The Glass Puzzle

by Christine Brodien-Jones

  This is it? thought Zoé, throwing Ian a worried glance. We’re going to defeat the Scravens with two tiny bottles of mist?

  “Look, the sun’s going down!” said Ian. “We’ve got to get back.”

  Zoé felt a fresh stab of panic. “Oh no, I hope Granddad isn’t wondering where we are.”

  “There is no need to worry. In your world only a few minutes have passed,” said Miss Glyndower reassuringly. “Be warned, however: it is during this brief time that the Scravens have a window. And although they are weakest in daytime, they are still capable of escaping through the puzzle into your world.”

  “There’s no way we can stop them?” asked Ian.

  “Unfortunately, no. Not if the gateway is flawed.”

  How many Scravens are getting through the puzzle this very minute? wondered Zoé. And how on earth are we supposed to fight them off? Forget it, this whole quest is totally hopeless. After all, she and Ian weren’t unstoppable superhero kids with magical powers who could fend off Scravens and save the world. Not in real life, anyway. They were just ordinary kids who liked to play scary games.

  “While you are gone, I shall devise a strategy to rid both our worlds of the Scravens forever,” said Miss Glyndower, walking with a vigorous step down the hallway. “The Scravens are treacherous foes and you must anticipate their every move. They will try to drag you down into their darkness—a darkness from where there is no return.”

  “But how do we fight them?” asked Ian. “We’re just kids.”

  “There is an ancient runestone in your world which the Astercôtes took back with them from Wythernsea, rather small as runestones go. Inscribed on it is the Incantation of Arianrhod. You must find this stone: it is crucial to defeating the Scravens.”

  Oh great, thought Zoé, one more impossible task.

  “Our granddad told us that there are thousands of runestones in the British Isles,” said Ian. “Remember, Zoé?”

  “Umm, not sure,” she said. Those kinds of things tended to slip her memory, whereas Ian always remembered historical facts down to the minutest details. She looked up at Miss Glyndower.

  “Did you give the runestone to the Astercôtes?”

  “I did, yes, as a protection against the Scravens. The incantation has far-reaching powers, for it was written by the goddess herself.”

  “Arianrhod was real?” Zoé felt as if the top of her head were flying off. She never realized that deities such as Arianrhod had actually walked the earth.

  “Most definitely.” Miss Glendower thought a moment. “The Astercôtes had connections with the Tenby Museum, as I remember, and to ensure the runestone’s safety they kept it on display within one of the smaller locked cabinets. As far as I know, the stone is still there.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Ian. “You want us to steal the runestone from the Tenby Museum? But everything’s behind glass! Not to mention all the surveillance cameras. We’ll get arrested!”

  “If the Scravens are devious, you must be twice as devious,” Miss Glyndower shot back. “You must find a way. And we have to move quickly. Midsummer’s Day approaches, the longest day of the year: we shall strike then, when the Scravens are at their weakest. We’ve only six days left.”

  Wow, thought Zoé, this is getting more complicated by the minute. Through a row of arched windows she glimpsed the Harshlands, and the sight of the gloomy forest filled her with dread.

  “So you think Arianrhod is the Scravens’ Achilles’ heel?” Ian was asking Miss Glyndower.

  “You could say that, yes.”

  Zoé had only a vague idea what Achilles’ heel meant—it sounded mythical. “What’s an Achilles’ heel?” she whispered to Ian.

  “Achilles was a Greek god,” he whispered back. “He had one weak spot and that was his heel.”

  “Got it,” said Zoé as Miss Glyndower ushered them through an archway made of a small whale’s jawbone, into a soaring chamber with a domed glass ceiling through which light filtered down. Zoé could see faint patterns of starfish, shells and sea horses embedded in the walls, and again she had the sensation of floating beneath the sea.

  “This is the original gateway to Tenby, made of Wythernsea glass,” said Miss Glyndower, pointing to the ceiling. “It is the way back to Tenby.”

  Zoé stared up at the glass, which gave off waves of swirling blue light.

  “Holy moly,” said Ian.

  “The Scravens are weakest in the day, because of the light, but remember: the moment you return, take apart the puzzle, for they are still capable of escaping,” said Miss Glyndower, placing a hand on each of the children’s shoulders. “May the goddess Arianrhod give you strength,” she whispered, kissing Zoé and Ian in the exact spot where, if they had one, their third eye would be.

  “How exactly do we get through there?” asked Ian, frowning up at the ceiling, looking like he was trying to solve a difficult math problem.

  “Follow the light,” she whispered.

  Then she was gone.

  “Miss Glyndower sure likes to talk in riddles,” said Ian. “I hope she hasn’t made any serious miscalculations. What if—”

  “Hey, how old do you think she really is?” asked Zoé. “Like, a hundred years? Two hundred?”

  But Ian wasn’t listening. Instead he was staring openmouthed at the ceiling, which was lowering, coming closer and closer, until it was only inches above their heads. Zoé felt a tingling through her body, her hair bristling with static, as she watched Ian slowly come apart, condensing into fine sparkling dust. Then she began to dissolve, too, atom by atom.

  The glass closed over her and Ian, pulling them in as the room fell away, sweeping them down a tunnel of glass. Zoé’s last thought was tinged with regret: they hadn’t said goodbye to Gwyn and Tegan.

  Zoé felt the floorboards beneath her and knew at once she was back in her grandfather’s attic. Ian sat nearby, rubbing the back of his head, his wiry hair sticking up all over the place.

  Leaning on one elbow, she stared up at the vaulted beams arching into darkness. Outside the window the fog had thickened, graying the light. Nothing seemed to have changed and she wondered how long they’d been gone. A half-formed thought nagged at her: Miss Glyndower telling them to do something when they returned. But … what?

  “Was I hallucinating?” asked Ian, sitting up and looking around. “Did we really go through the glass puzzle to Wythernsea?”

  “The puzzle pulled us in,” said Zoé, feeling light-headed. “And we met Gwyn and Tegan and Miss Glyndower. They’re all real—well, sort of—and Wythernsea is real, too.” She held out the vial of mist from Miss Glyndower. “Look, here’s proof.”

  Ian reached into his pocket and, pulling out the second vial, stared at it in disbelief.

  “Oh no!” cried Zoé, scrambling to her feet. Dark twisted shapes were rising out of the puzzle, eyes glowing, whirling up into the air. “We’re supposed to take the puzzle apart!”

  They sprinted over and in a wild panic Zoé wrenched away one of the pieces, sending it flying across the room.

  “Careful, you’ll break the glass,” said Ian, his voice taut. “I showed you, remember? Work from the outside.”

  Zoé tried to work methodically, but it was hard to concentrate with the Scravens circling overhead. If she looked up, she could see the leathery undersides of their wings—the sound of them scraping the beams made her want to crawl out of her skin—and cruddy black scales kept falling onto the floor next to her.

  As Ian dropped the last piece into the box, the Scravens gathered into a quivering mass, shrieking madly. Hurtling out of the window, they flapped away into the mist.

  “This is our fault! We let them in,” said Ian, placing the box at the bottom of the sea chest. “We shouldn’t have put the puzzle together.”

  “I know,” whispered Zoé. “I didn’t mean to, really. I think the light hypnotized me.”

  The cousins exchanged guilty looks. How many Scravens had they just set loose on Tenby?

>   “I wonder what the time is.” Ian secured the wooden lid. “I hope Granddad didn’t notice we were gone.”

  “Zoé, Ian!” Granddad’s voice floated up the stairwell. “Time for a cup of tea!”

  “That answers your question,” said Zoé. Granddad, she knew, always served tea at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon—which meant they’d been gone less than fifteen minutes.

  The next morning, umbrellas aloft, Zoé and Ian trooped behind their grandfather up a cobbled lane bordered on one side by the castle ruins, heads bowed against the pelting rain. Their trip to Caldey Island had been called off due to stormy weather, so Ian had suggested spending the morning at Tenby Museum. In the afternoon the two cousins would be meeting up with Pippin and Dr. Marriott.

  Inside their pockets they carried the vials of mist—“just in case,” they whispered to one another—and a puzzle-glass each. Ian joked around, calling them Scraven-Detector Kits, as if this were one of their made-up adventure games. Zoé knew he was trying to keep her from being frightened: a typical Ian gesture, which she appreciated. After all, he was probably just as scared as she was.

  Zoé gazed up at the high rocky headland before them, rising out of the sea like a green-humped dragon. Since leaving the cottage she’d been keeping an eye out for Scravens—or anyone who might have been tainted by the evil infiltrating Tenby. So far she’d encountered two little kids floating homemade boats in a gutter and Mrs. Owen from the Old Bakery walking her Welsh terrier.

  Finding the runestone would be tricky, she knew, but how were they going to track down The First? It seemed that Miss Glyndower had given them an impossible task.

  Granddad, in a long raincoat, scarf and galoshes, stopped to catch his breath halfway up Castle Hill. “This time of year, we’re never certain of the weather. Glorious one minute, then ghastly the next,” he puffed. “I expect you won’t be taking many photos today, Ian my boy.”

  “That’s okay,” said Ian. “I’ll spend my time in the museum soaking up Tenby’s history.”

  “You’ll find some rather bleak moments, I daresay,” said Granddad. “In the tenth century, bands of Vikings stormed the coast. Right terrors they were, too. The pirate John Paul Jones met his fate on Caldey Island, where his bones were found wedged between the rocks.”

  Zoé gave a low whistle. The pirate bones story was Granddad’s favorite tale, and it never failed to give her the creeps.

  “Don’t get me wrong, real pirates were in no way romantic,” Granddad went on, striding once more up the hill. “They were vicious and deadly—and a good number of them were Welsh.”

  “And did kids like me and Ian run away to sea?” she asked, as she often did.

  “Most certainly, little Magpie,” he replied, steering them through the crumbling stone archway to the museum. “Back then there were more child pirates from Wales than you could shake a stick at.”

  They left their umbrellas and coats in the museum entryway, and Granddad gravitated to his favorite exhibit—the birds of prey—while Zoé and Ian stood on either side of him, gazing solemnly at the rooks, ravens and carrion crows. Zoé never tired of hearing Granddad talk about the ravens in the Tower of London, and how for centuries they’d guarded it day and night. If ever the ravens abandoned the tower, Granddad declared, the tower would most certainly fall.

  Hmm, she thought, Wythernsea could definitely use a few ravens.

  “Anyone keen on fossils?” said a high, nasal voice. “We’ve an exceptional specimen on display in our fossils collection.”

  “Ah, Julian, nice to see you,” said Granddad, shaking hands with a tall, thin man in a tweed jacket and old-fashioned trousers, hair brushed neatly back. “I’ve my grandchildren with me today. Zoé and Ian, you remember Dr. Thistle. He’s head curator here.”

  Dr. Thistle nodded distractedly and Zoé noticed with a start that he wore rimless round spectacles with blue-tinted lenses, exactly like Iris’s and Catherine’s. Uh-oh, she thought, looking over at Ian, this could be enemy territory.

  “Hello,” he said, his eyes sliding past them. Zoé could see he was clearly more interested in his fossils. “You’re in luck,” he continued, guiding them over to a glass-topped cabinet. “Look here: five fossilized brittlestars with arms interlinked. Found in a peat bog near the River Usk.”

  “Peat bogs preserve things marvelously, don’t they?” murmured Granddad.

  Pressing her face to the glass, Zoé studied the handwritten cards describing a Cenozoic crab, a prehistoric egg, two Usk beetles and a trilobite. She took out her notebook, writing down the names of the specimens, taking care to spell them correctly, and drawing trilobites and beetles in the margins. She loved fossils, especially small, delicate, ethereal-looking ones.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Thistle,” said Ian, his voice quavering a little. “Do you have any runestones? I’m doing a special history project on Tenby and I think old medieval runestones are fascinating.” He held up his camera. “Would it be all right if I took some photos?”

  “I’m his fact checker,” said Zoé importantly, but already she could see Dr. Thistle shaking his head, lips set in a tight line.

  “Photos are not allowed,” said the curator. “In any case, we haven’t any runestones. You’ll have to inquire at the National Museum in Cardiff.”

  “I was sure there was a small runestone here,” Ian persisted, “in one of your glass cabinets.”

  Zoé grinned. She’d always admired her cousin’s stubbornness, probably because she had a stubborn streak, too.

  “Maybe it’s locked in a closet somewhere,” she suggested.

  Dr. Thistle gave a dry laugh. “Not very likely. I would be aware if we had such a prominent artifact on the premises. However, we have an ancient reliquary on display, discovered by a man digging up a wild cat on Caldey Island.” He pointed in an abstracted manner, adding dismissively, “Permanent Exhibits, next room over.”

  He walked off and rejoined their grandfather, who had moved on to the mammoth teeth. Zoé and Ian exchanged disappointed glances.

  “Think he’s hiding something?” Zoé whispered. To her, the curator came off as one of those superior-acting Brits her mom was always going on about.

  “He acted a bit cagey,” Ian whispered back. “Wouldn’t even look us in the eye. I’m wondering, what if Miss Glyndower had it wrong about the runestone? Old people are forgetful sometimes, and maybe she’s mixed up.”

  “No way,” huffed Zoé. “Miss Glyndower is ageless and brilliant and her brain’s in perfect shape. She’d never forget something as important as a runestone.”

  “I guess not,” said Ian, scratching his head. “I just hope she’s being straight with us. I mean, how does she know so much about Tenby when she lives in a totally different universe? What if Miss Glyndower’s mixed up with the Scravens and we don’t know it?”

  Zoé threw him a withering look. “I trust Miss Glyndower, that’s all. She seems, well, authentic.”

  Authentic was a journalistic word her mom used, along with verifiable and factual. Zoé felt a sudden pang, realizing she missed her mom. If her mother were here, she’d tell her about all the peculiar things going on in Tenby. Zoé imagined her mom going wide-eyed, pretending to be scared, though of course she wouldn’t believe a word of it.

  “Let’s split up,” said Ian. “I’ll stay with Granddad and check out the first floor, maybe get a look at Dr. Thistle through the puzzle piece. You can investigate the second floor.”

  “I’m on it,” she said, leaving Ian and Granddad to browse through models of old ships and climbing up to the Maritime Gallery. It was her favorite exhibit, filled with compasses and sextants and foghorns, a swivel saker gun and the figurehead of a knight from a sunken ship.

  When she saw the case marked Pirate Trove, Zoé felt a thrill go through her like an electric charge, certain that if this were the sixteen hundreds she’d be running off to sea. Inside were coins flattened by time, rusted daggers, and a pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle. REC
OVERED FROM THE WRECK OF THE BLUE SPEEDWELL, LOST OFF CALDEY ISLAND, ASH WEDNESDAY 1602, read the placard. THE REMAINS OF THE CREW WERE NEVER FOUND. She wondered if the inhabitants of Wythernsea had tried to rescue them.

  Zoé leaned against the case writing in her journal, imagining pirates with uncombed beards and pitted skin, cursing and spitting fish bones through gold-plated teeth. Dressed in bold colors, they creaked about the ship in leather boots; on rainy days, which were frequent, they sat around cheating at dice games, quick to lose their tempers.

  “A bloodthirsty era, to be sure,” said a splintery voice.

  Spinning around, she saw in the doorway a short man wearing an official-looking jacket over a rumpled sweater. His mouth looked as if it had been drawn with the flick of a pencil.

  “Piracy flourished for centuries in these waters, John Paul Jones being the most notorious pirate of all. One of his officers, known as ‘Leekie’ Porridge, was Tenby born and bred.” There were creases around the man’s eyes, like a child’s scribbling, and his hair hung in oily curls. “The seas were dangerous, what with them pirates and the wreckers,” he added in an ominous tone.

  “My granddad has heaps of books about pirates, like Charlotte Badger and Calico Jack, and I’ve read every single one. He’s told me stories about John Paul Jones, too.” Noticing a badge on the man’s lapel, she asked, “Um, do you work here?”

  “I do. Happens, too, I know local history better than most.” Sidling into the room, he glared at her from beneath his thick brows. “The name’s Stokes. I’m assistant curator.”

  “I’m Zoé.” Maybe this Stokes can help me find the runestone, she thought. “What are wreckers?”

  “Thieves, for want of a better word.” The man’s voice was like something rusty being scraped with a knife. “Stood on the cliffs of Caldey in the dead of night, swinging lanterns to lure passing ships. Afore long a ship sails past and makes for the light, then … crack!” A tiny spray of spittle flew from his lips, and Zoé’s stomach turned over. “The ship breaks up on the rocks and, like horrible crabs, the wreckers scuttle down, picking the wreckage clean.”