War in Hagwood Read online

  and doom is at the door.

  Shalt all the days be darkened,

  or golden evermore?

  He took a deep breath and stroked his beard thoughtfully. “There are no more verses and not even the greatest among us could foretell what will pass. That is why I have come, to see with my own eyes whether eternal darkness will cover the land or golden day will prevail.”

  “But I’m not this Blessed One,” Gamaliel protested. “I don’t have any power—even my wergling is useless and messy. The poem must mean someone else—I’m a nobody.”

  Gwyddion put his finger in his ear again and gazed at the boy for a moment. “My insight tells me you are indeed he,” he said eventually. “You have been chosen. Within you lies the whole hope of the sunlit world.”

  “If I could do anything to stop the High Lady, I would!” the boy cried. “But I can’t!”

  He would have said more but at that moment there came a terrible sound that boomed beneath the heavens. Far off, within the Hollow Hill, Rhiannon Rigantona was hammering the key on the anvil of the Puccas.

  The terrible, unnatural noise quaked in the evening sky. On the mound, Bufus and Kernella covered their ears while, above them on the Devil’s Table, Gamaliel shivered and his face drained of color. Gwyddion held up his palms to the trembling clouds and called upon the Thunderer to cease.

  “The sky god is tolling the end of days!” he declared.

  Gamaliel shook his head. “That isn’t your sky god!” he shouted above the din. “It’s Her! That can only mean one thing: She’s taken the enchanted key from Grimditch. She’s destroying it!”

  “You can’t know that!” Kernella yelled.

  “The Blessed One shalt know many things,” Gwyddion cried out.

  And then the hammering stopped. One sour, lingering note vibrated in the air, ringing dully in their ears and setting their teeth on edge. Then silence returned.

  “There’s not one shred of hope left now,” Gamaliel murmured. “Without the key, the box can never be opened. The High Lady has won.”

  He wiped his hand across his forehead and tried not to think about the terrible things that must have happened to Grimditch inside the Hollow Hill.

  The old man frowned and let his eyes wander to the pitted, lichen-spotted surface of the capstone. “Before we journey to the haunted crag,” he said, “I must find me a wood beast. How I wish there was an ox to be found, but a lesser offering must suffice.”

  “What’s an ox and why do you want one?” Gamaliel asked.

  Gwyddion looked at him in surprise. “An ox is a most suitable beast for sacrifice,” he said. “I must examine entrails and learn what I may from them.”

  Gamaliel caught his breath.

  “That’s horrible,” he said.

  “It is the only way!” came the stern answer. “I must read the signs before we set forth. The auspices must be observed.”

  Gamaliel looked down at the capstone. “Then this isn’t really a table,” he murmured, feeling sick. “It’s an altar. You killed things on it.”

  A wild light gleamed in Gwyddion’s eyes. “The gods demand blood!” he cried. “And how else am I to unravel the mysteries unless I unwind the internals of the dead and dying and interpret them?”

  “The poor animals …” Gamaliel whispered in a faint voice.

  The old man gave a callous laugh. “Animals?” he said. “Yes, for the most part. But the important rituals and festivals require perfect victims. Why, to please the Thunderer so he might send me hence, we built nine wicker giants in a ring about this place and set one to burning every night. Within each of them was a flaxen-haired maiden arrayed in fine white linen—bride offerings unto Him. It was a glorious sight. Their screams must have pleased Him most highly for the way was opened into the distant tomorrow and here I am.”

  Gamaliel could not speak. He stared at the man in revulsion and horror and stumbled away from him.

  “You’re as bad as the High Lady,” he managed to utter at last. “Or maybe … maybe you’re worse than Her. She knows she’s wicked and heartless—but you … you put the blame on your gods. And yet, you actually enjoy the evil things you do.”

  Gwyddion looked at him in confused surprise. “It is our way,” he said as if that was enough justification. “It has always been the same.”

  “Go away!” the boy shouted angrily. “You’re disgusting. I always thought the Dooits were amazing, wise wizards, but you’re just foul killers.”

  The old man reached out to him, but Gamaliel dodged aside.

  “I will not hurt you,” Gwyddion promised. “I am here to watch and discover whether dark or light will triumph.”

  “You wouldn’t know the difference!” Gamaliel snapped back. “You burned nine maidens alive just to satisfy your curiosity. You revolt me. Go back into the past where you belong. There’s enough murder and madness here already.”

  Unable to bear being on that foul altar any longer, he climbed over the side and began hurrying down one of the support stones. In a moment, he was leaping onto the grass and running back to his sister and Bufus.

  “I must accompany you,” Gwyddion objected. “I must know.”

  Kernella and Bufus had heard everything and they stared at the man with the same contempt as Gamaliel.

  “Come on,” Gamaliel told them. “We’re leaving—just the three of us.”

  “I can help you, Blessed One!” the old man cried.

  Gamaliel glared up at him. “You really believe we’d accept help from something like you? I’d sooner fight the High Lady on my own. I can’t even look at you. Go on—call up your fog and crawl back to the past.”

  “Yes, get lost and inspect your own guts!” Bufus bawled. “Or the Carrion Hag here will do something nasty to you.”

  Gwyddion looked alarmed and stepped back in fear. The werlings’ faces were fierce and full of hatred. He did not understand why they were making such a fuss over something so fundamental as sacrifice.

  “But the poem of prophecy,” he said. “I must know what follows.”

  “Try shoving your finger somewhere new,” Bufus suggested.

  The werlings turned their backs and began walking down the mound. Gamaliel was too enraged and shaken to say another word. He was desperate to leave that awful place. In his eagerness to find help, he had been too quick to trust Gwyddion. Why did Nest send them there? It made no sense to Gamaliel.

  Behind them, the old man was calling, begging to be allowed to join them, but the children ignored him. Kernella quietly slipped her hand into her brother’s and the three of them marched into the surrounding trees.

  Gwyddion stared after them, bewildered and broken. Then, miserably, he crouched down and sat beneath the Devil’s Table, waiting for the mist to return and claim him.

  “I told you he was a nutter,” Bufus muttered as they walked through the deep evening shadows under the oaks.

  “I’m not even sure he was the one Nest meant us to meet,” Gamaliel said, frowning. “Nest told us it’d be close to the Devil’s Table, not crawling out from under it.”

  “So is it back to the tower or not?” Kernella asked.

  Before Gamaliel could answer, a riotous commotion erupted in the branches overhead. Leaves ripped and twigs snapped and frenzied cries squealed in the treetops.

  The werlings halted and looked up.

  “Squirrel fight!” Bufus chuckled.

  “One of those voices doesn’t sound like a squirrel,” Kernella declared, critically. She was an expert on those particular animals.

  Gamaliel pulled her away. “We can’t hang around to find out,” he said. “We’ve got our own fight, remember.”

  Just as he finished speaking, there was a crash and a shriek and a bundle of rags and twigs came falling from the leaves above. Five squirrels came racing down the trunk in pursuit,
chattering and snapping and bristling with fury.

  The rags landed with a crump on the ground. To the werlings’ astonishment, they groaned loudly. At once the squirrels came charging after. They leaped upon the bundle and began tearing at the tattered black cloth and tugging on the twigs inside.

  “Hey!” Kernella shouted. “Get off that. Shoo!”

  The squirrels froze and noticed the children for the first time. Kernella folded her arms and made a threatening, growling noise in her throat.

  With terrified chittering, the squirrels tore back up the oak tree, their tails disappearing into the leaves.

  “Nice squirrel snarl!” Bufus congratulated her.

  The girl grinned proudly. “They’re my favorite shape,” she confided. “I was best in my year at them.”

  Gamaliel had wandered over to the ragged bundle and was crouching next to it, about to lift a strip of cloth to see what lay beneath, when a strident but muffled voice exclaimed from within.

  “No you were not, Kernella Tumpin! Stookie Maffin was twice the squirrel you ever were. Your tail looked like a startled hairy caterpillar and your ears were in the wrong place.”

  The werlings gasped and Gamaliel fell backward in shock. As they gawped, the rags rose up on two spindly legs. There was a flurry of dust and a shaking of cloth as a pair of twiglike hands emerged and a gaunt face with shining beady eyes reared on a long thin neck.

  “Deary me—the Doolan nuisance as well,” the creature declared without enthusiasm as those gleaming eyes fell upon Bufus. “Can this day get any worse?”

  Gamaliel could not believe it.

  “Master Gibble!” he breathed.

  “Oh,” observed the former Great Grand Wergle Master. “It just has.”

  * Chapter 11 *

  The Squirrel Raider

  TERSER GIBBLE, THE ONCE HIGHLY RESPECTED INSTRUCTOR in the art of wergling, surveyed his former pupils with a disagreeable and superior sneer—at odds with the rest of his appearance. In the days since his infamous betrayal and surrendering of the secret wergling passwords to the High Lady, drastic changes had come over him.

  The most striking was the loss of his long, tapering nose that used to whistle when he became agitated. The High Lady had commanded it to be cut off. Now a bandage, torn from his black tutor’s gown, was bound about his head, covering the wound and making him look like a masked highway robber. His once-dignified and proud appearance was gone, replaced by a disheveled, beggarly aspect, and he had developed a nervous twitch of the head.

  For several long moments, the children gaped at him as he dusted himself down and methodically checked to see that none of his gangly bones were broken after the fall. Then their mute surprise gave way to resentment and anger.

  Bufus was the first to vent it. “Well well,” he began. “It’s Old Gibble. Gibble the Coward, Gibble the Traitor. Why haven’t you dropped dead from shame yet?”

  “You left us at the mercy of those thorn monsters!” Kernella joined in. “And you told them to hunt for Finnen! I hate you; everyone back home hates you!”

  Master Gibble remained calm and aloof but at the mention of Finnen’s name, he squeezed his eyes shut and his head gave a nervous jerk to the side. Finnen Lufkin had been his most magnificent pupil and showed every sign of becoming a greater wergler than even he. Master Gibble had become rabidly jealous of the boy’s talent and had grown to despise him. It was he who had urged the werling council to banish the boy when he had exposed Finnen’s cheating.

  “Does Lufkin still live?” he asked bitterly.

  “No thanks to you,” the girl replied. “At least he did when we left him this morning.”

  “And those pernicious brutes of thorn and briar?”

  “We beat them!” Bufus crowed. “Every single one. Yeah, that’s surprised you, hasn’t it, Bluntface. I bet you thought we was done for.”

  The tutor’s eyes glittered. “So, has the council dispatched everyone, even children, to seek me out and bring me to justice?” he drawled slowly. “I shall not be apprehended easily. I am still the Great Grand Wergle Master and you are nothing. What unseasoned folly is this? I credited Yoori Mattock with more sense. I see I was mistaken—the fatuous old oaf.”

  “Mister Mattock is dead,” Gamaliel said sharply. “And you’ve got it wrong. We haven’t come looking for you. No one cares about you anymore. You’re the last thing on our minds.”

  “Typical of our stinking luck to bump into you,” Bufus added.

  Master Gibble would have snorted with derision if he’d still possessed a nose.

  “You cannot deceive me!” he exclaimed. “I’m far too wily and sagacious. How easily I see through your clumsy, juvenile perjuries. I am the remarkable Terser Gibble. It will be a peculiar day indeed when I—and my arch treachery—are not uppermost in our people’s thoughts. Am I not already an audacious, legendary figure in werling history? Of course I shall be remembered! So I warn you: Beware, and let me pass. Do not try to hinder me or you will suffer.”

  As he boasted, he thrust his arms out wide in a flamboyant, dramatic gesture and at once several objects dropped from his tattered gown and fell at his feet.

  “Hazelnuts!” Kernella cried.

  Bufus let out a shriek of laughter. “That’s why those squirrels were chasing you!” he guffawed. “You’d pinched their hoard. Is that what the legendary Terser Gibble has sunk to, robbing squirrel’s larders? What a sad joke!”

  Master Gibble flinched and jerked his head again. He lowered his arms and his narrow shoulders drooped sadly.

  “Vainglorious vagabond,” he muttered in a hollow, defeated voice. “Behold my ruin and degradation. Was there ever such a consummate humiliation as mine? Dishonor and ignominious exile I could bear, but this is too harsh a punishment—to be reduced to a nut burglar.”

  “I dunno,” Bufus interrupted. “I can think of a few really nasty punishments for you.”

  “You do not understand the full extent of my downfall,” the tutor lamented. “My wergling powers are gone, yes—all of them. I am unable to transform into even the simplest of shapes. They are denied me and so here you see the once–Great Grand Wergle Master, locked in his own sorry skin. I am compelled to scavenge like a scabious rat, living off whatever I can plunder or the moldering scraps that other creatures refuse to touch.”

  “It’s better than you deserve,” Gamaliel told him.

  “You won’t get any sympathy from us,” Kernella put in.

  “I do not ask for it,” the tutor said wretchedly. “I was tested and proved unworthy of the trust invested in me. Everyone should spit upon my memory. Yet, in these past few days I have suffered much.”

  “Join the club!” Bufus snapped. “You haven’t got a clue what we’ve been through!”

  “I am not excusing myself,” Master Gibble said. “What I did was indefensible, yet never in my life had I been so afraid as when I looked into the eyes of that owl. I would have confessed anything. The power of the Hill was in them.”

  “It’s that power we’ve been fighting ever since,” Gamaliel told him. “Yes, the High Lady. And we’ve got to keep on fighting. You just run off and annoy some more squirrels. We have to be somewhere.”

  Master Gibble regarded him with wonder. “Can this be the same tomfool child who fainted the first time he tried to change into a mouse?” he murmured. “The boy with the untidiest wergle pouch I ever saw? Was that only mere days ago?”

  “Wergling happens on the inside as well,” Gamaliel said softly.

  With a curt nod of goodbye, he began walking deeper into the forest. Kernella and Bufus followed.

  “See you, No-nose,” the Doolan boy jeered.

  “Don’t talk to him,” Kernella scolded.

  In mournful silence, Terser Gibble watched them venture farther into the darkening shadows. His eyes blinked and he jerked his head in
consternation. He despised his new life. It was desperate and lonely and terrifying. Seeing those children again reminded him how much better it had been before and he longed to remain in their company. He knew he could never redeem himself but if they would only let him tag along, he would be incredibly grateful.

  “Wait!” he called out suddenly.

  Only Bufus paused and turned around.

  “What?” he shouted back.

  Master Gibble reached out his long knobbly hands to them but even then his old pride caught in his throat and he couldn’t bring himself to beg. Instead, he cast around and his eyes lighted upon his stolen hoard.

  “Won’t you stop to eat?” he asked, snatching a hazelnut from the ground. “Surely there is time for that?”

  Gamaliel and Kernella halted. Bufus didn’t wait to be asked twice; he was already haring back.

  “I’m as hungry as an Umbelnapper!” he exclaimed, sinking his teeth into one of the proffered nuts. “But don’t think this makes us pals or anything. You’re a still a filthy traitor.”

  “The hazel is the ancient tree of wisdom,” Master Gibble said, with a hint of his former lecturing manner as he passed the nuts around. “May we all be granted that. I confess mine has suffered lapses of late.”

  The children ate quickly. The nuts were stale but, to their famished appetites, tasted delicious. There was not enough to satisfy them completely, but the gnawing emptiness in their stomachs was placated for the time being.

  “Thank you,” Gamaliel told Master Gibble when the last mouthful had disappeared. “Now we really have to be on our way.”

  “Where are you going?” the tutor asked anxiously.

  “That’s our business!” Kernella answered, although she had no idea herself.

  “Could … May I accompany you?”

  Gamaliel shook his head. “We don’t need you,” he said, remembering Gwyddion had asked the same.

  “Quite so. …” Master Gibble began in a sorrowful whimper and he finally choked back his pride. “Yet … yet I need you. Please don’t leave me behind—please.”

  He began to cry. It was a desolate blubbering and, once it had started, it all came flooding out. The former Great Grand Wergle Master slumped to the forest floor, wailing uncontrollably. Bufus was glad the long nose with all its tiny nostrils had been cut off. There would have been snot everywhere otherwise.