First published by Allen & Unwin in 2020
Copyright © Text, Jaclyn Moriarty 2020
Copyright © Illustrations, Kelly Canby 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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To Michael and Jane
for their friendship
CONTENTS
Maps
Part 1
The Stolen Prince of Cloudburst: A Narrative Account
Part 2
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Part 3
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Part 4
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Part 5
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Other Books
The Stolen Prince of Cloudburst: A Narrative Account
by Esther Mettlestone-Staranise,
Grade 6
ong ago, far away, on a damp and sniffly day—
This happened.
A little prince, not yet two years old, played upon the shore.
‘Hoopla!’ said his nanny, and the boy leapt over a frothy wave. Nanny and boy giggled.
‘Hoopla!’ the nanny repeated, and again the tiny boy leapt. He wore a little romper suit and his name—Alejandro—was embroidered on the collar. His little feet were bare, for the nanny had removed his shoes.
If you are wondering where the shoes were, well, I think they were probably just off to the side somewhere, on the sand.
‘Again!’ said little Alejandro.
‘Hoopla!’ the nanny obliged.
The child leapt.
This could have gone on for hours, days—maybe even years! Well, perhaps not years, they’d have gotten hungry—but the nanny’s gentleman friend happened to stroll byalong the boardwalk. He spotted the pair on the beach.
‘Ahoy there!’ called the gentleman friend.
The nanny straightened, raised her hand to wave, and that was all the time it took.
A Water Sprite burst from the waves and stole the child.
The nanny saw him. She felt a whoosh, a splash, turned at once and saw. The gentleman friend up on the boardwalk, he saw too.
The Water Sprite had broad shoulders. He gathered Alejandro into his arms, leapt into the waves and swam away. ‘Right before my eyes!’ said the nanny. ‘I chased him! Into the waves, I dove! Ruined my good pinafore! But the Water Sprite—and darling Alejandro—were gone!’
By the way, all this happened in the town of Spindrift, in the Kingdom of Storms, about ten years ago. Ordinarily, the royal family of Storms live in the city of Cloudburst, but they were on holiday by the sea.
Everyone searched the sea for the prince, even the lighthouse keeper: his lighthouse beam swept ba
ck and forth like a duster on the sideboard.
King Jakob and Queen Anita were distraught. Well, of course they were. (They were the little boy’s parents, if you haven’t figured that out.) They were also bewildered.
‘Why should a Water Sprite steal a child?’ they asked each other, over and over. ‘Water Sprites don’t steal children!’
Meanwhile, the Water Sprite was asking himself the same question.
His name was Caprito, and he had swum far out to sea, little Alejandro babbling beneath his arm, and then paused, treading water. Carefully, he’d placed the little prince on an ocean lily.
Then he had swum down to his home beneath the sea, and—
‘What have I done?’ he asked himself. ‘Why did I steal a child?’
For it was true that Water Sprites do not steal children. Not ordinarily, they don’t.
The Water Sprite swam directly to his own king, King Khalid, and confessed.
‘You stole a child?’ cried King Khalid. ‘Well, give him back at once!’
‘I can’t,’ replied Caprito. ‘I placed him on an ocean lily.’
(Ocean lilies, in case you don’t know, are just like the water lilies you see on ponds, only bigger and stronger. They spread themselves over the surface of the ocean like floating picnic blankets.) (That was a helpful aside.)
‘Then fetch him back from the ocean lily!’ ordered King Khalid, exasperated. ‘At once!’
Caprito thought that was genius, and he streaked through the water to the place where the ocean lily had been.
But it was gone.
And so was the child.
Caprito returned to his king. ‘Gone,’ he said.
The Water Sprite King was very upset and got stuck on the issue of why Caprito had stolen the child in the first place.
‘Why would you do such a thing?’ the King complained.
‘I cannot say,’ Caprito replied.
‘Yes, you can,’ the King snapped. ‘Say!’
But Caprito sadly shook his head. ‘I cannot say,’ he said, ‘because I do not know.’
Eventually, King Khalid summonsed a shore’s-edge meeting with King Jakob and Queen Anita. Caprito confessed all.
It was a heated meeting, as you can imagine.
Everybody asked the Water Sprite why he had done this: King Jakob, Queen Anita, constables, guards, the nanny, the nanny’s gentleman friend. But Caprito’s answer was always the same:
‘I cannot say.’
And then, more quietly: ‘I cannot say because I do not know.’
Caprito wept and apologised, begging forgiveness.
The king and queen did not much feel like forgiving him.
However, they did not throw him in a dungeon or declare war on the Water Sprite Kingdom, for they believed his regret and confusion.
While many thought the prince must have fallen from the ocean lily into the sea and drowned, others said that the lily could have floated across the Kingdoms and Empires, washing ashore in a distant land.
And so the search for little Alejandro continued, year after year, and King Jakob and Queen Anita grew ever sadder, sorrier, thinner and older. Sometimes they sat side by side on the beach, staring at the waves, taking turns with the spyglass, looking for their lost little prince.
Meanwhile, what of the little prince?
This is what.
He floated about on the ocean lily a while. Perhaps he fell asleep? I do not know. I was not there.
What I do know is this: the currents carried the ocean lily a fair distance, but it did not wash up on a shore.
Instead, pirates spied the child, and scooped him aboard their ship. They did not know he was a prince, of course, or they’d surely have demanded a mountain of gold for his return. They’re all about mountains of gold, pirates.
All they knew was that his name was Alejandro, for that was embroidered on his collar.
The pirates thought him as cute as a baby otter, gave him a parrot to play with and let him splash about with dolphins now and then.
As Alejandro grew older, however, they began teaching him things: how to fight with a sword, for instance, or to shoot with a bow and arrow, and how to load and fire a musketoon.
He excelled at these, and the pirates cheered and congratulated themselves on their forethought in fishing him out of the waves.
But then?
When he was eleven years old?
Well, they sat him down and told him that now he must become a pirate.
‘And what must I do as a pirate?’ Alejandro enquired.
‘You must steal gold and treasure from other ships!’ one pirate exclaimed, very excited to tell him. (They loved their work.)
‘Use the sword, the arrow and the musketoon, to kill any who try to stop you!’ a second cried.
‘Set the ships alight and watch them sink!’ all the other pirates bellowed.
Alejandro was eleven, as I said, and very shocked to find out that this was how his pirate friends spent their days. How they ‘earned a crust’, as they put it. (They’d kept him below deck while they pirated up until now.)
He had a golden heart and did not want to steal, destroy and kill!
The pirates were furious.
‘Not angry so much as disappointed,’ one of them said, which hurt Alejandro’s feelings, but then the others said, ‘Not angry?! Why, I’m angry enough to rip apart a sharkwith my bare teeth! I’m furious! Livid!’
They were also very disappointed. ‘All the work we put into bringing him up!’ they complained. ‘This is how he repays us?’ And they squabbled about who had been too soft, so that he was raised to be nice. A milksop.
They began to beat him then, and to inflict punishments upon him, trying to make up for years of kindness. Trying to un-milksop him.
‘We will make a pirate of you yet!’ they swore.
Poor Alejandro. He was very unhappy.
He used his wits and cunning, and escaped from the pirate ship!
They recaptured him.
He escaped again!
Upon the shore, he made friends with a girl his own age named Bronte Mettlestone, who was an adventurer. She invited him to live, happily ever after, with her family in faraway Gainsleigh.
And that, as I said, was the happily ever after …
But was it?
No!
We are forgetting the parents!
One night, Alejandro dreamed that his long-lost parents were sad.
The dream told him to have an adventure to find out who those parents were. (He’d forgotten.)
The story of this adventure is too long to put here, especially as it’s nearly midnight and my candle is almost completely burned down, and the other girls in the dormitory are snoring beneath their feather quilts.
So I will only say this: he did find his parents!
And he returned home to Cloudburst in the Kingdom of Storms to be reunited with King Jakob and Queen Anita! As we speak, they are planning an enormous party to officially welcome him.
And that is the end of the story.
(One last thing. Guess what? The girl in the story named Bronte Mettlestone? The adventurer?
She’s my cousin!!!
My sisters and I have even met Alejandro, the Stolen Prince of Cloudburst!!!
It’s true that we only met him for a short and busy time two years ago, so he might not remember us. But I remember him.)
The End
Esther, yes, I have read much of this story, or its basic facts, anyway, in the newspapers. You have not made them more interesting here. Worse, you have tried to put yourself in the story. You might be related to one of these interesting people, but that does not make you interesting. Do not put yourself in stories where you do not belong.
Also, do not begin sentences with the words ‘And’ or ‘But’. Do not break your sentences and paragraphs into pieces; your tale is very disjointed. Do not boast by saying that your asides are ‘helpful’—that is not becoming.
I see that you
stayed up past midnight to do your homework. Dreadful behaviour. DEMERIT. As this is your third demerit, please attend Detention on Friday evening as punishment.
Finally, you began this story with the words, ‘Long ago, far away, on a damp and sniffly day’. Please write out the following, 100 times:
A DAY CANNOT BE ‘SNIFFLY’
C–
A day can be sniffly, you know. My father told me it could.
He had a cold last summer. Father, I mean. He had a cold and sniffles the day I overheard the telephone conversation.
I was in the kitchen at home, underneath the table with a glass of lemonade. (That’s why I was underneath the table—the lemonade. It was meant for Mother’s work colleagues, not for you girls, I do not want to see you drink a drop of that! So I was very kindly hiding, to save Mother from seeing me drink a whole glassful of drops.)
I was also reading Dragon Detective: The Shadow in the Wind, a new novel by my favourite author in all the Kingdoms and Empires, G.A. Thunderstrike. It was 9.42 am, and I was happy.
When the telephone rang, I quickly pulled my legs in and curled them underneath me. I held myself still and waited.
Father’s footsteps approached. Slower, more considering, than Mother’s.
I relaxed. If Father caught me drinking lemonade under the table, he’d only murmur, ‘Lemonade! Nice one! Where is it?’ And pour himself a glass too, keeping an eye out for Mother.
Father’s slippers shuffled by the table. He blew his nose. It made a sound like a panicking cow. He picked up the phone.
‘Morning,’ he said, a bit croaky.
The sound of a distant voice.
‘Gordon!’ exclaimed Father, his voice gathering strength. ‘How’s the summer treating you?’
Gordon is one of Father’s research assistants. Father teaches history at Clybourne University, although mostly he doesn’t teach at all, he travels about collecting information and stories for his books. His research assistants do the teaching.
More chittering from Gordon’s distant voice.
‘Steady on,’ Father said.
More chittering.
‘But if you—’
Chitter, chitter.
Father laughed. ‘Well, that sounds just like Jonathan J. Lanyard, of course, but—’
The volume of the chittering rose. I still couldn’t make out the actual words.
Father blew his nose again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘did I hear you say—?’
Chitter.
Chitter.
Chitter.
Father had been silent so long that I peeked out from under the table to check he hadn’t fallen asleep.
He was leaning up against the kitchen sink, holding the telephone to his ear. In his other hand he held his handkerchief, and he was twisting this between his fingers. His cheeks and nose were bright pink from his cold, and his eyes seemed a strange mix of amused and irritated.
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