Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Cressida Cowell
Cover art copyright © 2018 by Brandon Dorman.
Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Originally published in 2018 by Hodder Children’s Books in Great Britain
First U.S. Edition: October 2018
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ISBNs: 978-0-316-50838-4 (hardcover), 978-0-316-50835-3 (ebook)
E3-20180914-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: Escape
1. Escape from Gormincrag Is Impossible
2. Did I Mention That Escape from Gormincrag Is Impossible?
3. Inside the Punishment Cupboard
4. The Pointing Finger of the Witchsmeller
5. The Finger Lands on Wish… and Everything Gets a Bit Chaotic…
6. And a Little More Chaotic Still
7. On the Other Side of the Wall
8. Following the Sweet Track
Part Two: The Witch-Trap
9. A Couple of Nasty Surprises on the Way to Castle Death
10. The Giant’s Last Breath
11. The Story Takes a Surprising Turn, as Is the Way of Stories
12. A Bad Moment for Your Escape to Get Held Up
13. Two Angry Parents
14. They Really Shouldn’t Be Fighting Each Other
15. The Kingwitch
16. The Witches Attack
17. Taking Off the Eyepatch
18. Forgive Them
19. Midwinter’s End Eve, Also Known as “Fool’s Day,” One Night Out of Time
Epilogue 1
Epilogue 2
Acknowledgments (Thank You)
Also by Cressida Cowell
This book is dedicated to dearest CLEMENTINE with so much love
Prologue
Imagine an age of giants.
It was a long, long time ago, in a British Isles so old it did not know it was the British Isles yet, when the country was all wildwoods, and there were two types of humans fighting in the woodlands.
The WIZARDS, who had lived in this forest for as long as memory, and were as Magic as the wood itself, and rode on the back of the giant snowcats. And the WARRIORS, who hunted the Magic down with bright swords and fire, so they could build their forts and their fields and their new modern world.
The Warriors were winning, for their weapons were made of IRON…
…and IRON was the only thing that Magic would not work on.
This is the story of a young boy Wizard and a young girl Warrior, who were both cheerful and hopeful and full of good ideas, but they had been taught since birth to hate each other like poison. It is the tale of how they met, and learned to be friends and to see things from each other’s point of view, and it really wants to be a HAPPY story… but unfortunately in the course of their last joyful adventure…
They accidentally let the KINGWITCH out of the stone where he had been imprisoned so safely for century upon century…
And WITCHES had returned to the wonder of the wildwoods.
Now, I do not want to scare you, dear Reader. But Witches had feathered wings and acid blood and every clawed hand ended in five talons as long and as slice-sharp as a freshly sharpened sword.
Which would be fine if they were well intentioned.
But Witches were the kind of evil who hate all things good and eat the hearts of robins and want to destroy the world and everything in it.
And the Kingwitch commanded them all…
Nobody knows where the Kingwitch was now hidden. But I do.
I want the boy, thought the Kingwitch, in cramped, wicked thoughts. I want the boy-who-is-very-nearly-mine, for HE can help bring me the girl-who-has-Magic-that-works-on-iron… for if I GET that Magic, I shall at last be invincible…
But fear not, dear Reader! This must be impossible.
Xar had been locked up in the great prison of Gormincrag. And nobody gets out of Gormincrag, which may not be very nice for Xar, but it also follows, as night follows day, that the Kingwitch and his Witches cannot get in.
And as for Wish, why Wish’s scary mother, the great Warrior queen Sychorax, has built a gigantic Wall across the entire western edge of her kingdom, a Wall so high that even a Longstepper High-Walker giant couldn’t see over it on tiptoes, to protect her people from the attacks of the Witches.
So our heroes can’t possibly meet each other, or the Kingwitch, in a story as short as this one.
It was extremely unlikely that they would ever have met in the first place.
It happened ONCE.
1. Escape from Gormincrag Is Impossible
It was a quarter past midnight, four weeks before Midwinter’s End Eve, and a thirteen-year-old boy was dangling precariously from a disintegrating homemade rope hanging from outside the darkest tower of Gormincrag, the Rehabilitation Center for the Re-Education of Dark Magic and Wicked Wizards.
(That, by the way, is a long and fancy name for a jail, and not just any old jail, the most secure and impregnable jail in the wildwoods.)
The boy’s name was Xar (which is pronounced “Zar”—I don’t know why, spelling is weird) and he really, really, really should not have been there.
He was supposed to be INSIDE the prison, not OUTSIDE it, dangling fifty feet above sea level from one of the windows. That’s one of the most important rules about prisons, and Xar really should have known that.
But Xar was not the kind of boy who followed the rules.
Xar acted first and thought later, and this was exactly what had led him to be put in the Gormincrag Rehabilitation Center in the first place, and given him the reputation of being the naughtiest, wildest boy born into the Wizard kingdom in about four generations.
See if you think that reputation is justified…
In the past week, for example, Xar had:
Put what was supposed to be sleeping potion into the Rogrebreath guards’ wine, but it turned out to be cursing potion instead… glued the bottoms of the entire Drood High Command to their chairs in the hope that it would give him time for a quick getaway—but forgot to glue the chairs to the floor, so the Droods just ran after him with chairs stuck to their bottoms… treated himself to some stolen invisibility potion, but unfortunately it had only made his HEAD disappear, giving the Drood in charge of Reprogramming a terrible shock because he imagined on visiting Xar’s cell that the prison had been invaded by headless GHOSTS…
None of these disobedient things had been intentional, exactly. They had all just happened by accident, in the c
ourse of him trying to escape, for even though Xar was a happy-go-lucky cheerful sort of person, two months of imprisonment had given even his high spirits a bit of a battering, and his quiff of hair had drooped a little under the pressure, and he had been feeling, at times, a little desperate.
Gormincrag was well known to be impossible to escape from, but Xar never let a little thing like impossibility put him off. So although to an outsider his present predicament might have looked pretty bad, Xar was remarkably pleased with himself for a person who was hanging on to a crumbling rope swaying violently above seas known to be infested with such dreadful monsters as Blunderbouths, Daggerfins, and Bloody Barbeards.
His wide-awake eyes were bright with excitement and hope.
“You see!” Xar whispered triumphantly to his companions. “What did I tell you? We’re doing brilliantly! We’ve nearly escaped already!”
And Xar was right: They had really done a very good job to get this far.
The Gormincrag Rehabilitation Center for the Re-Education of Dark Magic and Wicked Wizards had been designed to imprison some of the most terrifying monsters in the entire Magic world. Bogeymen. Ogres of all sizes and savageries. Jack o’ Kents, Bugbears, Kelpies, Grim Annises, you name it, and even, once upon a time, dare I say it, WITCHES, who were once extinct, and had recently reemerged in that part of the wildwoods.
NO ONE, no Dark-sprite, no Rogrebreath however large and terrifying, no Wicked Wizard of spells the most fiendish, had EVER escaped from Gormincrag before. People had tried of course, and the legends of brave but failed escape attempts from Gormincrag were told from sprite to sprite across the years. But no one had ever successfully made it out of there alive.
Even if, by some extraordinary chance, you made it beyond the prison perimeter without the skulls screaming, the grim towers of Gormincrag were built on seven islands set in a sea called prettily “the Sea of Skulls,” and the treacherous waves would get you, or those vicious merfolk, the Bloody Barbeards, would swim out of their holes in the Drowned Forest on the seafloor and get you, and bring you back.
As the son of a King Enchanter, and a boy with a great deal of personal charisma, Xar had quite a few followers.
At the moment he was accompanied by five sprites (Tiffinstorm, Timeloss, Hinkypunk, Ariel, and Mustardthought)—and these were beautiful, fierce-looking creatures, resembling a cross between a very small human and an angry insect, and three hairy fairies, (Squeezjoos, Bumbleboozle, and the baby), smaller, more beelike animals, who were too young to have climbed into their cocoons and metamorphosed into proper adult sprites yet.
Sprites can light up like stars in the night-time, but these ones did not want to be detected at the moment, so they had subdued the light of their little bodies to the very dimmest of glows.
These sprites all belonged to Xar, and loyally, quietly, invisibly, they had sneaked in to Gormincrag to try and help him escape.
“Yous right, Master!” Squeezjoos, one of the hairy fairies, whispered back. Squeezjoos was a tiny little six-legged creature, larger than a bumblebee but still so small he could fit into your hand, and he was buzzing excitedly around Xar’s head. “Yous ALWAYS right! That’ss why youss the leader and you never leads uss into any trouble! Oo! What’s this fasscintressting cave?”
This “fasscintressting cave” was in fact a large skull with its mouth open. Squeezjoos buzzed in to investigate and the mouth snapped shut with an ominous clang and the eyeholes squeezed tight closed as if they still had lids on them. “Helloooo?” buzzed Squeezjoos in anxious echoes from within. “Helloooo? I think I iss stuck!”
The sprites nearly fell out of the air they were laughing so much, but Xar intervened in quick alarm, hissing, “Don’t go over the boundary of the battlements anybody! There’s a Magic force field around this castle, and it’s fine getting IN, but you can’t get across it to get OUT!”
At some considerable danger to himself, because the skull was just out of reach, and he had to tie the end of the rope to his ankle and dangle upside down to get his hands on it, Xar then very, very carefully and delicately released the mouth bone of the skull so that Squeezjoos could buzz out triumphantly squeaking, “I is fine! Don’t worry everyone! I is FINE!”
And then Xar swung himself back onto a safer ledge again and explained to his interested companions that those skulls were the screaming kind, and they were one of the final defenses of Gormincrag. If you put one fingertip beyond the perimeter of the prison, the skulls would open up their mouths and scream bloodcurdling yells, which would wake the guards of Gormincrag and bring them down upon you.
This was typical of Xar. Although he had spent his entire young life leading his followers into considerable trouble, to do him justice, he always tried his hardest to get them OUT of it, even if it put him personally in great peril.
Xar was also accompanied by a talking raven—who had his wings over his eyes, such was his horror at the whole dangling-upside-down-and-rescuing-hairy-fairies-from-screaming-skulls episode—and a seven-and-a-half-foot Loner Raving Fangmouth werewolf called Lonesome, who made anxious grunting noises when Xar mentioned the Gormincrag guards.
Xar had met Lonesome in the prison, and while it is not really advisable to make friends with Loner Raving Fangmouth werewolves, neither Xar nor the werewolf had a lot of choice in the matter. They both wanted to escape.
The werewolf gave a smothered howl of discontent.
“What is the werewolf saying?” asked the raven.
The talking raven was called Caliburn, and he would have been a handsome bird, but unfortunately it was his job to keep Xar out of trouble, and the worry and general impossibility of this hopeless mission meant his feathers kept falling out.
“I think he’s saying, why are we heading in this direction?” said Xar.
Xar was the only one of them who had been taught werewolf language, but Xar wasn’t great at concentrating in class, and the problem with werewolves is they do mumble their words, so sometimes you could mistake a grunt for a gurgle, or an oooarrghh for an eerrggagh, and completely misunderstand what they were talking about.
“We’re going this way,” explained Xar, “because we’re just going to drop into the Drood Commander’s Room… It’s an important step in our escape…”
The werewolf gave a smothered howl of horror and waved his shaggy paws around with such alarm that he nearly fell off the rope.
“You shouldn’t be escaping! And we shouldn’t be helping you!” said Caliburn in a flurry of anxiety. “But surely if we are helping you to escape, the idea would be to do it quietly? Crusher and the animals are waiting for us down at the bottom of the western battlements…”
(Crusher was a Longstepper High-Walker giant, and he and the wolves, the snowcats, and the bear were also Xar’s companions.)
“We should be joining Crusher and the others!” Caliburn pointed out. “Hopping over the back of the wall, without telling anyone, not presenting ourselves to the head of the prison for a nice little chat and a cup of herbal tea!”
“Yes, well, that’s why no one has ever gotten out of this armpit of a jail before,” said Xar. “How many times have YOU tried to escape from here, Lonesome?”
The werewolf mumbled something that might have been “twenty-three”…
“You see?” said Xar. “Trust me, everyone! I have a plan that could just be the cunning-est, most brilliant, and daring escape plan in the entire history of the wildwoods…”
Xar had a lot of good qualities, but modesty wasn’t one of them.
Inch by inch, the little party crept down the ropes, landed on the windowsill outside the Drood Commander’s Room, and peered inside.
The room might have been the shape of a star, or a circle, or a pentagon, who knew? For the walls had a habit of moving around while you were looking at them, and the floor looked like the sea, and the ceiling might have been the sky. It was enough to make you feel a little bit sick just to look at it.
The only still point in the ro
om was a gigantic desk.
Three Wizards were sitting around the desk, talking.
One of the Wizards was the Drood Commander of Gormincrag, and Xar pointed to the spelling staff the Drood Commander was holding.
“That’s the reason we’re here…” whispered Xar. “Because the Drood Commander’s spelling staff controls everything in this castle.”
“Ohhh no… oh noo…” whispered Caliburn the raven, in a frenzy of alarm. “Don’t tell me that your plan is to steal the Staff-That-Commands-the-Castle?”
Xar nodded. That was indeed his plan.
“It’sss brilliant! Is brilliant!” squeaked Squeezjoos, buzzing around in such an overexcited fashion that he was very nearly sick.
“Sssshhhhhhhh…” everyone else whispered back.
The werewolf gave a small grunt that might have been approval. It was quite a good plan actually. At least, it was something the werewolf had never tried before.
But as Xar peered into the room, the shaggy weight of the werewolf’s fur on his shoulder, he started so violently he nearly fell off the windowsill.
For he suddenly recognized the other Wizards who were talking to the Drood Commander of Gormincrag.
“My father… and my brother…” whispered Xar.
It was indeed Xar’s father, the Great Wizard Enchanter, Encanzo the Magnificent, King of Wizards, and Xar’s older brother, Looter.
Xar could feel a mixture of fear and shame rising within him, starting with a queasy flip of his stomach and then bubbling up into a hot flush of shame.
When Xar had been arrested by the Drood Guards, Encanzo and Looter had been traveling on a mission to the Witch Mountains, to find out how bad the threat from the Witches was.
So they did not yet know why Xar was in here… and Xar really, really didn’t want them to find that out…
Xar could just about hear what the Wizards were saying, if he leaned in through the window.
“Your Droods have crept into my kingdom while I was away and have stolen my son from me!” raged Encanzo. “I demand that you release him this instant!”
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