Frogkisser!

  All the other witches scattered, shouting and screaming.

  “Duel! A duel!”

  Anya chose that moment to spring up and sprint for the closest gap in the stones, the precious bottle of witches’ tears hugged to her chest. As she ran, she heard a hissing behind her, like the sound of iron being quenched by a smith, only much, much louder—and, in counterpoint to that, a noise like hail falling on a tiled roof, rat-a-tat-tat.

  She didn’t dare look to see what was making these sounds, but raced down the hill, zigzagging in case one of the witches threw a potion at her, or even just a rock. The noises behind her changed, the hissing suddenly replaced by a great boom, accompanied by a blast of hot air that hit Anya and helped her along her way. Presuming it had cooled from its point of origin it must have been very hot indeed back there. Behind it came a sound like dozens of animals screaming, but not any animals Anya could recognize.

  She ran faster, scrambling over the low stone wall at the foot of the hill that marked the orchard’s boundary. Only when she was under the shade of the plum trees did she slow down a little and chance a look back.

  Coils of black, red, orange, and green smoke were rising up from Brokenmouth Hill, and there were flashes of flame between the stones. Anya saw witches running down the slope, but they weren’t chasing her—they were fleeing whatever was happening in the stone circle. One witch fell over and was helped up by two others, but they didn’t stop; they ran on again.

  Anya ran again too, weaving between the trees, her heart pounding and breath coming in gasps. She knew that even though she’d escaped the witches, Duke Rikard was still coming in his bone ship, and he would scour the countryside looking for her. He would summon ravens and weaselfolk and bandits and assassins.

  The carpet had landed in the tenth row of the orchard from the stone wall. Anya had counted on the way out, and she counted now on the way in. Bursting past the ninth row, she skidded to a stop, and looked to the left and right, expecting to see the carpet and her friends.

  But there was no sign of the rich red-and-blue carpet.

  Or of Ardent, Smoothie, Shrub, and Prince Denholm.

  Either she’d counted wrong, or they’d disappeared.

  Frantically, Anya ran to the next alley and looked up and down, then the next and the next. She ran back again in case she’d overshot, all the way to the low stone wall. Beyond that, the plumes of multicolored smoke rising from the hill were extending into huge billows, accompanied by distant explosions and strange shrieking or zinging noises. She saw no more witches outside the stone circle.

  Anya sprinted back through the trees, hitting her head every now and again on a low-hanging plum, counting aloud as she ran.

  “Ten!” she said at the tenth row. The princess was really beginning to panic. Rikard was getting closer with every minute she wasted looking and she was beginning to fear she would never find the carpet.

  If she couldn’t, she had no hope of escape.

  Ardent!” she screamed at the top of her voice. “Ardent!”

  “What?” asked a sleepy dog somewhere to Anya’s right.

  “Ardent! Where are you?”

  A pile of grass under a nearby tree moved, and Ardent’s snout emerged, followed by the rest of him. He loped over to Anya and licked her hand. Several other lumps rose in the cut grass and proved themselves to be Smoothie and Shrub.

  “Thought we’d better hide ourselves and the c-c-carpet,” said Ardent, trying and failing to conceal a very big yawn. “Tanitha taught us ‘surprise a superior enemy from hiding’ and I thought if it’s witches, they’d be superior enemies—”

  Anya crouched and hugged him as best she could with the bottle of tears between them.

  “Good, great, excellent idea,” she babbled. “But we have to get out of here. We have to fly in the carpet again—”

  “I’m not going back in that,” complained Shrub. “I got so cold I couldn’t even think, let alone wriggle my claws, and I—”

  “We have to,” Anya insisted. “Duke Rikard is coming in a bone ship, one that flies, and he’ll be here soon. He might already be ordering his minions here as well. Get the carpet out while I look at the map.”

  “I’m not going to get—”

  “You promised your mother!” interrupted Anya. She set the bottle of tears down and hastily unfolded the handkerchief map. “We’ll ask the carpet to fly slower. Now, it was twenty leagues southeast from the Wizard’s place to here, and it’s twelve leagues south from here to New Yarrow—that’s too far. And we can’t just fly into the city anyway. Shrub, I need your knowledge now. Where can we fly to that’s this side of the city? Somewhere safe?”

  “I don’t know,” said Shrub mulishly. He blinked his eyes several times and pushed some fallen plums around with his blunt head.

  “Think!” Anya urged.

  “I suppose there’s the Moon,” Shrub said.

  “What?” asked Anya. She looked up at the sky, as if either the silver or the blue moon might suddenly have appeared and be hanging low and reachable above them.

  “It’s an inn,” Shrub explained. “On the road to New Yarrow, by the river. A couple of leagues this side. Thieves and pirates use it.”

  “Like Bert’s robbers? Good ones?”

  “Nah,” said Shrub.

  “It’s no use if they’re ordinary ones,” said Anya. “They’ll just steal from us. Or even kill us.”

  “Not if you know the passwords. They’re guild thieves. And the river pirates are what d’ye call it? Fellow travelers or something. Got rules.”

  “Do you know the passwords?”

  “Might do,” acknowledged Shrub.

  “Do you know the passwords?” shouted Anya.

  “All right, no need to shout,” said Shrub. “I know some. Enough so they’ll leave us alone.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Ardent.

  “Course I’m sure,” said Shrub.

  “That’s not a good place,” said Smoothie, her eyes narrowed. “Too many evildoers go there. One day we otters will clean it out.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Shrub protested.

  “It’ll have to do,” Anya concluded. “It’s a couple of leagues this side of the city?”

  “I reckon,” said Shrub.

  “The carpet can probably fly that far. Oh, I wish I knew for sure. We’ll have to ask it to land a bit short to be on the safe side. Come on!”

  Smoothie had dragged the carpet out while they were talking, and was now brushing leaves off it. Anya joined her, trying to be both quick and careful. She didn’t want to upset the carpet. Even as she swept busily, she couldn’t help but glance up every minute or so, looking for signs of the Duke’s bone ship speeding to the hill, to catch a princess and undoubtedly kill her.

  As they lay down on the carpet, Anya did see it. The shadow of the ship almost passed over them as it flew over the orchard, its feather wings outstretched. The princess jumped as she saw it, then settled back down.

  “Quick!” she said. “Ardent, talk to the carpet!”

  “Pathadwanimithochozkal, prepare for flight!”

  The end of the carpet snapped up and over, and within two seconds everyone was rolled up tight, though not without protests from Shrub.

  “What do I tell it now?” asked Ardent nervously.

  “I’ll do it,” said Anya. She took a deep breath to collect her thoughts, after being badly rattled from the sight of the bone ship. The Duke was so close …

  “Oh Great and Magnificent Carpet Pathidwanimithochozkal,” she said. “Please fly us a little more slowly and very safely and … and not too high off the ground to a safe concealed landing place this side of the inn with the sign of the moon on the Yarrow River near New Yarrow, thank you very much.”

  Nothing happened. The carpet didn’t move.

  “You said the c-c-carpet’s name wrong,” said Ardent.

  “What?” shrieked Anya. She thought about what she’d said. Instantly the carpet’s name became a
ll mixed up in her head. And there was a noise outside—was it footsteps? Was the Duke walking towards them right now, while she was helplessly trussed up inside a carpet?

  “You say it, then!”

  Ardent barked once happily, and repeated Anya’s instructions, word for word, except he got the carpet’s name right. He really did have an excellent memory when he put his mind to it.

  In response, the carpet took off.

  If it was going slower than before, Anya didn’t notice. As the rug reared back and shot vertically into the air, she screamed, Smoothie screamed, and Shrub screamed. Even Denholm, who had been uncharacteristically silent, joined in with a rapid series of croaks that were probably the equivalent of a scream.

  The vertical flight didn’t last very long, a much shorter time than on the previous flight. The carpet leveled out, and though the airstream coming through was still cold, it was weaker than it had been before. But even though this was more comfortable, it worried Anya. What if the Duke had seen them and was giving chase in his flying ship? With the carpet going slower, he might be able to catch them.

  Pressed tight in the embrace of wool, she had no way of knowing what was happening. There was also the possibility that the distances on the handkerchief map might be wrong, or she’d calculated the combined distances incorrectly and the carpet would stop flying somewhere short of their destination.

  Death at the Duke’s hand, or death by falling.

  Anya shut her eyes and tried to think of nice things. But try as she might, she kept seeing the Duke standing in his ghastly ship of bone. Gotfried had been right all along. The white study must have had hidden doors, and behind them Rikard had been stripping birds of their feathers, collecting their bones, building his horrible craft with sorcery …

  Ardent said something. Anya shuffled her head around to get her ear pointed at him.

  “What was that?”

  “Inn … something—mumble—food,” said Ardent.

  “You had three breakfasts!” shouted Anya.

  “Just … something … keep … going,” retorted Ardent.

  “Lots of fish in the river,” said Smoothie. Her higher-pitched voice was easier to hear, and her head was closer to Anya’s than Ardent’s. “Hard to catch with this misshapen body, though.”

  “It won’t be too long before I can change you back!” shouted Anya encouragingly. She didn’t add, “I hope.” Now that she had been reminded of the Duke’s powers and his sheer horribleness, she felt rather less confident about her plan to steal the remaining ingredients from the League of Right-Minded Sorcerers.

  The carpet pitched downwards and everyone screamed again, except for Ardent, who barked with apparent enjoyment. It was the bark he used for chasing rabbits. He barked again as the carpet leveled out, then again, this time with surprise, as the carpet splashed down into water.

  Cool water gushed in both ends of the rolled-up carpet. Anya flailed her arms, trying to get the heavy material off herself so she could get out. She pushed her face hard against the woolen fabric, desperate to keep her nose and mouth out of the water, to get one last breath before she was submerged.

  The carpet unrolled. Anya lurched upwards, ready to swim for some distant surface, and found herself suddenly standing in only six inches of water. The carpet had landed in the broad shallows of a pebbly beach, on a bend in the river. The deeper, fast-running water of the Yarrow was a good thirty feet away.

  Smoothie put her head in the water, held it there for several seconds, then came up smiling and shook herself, sending droplets of water over everyone. Not that it mattered, because they were already completely sodden.

  Ardent picked up Denholm’s cage and carried it ashore, shaking himself as he went. Shrub went after him, grumbling under his breath. Anya checked her possessions, picked up her precious bottle of witches’ tears, and followed them.

  The beach was quite secluded. Following the tight bend in the river for about fifty yards, it was twenty yards wide and sheltered on the land side by high riverbanks, showing the erosion of spring floods. A tangle of willows grew along the banks. Though stunted, they provided excellent cover. The questers could be seen by anyone on the river, but only if they came around the bend, and they would hear the splash of oars or the flap of a sail in time to hide among the willows. It was a very good landing spot.

  “We’d better get the carpet in,” said Anya. She carefully surveyed the river, but there were only some diving birds in sight. No boats, and no ravens. She looked up as well, and was relieved to see nothing but clear blue sky with a few long wisps of cloud, and the sun beginning its descent towards the west. “Where do you think the inn is?”

  “Not sure,” said Shrub. He peered around. One eye looked right and one looked left, then they swiveled back together again. “I remember willows along the bank, but they started farther upstream. It could be just around the bend.”

  Ardent was listening, his ears pricked.

  “I c-c-can hear something from that direction,” he said. “When the wind c-c-omes, it c-c-arries the sound. Every now and then, a kind of tock sound, wood hitting wood.”

  “Must be the inn,” said Shrub. “They play bowls on the lawn next to the river. And bet on it. All day.”

  “Bowls?” asked Anya. “What’s bowls?”

  “It’s a game where you throw wooden balls towards another wooden ball,” Shrub explained. “They hit each other, knock them out of place. That’s what Ardent can hear.”

  Anya listened, but she couldn’t hear anything except the burble of the river.

  “How far away?” she asked Ardent.

  He thought carefully, ears slowly moving, catching the sound.

  “Two or three hundred paces. Around the bend, beyond the willow border.”

  “We should take care to be quiet ourselves. Come on. Let’s get the carpet in.”

  It took all of them to drag the carpet out of the water. Heavy even before its immersion, it weighted twice as much wet.

  “Don’t rip it,” warned Anya as Ardent took a new and firmer hold with his mouth. “We’ll need it later.”

  She thought for a moment, then added, “Because it is such a wonderful and amazing carpet. Truly we are very lucky to have … uh … Pathadwanimithochozkal in our company.”

  “You got the name right!” exclaimed Ardent, letting go to talk, and the sudden drop of his corner nearly made Anya’s arms get torn out. Because of this, she wasn’t sure whether she imagined it or not, but the carpet had seemed to wriggle in acknowledgement of her words.

  They laid the carpet out to dry in a small hollow up against the high riverbank, under the trailing willow branches, where it would hopefully stay hidden. Anya draped her cloak over a long branch in the hope that it might dry too. She took stock of the situation.

  “I have the ex-druid’s blood and the witches’ tears,” she said, mostly to get it clear to herself, though everyone else was listening. “Now, here’s my plan. We take a look at this inn to see if it’s a safe place to hide tonight. Then we need to sneak into the city and the League of Right-Minded Sorcerers’ meetinghouse, which is a fortress. We’ll steal some three-day-old hail and cockatrice feathers, get back here, and fly on the carpet to Trallonia Forest—”

  Somehow saying it out loud didn’t make it seem easier. In fact, it made it all sound much more difficult. But Anya couldn’t think of any other plan. And they’d made it this far.

  “The forest?” asked Shrub. “Why go back there?”

  “So I can borrow your mother’s cooking pot and stirring stick to make the lip balm,” Anya replied. She’d noted Martha’s bronze pot and the blackened branch, which she felt must be lightning-struck oak, given that Martha was the sister of one druid and the ex-wife of another. It was doubtless part of the reason her soup was so good.

  She continued, “We can get beeswax from someone there, I’m sure; many of the foresters keep bees. Anyway, I’ll make the lip balm there. We’ll send messages to gather Bert’s
robbers and the dwarves, and when they arrive we’ll carry out a surprise attack on Trallonia Castle and … uh … defeat the Duke.”

  “What about all his weaselfolk and assassins?” asked Ardent, who had been trained in tactics.

  “We’ll try to capture the weaselfolk. I’ll, uh … ”

  Anya paused, a grimace forming on her face. She willed herself to assume a normal expression and continued.

  “I’ll … I’ll kiss them with my lip balm on, and they’ll change back and run away. Some of them might even come over to us, like Smoothie, because they want to change back.”

  “Weasels like blood,” said Smoothie doubtfully. “Being bigger and stronger suited most of the ones in the group I was with.”

  “We might need more help than the robbers and dwarves,” said Ardent dubiously. “Weren’t we going to go to Denholm’s kingdom and get their knights and soldiers?”

  “Change of plan,” said Anya briskly. She looked at Denholm in his cage. The frog looked quite unwell, now a much paler shade of green. “I’m worried that something’s wrong with Prince Denholm. He needs to be changed back as soon as possible. And with Moatie … with Moatie gone, anything could happen to Morven. The Duke is clearly getting more powerful every day, and he might decide he doesn’t need even a puppet queen in Trallonia. So we have to act fast. Besides, I don’t think Denholm’s father, the king of Gornish, has that many soldiers anyway. We’ll have to make do with whoever we can … um … enlist to the cause. The foresters might join me, and some of the druids perhaps … ”

  “We’ll have to survive getting into the meetinghouse and out again in the first place,” Shrub pointed out glumly. “At least they can’t turn me into anything else. It’ll just be death, I suppose. Or torture … that’s always a possibility with that lot—”

  “Stop it!” interrupted Anya. “Let’s just focus on what we want to happen. Now, you said there was supposed to be a way into the meetinghouse through the sewers. Who could help us find that?”

  “A senior thief,” said Shrub. “There’s probably one hanging about the Sign of the Moon. They’d want payment. More than you’ve got, I expect.”