“Drudge! Don’t hurt her!” She leapt to her feet and went to the bars.
Pie sat quietly in Drudge’s palm. The vicious wounds inflicted on her by the weasel in the corridor were now mere scabs. Drudge placed the tumbler on the cross-bars of the door, then ran his free hand over Pie, inches from her fur.
The scabs vanished.
Pie leapt onto Jemma’s shoulders, nudged her cheek, then scampered to the ground and onto the bench next to Noodle, who was scrabbling at the wall.
“Drudge … you just healed her!”
Drudge nodded, then stretched his hand toward Noodle. Noodle’s fur shimmered; his scratches closed over. Amazed, Jemma turned back and looked at the old man. He was wheezing heavily.
“Efff … fort,” he explained. His eyes were watery and clouded over, with a faraway look in them that made Jemma feel strange, as if he, like her, dreamed of distant places. A large bump was peeking through his wispy hair, like a mountaintop through clouds.
“Drudge, I’m sorry about hitting you with the chamber pot,” she said, remorse prickling her skin.
“Guilt, baaad.” He looked at Jemma’s torn fingers and shook his head. “Weazzl baaad!”
“How did you know the weasels did that?”
Drudge smiled and tapped his forehead. Then he took her hands in his. At any time before, Jemma would have pulled away, but now she was transfixed. Warmth spread through her body; the soreness in her fingers subsided. He released them. The wounds had completely healed, and the weasel bites on her ankles were also free of pain.
“Drudge! How did you do that?”
“You … let me,” he said.
Jemma thought of all the times she had been disgusted by the old man, and felt ashamed. Perhaps she really was bad, having such horrid thoughts about him.
“Gnaaa!” Drudge frowned and shook his head. “Bad thought … not make you … bad. Shhhame … not good. Make weak!”
“And now you’re reading my thoughts? Drudge, I’ve been so wrong about you—who are you?”
“Me, good. Red. Here … For you. Now, time.” He delved into his pocket and pulled out two shiny, cylindrical objects, pointed at each end.
“The crystals! You knew where they were.… You see things too, don’t you?”
Drudge nodded and handed Jemma the crystals. She gasped. Their former cloudiness had faded to a silvery gray.
“Maaaa … paaaa … Ssso … they,” he sputtered. “Free! You … Sssso they!”
“ ‘You, so they.’ You said that yesterday, in the Vat Room.” For the first time, Jemma realized how frustrating it must be for him not to be able to speak coherently. “I’m sorry, Drudge. I never could understand you very well. I’ve been too impatient—”
“You … SSSSO-they! Mussst … sstrong! Essscep. Tunlll—”
“Tunnel?” Jemma’s heart flipped. “Do you know where it is?”
“Gnnnnaaa. But … Trusssst,” he said, tapping his forehead again. “I sssee. You—free! Go, sssooon!”
“But how? I’ve no idea where the tunnel is either.”
“Gnnnnn—trusssst! L-l-look!” Drudge pointed to the back of the cell. Noodle and Pie were still scratching away, a pile of mortar lying on the bench between them.
“Rattusses, what are you up to?” Jemma went to the bench, put the crystals down, and scraped around the stones with her fingers. Chunks of mortar fell away, revealing a small crevice. Noodle hopped into it and disappeared. Heart pounding, Jemma pushed on the stone. It thudded to the ground on the other side of the wall, and she knelt on the bench and peered into darkness. Noodle’s ruby eyes met hers, then he ducked and disappeared again. Seconds later, a loud squeak echoed out of the hole.
It was more than just a small space.
“Mother of Majem—can it be …?” Jemma shoved away the surrounding stones until she had made an opening large enough to climb through. “A cave! This must be where that prisoner Majem wrote about hid to do his digging!” she said. “Thank you, Zacharias Bartholomew! He made a wall within the walls … and over there—there’s a hole in the ground!” She turned to Drudge, hope surging through her.
“Sssseee!” he said. “Ratssses know too!”
Noodle scurried back out into the dungeon, and he and Pie ran in excited circles.
“This is really it? Oh, Drudge!”
A smile cracked across the old man’s face, then he pointed to the floor. “Fffood.” At his feet was a wineskin, several packages, and a loaf of bread with a knife sticking out of it.
“You’ve thought of everything!” Jemma picked up the wineskin, took out its stopper and sniffed. Sour milk! With hope came hunger, and she swigged it back, then poured a little onto the floor for Noodle and Pie. They lapped it up as Jemma tore off a chunk of bread for them, then chomped into the loaf herself. Drudge looked on, chuckling.
Jemma tucked the knife into her boot top, then made a new pouch out of the shawl, into which she put the crystals, the new food packages—cheese in one, by the smell of it, and sausages in the other—and the rest of the loaf. She tied it around her waist, threw the wineskin’s strap over one shoulder, then turned to bid Drudge farewell. But he was not done yet. He pulled off his cloak and stuffed it through the bars.
“Ssstorm, ssstopped,” he sputtered. “But cold, outssssd.”
“Where did this come from?” she said, wrapping it around herself. Its thick maroon velvet looked as though it had been torn and mended many times, but it was warm, lined with silk, and better yet, had a hood. It also had a pocket, in which she found a vial of purple liquid.
“Mauve …,” he wheezed, “essssnnce. Make strrrrong. Use wise … l-ly.”
“Thank you, Drudge. For everything. How can I ever repay you?”
“Be ffffreee …” His eyes misted, and he rubbed the velvet on Jemma’s shoulder, then touched his palm to her face, murmuring her name in a strangely jumbled way. She looked at him, puzzled. A blue aura seemed to shimmer around him, then disappear, so she wasn’t even sure she’d seen it at all.
Clang! The deep toll snapped Drudge out of his momentary dreaminess.
“Fffour-thrrrty—go, now!” he said. “Fffind. Big cave. Nothrrr … tunnll. Way ffrrm caaaassssll. No alaaa … alaaam …”
“A big cave. Then another tunnel, which will lead away from the castle, where there’s no alarm. I understand.” Jemma squeezed his hands. “I wish I wasn’t leaving you here! But—”
“Go!” Drudge pulled his hands away. “Mussst, now! Gbye, Jmmmaaah.”
“Goodbye. And please say goodbye to Digby for me, will you? Tell him … tell him I’ll look for him in Hazebury, when I get there.”
Drudge nodded, wiping one eye with the back of his sleeve. “Trusssst,” he said again, softly.
Jemma turned and squeezed through the gap, arms first, then head, shoulders, and torso. Noodle and Pie hopped in after her. She took one last look across the tiny dungeon. Drudge waved, then was gone. A fragment of her heart tore off and followed the old man up the dark corridor as he shuffled back to his lonely alcove.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rite of Passage
Monday, early hours
Jemma burrowed down a steady slope, Noodle and Pie dashing ahead and back again like two scouts as she hacked at the insect-littered cobwebs stretched across the tunnel. It had become narrower a while ago, and she’d had to wriggle out of Drudge’s cloak and roll it up beneath her to prevent it becoming any more tattered. Thank goodness she could see in the dark—carrying a candle as well as everything else would have been next to impossible.
“It’s all very well for you, Rattusses!” she said, spitting out another half-eaten cockroach. “Your favorite food. Not mine!”
The air was beginning to smell stale. Where was the cave Drudge had mentioned? Not much farther, she hoped. The muted tolls of five and five-thirty had come and gone: It must be almost six by now—the time when, every weekday for the past five years, Marsh had woken her for kitchen duties. In little more
than two hours, the family would wake and begin searching for her.… She wriggled on with renewed fervor.
The air became suffocating; the cobwebs got thicker. Where was that cave?
Suddenly, the ground pitched sharply away, and Jemma was sliding headfirst down a steep incline, the rats tumbling with her. Her heart seemed to fly up to her boots as dark liquid rushed to meet them. They landed in a pool of ice-cold water in the middle of a cave.
“Help!” Jemma gasped with the shock of cold. “I c-c-can’t s-s-wim!”
Noodle and Pie rat-paddled to the edge and scrambled out. They shook themselves, then sat, spiky-furred, squealing encouragement as Jemma flailed toward them. Her hands hit rock, and she clambered from the water, still clutching the knife in her right fist. She tucked it into the top of her boot, pulled the cloak from the pool, wrung out the skirt of her dress, and then began rubbing her arms and legs vigorously.
“S-s-sprites! I’ve never been s-so c-c-cold in my l-l-life!” She jumped up and down, scanning the cave as the rats licked their fur dry. Crescent-shaped, its shorter wall was made of rock, its longer wall hewn from the same granite as the castle. A few cracks shed faint slivers of light into the cave. Overhead was nothing but blackness.
“I think we’re at the b-bottom of one of the t-towers, Rattuss-usses,” she said, her teeth chattering. The cloak was rumpled on the ground, and she picked it up.
It was bone-dry.
“How weird. Just like Majem’s book …” She wrapped it around herself and it warmed her through. “I wish I still had the book,” she murmured. “I hate the idea of leaving it behind.” Then she remembered something else she’d left: the notebook Digby had given her, hidden under her mattress. The thought of any Agromond eyes reading her innermost feelings over the past year felt like an invasion, but it couldn’t be helped now. She sighed resignedly.
“Come on, you two,” she said. “Let’s find that last tunnel.” Noodle and Pie scampered up to her shoulders and plopped into the cloak’s hood.
The hollowness above seemed to move. Unease stirred in Jemma’s stomach. More movement, and a fluttering sound. Suddenly, from directly overhead, came a deafening
Clang!
The first strike of six. The sheer force of it pressed Jemma into the ground.
Clang!
She blocked her ears, but the thundering toll surrounded her in a thick, throbbing ring.
Clang!
The ring began to spin, closing in, darker than the darkness itself, sucking the air from her lungs. It wasn’t just the sound of the bell. It was something else.
Clang!
Jemma tried to move, but the ring pressed in, holding her fast.
Clang!
The spinning was now so rapid that she couldn’t see beyond it, couldn’t breathe. There was only one thing that could do that—
Clang!
Mordsprites!
Faster and faster they spun, tighter and tighter. Jemma choked and gagged, trying to beat off the swirling, diaphanous blackness. She couldn’t draw breath; her lungs felt on the verge of collapse. Where were Noodle and Pie? A tiny claw scraped her neck.
Then came another sound from above: whirring, getting rapidly louder, like mighty wings in a rush of wind. It whipped through the Mordsprites, fragmenting their mass into individual wraiths that fled upward as fast as they’d come. The wind dropped; the wings’ beating softened into gentler flapping, punctuated by synchronized breaths. Jemma blinked, and saw: bats. Thousands of them, surrounding her, open-mouthed, teeth glistening like tiny white needles.
Even if she could have moved, there was nowhere to run.
In one motion, the bats closed in and whooshed around her, the air from their wings lifting her from the ground. Tiny fanged faces swooped in and out of her vision; tiny black eyes locked onto hers, then disappeared again. She was propelled toward the outer edge of the cave, and up a pile of rubble. The bats deposited her next to a hole at the top of it, then moved back and continued their flapping and rhythmic breathing until the fear pumping through her veins had subsided; the spinning in her head had slowed; and the rats, who had clambered from the hood and up to her shoulders, had stopped panting.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “You weren’t attacking us at all! You saved us.”
Two of the larger bats flew up to Jemma’s face, their black eyes fixing on hers. An image of her eleventh birthday Ceremony flashed into her mind—the distress she had felt for the bat Nocturna had killed, and for its two companions that she had later rescued. She recognized the wings of the two in front of her now, scarred and jagged—wings she had tended until they had been healed enough to fly again.
The two bats moved back into the hovering throng. For a split second they all held her gaze; then, with one unanimous blink, they were gone.
Jemma sat with her back against the hard granite, awed by what had just happened. To think of the bats’ protection of her, compared to the treachery of the people she had believed were her family … How she hated this castle, hated every cold, hard, dark corner of it!
Noodle slid to the ground and stretched up the wall just to the right of the hole, his front paws tracing the indent of something. He squeaked, and Jemma leaned over to see. The letters ZB were carved into the wall.
“ZB … Zacharias Bartholomew! The prisoner who escaped.”
Jemma looked into the dark space. From somewhere beyond it, the Outside beckoned. She tightened the shawl around her waist, then crawled with the rats into the opening that only one man had ever entered before, seven hundred years ago.
The tunnel was larger than the one leading from the dungeons, and she could belly through it without having to flatten herself like a mouse. It sloped gently uphill, snaking around large boulders. In several places the earth had fallen in, making progress laborious. Soon, she heard a distant boom, and felt the low rumble of the huge bell reverberating through the ground. Six-thirty. One-and-a-half hours until the family awoke.
Weariness set in. Drudge’s cloak seemed to lose some of its warmth, and she began to shiver. Soon, cold and exhaustion were creeping through every muscle, clouding her reason. Her bones begged for rest, but Noodle and Pie’s nips and squeals cut into her dulled mind, spurring her on. So on she went until her bones gave up, and she barely cared about the seven tolls she heard in the distance, driving the dawn hours dangerously onward.
“I can’t, Rattusses, I can’t …” She lay her head on her arms. But the rats were having none of it. Pie nudged her face, keeping her awake, while Noodle nosed under Jemma’s hip, then bit, hard.
“Ow!” She jerked up, bumping her head, and then felt the lump in the cloak’s pocket: the vial of mauve essence Drudge had put there. Noodle wriggled up to Jemma’s face with the vial clamped between his teeth, then held it fast while Pie pulled out its cork stopper. Jemma took the vial and swigged it back. The essence’s sharp tang kicked through her body, a shot of instant energy. She crawled on. Within moments, fresh air breezed against her face, bringing a scent she had never experienced before: sweet, with a refreshing, slightly sharp edge.
“The Outside! We must be close.…”
Noodle and Pie scuttled ahead, disappeared around another boulder, then squeaked loudly. Jemma followed. Mere feet away, the tunnel sloped sharply upward, a faint trace of dawn filtering down from the top of it.
“We’re here! At last!” Jemma reached toward the slice of light above her head, her hands ripping away bundles of prickles and twigs still drenched from last night’s rain. The slice of light became larger, and larger. Beyond it, Mist-white and waiting, was the Outside.
Noodle and Pie scrambled onto Jemma’s shoulders and hopped through the hole. She untied the pouch from around her waist and threw it out to join them.
Now it was her turn.
How many times had she fantasized about this moment, and the elation she would feel to be Outside, able to go where she pleased? Instead, all the fears instilled in her by the Agromonds rose up li
ke an army, trying to block her way. But she knew they were lies, and steeled herself with Marsh’s words: Courage is doin’ what you must, even when fear is snappin’ at your heart.
With the rats squeaking their encouragement, Jemma wriggled out onto the hillside.
She lay on the soaked ground, half-expecting the shriek of the Wailing Alarm to wake her and for this to be a cruel dream; or to faint, felled by her supposed allergy to the Mist. But no Alarm came. This was real, as real as the soft earth beneath her. And she was alive and well.
“Rattusses,” she whispered. “We’re free.”
Free, for the first time she could remember. Free to find Marsh, her real family, and the world beyond Agromond Castle.… The possibilities were wonderfully, terrifyingly endless. Noodle and Pie stood on their hind legs and sniffed at the dawn air, then began nosing into fallen branches and nibbling gleefully on dead bugs as though life Outside was nothing new to them. She wished she could feel their ease. But Jemma felt the trees edge toward her, tendrils of Mist thicken around her. The place where she had longed to be did not feel the least bit friendly. All she knew was that within an hour, the Agromonds would wake. She must flee, as fast and as far as she could, before then. But first, there was her Stone to find, caught somewhere in the shadows of the castle walls.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the Shadows
Monday
The dawn breeze chilled Jemma’s earth-caked clothes. She brushed herself off and wrapped Drudge’s cloak around her, pulling its hood over her head and hugging herself for warmth. Then, tying her shawl bundle around her waist, she stood and faced the castle.
The only home she knew loomed through the Mist like a massive beast of prey. For twelve years, it had hoarded her in its belly, and now it crouched as if plotting its revenge on her for daring to break out. Her skin bristled, every instinct telling her to turn and run—run, into the forest, despite the dangers it held, and come back tonight—not go searching for her Stone now! Surely that was madness? It would be safer to wait, at least until after the hour of her planned Ceremony had passed, so that the Agromonds wouldn’t be so intent on finding her.
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