Dedication
For Evelyn Ida. Kick butt. — R.M.
For my family,
and in memory of Astro, our Mini Schnauzer,
who was usually curled up beside me as I Illustrated
this book. — S.O.
Contents
Dedication
Prologue: The Princess in the Yellow Nightdress
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
About the Author
About the Illustrator
Copyright
Prologue
The Princess in the Yellow Nightdress
In a crowded forest, not near anywhere, a woman in a yellow nightdress ran for her life. Her long, amber hair lashed behind her as she gasped heavy breaths and sprinted barefoot between the trees. Her back stung from where her wings once were. The remaining feathers fell away in tufts at her feet.
She stopped running when the ground ended. Panting, she looked out in front of her. Nothing but night filled the space as she peered over a high, rocky cliff.
There was a loud screech behind her and she whirled around to see a bolt of lightning ricochet against the trees. Then as quickly as it came, it disappeared, leaving only silence. She searched the dark forest and waited, her heart beating fast. She looked for a glimmer, a ruffle. Something. Anything.
Then the sound of deep laughter filled the air.
‘All alone, princess?’ came a voice from the forest.
She felt her fear double in her chest. Without her wings, there wasn’t much chance of escape. She knew that now. She took a deep breath and squared her bloodstained shoulders. With shaking hands, she called up the air around her until it was a swirling, roaring wind in her ears.
‘Argh!’ she cried as she hurled the wall of wind into the forest. Leaves flew from their branches, trees bent and snapped, and the ground shook. Then, without pause, she hurled another and another and another until the trees in front of her were bare. And standing still, amongst the trunks, was the dark silhouette of a man with long silver hair, gleaming eerily in the light from the moon.
Suddenly, a great gold bird burst from the trees. It flew towards her and grabbed her by the shoulders with its talons. The bird carried her off the ground in a large swoop until they were flying over the cliff.
‘No, Artemis!’
There was another crack of lightning but this time it was followed by a sharp pain in her chest. The bird dipped in flight, injured. He struggled to hold her. There wasn’t much time. She looked up at her friend, tears in her eyes.
‘Take it,’ she breathed. She let go of what she had been holding onto for so long. Then she pulled the talons from her shoulders and fell, a flowing tangle of amber and yellow silently plummeting towards the ground.
Chapter One
In the city of Urt, there was a wall. It was tall and wide, like most walls. It was boring and plain, also like most walls. But unlike most walls, and unbeknownst to all, behind that wall in the city of Urt lived an elderly lady named Dot and a young girl named Cora.
Behind the wall, in the space where they lived, Cora awoke one morning to the sound of a lullaby floating into her room. The gentle music sounded like it was far away at first so the young girl turned over in her bed and tried to go back to sleep. When the music persisted, Cora woke with a jolt, and sat up, wide-awake.
‘No, no, no,’ she pleaded.
With a whoosh, Cora shoved her blanket away and jumped out of bed. She pushed aside clothes and hopped over the trinkets strewn by her feet on the floor. She threw on her favourite green dress. Her mind still foggy with sleep, she tried to think. What else did she need? Shoes! She whirled around, searching for her boots. She found one on its side by the door and wrestled it on.
‘Scratch! Where’s my other shoe?!’
Scratch, the cat, yawned and stretched unhelpfully from his place on the bed.
Diving to her knees, Cora pushed aside her pile of books and grabbed her pack from beneath her bed. The pack she kept just for these situations. Throwing it on, she raced to the door and opened it, only to come face to face with Dot.
Crud.
The old lady stood with one hand behind her back and the other holding a shiny pocket watch. Her soft face was wrinkled in disappointment.
‘Cora,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Cora replied, looking down at her one-booted foot.
‘Five whole minutes. Luckily this was only a drill. But what if it had been the real thing? The lullaby —’
‘— means trouble,’ Cora finished. ‘I know.’
‘Yes, it means trouble and run.’ Dot sighed. ‘How am I supposed to let you collect by yourself out there,’ she gestured to the wall that sat between them and the city outside, ‘when you take five whole minutes to run from fake trouble in here?’
Cora groaned. She knew Dot was right. Since they had started doing drills, Cora had failed every single one of them. When she heard the lullaby from Dot’s gramophone, Cora was supposed to drop what she was doing, grab her pack and shoes, and meet Dot at the top of the wall as quickly as she could. But each time, Cora either went back to sleep, was too slow, forgot to grab her pack, or, like today, was missing one boot.
‘Sorry,’ Cora mumbled.
‘Well,’ Dot said, ‘it doesn’t help when you have a cat that likes to steal boots and eat them.’
Cora looked up to see Dot smiling.
‘This was beneath the table,’ Dot said. Then the old lady pulled out Cora’s missing boot from behind her back. The purple laces were half-chewed.
‘Scratch!’ Cora cried. ‘You pesky cat!’
Scratch purred from his place on the bed.
‘C’mon,’ Dot said with a chuckle. ‘I made porridge.’
Cora hopped on one foot as she put on her missing boot and followed Dot into the main room.
The space behind the wall where they lived was small. In fact, it was even smaller than small because from ceiling to floor, much of the room was taken up by things. Vases, fishing rods, picture frames, lamps, books. Some were pieces and parts forgotten. Others were odds and ends purposefully left behind. Dot and Cora collected them all. Well, they scavenged them all. But Dot and Cora preferred to call it collecting and themselves collectors. They loved what they found
. And every now and then they found something that others wanted too. Nobody suspected that the most successful scavengers in the city of Urt were an old lady and a young girl. But they were.
On the small, rickety, round table in the middle of the main room sat two bowls of porridge. Last week, Dot had traded one of her sewing kits for a jar of oats as a surprise. Cora didn’t remember much before meeting Dot, but porridge had always been her favourite.
They sat and ate. The delicious, fluffy lumps warmed Cora up from her toes to her nose.
‘There’s a new job,’ said Dot opposite her.
Cora looked up from her bowl.
‘A trader from Mill Town is looking for something small.’
‘When are we going?’ Cora asked, scoffing the remains of her porridge.
‘Not we this time, Cora,’ Dot said. ‘You.’
‘Me?’ Cora replied, almost choking on an oat. Her excitement evaporated.
Dot nodded.
Cora looked at the wall hesitantly. ‘But what about . . .?’ she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
The old lady smiled warmly at her. ‘You’re not like others, Cora,’ Dot said gently. ‘But you’re stronger than you think.’
Cora wasn’t so sure about that.
‘I’m not going to be around forever,’ Dot added.
‘Please don’t,’ said Cora softly. She didn’t want to think about a time when Dot wouldn’t be around. Instinctively, she grabbed the bracelet that hung from her wrist. Cora remembered when the old lady had found her five years ago. The bracelet and the clothes she wore were the only things she had. She remembered the feeling of coldness, of rain, of fear at the loss of her eye and the red, bumpy scar that sat in its place. Then she remembered looking up at Dot’s kind face, and it all going away.
Dot reached over and placed a hand on Cora’s. ‘It’s time,’ she said.
Although butterflies had now entered her stomach, Cora found herself nodding.
Dot gave her a proud smile before standing up from the table. The old lady walked over to the bookshelf in the corner of the room crammed full with heavy, bound books and old newspapers. She shuffled through the pages of a newspaper, walked back and placed a page on the table in front of Cora.
‘You are looking for this,’ she said, pointing to a drawing. Cora looked down at it, memorising every line, every stroke and every letter with her eye.
‘Toe Tippins Shoe Polish.’
Chapter Two
After saying goodbye to Dot and Scratch, Cora climbed the ladder down from the wall. When she reached the bottom, she stood for a moment in the narrow alleyway. Looking down it, she could see the smoke from the metal factory, the grey sky and the shadows of people moving about at the other end.
Cora took a deep breath to settle the fear that wriggled uncomfortably in her stomach. She always walked the city with Dot. In the rougher and darker parts, sometimes she would even hold Dot’s hand. Nervously, Cora grabbed the bracelet that hung from her wrist.
‘You can do this,’ she whispered to herself. Then, squaring her shoulders, she stepped forward and kept stepping forward until she reached the end of the alleyway. Without pausing or looking around, Cora stepped confidently out onto the grim streets of Urt . . . and then promptly ran into someone.
‘Oi! Watch it,’ croaked the small man she had collided with.
Cora quickly righted herself. ‘S-sorry.’ But the small man was already moving away.
Cora shook herself. Focus. She took another deep breath, straightened her pack on her shoulders and set off down the street, careful not to run into any more small men.
She did her best to step in time with the crowd that headed towards the factory. Around her, the main street in Urt was filled with people. They pushed and grumbled, sniffed and mumbled as they journeyed to where they needed to go. Some were factory workers, dressed in stained and grimy overalls. Others were dock workers. A few were shop owners. There weren’t any children. But Cora expected that. They would all be in school.
She felt herself relax as swirling scents of smoke and sea surrounded her as she walked. Cora breathed them in. Looking up, the sky was grey but the sun peeked out slightly from behind the blanket of clouds. Perhaps collecting without Dot is going to be okay, she thought.
Soon the street became wider and Cora could see that a few traders had set up stalls on either side of the road. Traders came in and out of Urt often, hoping to pick up some sought-after items or sell some not-so-sought-after items before moving on to the bigger, wealthier cities. They stood near their colourful, shiny wares, calling out to the crowd and Cora as she passed by.
‘The prettiest jewels!’
‘The finest rugs!’
‘The softest clothes!’
‘The warmest hugs!’
Cora stopped. She gave a small wave to the man who traded hugs. His name was Wilfred.
‘Cora!’ he said, spotting her. ‘Where’s Dot today?’
Suddenly, someone roughly pushed past her, someone else grumbled about the importance of manners in a crowd and then another someone stepped on the back of her heel. Deftly, Cora sidestepped through the crowd towards the hunched-over man. She took out one of the hickory buns Dot had put aside for her and handed it to Wilfred. The man’s eyes lit up and he gave her a big hug in return.
‘Be careful of the Trappers. They’re out and about today.’
Cora swallowed. Trappers. Trappers was the name given to the thieves in Urt. They took what they wanted from whoever they wanted. And they didn’t just take things. They took people, too. Trappers were dangerous and needed to be avoided at all cost. And what was worse was that Cora had completely forgotten about them. Hastily, she checked her pack to see if anything was missing. But nothing had been taken. She let out a sigh, thanked Wilfred and continued down the road, keeping her eye out for any sign of a Trapper.
‘Have a beautiful day in beautiful Urt!’ Wilfred called to her over the crowd.
Cora smiled. Nobody loved Urt more than Wilfred. Urt wasn’t a place many people wanted to be. Not even the man the city was named after, Edwaldo Urt, wanted anything to do with it. She imagined him at parties pretending as though he was hard of hearing whenever the city was mentioned, ‘Burt, you say? Never heard of it!’
Dot had told her that when an earthquake struck the city, a lot of people left and never came back, including Edwaldo Urt. Large parts of Urt were abandoned and forgotten in rubble. She tried to picture Urt when it was the beautiful, prosperous city Dot sometimes told her about. She looked up at the lopsided, grey and crumbling buildings next to her and tried to picture them new and sparkling instead of cracked and worn. She tried to picture the people beside her as cheerful and happy instead of grim and gruff.
Cora had small memories of being in another place once, before Dot had found her, but they were fleeting and unclear. A memory of pointed, red leather shoes in tall grass. Gazing into a bright sun, cool air on her skin. A yellow sundress and a soft laugh.
For Cora, Urt was what she had become used to. Just like her missing eye. She ran a hand over the red, bumpy scar that sat in its place. It was dark, unhelpful a lot of the time and to others it might’ve seemed ugly . . . but it just needed a little getting used to.
Dot had taught her that.
Cora looked over the top of the crowd and read the street signs to her left. Horn. Fink. Lox.
Turning down Lox, she soon left the shadows of the tall buildings and eventually came upon a row of empty houses. It was the first of the outer boroughs. She was where she wanted to be.
Hesitantly, Cora walked down the cracked garden path of the first dark house.
Chapter Three
The house was small but mostly still together. Cora could see that scavengers had taken some of the tiles from the roof and some of the glass from the windows. She walked up to the oak door and pushed it open. Stepping inside, the house smelt of dust and dampness. Rays of light shone down from above where the roof was missing its
tiles.
Cora checked the drawers in the cabinets nearby first. They were empty. She moved to the kitchen and checked the cupboards. There was a small blue button sitting alone in one of them. She put it in her pocket.
Cora was quick just as Dot had taught her to be. But there wasn’t much left to find in the house and no sign of Toe Tippins Shoe Polish, so she headed towards the front door. She stepped over a fallen, cracked roof tile and noticed something beneath it glisten in the light. Cora pushed aside the tile with her boot. Lying beneath it was a broken picture frame, and inside it a photograph of a family, smiling up at her. She bent down and picked it up. Carefully, she wiped the dust from it with her hand. Then Cora walked over to the fireplace and placed the picture frame on top of the mantle above it. There, she thought. Better.
She left the first house and moved on to the next. There wasn’t much in the second house besides some twine, which Cora pocketed. And the third house had half a bar of soap, which Cora also pocketed.
The fourth and final house was two storeys high. It had a large garden and many rooms. Cora searched them all. When she found nothing, she walked out through a side door and into the backyard. She put her hands on her hips and looked around. The grass at her feet was brown and dry. She thought about where to go next. A button, some twine and half a bar of soap was definitely not enough to go back home with. And there was still no sign of the shoe polish. Then, looking up at the house, Cora noticed a small, round window sitting above the others.
That’s weird. She had been through all the rooms in the house and couldn’t remember seeing the small, round window in any of them.
Trust your instincts, she heard Dot’s voice in her ear.
Nodding, Cora went back inside the house and took the stairs two at a time. She searched all the rooms once again. In and out, in and out. And just as she’d thought, there was no small, round window in any of them. That could only mean one thing.
‘An attic,’ she whispered in delight.
Cora looked upwards and searched the ceiling. And then, on the landing of the second floor, she found a tiny, broken latch poking out.
Jinxed!: The Curious Curse of Cora Bell Page 1
