Griffin of Darkwood

by Becky Citra

  “Seriously weird,” said Will.

  The afternoon flew by. Will and Thom used six decks of cards and built a huge castle. The best part was blowing on it and making it all tumble down.

  Will got back to the Sparrowhawk Hall just in time for supper. He sat alone at the long table in the dining room, reading one of his books, while Mr. Cherry brought in two plates of fish pie. By the time Aunt Mauve finally showed up, wearing her long black coat and squirrel cape, the pie was cold.

  “Where were you?” said Will.

  “If it’s any of your business, I’ve been wandering around for an hour trying to find my way here.”

  Aunt Mauve’s teeth chattered and Will said with a grin, “You should run everywhere like I do. It would keep you warm.”

  “Watch your mouth,” said Aunt Mauve.

  Will pushed his plate away. He was still full of pb and j sandwiches and chocolate cake. He picked up his book and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” said Aunt Mauve.

  “To my tower.”

  “I hope you’re not doing anything bad up there.” She squinted at Will. “I’ve a good mind to come up and see.”

  “You can’t,” said Will. “The stairs are too steep.”

  He left without saying good night to Aunt Mauve. When he got to his tower, he gazed around and thought, This is mine! He picked up his mother’s pencil box. Aunt Mauve would never make it up here. She’d never touch his stuff again.

  Tires crunched on the road below. Will put the box down and leaned out one of the narrow windows. Moonlight bathed the scene below. He watched the pink van disappear around the side of the castle. What was Mr. Cherry up to now? He ran to another window to see where the van had gone. It had stopped in front of an old shed beside a crumbling wall. Clouds drifted over the moon and everything went black. The van door slammed shut.

  Suddenly, an outdoor light flooded the area around the shed. Mr. Cherry was standing at the back of the van. He opened the door and dragged out two long objects. Light glinted on metal. Will wasn’t sure what they were but they looked heavy. Mr. Cherry disappeared with them inside the shed. On his way back to the van, he gazed up at the tower.

  He sees me, thought Will. He’ll think I’m spying on him. He ducked back inside and held his breath until he heard the van start up again. He peeked back out the window and saw red tail lights vanishing into the darkness.

  b

  In the morning, Will went to the kitchen to tell Mrs. Cherry that he didn’t want any breakfast. A woman with blonde hair was washing dishes in the stone sink, her back turned to him. Where had she come from? Was she another ghost? A radio was blaring loud music and Will shouted, “Tell Mrs. Cherry I’m not hungry.”

  He decided to go a different way back to his tower. At the end of a shadowy corridor, he spotted a wooden door, studded with pieces of black iron. It took a few hard tugs to open. Steep stairs cut into rough rock descended into darkness. He peered into the gloom, fascinated. Could this be the way to the dungeon? He ventured as far as the fourth step and stopped. It was too dark. He needed a torch.

  Will was almost back at his tower door when he bumped into Mrs. Cherry, carrying a tray. “Take this to your aunt,” she said. “I’m only doing a breakfast tray this once. I have a big castle to look after.”

  “You've got a helper,” said Will, thinking of the strange blonde woman in the kitchen, but Mrs. Cherry just glared at him and handed him the tray.

  Aunt Mauve was buried in a pile of blankets under the crimson canopy in the middle of the four-poster bed. “It’s about time breakfast showed up,” she snapped. She handed Will a list, written on a scrap of paper. “Take this into the village and don’t dawdle!”

  Will read the list:

  3 hot water bottles

  4 prs. wool socks

  2 prs. wool mittens

  1 wool scarf

  1 box of gingersnaps

  His heart sank. It would take forever to find all these things!

  “How am I supposed to pay for this?” he grumbled.

  “Tell them I’ll be down later to set up an account,” said Aunt Mauve. “In a pokey little village like this, they should say thank you very much for my business.”

  “Tell them yourself,” said Will. He refused to go until Aunt Mauve dug in her purse and produced a few crisp bills. He frowned. How did she have money all of a sudden? He tried to peek to see if there was more, but his aunt snapped the purse shut.

  Will raced to the tower to get his books to return to the bookstore and then clattered down the winding staircase. He wanted to check out one thing before he went to the village. He walked around the side of the castle to the old shed beside the crumbling stone wall. A shiny steel padlock hung from the door clasp. Will rattled the door but it was no use.

  When he got back to the front of the castle, Mr. Cherry was standing in the tall weeds, staring at something.

  “Come,” he said. “You’ll want to see this.”

  Will walked over slowly.

  A sparrowhawk stood on top of a struggling pigeon. “He’s stabbing it with his talons,” said Mr. Cherry. “He’ll do that until he kills it. Then he’ll tear it apart and eat it.” He grinned at Will. “I know. I’ve watched them before.”

  Horror filled Will. It would be a disaster if Thom saw this. He turned and ran all the way down the steep road into the village. It felt good to run, stretching his legs and sucking in gulps of air.

  He spent the next hour wandering up and down the winding cobblestone streets. They disappeared under archways or ended at stone stairs to someone’s curved doorway and he had to keep retracing his steps. He peered down the entrance to Shadow Alley. It was as gloomy as a dank cellar with tall dark buildings on either side.

  A street called Lantern Lane was especially twisty. At the end was a tiny house with a small courtyard made of blue, red, purple and yellow tiles arranged like a rainbow. A lace curtain at the window moved and a big Persian cat gazed through the glass at Will.

  It was Macavity, the cat who had met the woman at the bus. The cat squeezed his eyes shut and when he opened them again, they were a deep purple colour. Will watched the purple change to a brilliant emerald. He had never seen anything like it in his life. Magic.

  Macavity jumped off the windowsill and disappeared. Will wanted to have another look at the strange cat. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He left, winding his way back through the twists and turns of Lantern Lane, until he came out to the square.

  He hurried across the square to the Ex Libris bookstore and went inside. Favian, who was scribbling on a piece of paper, glanced up at the jingle of the bell. “Morning, Will.”

  “Hey,” said Will. “I’ve brought my books back.”

  He stared at the towering walls of books. This time there were four possible ways into the depths of the shop. “You’ve changed things.”

  “A bit of rearranging. An estate sale came in yesterday.”

  Will ventured in. He had picked out half a dozen books when he came across a wall of books only partially built, surrounded by untidy stacks of books. He reached for a book to add to the wall and turned around just in time to see a face peering at him. It had reddish skin, a short pointed beard and two horns sticking out of a mass of curly hair.

  In a flash, it disappeared.

  “Who’s there?” said Will. He peered up and down and around some corners, searching for the owner of the face, and then made his way to the front of the shop.

  “This is going to sound crazy,” he said. “But I think I just saw Mr. Tumnus. You know, from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”

  “Mr. Tumnus!” said Favian. “I’ve always felt that I wasn’t alone in here!”

  “And the night we came? I saw someone through the window. I think it might have been an elf.”

  “Indeed!”

  Will watched Favian put a sign in the window advertising Vespera Moonstone’s poetry reading. Beside it was a large colour photo
graph of Vespera Moonstone. She was the woman from the bus!

  “Vespera Moonstone was on the same bus as Aunt Mauve and me. I didn’t know she was the poet!” said Will. “She has this amazing cat.”

  “Macavity,” said Favian. “Vespera Moonstone is our local celebrity. She just got back from a book tour in the United States.”

  “I just went to her house. I knocked, but she wasn’t home.”

  “Vespera never answers the door when she’s writing. She has an artistic temperament.”

  “My mother wrote a book. It’s going to be published this year.” Will hadn’t known he was going to say that. The words just blurted out of him. And he wasn’t even positive that it was still true.

  “Really?” Favian looked so interested that Will told him all about his mother’s book and Mr. Barnaby and Barnaby Book Publishers Inc. He shook when he told Favian that Adrienna had died.

  “Oh, my,” said Favian. “You have had a tough time. Your aunt sounds like a dragon. But you’re living in a castle! That’s one interesting thing. Your mother would approve of that.”

  “She’d love the castle!” said Will.

  “So her book is called The Magical Night," said Favian. "Let’s think positively. I’ll order it for the shop and it will have a place of honour in the window. A mother who was a writer! How marvellous!”

  “I used to be a writer too,” said Will.

  “I suspect that once a person is a writer, they’re always a writer. I myself am a great reader, and once a reader, always a reader is what I say. The same must be true of writers, though I have no experience with it.”

  “I don’t know.” Will peeked at Favian’s paper. “If you’re not writing, what are you doing?”

  “Palindromes.” Favian’s long dour face lit up. “They’re a bit of an obsession with me.”

  “I’ve never heard of palindromes.”

  “They’re words that are spelled the same way backwards or forwards. Like the word racecar.” Favian printed it on the paper.

  “That’s so neat!” Will adored anything to do with words.

  “I enter contests all the time. You can have phrases or whole sentences too. Here’s one of my favourites.”

  With a chuckle, he wrote:

  Murder for a jar of red rum

  “I didn’t make that one up myself, I’m sorry to say. Palindromes are a pastime that is thousands of years old. Some of the most powerful magic words in medieval times were palindromes.”

  He wrote on the paper: odac dara arad cado

  “It’s from an old medieval spell book. It means fly like a vulture.”

  The ancient words gave Will a thrill. It would be cool to think of palindromes too, like Favian. “I better go," he said. "I have to buy some stuff for my aunt and then I’m meeting my friends.”

  “Odac dara arad cado!" said Favian.

  Chapter Eleven

  Morgan Moonstone

  It took ages to find the items on Aunt Mauve’s list. The first shops Will went to had CLOSED signs hanging on their doors, and he was convinced that the shop owners had turned their signs around when they saw him coming. When a shop was open, no one helped him and he had to search the aisles by himself. At the end, he had some money left over so he looked for a torch.

  “Don’t carry torches,” muttered the man in the hardware shop.

  Will went back to the grocer and the woman said, “You again,” and acted like she had never even heard of torches.

  Finally, a man in a second-hand shop sold him a big silver torch. “You watch your step up there at the castle,” he said.

  Everyone knows who I am, Will thought. It’s spooky.

  Next door was a shop called The Winking Cat. He peered through the window and then went inside. A teenager with blond dreadlocks sat at a till listening to music. Sparkling rocks of all different colours were arranged on tables and piled in plastic boxes labelled with names like tiger’s eye, sunstone, pink fire quartz, opals and Apache tears.

  “Crystals,” said the boy at the till. He turned the music down. “They have powers. For divination and stuff like that. And they can protect you from things. I’m not really into it myself.”

  Long skinny candles, bunched together by their wicks, hung from the ceiling. One other customer, a girl with long red hair, was standing in front of a display of narrow boxes with a sign that said Incense. It was the girl from the bookstore. Will thought Favian had said her name was Madeleine with a foreign-sounding last name.

  He picked two postcards from a rack at the front of the shop. The first picture was a tapestry of two knights on horseback in front of a castle. He read the caption on the back. Jousting Knights, 1601, Morgan Moonstone, Medieval Tapestry Collection, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

  The picture on the other postcard was also a tapestry. The back of the card said Stag in the Forest, 1602, Morgan Moonstone, Medieval Tapestry Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  Morgan Moonstone. The name was on both postcards. Was he an ancestor of the poet Vespera Moonstone? Had Morgan Moonstone woven the tapestries?

  Will took the postcards to the counter and asked the boy for four red candles. He paid for his purchases, left the shop and headed up Black Penny Road with his bags. He was just about at Thom’s door when Thom stuck his head out the window above and called, “What took you so long? Emma’s here. We’re going to set the Cherry Tart Flambé on fire!”

  Will leapt up the stairs. Thom wore a flowered apron and his hair was sticky with yellow custard. Emma was standing on her head in the middle of the room.

  “How many seconds?” she grunted.

  “Sixty-five,” said a man with a pale face, seated in a wheelchair in front of a huge loom.

  Emma collapsed on the floor. “Beat my record!” She had a long purple and red striped scarf draped around her neck. Will thought she looked amazing.

  “Did you see Peaches on your way here, by any chance?” she said.

  “No,” Will replied.

  The man in the wheelchair smiled. “You must be Will. I’m John, Thom’s dad.”

  Will dropped his parcels on a table. He stood beside the loom and watched. John was weaving a picture of a lord and a lady riding a magnificent white stallion. The colours were vibrant – blue, gold and crimson. “It’s awesome!” said Will.

  “It’s going to be a wall hanging,” said John.

  Will remembered his postcards. He took them out of a bag and showed them to the others. “I got them at a shop called The Winking Cat.”

  “That’s my granny’s shop!” said Emma. “She’s too old to work there now, and we take turns looking after it for her. You must have met Lukas. He’s one of my brothers.”

  “This one’s my favourite,” said Will, pointing to the postcard of the stag with silver antlers.

  John wheeled over to have a closer look. “That’s a very famous tapestry. The workmanship is exquisite. It’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.”

  “Who’s Morgan Moonstone?” asked Will. “His name is on the back of both cards.”

  “What about the Cherry Tart Flambé?” interrupted Thom.

  “Right,” said John. “Into the kitchen, everyone! I want to see this too. And then we'll talk about Morgan Moonstone!”

  Cherry Tart Flambé, Will discovered, was a big pie filled with pale yellow very lumpy custard.

  “The lumps are the cherries,” explained Thom. “I only had one can of cherries so I had to make a lot of custard.”

  Thom sprinkled sugar all over the pie. Then he stuck the pie under the broiler until the sugar turned a lovely brown. John produced a small bottle of something he called cognac. Thom poured the cognac over the pie. “Matches!” he said dramatically.

  Emma handed him a box of matches. “Is there a fire extinguisher around here?” she asked.

  “Very funny,” said Thom.

  “Stand back!” said John.

  Thom lit the match and held it to the pie, which instantl
y burst into flames.

  “CHERRY TART FLAMBÉ!” yelled Thom.

  For a few breathtaking seconds, the flames shot up over their heads.

  “Look out!” shrieked Emma.

  Will thought the whole pie was going to burn up, but then, just as suddenly, the flames died down. Thom’s breath came out in a whoosh. “It worked!” he cried. He did a little dance around the kitchen. “I am good. I am soooo good!”

  They sat at the table and Thom dished it out with a giant spoon. Emma declared it was one of Thom’s best desserts yet.

  “Hooo-whooo-hoooo,” howled a voice from the street below.

  “I’ll let him in!” said Thom. He raced downstairs. Peaches bounded up ahead of him, a brown boot clamped firmly in his mouth.

  “I can’t get it away,” panted Thom.

  “It’s old Mr. Branson’s,” said Emma. “That’s the third time this week.”

  “Does he take things a lot?” said Will.

  Emma nodded. “He’s a retriever. Last week it was Mrs. Thompson’s tablecloth and the Howard twins’ baseball mitts.”

  Peaches dropped the boot and Emma grabbed it. “It’s a full-time job taking everything back,” she grumbled.

  Will looked at John Fairweather. “Morgan Moonstone,” he reminded him. “You were going to tell me about him.”

  “Right," said John. “Where should I begin? Over four hundred years ago a tapestry weaver came to Sparrowhawk Village. His name was Morgan Moonstone. He travelled with his wife and infant son.”

  “He wove magic tapestries!” said Thom.

  “Is that true?” said Will. “Were they really magic?”

  “Lots of people in this village believe it,” said John. “They say that the tapestries could make things happen. You see, a tapestry tells a story. If a lord was planning a tournament, he would ask Morgan Moonstone to weave a magic tapestry showing his favourite knight winning, and then that knight would win!”

  “Everybody would want a magic tapestry,” said Will.

  Would a magic tapestry have saved his mother? Would it make Mr. Barnaby publish The Magical Night?

  CRAAASH! Emma and her chair toppled to the floor. Peaches leapt on top of her and washed her face with his slobbery pink tongue. “Hey! Get away!” said Emma picking herself up.