Dylan's Yuletide Journey

by Jemima Pett

Dylan’s Yuletide Journey

  Jemima Pett

  A Princelings of the North novella

  Dylan’s Yuletide Journey

  A short chapter book by Jemima Pett

  Published by Princelings Publications

  (c) J M Pett 2013 all rights reserved

  A note about the story

  This short story is independent of, but set in, the world of the Princelings of the East. It introduces Dylan and Dougall, the Princelings of the North, since Haunn is on the island of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. It fits into the Princelings series after book 3, The Princelings and the Lost City and before book 6, Bravo Victor. It has brief appearances by some characters from the main series, like Prince Lupin of Buckmore, and features Prince Engineer George, who seems to get in everywhere. But it mostly stands on its own.

  This 7,000-word story is suitable for readers aged 8 and over. Reading ease rated level 4.

 

  Chapter 1: The Case of the Missing Strawberry Juice

  In which Dylan overhears something to Dougall’s disadvantage

  Dylan sprawled on the edge of the crag. He was looking for anything useful on the rocky shore below. He had run outside as soon as he heard the screams of rage from Uncle Donal echoing through the rocky tunnels of Castle Haunn. He wasn’t going to get blamed, oh, no. It wasn’t Dylan’s fault the lights had gone out and the ship carrying their provisions had missed the harbour. It wasn’t his fault it had been a stormy night. The captain of the ship had not been able to find a safe haven. But whoever’s fault it was, there would be no extra food, no extra wood and no extra strawberry juice for the next two weeks at least.

  It was going to be a cold, cold, yuletide this year.

  Down on the shore he shrank against a rocky ledge while the eagle went over. Rich pickings for him, Dylan thought. Poor pickings for Dylan, though. He’d found an empty crate which might have held the strawberry juice bottles. They’d probably floated away, sunk, or been smashed to smithereens. He wondered why there was such a shortage. They weren’t allowed to drink it any more. Too precious. He gave up on his search and decided it was time to play games with his brother.

  Dougall was not in the power plant room, where he worked. He was not in the library, nor the arena. Dylan checked out the little cubbyhole where they slept, and stayed there as he heard his uncles Hamish and Heath coming closer, discussing something.

  “He was trying to help, that’s all.”

  “It was stupid, he should know better. Interfering in grownups’ business!”

  “He’s still a wee thing; he’s got bright ideas and his heart’s in the right place.”

  “That’s my point! He should keep his nose out and listen to his elders!”

  They passed Dylan without noticing him. Dylan was very good at flattening himself into his thick dark coat and hiding his white chin and feet so that they didn’t show. He gave a passable impression of a mop. Dylan wondered who they were talking about. There weren’t many ‘wee things’ around the castle. The prince and princess weren’t likely to be classed as ‘wee’ any more. The smith’s daughters weren’t likely to be referred to as ‘he’. That rather left their second cousin Rory and themselves. Dylan got a bad feeling. What had Dougall done now?

  ~~~

  Dougall was curled up in the corner of the dry dungeon. His forlorn expression would melt the hardest of hearts. Dylan was used to it.

  “What happened?” he whispered through the grill of the dungeon door.

  “The power ran out. I tried raspberry juice but it didn’t work.”

  “Why didn’t you use strawberry juice? Isn’t that what it runs on?”

  “There isn’t any,” Dougall replied, surprised that Dylan didn’t know.

  “So, because we didn’t have any left, the ship that was bringing us our winter’s supply crashed into the rocks,” Dylan summarised.

  “Yes,” Dougall replied. He sank his head onto the ground, letting his fringe fall over his eyes so Dylan couldn’t see him crying.

  “Why isn’t there any?” asked Dylan, but there was no reply.

  ~~~

  There was no reply as Donal, Laird of Haunn, asked his court the same question. A few people in the large meeting room upstairs shifted anxiously in their seats. Hamish and Heath exchanged glances and looked at their laird expectantly.

  “I want to know where it’s gone!” Donal was not happy. “I want to know how we are going to heat the place through Yule. How we are going to eat? And how we are supposed to celebrate Solstice without our supplies?”

  “Perhaps it would help if we found out how long it’s been missing?” suggested Hamish.

  “It ran out last night, Hamish. It’s obviously been missing since the weekend.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s right, sire. The keepers of the fuel cell have been worried about supplies for some time. That’s why we asked for the urgent delivery. In fact, hm, they’ve been experimenting with raspberry juice for a few weeks now. It seemed to be working all right if they diluted the strawberry juice with it.”

  “Raspberry juice?” The Laird was surprised, but interested. Strawberry juice was like gold dust in the northern climes.

  “Yes, sire. It’s plentiful of course, since we grow them ourselves. Those wee wild strawberries don’t give enough juice to be worth picking.”

  “Who thought up such a stupid idea?”

  Hamish hesitated. “It was one idea out of a number that the team thought up together,” he said. Since his team were responsible, they might as well share it rather than let Dougall take all the blame. After all, they’d gone along with the idea of diluting it. Just not switching over entirely.

  “So, Hamish. What are you going to do to make sure we don’t all starve and freeze over Yuletide?” asked the Laird, making it quite clear where he laid the blame for their predicament.

  Chapter 2: Dylan takes a message

  In which Dylan’s new route leads him astray

  Dylan sped along the grassy trail at the side of the glen, climbing ever higher. He watched carefully for hawks, ravens and eagles. They might think he made a better snack than a rabbit. He was the fastest and cleverest runner at Haunn, and it was his job to carry messages to the other castles. This time, it was a message that needed to go all the way across the sea to Kerrera. The post office there would send it onwards to the legendary Castle Buckmore. He repeated the message to himself from time to time. He had to make sure he remembered it all when the time came to write it down and send it by vacuum tube. He also repeated the second message that Dougall had given him.

  Dougall had been let out of the dungeon in time to see him off. He made Dylan tell him the official message, then made him remember another one, full of technical detail, that he had to address to a very particular person. Dougall had shown Dylan an old newspaper in the library to help him remember. Dylan liked the picture in it: a clever princeling who had invented strawberry juice power. Dougall wanted to be like him, but had failed.

  As Dylan reached the end of one glen and dropped down into the next, he thought of Dougall’s ambitions. He didn’t think Dougall was wrong to try to fix their problem with raspberry juice. He’d managed to keep the light going for months by diluting strawberry juice with it. Raspberry juice must be some help. Just not enough.

  The sun was dipping behind the mountains as he reached the Bridge of Aros and turned along the shore towards Castle Sarlen. With luck, he would pick up a cart going to Castle Craig, or even a boat going directly to Kerrera. Otherwise, he’d have to run through the night.

  His luck held. A fishing boat was just leaving Sarlen f
or Kerrera and he didn’t even have to see anyone in the castle. There was no time to be lost, Dylan thought to himself. The messages must get through!

  ~~~

  Dylan sat on the deck watching the water speed past. He was feeling very pleased with himself. Less than 20 hours from leaving Haunn to get a message into the vacuum tube system! It must be a new record! He was on the last ferry from Kerrera to Castle Craig before the Yuletide festival began. It was packed with people returning to their home castles, well, Sarlen, Craig and Tober Hold anyway. He thought he might try a different route home, one that he’d eyed for some time. It might turn out to be a short cut.

  He got a lift on the top of a cart taking stores and people from the ferry to Castle Sarlen, and dropped off it just before it entered the small town. No reason to take chances, he thought. He climbed up over a wooded hill, then up onto some moorland, keeping a crag on his right and heading west. He calculated the time left before it got dark and hoped he would be across the island before then. He would be able to pick his way along the west coast after nightfall all right, but he was unsure about the moorland or the woods in the dark. It was wetter than he had anticipated, and even his famous ability to find dry routes through the worst bogs let him down. He had wet feet and a wet coat before he reached the cover of the trees. He froze as he entered them, to let a huge stag roam across his track, accompanied by four very graceful lady deer. He shook his coat and trotted on, listening to the silence of the forest.

  While the moon was up, he made good time along the coast. He thought he had just enough moonlight to go over the last headland rather than round. Just over the top, as he climbed down through some crags, he heard voices.

  “There’s no point in going back there, then.”

  “No, and Sarlen is too well guarded.”

  “Och, well, we might as well finish up for a while and make sure it’s not found then.”

  Dylan crept closer. Two people were sitting round a very small fire, sheltered from the wind by crags and rocks. A third stood up as he watched, and walked out of sight, into the hillside. “Bring another bottle back, Mac!” one of the seated persons called after him.

  Dylan inched round a small outcrop of rocks and crept up the side of the hill. Could he see where the third person had gone? Was it a cave? He only knew of sea caves, he had never seen one up in the hills. He heard the other two moving but ignored them. He was sure he could not be seen.

  He poked his nose over the crag to look into their hiding place. He looked straight into the eyes of a large, black-haired, black-eyed person with a scar across his face. Someone pounced on him from behind. Before he knew it, he was being bundled down the steep rocks into the cave, one person pulling his legs, the other grabbing his hair. It hurt. And what’s more, it hurt his pride.

  They threw him into a corner where some pointed rocks jabbed him in very uncomfortable places.

  “A spy!” said the black-haired one.

  “A nosy parker,” said the second one, brushing handfuls of Dylan’s hair off him where he had pulled it out during Dylan’s struggles.

  “A meddling nephew!” said Uncle Heath, coming forward. At the back of the cave, the contents of some sort of machine were bubbling and hissing and dripping, all surrounded by a weird glow. “Somehow I don’t think you’ll be seeing in the new year, my lad.”

  And they tied him, gagged him, and left him in the cave as they tidied up and walked away into the night.

  Chapter 3: Solstice

  In which many questions are asked, but few are answered

  Dougall shivered as they stood in the arena. The Laird of Haunn was giving the traditional Solstice Speech of Renewal. Uncle Donal believed in using this occasion to ensure that everyone remembered their basic astronomy lessons. He had been known to point at someone and ask him or her to explain a finer point of planetary science. Haunn were hot on planetary science. There were lots of books on it in the library, and Donal received letters from people all the way from Castle Edin asking his advice and opinion on it.

  He had not asked Dougall a question at Solstice since his first year. The question was about the coloured lights in the sky. Dougall’s reply explaining solar activity and excitation of the earth’s atmosphere was so precise that Donal had put Dougall in Uncle Hamish’s technology working party. Dougall smiled as he remembered Dylan asking him how he knew all that. Dougall had read it in the library. Dougall knew Dylan read things in the library too, just not the same things. He wondered where Dylan was. This was the second morning since he’d left. It was quite likely that he hadn’t managed to get to Kerrera till yesterday evening, but he knew that Dylan was always trying to break his speed-record for getting messages to the mainland. Maybe there hadn’t been a boat.

  Dougall became aware that everyone was looking at him. In silence. The smith’s daughters were trying not to giggle.

  He looked at Uncle Hamish, who was looking mildly amused. He looked at Uncle Donal. Uncle Donal was waiting for a reply. Oh dear.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle, I mean, sire,” he said, wiggling his ear and trying to clean it at the same time. “Please could you repeat that?”

  “No, young man, I will not. You will spend this evening copying May’s Treatise on Inter-Stellar Dust Particles while the rest of us have our Solstice supper.”

  Dougall hung his head, his fringe falling forward to cover his eyes as usual. Disappointment at missing the party was tempered with relief. The food wouldn’t be much good and the library would be warmer than the Great Hall. He paid a little more attention to the rest of the Laird’s speech, whilst still calculating when Dylan would be home, and how long it would take the great people at Castle Buckmore to respond to his special message.

  ~~~

  “This strange message arrived yesterday from one of those island castles up north,” said Baden, Steward of Buckmore. He handed a piece of paper to Prince Lupin, King of Buckmore, and retrieved the approved seating plans for that evening’s Solstice banquet. “I sent it down to Pippin, but he didn’t think he had any authority in the matter. I tend to agree with him. What do you think?”

  Lupin sat back in his office chair and read the message aloud.

  “Fuel cell failed causing shipwreck stop strawberry juice unreliable stop send reliable replacement stop Donal of Haunn. Shipwreck, eh?”

  “Do we know a Donal of Haunn?” asked Baden.

  “Yes, he was one of the chaps I met on my honeymoon. One of the few islands we actually visited,” Lupin grinned, remembering his washed out honeymoon a couple of summers back. “Desolate place right on the edge of the world, and they are barely hanging on there, I think. Small place, smaller than Marsh, even. I was keen to give them what technology we could. They are fine scientists, even if they do spend most of their time on astronomy.”

  “Apparently there was another message in the same batch, also from Haunn. It was directed to Princeling George Marsh of Buckmore, and marked Super Urgent. They’d put stars and arrows all round it to draw attention to it.”

  “Sounds like the engineer in charge slipped a message in,” grinned Lupin. “What happened to it?”

  “Since Pippin was flying over to spend today at Marsh, he took it with him.”

  “Very sensible,” said Lupin. “I hope he remembered to take all those things Nerys was sending to Jasmine and the new nephews.”

  “He did. He didn’t have much room left inside.”

  “George needs to get on with this weight-carrying machine he’s designing,” Lupin muttered, and looked at the note again. “We need to find out what’s wrong before we just send a replacement. Bad time of year for this to happen.”

  “For them or for us?” asked Baden.

  Lupin just nodded. “Find out what George is going to do, would you? Do what you think best but keep me informed.”

  ~~~

  “How are you getting on, young Dougall?” asked Heath, sitti
ng next to him at the copy desk in the library. He balanced a small plate of food on the armrest. The carrot and swede had been carved into interesting shapes, but they were still just carrot and swede.

  “About half-way, thank you Uncle,” Dougall said, reaching for a piece of carrot.

  “I expect you miss Dylan, do you? When will he be back, do you think?”

  “Oh, not till tomorrow at the earliest. Do you think the Prince of Buckmore will do anything?” Dougall did not want anyone to know of the second message Dylan had been carrying.

  Heath looked satisfied at the reply and stood up. “I don’t know. I expect so; they are supposed to be good at this sort of thing.”

  “How much do you know about strawberry juice technologies, Uncle?”

  “Not too much, I’m afraid, young Dougall. I know it’s progress, like that copier you have there, but I don’t know how they work. I just use them when I have to. How does that work without a fuel cell, anyway?”

  “Oh, this uses the solar cell on Ben Craich. We have wires that bring it down to the castle. It’s not strong enough for the ovens at this time of year though. Just small things.”

  “Hm. Well, I’ll leave you to your work then.” Heath stood up and moved away.

  “Okay, uncle,” replied Dougall, and he turned back to his copying.

  Upstairs in the Laird’s chambers Lady Carolyn was in a foul mood.

  “It was in the casket where I always put it!”

  “Well, maybe you dropped it last time you wore it,” replied Donal. He knew that unless he pacified his lady the Solstice party would be a disaster.

  “Of course I didn’t drop it. I put it back here where it belongs! Somebody has stolen my best silver necklace!”

  Down in the smithy a similar conversation was taking place. The smith, Rowan, was trying to pacify his daughters, Eiris and Mhairi, who were in floods of tears since each had lost one of her ankle bracelets. Eiris’s was silver-gilt, to set off her silvery hair, and Mhairi’s was copper, which made a fine accent to her red hair.

  “I’m sorry my sweetlings,” Rowan said. “You’ll have to wear two of them and make it look like that’s how they are meant to be. We’ll look for them another day. Dry your eyes now or we’ll be late.”