Crystal

by Rebecca Lisle

  The prison guard pointed out Effie, and Raek moved towards her purposefully, weaving around the tables like a thin grey stick. Visitors and prisoners nodded and bowed as he walked past, and then quickly turned away to begin whispering again.

  ‘How kind of you to visit us,’ Crystal said. ‘I’m sorry we can’t offer you tea.’

  ‘Tut, tut, still very rude,’ Raek said shaking his head. ‘I didn’t come for tea, of course. I did warn you, Crystal,’ he went on, ‘and now your mother is in serious trouble. Stealing. Attempting to take a sly-ugg out of the Town. Lying. She can’t escape punishment.’

  Effie didn’t look at him. She studied the dirty scratched wall and rocked backwards and forwards slowly.

  ‘Did she take that in?’ Raek asked Crystal. ‘Should I say it louder?’

  ‘She’s not deaf, just unwell,’ Crystal said quickly. ‘I can’t make her understand anything. She isn’t talking sense.’

  Effie picked up the water jug and began pouring water into the glass and back again, in and out, and in and out.

  ‘She likes the sound the water makes,’ Crystal explained. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It looked as if she was talking sense a moment ago,’ Raek snapped.

  ‘Oh, no, she wasn’t,’ Crystal said. ‘Nothing but rubbish.’ Her blue eyes challenged Raek to disagree.

  He sighed. ‘Well – perhaps it’s for the best. If she knew what was going to happen to her … Grint, Bless and Praise his Name, wanted her sentence reduced because of her illness and the help she gives him, but the Elders felt that she should be made an example of and I agree. John Carter is very persuasive. Effie was initially charged with stealing the candlestick, for which the punishment is banishment to the mines. After a meeting, however, the Elders decided that her dabbling in black magic and witchcraft is a much worse offence and will bring a harsher punishment. Her implication in the death of that woman, Annie Scott, was the final straw.’

  ‘Mum never—’

  But Raek blanked her out with his hand. ‘Silence.’

  Crystal stood up. She felt herself trembling and put her hands on the table to steady herself. ‘Mum’s not well. It isn’t fair! It was me—’

  ‘She was well enough to steal. Well enough to concoct magic potions that kill. Well enough to try and put a spell on Grint, Bless and Praise his Name! Oh yes, she tried that all right with her moon moss and lichens, herbs and potions. She will be punished most severely! And,’ he added, pointing to the carry-box, ‘I’ll take that.’

  ‘Oh no, you can’t!’ Crystal said. ‘I mean, Grint, Bless and Praise his What’s It, told me that I had to bring him the sly-ugg. He was very clear about that. I promised—’

  Raek smiled; he knew she was lying.

  ‘Thank you!’ He picked up the carry-box. ‘It’s very light!’ He peered through the mesh screen. ‘It’s empty! Where is the sly-ugg? Where are you hiding it? Give it back!’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Crystal said. ‘Of course we’re not hiding it! We hate it!’ But she was thrilled. The sly-ugg had made a getaway!

  Raek called for the prison guards. ‘Make them tell us where it is! Make them give it back!’ Raek shouted. The guards ordered Crystal and Effie to take off their cloaks and shake out their skirts but there was no sign of the sly-ugg anywhere.

  ‘You don’t think I’d allow that horrible thing on me, do you?’ Crystal said. ‘It’s disgusting!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re capable of doing to save yourself,’ Raek said. But finally he had to give up the search and admit that the sly-ugg had vanished. ‘We will find it. I’ll put out an alert. What it knows, I must know!’

  He marched out. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘I’m not ill,’ Effie said as she kissed Crystal goodbye. ‘It’s just that the ice is melting. My brain is thawing. Don’t worry, my dear daughter. When I remember everything, when I know where to go, nothing will stop us from returning home.’

  Effie’s eyes shone brilliantly, sparkling as if the sun were reflected in them. Her cheeks were flushed.

  ‘Everything will become clear.’

  15

  Questrid Has Some Very Small Visitors

  The girl at the bottom of the lake had vanished. All Questrid could see was the circle of dirty water far below and the twisted trees round it. He was cold and his hands, jacket cuffs and the end of his scarf were all soaking.

  He gave up, scrambled onto the ice and lifted the raft out of the water behind him.

  The stone acorn holder lay where it had landed. Questrid picked it up.

  ‘What an absolutely exquisite object,’ he said out loud. ‘A work of pure genius! I wonder which talented young sculptor could have made it?’ He chuckled. ‘I have never seen anything so totally brilliant!’

  He carefully unscrewed the acorn from the cup. He was not surprised to find a strip of paper inside but he wasn’t expecting to see the messages written on it:

  And on the other side, written in different handwriting:

  Was that message from the girl he’d seen? HELP ME! Well, of course he would!

  He left the raft at the lake’s edge, out of the way amongst some rocks in case he needed it again, and raced home on the sledge. However sick Greenwood was, he had to speak with him. He had to! That girl down there needed help.

  As Questrid came to the last long slope that would take him home, he caught sight of something high up in the sky and stopped. It was big. Was it a snow albatross? A mountain macaw? He shielded his eyes against the sun … and stared and stared. A spark of excitement, a little thrill rippled through him. Could it be …? It did look like – Yes! It was! It was a dragon! And unless he was badly mistaken, it was the pixicles’ dragon, Boldly Seer!

  The enormous purple and silvery dragon came closer and closer. It swooped low over Questrid, beating the snow into a storm cloud around him with its wings.

  ‘Boldly Seer!’ Questrid shouted, waving his arms. ‘Boldly Seer!’

  The dragon circled gracefully one way, then the other, in a perfect figure of eight, before flying off towards Spindle House.

  Seated on the dragon’s back were two small figures. Questrid recognized the red-hatted figure when it waved back to him. ‘Little Squitcher!’ he yelled. ‘Hello!’

  The pixicles had meant to name the dragon Boadicea, after the fierce female warrior who rode chariots, but they’d got it a bit wrong and she was Boldly Seer. Questrid had ridden on her himself. He loved dragons. He dreamed of becoming a Dragon Master one day.

  Boldly Seer sailed down the hill like a kite and Questrid followed almost as fast on his sledge. When they reached the flat ground, the dragon tucked up her feet and skidded neatly on her belly towards the gateway. At the final moment, just before she hit the wall, she spun round so it was her plump side that gently bumped the stones.

  By the time Questrid reached them, the two ice pixicles were climbing down from the seat on Boldly Seer’s back and shaking off the snow from their clothes. They were only a little taller than knee-high, very pale-skinned and fair-haired.

  ‘Hello!’ Questrid yelled. ‘Hello!’ He swerved to a halt beside them and jumped off his sledge, dropping down to his knees to be level with them. ‘How fantastic to see you! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Greetings, Lanky Boy!’ Squitcher took off his red woolly hat and held out a tiny hand, like a mouse paw, to be shaken.

  ‘Welcome to Spindle House!’ Questrid said, trying not to crush the minuscule fingers. ‘Great to see you – and Boldly Seer.’

  ‘Ah yes, she is remembering you,’ Squitcher said. ‘You helped her before and a dragon never forgets – did you see how she play dive-bombed you? Oh yes, she remembers you and likes you too.’

  The older pixicle stepped forward to shake hands. He had a tiny blob of a white beard on the end of his pointed chin, and crinkled-up translucent grey eyes. When he snatched off his blue hat, a cloud of puffy white hair billowed out.

  ‘Grampy, at your ser
vice,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like to come inside?’ Questrid asked them. ‘It’s lovely and warm and—’

  ‘No, no!’ squeaked Grampy. ‘We are not warm-loving pixies!’

  ‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Don’t snap, Grampy,’ Squitcher said. ‘The Lanky Boy is only trying to be politely-respectful, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Questrid said. ‘It’s great to see you and I just thought we should go somewhere more comfortable …’ He was beginning to shiver because although he didn’t usually mind the cold, parts of him had been wet for ages and now he was kneeling in the snow so his knees were wet too.

  ‘We have come on a mission of greatly meaningful-importance,’ Squitcher said gravely. ‘If you are icy-cold and not comfortable at the present time, we must wait.’

  ‘Why don’t you come into the courtyard? You could sit on the bench? Oriole can probably find something for you to eat while I go and change clothes.’

  ‘A jolly-sounding jolly good idea!’ Squitcher said. ‘Boldly Seer is digging herself a nice bed-nest there by the wall. She will be fine for the night.’

  ‘Night?’

  Squitcher smiled and raised his eyebrows questioningly. ‘Perhaps-maybe. We’ll see.’

  While the pixicles settled down on the bench in the snow, Questrid explained to Robin and Oriole who their visitors were. Thunder and Lightning stopped munching hay and watched them with interest; they’d never seen anything like a pixicle before. Silver trotted out to sniff them thoroughly and give them a friendly lick.

  Oriole handed out cold fizzy drinks and ice cream while Questrid ran up to his room to change. He could barely get his frozen fingers to do up buttons and pull on braces and woolly jumpers. He guessed the visit from the pixicles had to be important – as far as he knew they had never come to Spindle House before.

  Wrapped up warmly, a mug of hot chocolate in his hand, he settled down to listen to their story.

  ‘When I was a young slip of a lad,’ Grampy began, ‘I was a hot-tempered fire-and-brimstone boy.’

  ‘Not like now, then,’ Squitcher said with a grin.

  ‘Hush! No joking-mockery matter! My anger was bubbling, boiling, scalding-hot. I see no reason to tell you why or give you details, Lanky Boy, but one day I did a terrible-bad thing …’ He paused to stroke his pointed ears nervously. ‘Oh, the shame, the shame!’

  ‘Never mind all that,’ Squitcher said. ‘Get on with your story, old man. We’re talking hundreds of Marble Mountains years ago. Shame’s all gone.’

  ‘You remember our icy eye-cycles in our gardens, don’t you?’ Grampy asked. ‘We are the best ice sculptors for miles around. Our eye-cycles are best-special to us, showing us the future and the gone-away-past. But you may not know that they are priceless-valuable and we never, never let anyone who is a non-pixicle have one. Not ever. Too preciously-special to let others hear a fortune or a pastune, too much danger of someone else-other misusing them and doing bad—’

  ‘I remember you let the girls look in them as a treat when we stayed with you,’ Questrid said, ‘but I got the feeling they only got a hint at the future—’

  ‘Clever-brainy boy. Face-features do not hint at existence of a working mind. Ha ha! Just my little fun-joke. It’s true we can see more in the eye-cycles than any other Water person. Certain-sure more than non-Water types like you. In the wrong hands of the wrong sort, an eye-cycle can be a dangerous thing.

  ‘And this is why we’re presently-here,’ Grampy said. ‘We have heard a fortune singing and ringing and calling out. Another eye-cycle, you understand? Not an eye-cycle in our village, but another one—’

  ‘What’s this got to do with Grampy’s temper?’ Questrid interrupted.

  ‘Wait. Listen. We were amazedly-flabbergasted to hear it,’ Squitcher said. ‘How was this possible? Another eye-cycle! Where? How?’

  ‘So we set out on Boldly Seer to seek it out,’ Grampy said. ‘Even though I was knowing in my heart where the fortune rang-sang from.’

  ‘Huh, the silly old man! Wouldn’t tell us! Wasted all that time!’ Squitcher said.

  ‘Humph. Silly young man! You took some long-time-ages to find it,’ Grampy retorted quickly.

  ‘Where was it?’ Questrid asked them.

  ‘Pol Lake—’

  ‘Pol Lake! How weird, because—’

  ‘Don’t interrupt. Pol Lake is hidden in the folds of the Glass Hills, frozen from top-most to bottom-most,’ Grampy said. ‘From bottom to top it freezes, except for once on a rare-occasional moment when it is not frozen and then a gateway opens and you can slip along through to the other side.’

  Questrid thrilled at the words. ‘Yes? I know. I mean I sort of know. Where to? Where’s the other side?’ He could barely speak with excitement.

  ‘I don’t know! The other side, that’s all I can tell you,’ Grampy said quickly. ‘I threw the eye-cycle in there to spite my father. I told you I was a fearful, brimstone-temper boy.’

  ‘You threw the eye-cycle into the lake?’ Questrid said.

  ‘Yes. And some person has got it down there and they are badly-wickedly employing it. We flew over the lake and saw the melt hole. We heard the eye-cycle singing a fortune; the tune was coming up through the hole—’

  ‘But hold on,’ Questrid interrupted him. ‘I don’t understand. It must be years ago that you threw it in – but only now that you’ve heard it?’

  ‘Oh, Lanky One, what questions and questions!’ Grampy said.

  ‘But he deserves a polite answer, Grampy,’ Squitcher said. ‘We think that when Grampy threw-tossed the eye-cycle into the hole it didn’t reach the other side, but got trapped-lodged in the ice. Frozen up and iced there. Maybe for years and years it slowly sank through the ice. I don’t know. We thought we heard it ten years-long ago but we weren’t sure – there was an ice melting moment then also. Now the melt hole is open again and out comes-singing the sound—’

  ‘Our sound! Our eye-cycle! Someone is using it! This cannot happen,’ Grampy said. ‘It must be stopped!’

  ‘So that’s why we’re here,’ Squitcher said. ‘We need your help to go and find-locate it and bring it back.’

  ‘But, but—’

  ‘You are being a jolly Stone-Wood person,’ Squitcher went on. ‘You are perfect for passing through. We are ice pixies, yes from the Water tribe, and yes we can pass through, but look at us! So small and minuscule. What could we do down there?’

  ‘And if we did go down,’ Grampy put in, ‘they’d keep us – whoever they are – make us tell what’s in the eye-cycle. Not good. Much better you go, Lanky Boy. Lanky Boy can’t do anything useful with the eye-cycle.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘So please, dear friend, will you help us?’

  16

  Trouble for Grint

  The power was slipping away from him; Grint could feel it. The Elders he’d spoken to that morning had not looked him in the eye. They had not laughed at his jokes or clapped and cheered as he spoke. How was this possible so suddenly, he wondered? After all he’d done building up the Town. Just one day without Effie and he was already losing control. He should have nipped John Carter’s rebelliousness in the bud.

  He decided to call a further meeting in an attempt to quieten things down and regain some control.

  The Elders grouped in the hall, muttering and whispering. Grint climbed onto a big marble table to speak. He could hear desperation in his voice and tried to slow down his speech and steady himself. He wiped away the sweat that had broken out on his forehead. He had to make them see sense. Otherwise he would lose Effie and he could not afford for that to happen; not if he was to have any chance of remaining their leader.

  ‘We must all thank Mr John Carter for apprehending Effie and Crystal Waters,’ he said, trying to smile through his gritted teeth. Whatever he did, his voice rumbled and grated as if it were tired. ‘Mr Carter has been very diligent … I agree that Effie stepped out of line when she tried to leave
the Town but—’

  ‘Stealing! Stealing, don’t forget!’

  ‘And I know some of her dabbling with herbs and flowers might seem—’

  ‘Might seem?’ John Carter shouted. ‘She killed my cousin, Annie Scott, with her so-called medicine!’

  ‘Now, now, we have no proof—’

  ‘She’s not like us,’ someone shouted. ‘She doesn’t look like us. Nor does her daughter. We don’t want them here!’

  ‘I fail to understand—’

  But the Elders shouted Grint down. ‘She’s a witch!’ John Carter cried. ‘We’ve talked it through. We Elders have consulted and we agree she is a witch and must be tried by us. Maybe she’s bewitched you, Grint, Bless and Praise You, maybe that’s why you think she’s worth saving!’

  ‘We don’t want a witch in the Town.’

  ‘She should be put to the witch test!’ Sam Smith, Carter’s friend, called out. ‘Who agrees?’

  Everyone in the room raised their arm in agreement.

  ‘No, no!’ Grint had to shout to be heard. ‘This is just the sort of superstitious rubbish I wanted to eradicate from the Town! She is different, but she is not a witch!’

  ‘All right for you to say that!’ Henry Timms cried. ‘You’re protected here in your big house with Raek to look after you, doctors to tend you. We have nothing except the likes of Effie Waters, and if her magic does kill us who do we turn to then, eh?’

  ‘Yes!’ another cried. ‘She’s killed! She’ll kill again. I say test her. See if she is a witch!’

  ‘The ducking stool will prove it!’

  ‘The two of them want throwing out of the place,’ Sam Smith said. ‘They’re odd. Never belonged.’

  ‘No, no, not the ducking stool,’ Grint said. ‘You’re wrong! That’s from the dark ages. We can’t—Haven’t I always been right? Don’t I know always what will happen? I’m telling you—’

  ‘But now we’re telling you!’ John Carter cried. ‘This time we are making the decision. And if she’s not a witch, it won’t hardly matter, will it?’