyr struggled in the invisible ropes. The whole ship began to plummet.
“We’ve got to cut that thing loose!” shouted Tom.
Selden Changed into a leopard and slashed his claws overhead. “I could get it free, but I can’t see what I’m cutting!”
“We need Marian!” said Hen. “She could make everything visible again!”
Izzy looked around frantically. Her eyes landed on a sack of flour Lug hadn’t thrown over the side yet. “That’s it, Hen! We’ve got to make the ropes reappear!”
She flagged down Hiron and shouted her plan to him.
“Good idea!” he said. “Lug! Toss me that last sack of flour!”
Lug heaved the sack over the side, and Hiron caught it in his claw
s. He carried it over the Rock Skyr and tore into the sackcloth with his talons. The bag ripped open, and flour spilled out and settled onto everything beneath, forming powdery outlines of the balloons and all the ropes and rigging.
“There! I can see them now!” Selden leaped from rope to rope, slashing the ones the Rock Skyr was most tangled in. When he cut the last rope, the giant beast burst free of the ship and wheeled away to the west.
The Muscadine continued to sink.
Everyone held tight to whatever they could get their hands on as the ship spun uncontrollably. Izzy could hear a high-pitched whine overhead. The Skyr must have punctured one of the balloons before it got away.
“Everyone hold on!” cried Tom. “We’re going down!”
The Muscadine dropped down into the canyon below. The ship swayed, knocking into one side of the canyon walls and then the other. With a crunching crash, the ship slammed into a grove of gold-leafed trees, rocked forward once, and then fell down into the shallow river at the bottom of the canyon.
Izzy climbed out of the wrecked basket and stumbled in the knee-deep water. She looked around, dazed. “Hen? Everyone? Are you OK?”
“I’m here!” Selden, in his stoat form, jumped down from one of the tree branches and helped Izzy search the wreckage. It was difficult, because the half-deflated balloons were still mostly invisible, and they covered everything.
Coated in rock dust and flour, Lug emerged from beneath an invisible clump of fabric. He had Hen cradled in his arms.
Izzy ran to her little sister. “Oh my gosh, Hen! Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine.” Hen coughed. “But where’s Tom? And Hiron?”
Before they could start looking, they heard a shuffle behind them. Izzy spun around. One man, then two, and then two dozen men and women wearing brown and gray hooded capes stepped out from behind the trees.
Selden backed up against Izzy and Changed into a wolf. Before he could even complete the Change, one of the men bounded into the river and aimed a slingshot at Selden’s snout.
Izzy now realized she had been mistaken. This wasn’t a man at all. He was as tall as a grown man but covered all over in fine, tawny fur. What Izzy had thought was a brown hood was really a pair of ears. They were long and slender, like a hare’s, with a jagged scar running down the edge of the left one.
The strange rabbit-like man kept the slingshot trained on Selden while the rest of his companions swiftly closed in around them.
When they were surrounded, the rabbit-man lowered his weapon and shook his head with a good-natured smile. “Of all the creatures to be taking prisoner today, I didn’t expect a handful of Bretabairn.”
17
The Fillifut
Izzy gulped down her soup even though she was pretty sure the gritty powder swirling in the bottom of her bowl was dirt. She was so hungry that she could’ve eaten an entire tower of peanut butter sandwiches, which she realized she wasn’t very likely to get, not at the bottom of a rabbit warren at the edge of the Norlorn Mountains.
She sat on the packed dirt floor of a spacious, round room with Hen, Selden, and Lug beside her. Overhead, the squiggly ends of plant roots poked down from the ceiling. Two of the rabbit-people, a short-eared man and a woman with light-gray fur, squatted on either side of the entrance, their faces guarded and blank. Whenever Izzy tried to ask them questions, they just puffed air out their wide nostrils. She hadn’t seen their leader, the one with the mangled ear, since they were all taken underground.
Hen leaned her head on Izzy’s shoulder. “Do you think Tom and Hiron are OK?”
Izzy put her arm around her sister. After the wreck, the rabbit-people had searched what was left of the Muscadine. They hadn’t found Tom Diffley. Izzy hoped that was because he was hiding from them and not because he was crushed beneath the invisible hull of the ship. There had been no sign of Hiron on the ground or in the sky.
“I’m sure Hiron flew away,” Izzy whispered. “He’s figuring out a way to help us right now. And you know Tom. He’s building something that will get us out of here.”
“It better be something that can dig a deep hole,” said Selden, patting the dirt wall beside him. “We’ve got to be thirty feet underground.”
“It’s too bad Rusk isn’t here,” said Lug. “He can Change into a mole. He’d have us out in no time.” Lug sniffed his empty soup bowl. “Wish I knew how they made this stew. Smells like dandelion root but more lemony. They must have a different variety up here in the mountains.”
“I tried to keep track of where they were leading us,” whispered Selden, eyeing the guards. “But once we got underground, I got lost from all the twists and turns. Even if we could fight our way out, I don’t think we could actually find our way to the surface.”
“No one’s doing any fighting,” said Izzy. She nodded at the slingshots both guards kept at their hips. “We’ll have to come up with some other plan. We just need to think.”
A soft thumping echoed in the passageway outside. The guards straightened up and saluted. The leader with the ragged ear appeared and waved at the guards to relax. He whispered something to the male guard. The guard nodded and retreated on all fours down the hallway.
“Hello again, Bretabairn,” the leader said cheerfully as he entered the room.
Izzy couldn’t stop staring at this strange mixture of man and hare. His face was long and narrow and covered with fur, and his eyes were set more to the sides of his skull than the front. A smile tugged at the corners of his black lips.
He sat back on his haunches and crossed his arms casually. “And hello to you, human child,” he said to Hen with a friendly nod.
Hen crossed her arms and glared back at him. “Hello yourself.”
The rabbit-man chuckled. “Fair enough. But let’s be friendly, can’t we? Haven’t we treated you well so far?” The guard reappeared and handed his leader a bowl of the same gritty, herby soup. The rabbit-man took a sip and held up the bowl like he was giving a toast. “Did you eat enough? Say the word, and you can have more.”
“The word,” said Lug, raising his hand. “And you must tell me, is this dandelion root? Because I distinctly taste—”
Selden elbowed him in the stomach. “Don’t make small talk with him! He’s our jailer!”
The man handed Lug the rest of his soup. “Your friend is right, I’m afraid. Now is not the time for polite conversation. Though under other circumstances, I’d happily talk recipes with you.” His eyes sharpened, and he tilted his head back, looking at them down the length of his slender face. “Which one of you will tell me what a handful of Changelings is doing here at the edge of the Witchlands in a ship under a witch’s spell?”
“Why should we tell you anything?” asked Selden. “We don’t know anything about you or who you serve.”
The rabbit-man narrowed his eyes. “The Fillifut serve no one but ourselves.”
“Fillifut?” asked Izzy.
“The quick-footed ones. My name is Fye. As our herd’s leader, I have the right to know the reason you are trespassing on our lands.”
Izzy glanced at Selden and Lug, but they seemed just as surprised to learn of the existence of this warren of half-rabbit creatures as she was.
Fye tilted his head, regarding them with one eye. “This is some sort of test, isn’t it? To see if we will fulfill our bargain with Rine?”
Izzy’s stomach dropped. “You have a bargain with Rine?”
Selden stood up. “I knew it! They look like rabbits, but they’re rats through and through!”
The female guard snarled and reached for her slingshot.
“Stand down, Race!” barked Fye. “You and Clip go up top. I can handle this on my own.”
Race nodded to her leader but kept one eye on Selden. Both guards left, their long feet slapping the dirt as they disappeared down the hall.
Fye turned back
to Izzy. “If this isn’t a test, then that makes you the most foolish children I have ever met.” He frowned, all his friendly cheer gone. “I am under oath to bring anyone I suspect of being a Changeling straight to Rine.”
Hen’s hands balled into fists. “You can’t do that! He’ll kill them!”
“Why would the witches help you cloak your ship only to kill you?” asked Fye. “And why would you be heading straight into their domain if you are under such a threat? You aren’t telling the whole truth.”
Hen broke into sobs. Lug pulled her close, and she turned her face into his shoulder.
Izzy stood up with her palms facing out, trying to keep her voice calm. Fye seemed reasonable. If she could just explain things, she could get him to understand. “Did Rine tell you why he wants you to bring him Changelings?”
Fye shook his head. “We don’t speak to each other more than is necessary.”
Izzy couldn’t keep her words from rushing out, pleading and desperate. “I know this must all look very strange. It’s complicated. But Hen’s telling you the truth. If you hand us over to the witches, they’ll kill us. They want our hearts for some sort of potion, and as soon as they find us, they’ll cut them out!”
Fye looked appalled. “Cut your hearts out?”
“What did you think they were going to do?” said Selden. “Invite us in for tea and biscuits?”
“Let me try to explain why we’re here,” said Izzy. “If we can just get to—”
Selden held his arm out in front of her. “Don’t explain anything to him. Can’t you see he’s going to hand us over no matter what? He swore an oath to the witches. That tells you what sort he is. I bet Rine throws him some shiny brass coins for being such a good servant.”
The room swirled in a confusion of black and brown fur. Selden Changed into a wolf, but Fye sprang on him first. The rabbit-man pinned him from behind, the cord of his slingshot pulled across his throat. The sounds of the guards’ feet pounded in the hallway.
“Everyone, please calm down!” said Lug.
Race and Clip reappeared in the doorway, but Fye waved them away.
In a Dark Land Page 13