Fyre Read online

  Wolf Boy shrugged. “Who knows? But I’d guess all day. We’ve had a few of these recently and once they start, the snow keeps falling until the cold night air comes in.”

  Septimus would have happily waited the blizzard out in the comfort of Aunt Zelda’s cottage. He would have loved to spend a day by the fire talking to Wolf Boy, catching up with his life and finding out what he was doing. But one look at Jenna told him that that was not an option. “I’ll have to come back for it,” he said. “Tomorrow, when the blizzard’s blown out.”

  Jenna pushed Septimus into the little cupboard under the stairs, closed the door and lit a small lamp. The light flared up in the dark and Septimus saw the familiar shelves with their orderly bottles of Unstable Potions, and below them he saw in the dark wood a line of drawers, in which he had always supposed the Partikular Poisons were kept. He watched as with a practiced air, Jenna reached down to the bottom drawer and opened it. He sensed something move within the drawer and heard a soft click behind them as the cupboard door locked itself and they were plunged into darkness.

  The next thing Septimus knew was Jenna pushing the door open again. He guessed she had forgotten something. She stepped out and he waited for her to go and get whatever it was.

  Jenna looked back into the cupboard. “Are you coming, Sep?”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “Back at the Castle. In the Palace.”

  “Already?”

  Jenna grinned. “Yep. Good, isn’t it?”

  Septimus followed Jenna out of the cupboard and stepped into a small, cozy room. It possessed a little fireplace with a fire burning in the grate, and a comfortable, somewhat worn-looking chair placed beside it. What he did not see was the occupant of the chair: the ghost of a Queen—a young woman, wearing a red silk tunic, with a gold cloak wrapped around her shoulders. Around her long dark hair was a gold circlet—the one that Jenna now wore.

  At the opening of the cupboard door, the ghost jumped up. She had been waiting for this moment. Her daughter had rushed past her so fast on her way into the cupboard that she had not had time to react. Now she was ready. The ghost of the Queen got to her feet and stepped in front of Jenna.

  Jenna stopped dead—something was in the way.

  Septimus was just behind Jenna. “What is it?” he whispered.

  Jenna remembered something the ghost of Queen Etheldredda had once said to her. “I think that maybe my mother is here,” she whispered. Tentatively she put her hand out in front of her.

  The ghost of Queen Cerys stepped back to avoid being Passed Through. “Yes, yes, I am here!” she said—but no sound emerged. What the ghost did not realize was that it takes some practice to speak without Appearing. And Cerys knew that the Time was not yet Right for her to Appear to her daughter.

  Jenna turned to Septimus. “Do you feel it?” she whispered.

  Septimus nodded. The little room felt strangely full of movement, as though currents of air were swirling around.

  Jenna took a deep breath and said out loud, “Is anyone there?”

  “I am here,” said the ghost of the Queen, silently and somewhat irritably. “Daughter, our mothers tell me the Dragon Boat is dying. You must save her!”

  Beside the ghost of Queen Cerys stood the ghost of her own mother, Jenna’s grandmother, the redoubtable Queen Matthilda. The rotund ghost, gray hair awry, crown slightly askew as it always had been in Life, was agitated. “For goodness’ sake, Cerys, say something,” the ghost told her daughter.

  “I am trying to, Mama.”

  “Well, try harder, dear. She’ll be gone in a moment. The young move so fast.”

  Queen Cerys concentrated hard. “Daughter. Listen to me!”

  Jenna glanced at Septimus. “Was that you?” she asked.

  “Was what me?”

  “A kind of whisper.”

  Septimus shook his head. He longed to get out of the oppressive little room; it held bad memories for him. “Let’s go, shall we?” he said.

  Jenna nodded.

  Queen Matthilda was exasperated. “Cerys, tell her!”

  “How can I concentrate when you keep going on at me?” Cerys demanded crossly, as she watched her daughter and the Alchemie Apprentice edge past her.

  “Well, I shall tell her,” snapped Queen Matthilda.

  “No, you will not.”

  “I shall. She is my granddaughter.”

  “And she is my daughter.”

  “Sadly neglected if you ask me,” Queen Matthilda huffed. “You really should make more of an effort with her. Poor child. You know I would happily stay here in your place so that you could go to her. She needs you, Cerys.”

  Jenna took the few steps across to the blank space in the wall where the hidden door to the outside lay. Septimus followed, glancing backward uneasily.

  Cerys was fast descending into one of the legendary fights that she used to have with her mother. “Mama, you know The Queen Rules perfectly well. We do not Appear until the Time Is Right. You know that. How can my daughter ever become a true Queen if we keep Appearing to her, telling her what to do, preventing her from finding her own true path?”

  “Absolute twaddle,” harrumphed Jenna’s grandmother. “I never did agree with that part of the Rules. Never.”

  “You cannot cherry-pick from the Rules, Mama. It is all or nothing. Wait!”

  The ghost of Queen Cerys saw her daughter take hold of the Apprentice’s hand and heard her say, “Let’s go, Sep!” Cerys began whirling around the room in frustration. Why couldn’t she speak? Why? As her daughter headed toward the wall, a faint, despairing cry found its way into the room: “Hear me! Only you can save the Dragon Boat!”

  On the other side of the wall Jenna stared at Septimus openmouthed. “That was my mother!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sep, I know her voice. I know it. It’s my mother!”

  “It was only her ghost, Jen.”

  “So why doesn’t she Appear to me, Sep? Why? She must have seen me often enough. She’s just like my father. They’re both the same. They both keep away. It’s horrible.”

  “Oh, Jen,” said Septimus, at a loss for words.

  “And now—now all she does is tell me to do something that I can’t do!”

  11

  DRAGON FYRE

  Septimus held a burning rushlight to light the way as he and Jenna walked through the coils of the lapis lazuli Labyrinth. The last time Jenna had been there was five hundred years in the past, and the flickering of the flame lighting up the blue lapis walls brought back terrifying memories of being dragged through it by the murderous ghost of Queen Etheldredda.

  At last they reached the arch that led into the Great Chamber of Alchemie. After Septimus’s descriptions of all the soot and sand, Jenna was expecting to see a wreck, but what met her was a bright glittering chamber, full of gold—a testament to Septimus’s cleaning skills.

  Jenna’s gaze was at once drawn to the two huge, patterned gold doors set in the wall opposite: the Great Doors of Time that had once been the gateway to the Glass of Time itself. Even though she knew that the Glass had shattered and no one could now pass through them to another Time, they still had a presence that gave her goose bumps. Jenna shivered and looked away to the neat ebony workbenches that lined the walls, clean and polished, with unpacked boxes stacked up neatly.

  Jenna loved all the gold gleaming softly in the candlelight—gold catches, handles and hinges, tiny gold drawers below the workbenches, gold brackets that held up the shelves and even the scuffed strips of gold that ran along the bottom of the ebony benches, protecting the precious wood from the boots of Marcellus’s ancient and long-gone junior Apprentices. Jenna and Marcellus shared a fascination for gold.

  To Jenna’s right was the furnace—still unlit—with its funnel of a chimney snaking up through the domed ceiling. In the center of the Chamber was a long table on which a line of candles was burning brightly. But
something was missing.

  “Where’s Marcellus?” asked Jenna.

  Septimus shrugged. “I dunno. He’s always going off somewhere. He’ll be back soon.”

  Jenna sat down at the long table. “So, where does he go, then?”

  “I don’t know. He never says.”

  “Don’t you ask?”

  Septimus laughed. “I know you would, Jen. But it’s not polite for an Apprentice to ask things like that. He’d tell me if it was important.”

  “Sounds weird to me,” Jenna said. “I mean, what else is there to do down here?”

  The sound of footsteps in the Labyrinth stopped their conversation. A few seconds later, Marcellus Pye appeared through the archway. He looked startled.

  “Septimus! What are you doing back so soon? Oh! And Esmeralda!” Marcellus was spooked. In the candlelight Jenna looked so much like his long-gone sister, Esmeralda, that he had forgotten for a moment what Time he was in. Being in the Fyre Chamber still took him back to the old times. Marcellus recovered from his Time Slip and offered Jenna the seat at the head of the table. “Please, Princess Jenna, sit down.”

  Jenna took her seat and Marcellus sat down a little shakily on the bench at the side of the table, leaving Septimus to take his usual place on the right-hand side.

  “Welcome to the Great Chamber, Princess Jenna,” Marcellus said rather formally. “I am delighted that you have come to see it so soon. It is an integral part of the Castle in which the Queens have always taken a great interest. Much greater, I believe, than in the Wizard Tower.”

  Jenna nodded—she could believe that. Remembering what she had come for, she placed the leather bag on the table and took out the two bowls.

  Marcellus looked at them with interest. “Ah,” he said. “The Triple. How nice.” He waited for Jenna to put the third bowl on the table.

  “There isn’t another one,” she said. “The python ate it.”

  Marcellus looked shocked. “You must get it back right away. Kill the wretched snake if you have to.”

  “It’s not that easy,” said Jenna. “You see—”

  Marcellus got to his feet. “Well, Marcia will just have to go without her silly shoes.”

  “Shoes?” asked Jenna, confused.

  “Her purple pythons. Isn’t that the only reason Terry Tarsal keeps that ghastly snake? Marcia may not believe it, but some things are worth more than shoes and this set of bowls is one of them. Terry Tarsal will just have to kill his precious python.”

  Now Jenna understood. She sighed. “It’s not Terry Tarsal’s python, Marcellus. I wish it were.”

  “Then whose python is it?”

  “It isn’t anybody’s python. It’s the giant Marsh Python.”

  Marcellus sat down. “Ah. Unfortunately not quite so easy to catch.”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s a great shame. To lose the Triple after all this time.”

  “I told Jenna that you could Clone them,” Septimus said anxiously.

  Marcellus laughed. “You have great faith in me, Apprentice. But there is much to do before we can even think of that.” He sighed and stood up as if to end the meeting. “I am so sorry, Princess,” he said. “I cannot Clone the gold for you now. We are not yet ready.”

  “So that’s it, then,” said Jenna flatly. “She’s going to die.”

  Marcellus looked shocked. “Who is going to die?”

  “The Dragon Boat.”

  “What, the Dragon Boat of Hotep-Ra?”

  Jenna nodded, too upset to speak.

  “If you will forgive the question, Princess, why do you think she is going to die?” Marcellus asked.

  “I haven’t heard her heart beat for a whole five days now. I go every day in the Big Freeze. Aunt Zelda said I should. And I do hear it. Even though no one else can, I always do. And now . . . now it’s stopped. And the only thing my mother has ever asked me to do, I can’t.”

  Marcellus thought that Jenna had the same look that his sister Esmeralda used to have when teetering on the edge of a tantrum. He decided to tread carefully.

  “Tell me, Jenna, what is it that Sarah has asked you to do?” he asked gently.

  “Not Sarah—not mum. My mother. The Queen.”

  “The Queen? Her ghost has spoken to you?”

  “We think we heard something,” Septimus said doubtfully.

  Jenna was distractedly tracing her finger around the design of the sun cut into the ancient wood of the table. “Sep, I heard my mother. I know it was her.” She looked up at Marcellus. “Her ghost spoke when we were in the Queen’s Room.”

  “Ah. Then it is your mother,” said Marcellus. “That is where the ghost of the previous Queen always resides.”

  “Does she? Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Jenna.

  “Well, I assumed you knew,” said Marcellus.

  “No. No one tells me anything,” Jenna declared. “Not even my mother.”

  Marcellus stood up. “Then it seems to me, Princess, that as your nearest relative on the royal side, it is time I stepped in. I will tell you all I know from my dear dead sister and my, ahem, less dear but thankfully dead mother.”

  Jenna looked surprised. She had never thought of Marcellus as a relative, but it was true; he was in fact a great, great—and then some—uncle. Suddenly she felt a weight lifted from her shoulders. The Dragon Boat was no longer her worry alone. “Thank you,” she said, smiling for the first time that day.

  “My pleasure, niece,” said Marcellus. “Now, I suggest we repair to the boatyard and open the Dragon House.”

  “But what for? We’ve lost the Triple so we can’t revive her,” said Jenna, exasperated. She wondered whether Marcellus had actually listened to what she had been saying.

  “There is more than one way to skin a cat,” said Marcellus.

  Jenna’s patience ran out. Angrily, she stood up, scraping the old oak chair back across the stone floor. “Stop talking in riddles, Marcellus,” she snapped.

  Marcellus put his arm out to stop Jenna from going. “Forgive my obscure speech, Princess,” he said. “What I mean is, there is more than one way to revive a dragon.” He stood up and put his arm around Jenna’s shoulders. “The Magyk way is beyond us now, so I shall show you the Physik way.”

  Jannit Maarten was sitting in her snow-covered hut in the boatyard, cooking her favorite sausage and bean stew when, to her dismay, she saw the new Castle Alchemist walk by with the Princess, the ExtraOrdinary Apprentice and then—as her tiny snow-dusted window filled with green—ohnonotthatwretcheddragon. Jannit muttered a sailor’s curse and got to her feet.

  During the Big Freeze, Jannit hibernated like a tortoise in her hut. She looked forward to the peace and quiet that the first flakes of snow brought with them. She sent her Apprentices and dockhands home, and waited happily for the day the Moat froze over and not even the Port barge could disturb the serenity of the boatyard. For the rest of the year Jannit worked day and night, eating, sleeping and dreaming boatyard business, but the Big Freeze was her holiday. As she had grown older, Jannit had begun to look forward to it so much that she had recently considered barring the way through the tunnel to ensure she was not disturbed by anyone from the Castle. The sight of three Castle dignitaries walking by her tiny snow-dusted window, accompanied by a notoriously heavy-footed dragon, made her wish she had done just that. There was a sharp rap on her door and Jannit briefly toyed with the idea of pretending she was not there in the hope they would go away. But the thought of them poking unsupervised around her boatyard and, even worse, the heavy-footed dragon trampling on the delicate shells of the upturned boats, got Jannit opening the hut door with a growled, “What?”

  The new Castle Alchemist spoke. “Good day, Mistress Maarten, I—”

  Jannit bristled. “I am no one’s mistress, Alchemist.” Jannit, who disapproved of Alchemie, managed to make “Alchemist” sound like an insult. “Jannit Maarten is my name and Jannit Maarten is what I answer to.”

  “Ah. For
give me. Jannit Maarten. Yes. Indeed. Ahem.”

  Jannit, who was nearly a foot shorter than Marcellus, folded her arms belligerently and squinted up at the Alchemist. “What do you want?”

  Marcellus looked down at the small, wiry woman swathed in a thick blue-black woolen sailor’s coat that was far too big for her and reached almost to the ground. He could see she meant business. Her iron-gray hair was scraped back into a sailor’s pigtail that seemed to bristle with annoyance, and every deep-set, wind-burned line in her face showed just how displeased she was to see him. Marcellus took a deep breath. He knew that what he had to say was not going to go down well.

  “We have come to open the Dragon House,” he said. “I am sorry for any inconvenience it may cause.”

  Jannit looked flabbergasted. “You what?”

  Jenna decided to step in. “I’m really sorry, Jannit,” she said. “But I think the Dragon Boat is dying. We have to get into the Dragon House. We have to try to save her.”

  Jannit liked Jenna, who reminded her of how she had been as a girl: a confident, taking-charge kind of person. That, thought Jannit, was how girls should be.

  “Well, Princess, I am most sorry to hear that. Of course you must open the Dragon House, though how you propose to do that I have no idea. You do realize there is no opening anymore—just a solid wall?”

  Jenna nodded. “Yes. That’s why we have Spit Fyre with us.”

  “So I noticed,” said Jannit drily. She looked up at the dragon, and Spit Fyre’s green eyes with their red ring of Fyre around the iris met her disapproving stare. Spit Fyre shifted uneasily from one foot to another. He felt as though he had done something wrong, although he wasn’t sure what. He finished chewing the cow bone that Septimus had just fed him and a large glob of dribble headed for Jannit’s sealskin boot.

  Jannit moved her boot just in time. “Well, I suppose if you must. Don’t let him tread on anything, will you?” she said. “I don’t want anything broken.”

  “We shall naturally take great care,” said Marcellus and gave a small bow. Jannit—who thought bowing was an affectation—harrumphed and turned to go back inside her hut.