Northwood

by Brian Falkner

The naughty chair was extremely uncomfortable. There was no way to get comfortable on the uneven surface, which was probably the point.

  “How did you get in, you horrible little girl?” Sergeant Lee was thunder and lightning, his face close to hers, flecks of spittle flying in every direction.

  Cecilia didn’t like being shouted at, and she didn’t like being spat on, and she didn’t like Sergeant Lee very much either.

  The rest of the citizens, still in their party clothes, were gathered at the back of the throne room. None of them looked happy.

  “And where are those nasty little friends of yours?” the King said, angrily.

  Cecilia glanced at the twins’ mom and dad, silently standing at the back of the room with horrified looks on their faces, but she said nothing.

  She had never told a lie in her life, but if she told the truth now, they would find the secret passage and Avery and Evan.

  She couldn’t give them up.

  Eventually she said quietly, “I’m not going to say anything.”

  “Oh yes you are,” Lee said in a low, menacing voice.

  Cecilia struggled to think.

  Her brain wasn’t working well with all the shouting and spitting. What was that line they always said in the movies?

  “I have the right to remain silent,” she said.

  That seemed to throw him off course for a moment.

  “Did you have a copy of the key?” he asked.

  “I have the right to remain silent,” Cecilia said again.

  “Did you pick the lock?”

  “I have the right to remain silent.”

  “What were you doing in the royal quarters?”

  “I have the right to remain silent.”

  If he’d asked her how to spell rhododendron or what the capital of Iceland was, she would have answered just the same.

  King Harry had been sitting quietly watching the proceedings, his face a dark chasm.

  Now he yelled out, “She’s a spy!”

  “How could she be a spy?” Mrs. Proctor called out, quite reasonably, from the back of the room. “She’s just a little girl. And anyway, what is there to spy on?”

  If only you knew! Cecilia thought.

  In her mind she had been debating whether to reveal what they had found out about the King.

  They had no way of proving it, but if she told everybody what they had found, then it would be up to the King to prove that he wasn’t a descendant of the evil Baron Mendoza.

  “She’s a thief!” the King cried.

  “A nasty little thief,” Sergeant Lee agreed.

  “And a traitor!” King Harry yelled.

  “A treacherous little traitor!”

  “As well as a spy!” The King was getting quite carried away now.

  “A despicable little spy!”

  “I’m not a spy, a thief, or a traitor,” Cecilia said. “The truth is that I found a very interesting picture, and I think it shows that King Harry is really —”

  That was all she got out before a hand was clamped over her mouth and Sergeant Lee’s eyes were just in front of her own, boring into her like two electric drills.

  He spoke quietly, so that only she would hear. “People who talk too much around here have a way of disappearing.”

  Cecilia’s words froze in her throat.

  “She’s a spy,” King Harry said again. “To the dungeon with her.”

  28

  DARKNESS

  ALONG WITH SHOUTING and spitting and Sergeant Lee, Cecilia didn’t like dungeons much either.

  In fact, they were on top of her list of dislikes.

  Private Skunk led her down to the dungeons, which she hadn’t even known existed. Why would a good, benevolent king like Danyon need dungeons? she wondered.

  Then she reminded herself that King Danyon hadn’t built the castle, he had merely come to live in it. Perhaps whoever had built it, all those years ago, had needed dungeons.

  Walking along next to the guard, she found out why the twins called him Skunk. Some people are born smelly. Some people achieve smelliness. Others have smelliness thrust upon them. Cecilia wasn’t sure which type of person Private Skunk was, but she suspected all three.

  As she walked, she turned her face away from him, hoping that would make a difference.

  It didn’t.

  The dungeons were deep within the castle, on the lowest level, well below the entrance with the big stone door.

  The original builders of the castle had not smoothed the walls of these caves, or flattened the floor. They had just built a door of heavy brass bars across the entrance to a cave. The bars, although green and decrepit, still looked strong.

  The light from Skunk’s lantern briefly let her see inside the dungeon, and it looked horrible. Water seeped down one of the walls, which was mottled purple and green. There was no bed or mattress — just a hard and uneven rock floor.

  “You can’t put me in there,” Cecilia cried out when she saw it, almost gagging on the pungent fumes given off by her prison guard. “That’s barbaric!”

  “You get what you deserve,” Skunk muttered.

  There was a heavy brass key hanging on a hook on one of the walls outside the dungeon. He took it, struggling with the ancient brass lock for a moment, before there was a dull click and the door opened.

  “Get inside,” he said, and shoved her forward at the same time. She sprawled on the harsh, unfriendly rock of the floor. By the time she had gotten back to her feet, the door was shut, and there was another click as it locked.

  “You can’t leave me here!” she yelled, as Skunk replaced the key on the hook and slunk back up the stairs.

  He didn’t say anything.

  And then there was nothing.

  Just darkness.

  Complete and utter darkness.

  ***

  You lose track of time when there is nothing to help you measure it by. With no sunlight or moonlight, or even the glow of a lantern, there was no way of knowing whether a minute had passed or an hour.

  Even once Cecilia’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she could not see her own hand if she held it right in front of her face.

  It was almost as quiet as it was dark.

  Down here there was no sound from the gasoline generator upstairs, no gentle breathing of the wind, no shuffling of feet in the corridors.

  Yet there were sounds. She became aware of the air moving through her nostrils and the quiet beating of her heart.

  She listened for the feet of rats, or other tiny creatures, but it seemed that even they didn’t like this cave.

  There was nothing.

  Only her.

  Cecilia.

  Was that footsteps she could hear in the distance, coming down the stairs?

  She felt her way across the floor to the door.

  Using the bars for balance, she stood upright and strained her eyes toward where she remembered the stairs were.

  Was that the tiniest imagining of a faint glow?

  It was!

  The light strengthened, and already she could make out the entrance to the stairway.

  More — she could see the bars of the door in front of her face.

  A lantern appeared at the bottom of the stairway and there were hushed voices.

  Voices she recognized.

  “Avery! Evan!” she cried out. “Over here!”

  “Cecilia.” They hurried across to the door.

  “There’s a key on the wall over there,” Cecilia said, pointing.

  Evan fetched it, and they struggled with the lock for a few minutes.

  Cecilia listened for any more footsteps on the stairs as they worked the lock, but there was nothing. Finally, the lock clicked open.

  “Thank you, thank you!” Cecilia cried,
hugging them both.

  “Hurry, we have to get out of here,” Evan said.

  “Where to?” Cecilia asked as they headed back up the stairs.

  “Tony Baloney’s house,” Avery said. “They won’t think of looking for you there.”

  “And that will give us time to work out what we’re going to do about the King,” Evan said.

  “What happened to you guys?” Cecilia asked. “After I was caught.”

  “We hid in the tunnel,” Avery said. “They searched all the rooms after they found you, but they still don’t know about the secret passage.”

  Evan added, “We had to wait until the Court of Inquiry, when everybody was gathered in the throne room, before we could slip out.”

  “What about Rocky?” Cecilia asked.

  “He’s fine. He’s with Mrs. Proctor,” Avery said.

  They were just coming up to the next level, a creepy cave full of stalactites and stalagmites, with deep alcoves and rocky protrusions.

  “Thank you for rescuing me,” Cecilia said. “It was horrible in there.”

  “I didn’t expect it to be so easy,” Avery said.

  Evan stopped dead in his tracks. Since he was the one who was carrying the lantern, Cecilia and Avery stopped with him.

  “It was easy,” he said. “Too easy. What kind of idiot leaves the key to the prison hanging just outside the prison door?”

  “Skunk,” Cecilia said.

  “He’s not the tallest tree in the forest,” Evan said. “But even he’s smart enough to take the key away with him.”

  “It’s a trap!” Cecilia realized with horror.

  “They wanted you to escape,” Avery said.

  “They wanted to catch us too,” Evan said. “We’ve got to get out of here, now!”

  Already it was too late.

  Four large men stepped out of the shadows and surrounded them.

  The men had heavy black sacks, and a moment later Cecilia found herself tied inside one, bouncing along on somebody’s shoulder.

  “Where are you taking us?” she heard Evan cry.

  But Cecilia had a horrible feeling that she already knew.

  29

  OUT OF FEAR

  ALL THE AIR whooshed out of Cecilia’s body as the sack she was in hit the ground hard.

  There were two more thuds nearby. Evan squealed in pain, and Avery called someone a name that was not very nice.

  Then footsteps retreated and they were left alone. Even without seeing, Cecilia knew where they were from the sound of the wind through the trees around them.

  They were somewhere in the middle of Northwood forest.

  They were lion fodder.

  She scratched around inside the sack, feeling for a seam. There had to be one, she figured, and it would be hand sewn, and quite rough.

  Her fingers found what she thought might be a seam at the bottom of the sack and she felt her way along to the end. She managed to work up a thread and pulled on it until she had a loop of cotton, which she snapped.

  Starting at one end, she picked at the stitching with her fingernails until she had loosened four or five stitches, making a small hole in the bottom of the sack. Then she grabbed both sides of the seam and pulled. The seam began to open with a ripping sound.

  As soon as the hole was large enough, she pulled the sack down over her head and stepped out of it, finding herself in a small clearing. It was dark in the forest at night, but the moon rose high overhead.

  It painted the long grass of the clearing in long silver brushstrokes, and gave an unearthly halo to the tree canopy around them. By its light, she could make out the black shapes of her friends wrestling with their sacks on the forest floor.

  “Hold still,” she said to the nearest sack, and pulled quickly at the rope that was tying it shut. Avery’s head popped out, her hair a mess, her eyes black with anger.

  “How dare they!” she exploded. Then she stopped and looked around. “We’re in the forest,” she said.

  “Shhh,” Cecilia said, untying Evan. “There may be lions nearby.”

  ***

  It should be terrifying, Cecilia thought, but it’s somehow beautiful. They were lost in a maze in a dark forest filled with man-eating lions, which should have been enough to have them cowering and crying on the ground. But instead Cecilia felt bold.

  Perhaps she had just run out of fear. She had been using so much of it in the castle, with the King and his evil guards. Maybe fear was like water in a glass, and when you used it all up and there was nothing left in the glass, then you weren’t afraid anymore.

  Cecilia was not afraid.

  “What do we do now?” Avery asked. “How can we get back to the castle?”

  Evan was gazing up at the moon and the stars. “This way, I think.”

  “Do we want to return to the castle?” Cecilia asked softly.

  The others turned and looked at her.

  “Even if we can find our way,” Cecilia said, “King Harry will just throw us in the dungeon again.” She shuddered at the thought. “Maybe we should try to find our way out.”

  “We don’t have a choice. We have to go back,” Avery said. “We have to tell everybody the truth.”

  “It’s a maze,” Evan said. “We’ll be lucky if we can find our way anywhere!”

  “We can’t stay here,” Avery said. “So let’s just start walking.”

  “We can’t be too far from the castle,” Evan reasoned. “It didn’t take them all that long to bring us here.”

  “Also, they wouldn’t have wanted to travel too far in the forest at night,” Avery said. “Because of the lions.”

  “We’ll go Evan’s way,” Cecilia said. “See where that takes us.”

  Where it took them was directly to the lions’ den.

  30

  FIST ROCK

  THE PATH BEGAN to dip into a small ditch.

  “Do you recognize this place?” Cecilia whispered.

  “No, never been here before in my life,” Avery whispered back, and Evan shook his head.

  They had been walking for hours. Following tracks, trying to recognize paths, walking in circles for all they knew, because there was no way of identifying trees or turns in the darkness.

  For half of that time they had traveled with the sound of snoring lions in their ears. They couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. In the cold dark night of the forest, the sound traveled a long way, bouncing off trees and sneaking along pathways until it could have been coming from anywhere.

  The path dipped farther down into the ditch. Here, the damp smell of the forest intensified. Snoring surrounded them. Cecilia thought it was getting louder and said so in a tiny voice.

  “We can’t tell where it’s coming from,” Avery said. “We may as well keep going for now.”

  They came to a bend in the path. There had been no side paths for a long time, so the only way to go was ahead.

  But here there was no doubt. The snoring was much louder, and it was coming from more than one lion — more than two, probably, although it was impossible to tell for certain.

  “We have to go back,” Cecilia said, as quietly as she could. Her voice was barely a glimmer of sound in the still night air.

  “We can’t.” Evan’s voice was just as quiet.

  “We have to,” Avery said.

  “We can’t,” Evan repeated.

  “Why not?” Cecilia asked.

  “Because there’s a lion behind us,” Evan said.

  Cecilia looked back along the trail, but could see nothing. “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Because I can hear it breathing,” Evan said. “We must have woken it up, or maybe it couldn’t sleep, or whatever. But it’s been on our trail for the last ten minutes.”

  Cecilia listened carefully. There it
was: a low rasp of breath, in and out. With all the snoring around them she hadn’t noticed it before. She couldn’t tell how far away it was, but it sounded close.

  That was the last thing they needed. An insomniac lion.

  “Why hasn’t it attacked us?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Evan said.

  Cecilia had an idea why, but didn’t want to say it out loud. She had a strong feeling that the big cat behind them might have been herding them. Pushing them toward something, or someplace.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “We have to go on,” Evan said. “We can’t go back.”

  The sloping path led them down to another small clearing, where the moonlight poured through the gap in the trees and seeped into the ground like silver blood.

  At the far end of the clearing stood a huge fist-shaped rock. It was formed out of a series of flat ridges on a small cliff face that transformed into a clenched hand as they climbed into the sky.

  The ridges were not flat, Cecilia realized, but covered with dark mounds of rock.

  One of the mounds moved and stretched.

  The mounds were lions.

  Cecilia was dumbfounded. She had no idea how many lions there were roaming the forest. But just in this one place there had to be a dozen of them, sleeping on the ridges of the cliff face. She had been right. The lion behind them was herding them toward this place. The lions’ den.

  “What now?” Cecilia said.

  “We go back,” Avery said. “I’d rather face one lion than a whole pack of them.”

  “Pride,” Evan said.

  “What?” Avery’s voice raised up a notch.

  “A pride of lions, not a pack,” Evan said.

  “Oh, just shut up,” Avery said.

  A low, menacing growl came from behind them.

  There was another growl, much louder now, and the snoring stopped.

  “Oh no,” Cecilia said.

  A shape uncurled itself from the long grass in front of them. Two dots glowed. Two huge eyes. Another lion. A huge lion. They had almost walked right on top of it. Silver moonlight stained its coarse fur as it got slowly to its feet.