The Kingdom of the Lost Book 1

by Isobelle Carmody

  One day, Zluty left Bily laying out his seeds to dry in the hope that some might be salvaged, and walked a half day East to look at the patch of sweetgrass he usually harvested for new bedding. The crop had been so completely destroyed by the stonefall that it might never have existed.

  The next day he went further East to dig for orange tubers, having warned Bily that he would not return until the following day. He managed to locate a few roots, but they smelled strongly of the red stones, and Redwing and the other birds had refused utterly to eat anything that smelled of them, explaining that it would make them sick.

  Two days later, Zluty went South to the swamp. He had been afraid that the wild rice would also be tainted by the red stones, but the swamp had swollen to many times its size, drowning not only the openings to the blackclaw nests but all the wild rice.

  Zluty was very glad when he came across a tuft of bright yellow flowers of a kind he had never seen before on the way back. Wild flowers often grew on ledges in the rifts after rain, and although their smell told Zluty the flowers were inedible, he knew Bily would enjoy their colour and perhaps the bees would be able to harvest the pollen. It was much better not to go back empty-handed, given his bad news.

  Bily had exclaimed in pleasure at the sight of the flowers, and the bees emerged from their jar to swoop on them at once. But when Zluty told him about the swamp, Bily’s face fell. He knew as well as Zluty that even with all that his brother had brought back from his trip to the Northern Forest, there was too little they had managed to salvage from the cellar storage to last them the whole Winter without the wild crops.

  Bily might have worried more if the monster’s cough had not that afternoon turned into a severe chill. The monster shivered and shook the whole evening, and though Bily tended to it constantly, replacing the blankets that kept falling off, and feeding it warmed honey water that Zluty brought down from the fire, it was worse by nightfall. The monster was so painfully thin now that its bones showed through its skin, and looking at it, Zluty could not help but wondering if it would not have been better for it to die swiftly like the diggers, rather than to linger on in this dreadful way.

  But he said nothing of that to Bily whose heart was set on saving the monster.

  Nor did he say that, even if the monster did survive, they were all likely to die of thirst or hunger before the Winter was out. He had a habit of protecting his gentle brother, but after he helped Bily drag his mattress down to flat ground so that they could pull the pallet out of the ruins and he could sleep by the monster, Zluty sat on the broken stone wall reflecting that, for the first time in his life, he did not know what to do next.

  17

  The next morning, Bily woke to hear the monster speaking. ‘You will die if you go North,’ it said in its soft thick voice, wheezing only a little.

  Before Bily could sit up and ask what it meant, he heard Zluty speak.

  ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’ he asked, sounding wary.

  Bily kept his eyes shut, listening.

  The monster gave a heavy sigh. ‘There are those among my people who see more than others. Seers they are called. I have told you of them. But there are others besides them who have the power to see things that have yet to come. It seems I am one of them, though I never knew it until the arosh chased me over the desert. Just now I felt you would convince Bily to go to the Northern Forest for the Winter. But if you do that, you will both die.’

  ‘I have been there many times without harm,’ Zluty said. ‘There is water and a cave we can shelter in, and abundant food in the forest.’

  ‘You have never been there in the Winter when meat-eating beasts come to take shelter and find water, just as you would do,’ answered the monster.

  A shiver of fear ran down Bily’s spine.

  ‘I have seen no sign of such beasts,’ protested Zluty. ‘How do you know beasts come there? You have never been there.’

  ‘No, but I think this Northern Forest of yours is one that my people tell about. And the stories are full of fell Winter beasts that are drawn there when the cold comes to prey upon the small creatures that dwell there.’

  ‘If we stay here we will die,’ Zluty said in a low voice. ‘The water is foul and the wild crops are all dead. We do not have food enough to last the Winter.’

  ‘That is true,’ said the monster. ‘If you would live, you must travel to the West. You must leave very soon if you would survive, for you will have to cross the desert and the mountains before the Winter comes.’

  There was a silence and then Zluty said, ‘The bee Queen told me that she had seen me bringing the little queen to the vale of bellflowers. I thought she meant the cottage, but she made the bees put a lot of honey into the pot for the journey.’

  ‘You should leave today,’ said the monster.

  ‘We can’t go so soon,’ Zluty protested. ‘We must make preparations and you are too weak to travel safely.’

  ‘You must leave me behind,’ the monster answered.

  ‘No!’ said Bily, springing up and glaring at them both. ‘If we have to go away, we are all going together.’

  ‘I cannot walk, Little One,’ said the monster gently. ‘The blackclaw poison did not kill me, but it has weakened me badly. I may never be able to walk again.’

  ‘We can pull you in the pallet,’ Bily said. ‘And if we go West, eventually we will come to your people. They will know how to help you.’

  The monster stared at him. ‘You would move too slowly, and you would need more water and food for three than for two.’

  ‘I’m not leaving without you,’ Bily said.

  The monster sighed and turned its eyes to Zluty. ‘You must make your brother understand that this is impossible.’

  Zluty sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Monster, but if Bily is determined that we must take you, we don’t have any choice, for he is terribly stubborn. Besides, if we go West, as you say we must, it is unknown terrain for us. It may be that we will not survive without your knowledge.’

  ‘Oh, Zluty!’ Bily cried, and flung his arms around his brother and hugged him tightly.

  ‘If you both perish trying to save me, I will have repaid you ill for saving my life,’ said the monster.

  ‘If we leave you, I will not have saved your life,’ Bily said, sounding elated.

  ‘We can tie all of the food we have saved and the water urns to the pallet, and I can rig up a canopy to make a sort of roof over it,’ Zluty said thoughtfully.

  ‘I will make some pancakes for us to take with us, and we will need to take as many ground cones as we can for fire, if the desert is as bare as the monster told me,’ Bily said decidedly.

  The monster sighed. ‘This is foolishness.’ By dusk, Bily had finished fussing and rearranging packages about the sides of the wheeled pallet and he went to say goodbye to the diggers and to make them a gift of all the food and the white fluffs he had dried out, which they could not take with them. The diggers would survive well enough for they always had a great deal of food stored away and they would certainly have enough to last for the Winter to come with what he was giving them. Whether or not they would find the world restored by Spring, he did not know, but he hoped for their sake that the taint left by the red stones would fade so that the wild crops would grow again. Some of his flowers might even reseed in time, and it gave Bily a queer feeling to imagine flowers blooming beside the empty ruin of their cottage.

  Zluty took the opportunity to force himself to go into the cellar one last time to see if he could find Bily’s spindle. There was only one corner of the cellar he had yet to search, and the water stank badly, but he took a deep breath and ducked under, feeling about with both hands. He was about to give up after going under for the third time, when he found it.

  He bore his prize up to the sunlight triumphantly and shook himself dry before setting about cleaning it with a twist of sweetgrass.

  ‘You know this is madness,’ the monster said to him. ‘Why did you agree?’

>   ‘I know that Bily would never forgive himself if he left you,’ Zluty said softly. ‘The truth is that I am glad he is so determined to save you. I do not think he would have been able to bear leaving the cottage otherwise.’

  The monster gave him a curious look. ‘You underestimate your brother.’

  ‘I know that he will be braver for your sake than for his own,’ Zluty said.

  Both fell silent when Bily returned and Zluty presented him with the spindle.

  ‘It is strange,’ Bily said, glancing up at the few remaining stars as they got up the following morning. ‘I have lain awake so many nights worrying before you made your journeys, and yet now that I am going with you I find I am not anxious for either of us. I am only sad that we must leave the cottage.

  ‘We could come back, after the Winter ends,’ Zluty said, thinking how lonely it would be to journey with no image of home and a lantern in a window to draw him on. But then he looked at Bily, and his heart grew calm, for it was his brother that had made the cottage a home.

  ‘We won’t ever come back here,’ Bily said softly. He heaved a sigh and stood up. ‘Let us go. It is better to be gone than going.’

  ‘It is not too late to leave me,’ said the monster, as Zluty tied their bedding to the pallet.

  In answer, Bily took up one of the ropes fastened at the front of the pallet and Zluty took the other. The brothers smiled at one another and, without a word, they turned to face West, and began their journey.

  Overhead, Redwing swooped and soared, piping her joy, for unknown to all of them, she was going home.

  The Kingdom of the Lost is a magical new series for younger readers from the award-winning author of the Little Fur books.

  In The Cloud Road, Bily, Zluty, Redwing and the monster cross a barren desert and journey over high stony mountains full of strangeness and danger, in search of a distant fertile vale where they can to make a new home. The way is hard and long but their greatest peril lies in a secret the monster is harbouring, which has the potential to destroy them all.

  Book 1 – The Red Wind

  Book 2 – The Cloud Road

  Book 3 – The Velvet City

  About the Author

  Isobelle Carmody began the first of her highly acclaimed Obernewtyn Chronicles while she was still at high school, and worked on the series while completing university. The series, and her many award-winning short stories and books for young people, have established her at the forefront of fantasy writing in Australia.

  Obernewtyn was shortlisted for the 1988 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Award, and its sequel, The Farseekers, was an Honour Book in the 1991 CBCA Awards. The Gathering was joint winner of the 1993 Children’s Literature Peace Prize and the 1994 CBCA Book of the Year Award. Her novels Greylands and Alyzon Whitestarr were both winners of the Aurealis Award for Speculative Fiction, and the first book in The Legend of Little Fur series, Little Fur, won the 2006 ABPA Design Awards. The Kingdom of the Lost is Isobelle’s second series for younger readers.

  Isobelle divides her time between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and her travels abroad.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks first and foremost to my editor Katrina, and her little inner traveller, for sharing the journey; to Jan and to my brother Ken, whose generous artistic advice and suggestions were invaluable; to Marina, for her wonderful design skills and patience with me; and to John and Virginia for inviting me to share their sanctuary on Santorini Island, where I wrote The Red Wind.

  VIKING

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  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2010

  Text and illustrations copyright © Isobelle Carmody, 2010

  The moral right of the author/illustrator has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  ISBN: 978-1-74-253090-1