The Song of the Winns

by Frances Watts

  She waved madly in their direction until Uncle Ebenezer spotted her. He stood up, beckoning. “I’ve already got your lunch,” he called.

  Alice and Alex pushed through the crowd to the table and slumped into the two empty seats.

  “Uncle Ebenezer, you’re my hero!” Alex exclaimed. One of the trays was piled high with cheeses of all descriptions, including a large wedge of Stetson Camembert.

  “Ah, well, I don’t know when you’ll be back in Shetlock, so I thought I’d get you a sampler of our best cheeses. See this hard one here? It’s from the slopes of Mount Sharpnest. . . .”

  As her uncle and brother talked cheese, Alice stared at the salad sandwich her uncle had thoughtfully selected for her. Fear had filled the place in her stomach where hunger should be. She pushed the plate away.

  “How was your first morning as a codebreaker, Aunt Beezer?” she asked.

  Her aunt beamed. “Fascinating,” she said. “It’s going to be very challenging, but I’ll be working with some of the finest mathematical brains of Shetlock and Souris. And how was your morning?” Aunt Beezer’s smile dimmed and her eyes were troubled. “Tobias sent a message to say that you’re leaving this afternoon. Do you feel ready?” She glanced at Alice’s uneaten sandwich.

  Alice lifted a shoulder and gave a wan smile. “I guess so. Solomon Honker was very thorough. But I do feel a bit . . . a bit scared,” she confessed.

  “I’m not surprised,” Beezer said. “Alice, you don’t have to do this, you know. No one would think any less of you if you decided to pull out of the mission.”

  For a moment Alice was tempted. Yes, she and Alex could pull out (for surely they wouldn’t send Raz without his twin). FIG could find another way. But then she remembered what Tobias said: there was no other option. And she knew that if she didn’t do everything she could to help free Gerander, she could never live with herself.

  She looked at her aunt and forced a smile. “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good mice to do nothing,” she said.

  Beezer smiled back; Alice was quoting one of Uncle Ebenezer’s favorite sayings.

  “We’ll be fine,” Alice continued. Adopting her brother’s breezy manner, she added, “We can outwit any Sourian.” (Except Sophia and Horace, she amended privately, with a quiver.)

  When Alex had devoured the last of his cheese platter, Alice pushed her chair back from the table. “I think it’s time,” she said.

  Together the four of them skirted the hall until they were standing on the steps of the cafeteria. When Alice saw Solomon Honker striding toward them she wondered if he was still their stern teacher or had once more become the friendly mouse they had encountered briefly the night before.

  “You’re ready?” he asked his pupils. “Good.” He tapped the air with a white envelope he held. His manner was serious, but not stern. It occurred to Alice that perhaps they hadn’t even met the real Solomon Honker yet. Maybe they had only seen him playing roles, like she and Alex were about to play roles. It was an interesting thought, one she filed away for future consideration.

  “Would you like to come see them off ?” Solomon Honker was asking Ebenezer and Beezer, who nodded gratefully.

  Their teacher led them to the long tree-lined road they’d come up when they had first approached the school.

  “Where are we going?” asked Alex as they started down the road.

  But Solomon Honker merely raised a finger in a “You’ll see” gesture and, pushing back branches, turned down a secluded path partially obscured by shrubs. Exchanging mystified looks, his pupils and their aunt and uncle followed.

  9

  The River’s Source

  As Alistair was dragged to his feet he thrashed against the grip restraining him, kicking out with his legs and squirming in his captor’s arms.

  “Alistair, stop, it’s okay.” The voice was familiar and Alistair paused in confusion. “It’s me: Feast Thompson.”

  Feast Thompson? As a wave of relief surged through him, Alistair’s legs grew weak and he sagged against the FIG operative. He peered into the gloom and saw that Tibby Rose was hugging the slim form bending over her. “Is that you, S-Slippers? Are we . . . are we near the source?” His throat felt thick with emotion as it began to sink in that he and Tibby were safe—well, as safe as they could be on the run in Gerander.

  Slippers Pink lifted her head. Her eyes shone in the dim light. “It’s me, Alistair,” she said softly, as if she, too, was finding it hard to speak. “And the source of the Winns isn’t far away.”

  “What happened to you two?” asked Feast urgently. “Why did you arrive on foot? Where’s Oswald?”

  Tibby made a small, unhappy sound and Alistair’s voice was low as he said, “So you haven’t seen Oswald?”

  “Not since he dropped us off here nearly forty-eight hours ago,” said Slippers. “We didn’t know if the mission had been aborted, or if something terrible had happened, or . . .” She shook her head.

  “Something terrible did happen,” Alistair told them, and he described the eagles’ attack. He heard Slippers’s sharp intake of breath when he recalled how Oswald had dropped them in the icy reaches of the Crankens. “And we have no idea what happened to him after that,” he finished, feeling once more a pang of guilt and sadness as he contemplated the brave owl’s fate.

  “Oh, poor Os.” Slippers put her hands to her mouth, clearly distressed. “I think we’d all better sit down to hear the rest,” she said. “Feast, some hot tea is called for.”

  Slippers Pink fetched the pair’s rucksack from a thicket of bushes on the other side of the clearing as Feast Thompson hobbled toward the trees.

  “What happened to Feast?” Tibby gasped. “Is he hurt?”

  “He twisted an ankle when we landed the other night,” Slippers said.

  Alistair and Tibby rushed to help Feast forage for kindling among the trees surrounding the clearing, and soon a small fire glowed within a circle of rocks. Slippers filled the pot from the spring and set it in the embers, then threw a handful of needles into the simmering water. “Spruce tea,” she said. “Full of vitamin C.”

  Soon they were each sipping at a tin mug of hot liquid.

  “So what happened next?” Slippers prompted as Alistair breathed in the mild scent.

  Tibby took up the story, explaining how she had hit her head and Alistair had pulled her on the sled he had built, all the way up to their narrow escape from the Queen’s Guards on the same sled just a few hours before.

  “That was very good thinking,” Slippers said as they related how they had covered their tracks and fled into the forest while the guards went after the sled. “But,” she added, “the Sourians now know that two ginger mice have crossed the border. We’ll have to be extracautious.”

  “We’re always extracautious, Slips,” Feast pointed out. “But I agree that the sooner we find those secret paths and put some distance between us and the guards who are looking for Alistair and Tibby Rose, the better. Before anything else, though, these two need some sleep.”

  Alistair woke to sunlight filtering through the leaves and sat up immediately. The others still slumbered on beside him: Tibby, curled into a ball around her rucksack; Slippers Pink, her shiny black boots lined up neatly at her gingery pink feet; and Feast Thompson, stretched out on his back, one hand clutching a stout walking stick Tibby Rose had found for him when looking for kindling the night before. Alistair stood up and walked to the edge of the copse of trees. He knew it was useless trying to go back to sleep. Not with the fluttering of anticipation he felt.

  He gazed down the slope into the valley below, still in shadow. Somewhere down there was the Winns. That was where their mission would finally begin, where they could finally start to solve the mystery encoded in his scarf. There, he hoped, he would find the first of the secret paths that crisscrossed Gerander—and might one day be used to set her free. Unbidden, the melancholy refrain sung by Timmy the Winns floated into his mind, and he sang it under h
is breath:

  “Wherever the Winns takes me, that’s where I’ll be,

  For me and the Winns will always flow free.”

  But however much Alistair wished to see the Winns flow free, more than anything he wished to see his parents freed. As the sun cleared the trees above him to send the first rays of light into the valley below, he glanced behind him impatiently.

  They had a light but nourishing breakfast of berries and nuts, then the four mice walked in single file along a path, which led downhill from the clearing and meandered through flower-strewn meadows before re-entering a forest of oak and chestnut trees.

  After a few minutes’ walking, Slippers Pink, who was in front, stopped. “Here’s the source of the Winns,” she said quietly, reverence in her tone.

  Alistair moved forward. There, in the center of a cool green glade, was a pool. The silence was absolute except for the whisper of leaves in the trees above and a single note of birdsong. Alistair perched on a rock and gazed into the pool’s depths. The water, which was the deep green of moss, was clear and clean and fathomlessly deep. When he put a hand in, it was as cold as ice.

  Just below the pool, water sprang from a rock and trickled down the hillside. Alistair stared at in wonder. It was hard to believe that this would become Gerander’s principal river.

  They followed a path alongside the trickle, which had become a stream by the time they passed a small stone cottage. Tucked into the green hillside, it looked as worn and weathered as the rock itself. Though they proceeded warily, there were no signs of life as they hurried past. Vestiges of crumbling stone walls were visible here and there among rampant weeds, and the trees nearby were groaning with fruit. What had once been a well-tended garden had grown wild.

  They walked further into the valley, with the river, now broad and lined with reeds, on their left, and a high, forested ridge to their right. Across the river was a dense canopy of plane trees. Apart from the distant clatter of cicadas, the landscape through which they walked seemed to be deserted.

  “But we mustn’t relax,” Slippers Pink warned. “The Queen’s Guards have set up checkpoints along all the roads of Gerander, and patrols are roaming the countryside too.”

  Slowly, so that Feast and his injured ankle could keep up, they followed the river for several miles, but by lunchtime, when the path ahead entered an avenue of plane trees, they hadn’t seen any landmarks to match those they had found on Alistair’s scarf.

  While Slippers Pink and Feast Thompson produced the makings of simple cheese sandwiches from their rucksack, Alistair and Tibby Rose sat on a rock and studied Alistair’s scarf.

  “We must have come too far,” Tibby said. “I’m sure we passed this bend in the river ages ago.” With her finger she traced a small curve in the stripe of blue bisecting the scarf. It was definitely below the burst of orange and speck of yellow they’d shown Tobias back in Stetson. “We’ll have to go back.”

  And so after lunch they retraced their steps, but as the afternoon wore on, Alistair began to feel increasingly despondent. He had seen hundreds of trees and rocks, but none had looked like a burning tree or a rock of gold. He walked faster and faster, until he was almost jogging along the path, scanning the surrounds with an increasingly desperate eye.

  “Alistair, slow down,” Slippers called from some way behind. “We have to stay together.”

  Reluctantly Alistair slowed his pace, matching it to the lazy meander of the river. And soon, although his eyes were still scanning the rocks and trees, his ears were tuning in to the river, the way it gurgled and burbled over and around stones and branches. After a while he noticed that his feet seemed to be following the rhythm of the river of their own accord. He felt as if he were moving in a trance, hardly aware of moving in and out of the shadows of the plane trees that lined stretches of the river, or the buzz of cicadas, or the slow sinking of the sun, which set the sky ablaze.

  A gentle breeze set the reeds rustling and the ends of his scarf fluttering. When he rounded a bend and saw, beneath a tall ridge of rock, a tree whose leaves seemed to have caught flame, his heart skipped a beat. He turned to see if the others had spotted it too. Tibby Rose was right behind him, but Feast and Slippers were still out of sight around the bend.

  “Tibby,” he breathed, “can you see it?”

  Tibby nodded, then pointed. “Over there: look how that rock is glowing where the sun hits it; it looks like—like a rock of gold.”

  Alistair recited the words slowly.

  “A burning tree

  A rock of gold

  A fracture in the mountain’s fold,

  In the sun’s last rays when the shadows grow long

  And the rustling reeds play the Winns’s north song.”

  “Of course,” Alistair breathed. “That’s why we couldn’t see it earlier—the tree doesn’t burn and the rock doesn’t glow until they’re hit by the sun’s last rays.”

  “A fracture in the mountain’s fold,” Tibby repeated. “What do you suppose that means?”

  The two ginger mice turned to stare at the sheer rock face, then approached and began to trace its sharp creases. Alistair ran his palm along the sheer face until he was stopped by a small fissure. He slipped his hand into the crack, expecting to be impeded by another seam of rock, but instead he was able to extend his whole arm into the space. His pulse racing, he ran his hand further down the crack, which grew wider and wider until, at the base of the rock, he found a hole wide enough to squeeze through. He dropped to his knees and wriggled through into a cavernous space. Here and there the darkness was pierced by light filtering through small holes and cracks in the rock. He walked clockwise around the space, looking for some sign that this place was what he was seeking, though he wasn’t sure exactly how he’d be able to tell. But surely it couldn’t be a coincidence—that rock shining gold in the sun’s last rays, the tree that looked as though it had burst into flame.

  He was about a quarter of the way around the cavern when he found it: a light-filled alcove, its roof open to the sky. The walls were whitewashed so that they seemed to glow in the light of the setting sun, and there, painted directly on the wall in vivid colors, was a familiar arrangement of shapes and squiggles with a wide blue stripe running down its center. Holding his breath, Alistair unwound his scarf and held it up beside the painting. They were exactly the same.

  With growing excitement, he wrapped his scarf around his neck once more and resumed his exploration of the cavern. There was something here, he was certain now. Something to do with the secret paths. He had almost finished his circumnavigation, and doubt was creeping in, when he came to an opening carved into the wall, concealed from the mouth of the cavern by a jutting rock. Alistair stepped inside, and then took another step. The rock arched above him, a little higher than his head.

  It was a tunnel.

  Then, as if from a great distance, he heard Tibby’s voice calling his name.

  “Alistair? Where are you? Alistair!” She sounded worried.

  Realizing he must have been gone for some time, Alistair hurried back to the cavern mouth and crawled through the hole.

  Tibby was standing several meters away, glancing around anxiously.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Turning at the sound of his voice, Tibby said, “I thought you’d disappeared off the face of the earth. Where were you?”

  Alistair indicated the crack in the side of the rock face. “In there,” he said. “It leads into a huge cavern and, Tibby—I’ve found it!”

  “Found what?”

  “A tunnel!”

  “A tunnel?” she repeated excitedly. “Where to?”

  “I don’t know, but it must be one of the secret paths—I saw a painting that matches my scarf exactly. Hang on . . .” Alistair quickly unwound the scarf from around his neck again and, crouching, laid it out flat on the ground. Tibby kneeled next to him as he found the dash of gold and splash of red knitted into the uppermost part of the scarf, just to the left
of the wide blue stripe. Close by, he saw, was a small brown arch.

  “Tib, look—do you think that brown arch could be a tunnel?”

  Tibby followed his pointing finger. “It makes sense,” she said. Peering closer she added, “And there are brown arches running part of the way down this side of the river with more leading off to the side.”

  “That line running down the left-hand edge must be the coastline of the Cannolian Ocean,” Alistair surmised. “So those paths must lead to the coast.” He lifted his eyes from their contemplation of the scarf to look at his friend. “Which means . . .”

  Tibby’s eyes widened as Alistair’s meaning sank in. “Which means we can take the tunnels almost all the way to Atticus Island!”

  “With no fear of meeting a Sourian patrol!” Alistair cried jubilantly. His parents seemed closer than ever—he couldn’t wait to get going. “Let’s go find Slippers and Feast.”

  Feast Thompson and Slippers Pink were rounding the bend. Feast was limping heavily, leaning on the stick.

  “Alistair, you’re safe,” Slippers said with obvious relief. “When we heard Tibby calling we thought something must have happened.”

  Alistair felt a pang of guilt as he saw the fatigue creasing Feast’s face and the anxiety lining Slippers’s. He really shouldn’t have taken off like that.

  But before he could apologize, Tibby was telling them about Alistair’s discovery, and he saw their expressions brighten.

  A few minutes later, the four of them had crawled through the entrance to the cavern, which was completely dark now that the sun had slipped below the ridge.

  “How do you turn on the light?” Feast joked.

  “With these,” said Slippers. In a niche in the wall, she had found a candlestick and candles.

  They lit a candle and Alistair showed the others the alcove and the mouth of the tunnel before returning to the cavern where they’d left their rucksacks.

  “We can sleep in here tonight,” Slippers decided. “The ground might be a bit cold, since it hasn’t been warmed by the sun, but at least we’ll be safe.”