“Malcolm — can you see the guard tower?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, indeed I can. I eat many carrots. Carrots are good for eyesight, you know? I can see quite a long ways on a clea —”
“Malcolm! Just tell me if it’s clear to go or not,” I said.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to get carried away.” He peered out along the walls of Bridewell for a long moment, then turned back to me.
“It’s clear!” he shouted.
I relayed the message to Pervis, and he wasted no time in pushing up the door enough to let me out. It felt wonderful to have the weight off my back. I quickly darted free, then ran for the trees as fast and as low as I could. Malcolm, Beaker, and Murphy zigzagged in front of me, moving from clump to clump in the underbrush.
When we arrived in the grove of trees, I crouched low and took out my spyglass, aiming it at the walls of Bridewell. There on the closest tower stood an ogre, staring out into the Dark Hills. As I watched, another ogre arrived at the tower and looked toward the grove of trees. I stayed very still until the two ogres began to talk. Then I looked back at the trapdoor I’d been freed of.
Pervis had yet to arrive, so I waited, whispering in the trees.
“Have you seen anyone else out here?” I asked Malcolm and Beaker.
“No,” Beaker reported. “But Ander has been keeping us busy on the watch. We all smelled something rotten when those creatures took over Bridewell. And it was very strange how Bridewell emptied out. We keep a close eye on the walled city. It seems to be a place where a great many important things take place.”
There was a nervous pause from the animals, and then Malcolm added something more.
“Things aren’t as they used to be in the forest, Alexa. Things are … well, they’re different. You’ll see.”
I asked him what he meant, but he wouldn’t tell me anything else. My thoughts drifted to Armon, my father, Warvold, Nicolas — everything was coming unraveled. It seemed so many of the people I loved were in grave danger, and I wondered how things could ever be put back together again.
The door tipped open slightly, and I knew that Pervis had arrived with Yipes at the top of the ladder. Peering through my spyglass I saw with some relief that the two ogres were arguing, pointing into the Dark Hills and pushing at each other.
“Go, Malcolm! Now!”
Malcolm was momentarily stunned and darted around in circles in the trees. Then he found his bearings and hopped quickly toward the door where Pervis and Yipes lay hidden.
The door flew open, and the cage was set outside in the open. Then Pervis emerged, and the door disappeared from sight, back into its resting place on the ground. Pervis took hold of the cage and started running across the open toward the trees with Malcolm leading the way. It was a mighty task for a small man like Pervis, but he managed to run quite fast with his arms wrapped around the cage.
I looked into my spyglass again and watched as the ogres continued to look out into the Dark Hills. One of them turned toward the courtyard, and the other crept down the side of the tower back into Bridewell. The remaining ogre turned then, looked directly at me, then scanned the forest to my right.
When I pulled the spyglass down to see where Pervis and Yipes were, I couldn’t find them.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Down here!” answered Murphy. He was scampering down the line of trees to where Pervis had hidden in the low bushes.
“Good work, Alexa,” said Pervis. We were all safe in the grove, and we carefully moved farther back into the trees, where we sat in a circle.
“It feels so good to sit down and rest,” I said, fully exhausted.
“I can’t tell you how much I would like to stand up,” said Yipes. “They only let me out of here to go to the bathroom, and I haven’t done that in quite a while.”
I smiled as Pervis took the cage off into the trees where the two of them would figure out some way for Yipes to relieve himself.
In the morning light, I remembered how much I loved the sound of wind through the trees. I laid back and closed my eyes, and I was comforted by the sound of a million tiny leaves dancing on a summer morning.
As the world spun out of control all around me, I drifted into a deep sleep and dreamed of animals and giants. And I heard the voice of Elyon through the wind.
I am sorry, Alexa. Your father’s time has come. He will leave the land of the living before the sun rises twice more.
I woke with a scream and found that things were not as I’d left them.
PART 2
CHAPTER 13
THE LESSON IN
THE LEAF
Yipes was sitting in the cage, which was next to me, rubbing his head with one hand. When I’d awoken, it had frightened him into leaping up and banging his little head. It took me a moment to shake away the sleepiness and remember where I was.
“That must have been some dream,” said Yipes. “I’m not sure I want to hear about it.”
“Where has everyone gone?” I asked, startled to find only Yipes there in the grove with me. It was warmer now, but there was a lot of shade thrown from the trees above, and I couldn’t be sure how long I’d slept or if I’d slept at all.
“Pervis didn’t want to wake you. He’s gone to find your father.”
“What about the rest?”
“I don’t know,” said Yipes. “The animals have all scattered — including Murphy — which seems a bit strange. I think they’re watching for Grindall, but I can’t understand them so I’m not sure. They’re around here somewhere.”
I stood in the grove of trees and took the Jocasta’s leather bag in my hand. I wanted to remove it and bury it deep in the ground so I wouldn’t have to listen to it.
“I don’t want this terrible Jocasta anymore!” I yelled. “I’m hearing things I don’t want to hear, things I hope are not true.”
Yipes took his hand away from his head and folded his hands together, rubbing his thumbs back and forth in his lap. He was sitting cross-legged, but it was such a small cage that he still had to turn his head down to fit inside. I stood up and turned away from him. Through the trees and way off in the distance, I could see the walls of Bridewell, cold and alone, empty but for Grindall and his ogres — and maybe my own father, alone and searching for me in vain.
“I used to love Bridewell,” I said, the late-morning breeze lifting my hair in little waves. “When my father and I would go there — when I was younger — there was nothing I loved more than the excitement and the mystery of my summers. To explore Renny Lodge and walk down all the cobbled streets pretending I was on special assignment from Warvold himself — some secret task he’d asked me to do — those times were the heartbeat of my childhood. I would imagine that Pervis or Grayson or Ganesh were spies and I’d been sent to uncover them. But there was something special about those times, because while I enjoyed my fun, there was no real danger.” I paused, frightened by my own words. Somehow saying them made me even more aware that those carefree days were gone, replaced by something almost too real, too dangerous.
A wayward leaf fell from a tree far above, dangled on the air, then landed at my feet. I picked it up.
“It’s summertime, Yipes. Leaves shouldn’t fall in summertime. This one’s gone old before its time.”
I took the leaf over to the cage that held Yipes and poked the stem through so that it stood like a flower.
“Bridewell is taken, and The Land of Elyon is failing,” I said. “I feel so lost, Yipes. I want to go home and find things as they used to be. I want to visit Bridewell and explore within the safety of its walls for as long as I please. I want this adventure to be over.”
The wind turned up and blew the leaf back and forth against the cage, but it didn’t escape the trap I’d put it in.
“You’re growing up, Alexa, and I’m afraid there’s no turning back the clock,” Yipes told me gently. “I remember when I was a boy, all I wanted to do was grow up and get away into the wild. But the
re came a time when I wished I could be a boy again, that I could turn the world back into a simple place.”
He took the stem of the leaf between his finger and thumb and twirled it, looking at it in a way I didn’t understand.
“We can’t go back, Alexa,” he said. “We can’t go back once we’ve started growing up, and the world can’t be made simple again.”
Yipes let the leaf go, pushing it through a hole in the cage. The wind came up and carried it across the grove, where it skidded on the ground and bounced on the breeze out of sight.
“There is something we can do,” Yipes continued. “We can reclaim this place for good — we can restore it to what it once was. And then maybe the places of your past will feel something like they used to.”
Yipes was right. I knew I couldn’t go back, and I knew it was entirely up to me to defeat the terrible evil that had entered our world. But why did my father have to die as part of Elyon’s plan? I tried to put the idea out of my mind, but it wouldn’t go away.
“A single leaf, fallen before its time,” said Yipes. “I wonder what can be learned from a leaf like that, one that will be brown and dead in a day or a week as all its friends stay green and true in the trees above.”
“I don’t see a lesson there, Yipes. I only see the two of us, lost and alone, with a task beyond our ability before us.”
Yipes stared off in the direction where the leaf had blown away. He thought for a moment, then kept on with his prodding.
“You’re not looking hard enough.”
I thought more of the leaf that had danced away to its death, where it would crumble and decay into the earth, no one to care about it or notice it had gone. I was too tired to think, and all I really wanted to do was go home and sleep for days and days.
“Here’s what I think,” Yipes said, aware from the look on my face that I was unlikely to offer much in the way of an answer. “That thing, that tiny part of The Land of Elyon, is gone but not entirely forgotten. Elyon had his reason for making it fall into our lap, just as he had his reason for sending you and me on this journey. Sometimes we see something as plain as a dying leaf and our hearts grow sad, but we must always hold true and fight on, Alexa. Whatever happens to us, we will not be forgotten in the end. He will remember us.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I’d heard just moments ago, that my father wouldn’t live much longer, that he would join the leaf before too long. And yet Yipes’s words did comfort me a little. Even if this adventure were to take my life and that of my father, we would not be forgotten or left behind. Somehow I began to think better of the leaf. Maybe in death it would find something more than we could imagine.
“What shall we do?” I asked Yipes, thinking I’d had enough of mulling over the questions of this life and the next. “I can’t leave you here by yourself, but we really must be getting on. Where on earth has Murphy gone off to?”
“I think we’ll have to wait here,” Yipes told me, “at least until Murphy shows up again. You look like you haven’t slept in days, and this is the safest place I can think of to take some time to regain your strength. That little nap you took won’t be enough to get you all the way to the Tenth City.”
I protested and argued for a while, but I was awfully tired. Sitting there in the grove as the noonday sun hovered overhead, I began to feel sleepy.
“I’ll just lie here for a moment,” I said, and I reclined right next to the cage, my head resting on my pack. We talked some more in the soft heat of the day. The sound of Yipes’s words and the trees swaying overhead began to garble together until I could no longer stay awake. And then I fell into a long, deep sleep.
“Alexa — wake up.”
I lurched forward and groaned awake, my body surprisingly sore from the hard ground beneath me. It was still light out, but there was now a coolness in the air around me.
“Now that was a nap,” said Yipes, smiling from inside his little cage.
I rubbed my eyes and yawned, wondering how much of the day I’d slept away.
“Is it almost evening?” I asked.
“Not quite. It’s morning, Alexa. I kept thinking you would wake up, but it remained warm last night and you kept right on sleeping.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “I can’t have slept all day and night, can I?”
Yipes grinned at me, and I realized I really had slept that long. I must have been even more exhausted than I’d thought.
“Yipes, we have to be moving along,” I said, gathering my pack and making ready to go. “I know it’s just the two of us, but we can’t waste any more time here in the trees. I’ll have to drag you along until we find our way to the forest council.”
“Are you sure there are only the two of us?” asked Yipes.
“What do you mean? Where’s Murphy?”
Yipes put his finger to his lips and became very still. Then he whispered, “Listen.”
All I could hear was the rustling of the leaves in the trees. But Yipes had grown up in these mountains. He could keenly sense people and animals approaching. The first discernable sound that I heard, besides the wind in the trees, was very clear — a shrill, loud noise in the distance. I looked up.
“Squire!” I said. We hadn’t seen her in a long while, and I welcomed her presence. She circled high in the air but did not descend, which got me to wondering what she might be seeing from the sky. How I wished I could see with her eyes and know all the secrets of The Land of Elyon so easily.
“Why doesn’t she come down to us?” I asked. “I think she would find it quite interesting to see you behind those little bars.”
Yipes was listening carefully, his head turned to one side.
“She’s here to warn us,” he said. “Danger is near.”
This was not what I was hoping to hear. Caught alone and defenseless with a very small man trapped in a cage was about as helpless a situation as I could imagine.
“I can’t leave you again, Yipes,” I said. I looked all around for a place to hide the cage, but the best I could do was drag it between two trees that grew together at the bottom and branched out. We huddled in the grass as I peered through the V at the center of the two trees, keeping my head low so I wouldn’t be seen.
We waited and listened until finally I began to hear something new in the distance — something large. Whatever it was, it was moving slowly, lumbering along, breaking twigs underfoot as it went. Could it be an ogre? Or maybe it was Ander, the giant grizzly bear, come to free Yipes from his cage. As I stared out into the grove of trees, I saw something unexpected. It was Murphy, scampering to and fro, yelping at the top of his lungs over the lumbering sound coming from somewhere behind him.
“Alexa? Yipes?” he called. “Where have you gone? Come out if you can hear me!” Malcolm came bounding up behind Murphy, and the two of them circled and sniffed where we had been.
I whispered as loudly as I could, “Murphy — we’re over here. Where have you been?”
Murphy and Malcolm hopped and darted in our direction. Then Murphy came up the tree to the V where I looked out and sat right in front of my face.
“Oh, I do love surprises, don’t you?” he said.
The heavy sound of something approaching grew closer, louder. I thought I saw something in the trees moving toward us.
“Only a moment more,” said Murphy, “and I do believe you’ll both be very surprised.”
I was just about to scold Murphy for leaving us to wonder what might be coming … but just at that moment Armon came into view, his giant shoulders so high up in the air, his arms pushing away limbs of trees as though they were toothpicks. I was overjoyed at the sight of him.
“Armon!” I ran from behind the trees into the open space of the grove and stood before him, but instead of embracing me he moved aside, and I saw an even greater surprise. Behind him was Warvold, looking very excited to see me.
I ran to Warvold and threw myself into him. Armon put his giant hand atop my head and scattered
my hair from side to side. I couldn’t imagine how, but we’d found our way back to one another.
When I looked over my shoulder from my embrace with Warvold, I saw that Armon had gone to the trees I’d hidden behind. He peered into the V, put his whole arm in between, and pulled out the cage with Yipes trapped inside. He then took two giant strides into the grove and set down the cage between us where we all stood staring. Warvold knelt down next to the cage and peered inside.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” he said to Yipes. “It looks as though you’ve gotten yourself into quite a bit of trouble in my absence.”
The two of them looked at each other with great joy, old friends finally back together again.
“We might be wise to leave him in the cage,” said Armon. “He’s easier to look after this way.”
Yipes only smiled, overcome with happiness at this reunion.
“Then again, he can be quite useful at times. I suppose we ought to let him out,” said Armon.
He reached down and put his fingers into some of the holes in the cage. Then, with no effort at all, he pulled his hands apart and the cage split open like an old burlap sack. Out hopped Yipes.
He kept on with his hopping as he went around our circle, touching a sleeve or receiving an embrace. Then the reason for his strange behavior became apparent as he darted off into the woods looking for a place he could call a bathroom.
“I don’t understand, Warvold,” I said. “How did you find us?”
Warvold started the story and then had to begin again when Yipes returned (looking very relieved, I might add). It would seem that Armon had thought the Warwick Beacon might make it back around to Lathbury while we were busy rescuing Yipes. And so, after eluding the black swarm, he had spent the night hours running to the cliffs, right to the same place where we had left Renny. Down the rope he’d gone, through the mist, looking out along the water for the Warwick Beacon all that next day and night. Finally, a few hours ago, the ship had shown itself on the horizon, the winds having carried it around the far side of The Land of Elyon while I slept. The only stop the ship had made was at Castalia, where Balmoral had gone back to his people.