The Floating Island

  “I’ll bring Saeli,” she said, her words muffled by the covers. “She has a good eye for things that are unusual or out of place.”

  One by one they dropped off to sleep, first Nick, then Clemency, finally Char. Only Ven remained awake, trying to find a comfortable position. Something kept nagging at his mind, as if he were missing an obvious clue, and something kept poking into his hip as well. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out. It was the wooden cube, the puzzle the king had given him.

  He turned over onto his back in the darkness and twisted the puzzle cube, trying to put the pieces of the mystery at the crossroads together in the same manner as he was solving the wooden one. Finally he drifted off, his dreams haunted by clutching hands and ghost wolves that melted in the rain.

  26

  The Puzzle Solved

  IN HIS LAST DREAM BEFORE MORNING VEN DREAMT HE WAS BEING stabbed in the back, first by Whiting, then by each of his housemates in Hare Warren and the people in the Crossroads Inn. One by one his friends lined up and took turns plunging a heavy, dull knife into his lower back, handing the weapon to the next person in line when they had finished.

  When he woke, his back ached terribly. Ven rolled over and discovered he was sleeping on the puzzle box. He groaned, then sat straight up as a thought occurred to him.

  Solving these puzzles teaches me how to think in the right ways, the king had said.

  “Char!” Ven gasped, shaking his roommate awake.

  “Wha—? Huh?” Char mumbled, half asleep still.

  “I need your help,” Ven said, shaking Clemency as well. “And yours—and Saeli’s. You, too, Nick.”

  The injured boy sat up carefully in his bed as the others stretched grumpily. “What kind of help, Ven?” he asked.

  “Solving this puzzle,” Ven said. “Something terrible has been going on for a very long time at the crossroads. We know there is a genuine evil there—not just dogs masquerading as demonic wolves. We know that people have died there, or disappeared, and that something is draining the magic of the place, and the life out of the people who are tied to it. Whatever it is must be something from long ago, so long ago that no one remembers what happened here. And I think it’s a riddle so complex that no one person can figure it out or stop it. If it were, Mrs. Snodgrass would have been able to, or Constable Knapp, or McLean, or even all the king’s men who have investigated the murders but never found the answer. But those are individuals looking at it. We need to look at it as a—”

  “A team?” Clemency interjected excitedly.

  “Well, yes, but I was going to say as a puzzle. If we apply the king’s rules of puzzling to this situation, we may be able to figure out what is going on there.”

  “What are the rules?” Nick asked.

  Ven looked out the window at the sky, which was beginning to turn a lighter shade of blue at the horizon. “The first one is ‘See things as they are, and not as they seem.’ The hardest part of this is that everything at the crossroads seems normal.”

  “All right, then,” said Char, shaking his dark hair roughly into place. “Let’s go have a look at those crossroads in daylight.”

  “How can I help?” Nick asked.

  “Tell us what you saw before the dogs attacked you,” Ven said. “Or what you heard. Have you ever noticed anything strange about the place?”

  Nicholas lay back against the pillows and thought for a moment. “I didn’t see anything—they caught me from behind. But I guess I did hear something strange.”

  “Sort of a weird, windy whine?” Char asked.

  “Yeah,” said Nicholas. “I had heard that many times before—Albert and I heard it especially loud the first night you guys came.”

  “The dogs came right up to the window that night,” Ven said. “I could hear them growling outside, sniffing around. It was like they were looking for me. I even thought I heard my name.”

  “When I heard that sound behind me on the road last night, I about dropped,” Nicholas. “I could hear it get louder as they got closer, and I kept running faster and faster—and then all of a sudden, just after I ran through the crossroads, the noise stopped. Almost like the sound was swallowed.”

  “It did?” said Clemency.

  “Yes. But then something snagged my foot—it almost felt like somebody grabbed me—then the dogs were on me a second later, and that’s all I remember.”

  “There seems to be a place where the wind won’t blow at the crossroads,” said Char. “My kite dives smack for the ground whenever it drifts near there.”

  “That’s a piece of the puzzle, I’m sure,” said Ven. “Thanks, Nick. You’ve been a great help. Get some rest. We’ll come back and tell you what we find.”

  Nick’s eyes were wide and his face pale. “I hope so,” he said uncertainly. “Do be careful, mates.”

  “I’m going to go get Saeli,” said Clemency as they left the beautiful room and headed back into the main part of the inn. “And check in on the girls—Ciara’s watching Mouse Lodge for me, but I imagine they are pretty worried.”

  A chorus of soft whispers and fluttering rose up around Clemency as she headed for the back door.

  “Clem,” Ven said quickly, “McLean suggested that the Spice Folk might be able to act as my eyes—are they willing to come out to the crossroads with us?”

  The inn went suddenly silent.

  “Uh—no,” Clemency said.

  “Hmm. All right,” said Ven. He was disappointed, but not particularly surprised.

  While Clemency went to Mouse Lodge, Ven and Char went to the stables to find tools for their task. They found Cadwalder there, just finishing up the day’s mucking and getting ready to head off for bed.

  “Morning, Cadwalder,” Ven said.

  The tall boy turned around, surprised, and leaned on his rake. “Morning Polypheme, Char.” He looked tired. “What are you doing up so early?”

  “We were wondering if we could borrow some spades,” Char said.

  “Sure,” Cadwalder replied, nodding to the tack room. “There are a couple over there.”

  “Thanks,” said Ven. “We’ll return them when we’re done.”

  “See to it that you do,” said Cadwalder, returning to his chore. “I’ll be asleep.”

  Spades in hand, the boys made their way to the crossroads, where Saeli was standing nervously beside Clem.

  “You all right, Saeli?” Ven asked gently. The small girl nodded, but he could see that she was trembling. “Good. Let us know if you see or notice anything you think might be important.”

  The four children walked slowly to the place where the two roads met, searching the area with their eyes. The morning birdsong was strangely quiet; every now and then a chirp or twitter could be heard in the distance, but the area near the road was silent.

  “I can feel the evil here,” Clemency said, her normally vibrant voice flat and frightened. Ven turned to look at her and saw she was sweating, her rich brown skin dusky.

  “Go back if you need to, Clem,” he said.

  “Not on your life,” the curate-in-training retorted.

  Ven smiled. “Let’s keep together, then.”

  They circled the entire center of the roadway, stepping carefully in and out of road and grass. Finally Saeli looked up with an urgent gleam in her eye. She bent down and plucked what looked like a blade of grass with some tiny pink-white flowers on it, then held it up in front of the others.

  “What is that, Saeli?” Char asked.

  The small girl swallowed hard, then spoke. Her voice came out in a crackling whisper. “Yarrow,” she said. She handed the plant to Ven.

  “What does this mean?” Ven asked.

  Clemency shrugged. “It’s an herb, a fairly common flower. One of the Spice Folk is named Yarrow, and this is her plant. It’s used in medicine to stop bleeding and heal infections, and also as a sign of love.”

  Ven looked across the fields around the road’s edge. “It’s everywhere around here.”

/>   Saeli shook her head. “Not there,” she said in her gravelly whisper.

  She pointed to a spot along the roadway at the edge of the crossroads.

  The four moved slowly closer, and Ven could see that she was right. It was a bulge of dirt beside the actual roadbed where no flowers or even grass grew. There was nothing especially noticeable about the patch, but on closer examination they could see that Saeli was right—there was no sign of the yarrow that dotted the fields elsewhere.

  “Can you bring up flowers here, Saeli?” Clemency asked.

  Saeli closed her eyes and concentrated, her tiny forehead wrinkling deeply.

  All around the road’s edge a tiny explosion of colors appeared as wildflowers of every kind suddenly bloomed in the grass. A thick blanket of color spread over the fields, the green grass turning yellow, white, red, blue, and pink in a heartbeat.

  “The second rule of puzzling—‘Look at the details and the whole picture separately,’” Ven said. “‘You will see two different things.’”

  “Look,” Clemency said, her voice quavering a little.

  Nothing grew in the spot.

  “Oh, dear,” Clemency said. “This is bad.”

  The wildflowers that had surged up from the grass withered and died away.

  “This must be what McLean meant when he said the Spice Folk could be our eyes,” Ven said. “If their magic doesn’t work here, there must be something terribly wrong with the earth.”

  “Well, let’s get digging,” said Char. He started to plant the spade in the dirt when Clemency’s hand shot out and grabbed it.

  “I don’t know if we should,” she said quietly. “The evil here is very great. I don’t know whether we will be able to handle it.”

  “It’s daylight,” Ven said. “Gregory said the evil that was buried here only comes out at night. So we had best get to work.”

  He and Char began to dig while the girls stood back and kept watch for passing carts. Each time a carriage or a farmer’s wagon would approach they would cease their digging, to return immediately to it once they were out of sight.

  As Clemency had predicted, Ven was a natural digger. Char had to quit and rest after an hour or so, and traded places with Clem, but Ven kept on, because it seemed as he dug that the earth moved willingly out of the way. Saeli had coaxed a large bush to grow between the hole and the crossroads so that they wouldn’t be seen. The pile of dirt from his spade soon grew larger than the bush.

  This must be what the Nain who live downworld do, he thought, pleased in spite of the danger of the situation. It’s as if the earth was almost liquid, like swimming through it. No wonder Nain like to tunnel and build roadways, and harvest gems and coal and precious metals. It’s easy for them.

  It was long past noon when his spade finally struck something harder than the clay and rock of the roadway. The sun had turned a darker shade of orange and was hanging in the sky, halfway down the welkin, burning ominously.

  Even in the summer heat, the four children suddenly felt cold.

  Carefully Ven cleared away the dirt. At the bottom of the hole was an intricately carved box, as large as a bench, the many pieces that formed its lid wedged open.

  Resting in it was a pile of bones. The skull grinned up at him lifelessly.

  At first he could only make harsh sounds at the back of his throat. Ven swallowed, his mouth dry.

  “This is a Rover’s box, I think,” he said when he could finally speak. “The king told me about them.”

  “Why is it open?” Char asked, his voice higher than usual.

  Ven shook his head. “I don’t know, but it would seem that because it’s open whatever—whoever—is resting in there is able to get out at night.” He felt his stomach twist into a tight knot. “Gregory said that what was buried here was an old evil, able to suck the very life from this place. I don’t know how this box got opened, but that must be why whatever it is can walk the world at night.”

  Char glanced above him nervously.

  “Speaking of night,” he said, “the sun’s starting to go down.”

  “What are we going to do now?” Clemency asked. “If anything, we may have just made it worse. Now we’ve uncovered the bloody thing, it can get out without any effort.”

  “We have to figure out how to close this box and lock it again,” Ven said, standing and brushing the dirt from his hands. “And quickly.”

  “I can’t even tell how the bloody lid is supposed to fit together in one piece,” said Char. He reached into the hole and pushed two of the sides toward each other, but they turned on an angle and sprang farther apart.

  “If this is a Rover’s box, it’s a puzzle that only the one who made it knows the solution to,” Ven said desperately. “That person is most likely long dead—in fact, I bet that’s him in the box—except for the bones, it’s empty.”

  “And except for that rubble in the bottom,” Clemency said.

  Ven looked more closely. Clem was right—beneath the bones were shreds of rotting cloth, some pebbles, a few broken pieces of iron, and a smooth, thin stone, oddly shaped. Nothing of any apparent value.

  “The king said Rovers store their treasure in these boxes,” Ven said, trying to see around the bones without getting close enough to touch them. “Maybe brigands came upon this Rover while he had it open, killed him, took his stuff, and put him in the box, but couldn’t close it, so they just buried it with the top open. No wonder he’s so nasty—he’s getting revenge at anyone he can catch at the crossroads now. And he’s the only one who could have closed the box, because only the person who made it knows how.”

  “Only the person who made it? Are you sure?” said Clemency, pushing on one side of the lid again, and reeling back when it broke into four separate squares.

  Ven thought hard, trying to remember exactly what the king had said.

  “It would take a puzzler of very great skill, greater than the king’s own, to figure it out,” he said. “Or a very talented thief.”

  The four stopped and looked at each other.

  “I’ll go get her,” Clemency said, starting back toward Mouse Lodge.

  “Wait a minute—I dunno,” said Char doubtfully.

  “That’s who I had in mind,” said Clem.

  “No,” said Char, “I mean I don’t know if we can trust her. I was in a jail cell with her for an afternoon till they separated us, and she picked me clean. I’m lucky I escaped with my underwear. I’d hate to have her do somethin’ stupid.”

  “The king believes that everyone holds a piece of the puzzle that makes up the world,” said Ven. “We need to get this box closed, and I don’t know anyone else who has a chance to figure it out. She was able to solve the practice box without a second thought. Go get her, Clem.”

  Char glowered while they waited, but Ven was too busy watching the sun sink to notice. After some time Clemency returned, Ida following along behind her, an insolent expression on her face.

  “Come on, Ida, hurry up!” Ven called.

  “Keep your knickers on, Polywog,” the girl retorted. She came up to the deep hole and stared down into the bottom of it. “Whoa—bones. I don’t do bones.”

  “You don’t have to touch the bones, ya twit,” said Char nastily. “In fact, we’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t, thank you very much.”

  Clemency gave Char a sharp dig in the ribs. “Don’t you call her names,” she said angrily. “She’s doing us a favor.”

  “Right,” Char mumbled.

  “It’s important we get this closed, Ida,” Ven said to the girl. “And it can only be closed in one way. The Rover’s box is the exception to the last rule of puzzling—there is only one real solution.”

  The thin girl with colorless hair nodded, then climbed down into the hole directly in front of the box. She stood there with her arms folded, studying it silently.

  “How long is this going to take?” Char asked after a long time had passed and Ida hadn’t moved. He was watching the sun slip over
the edge of the world and the sky begin to turn dark.

  Ven shook his head. “As long as it takes, I suppose.”

  “Hope that the daylight holds out that long,” Char replied.

  Finally, just as dusk was setting in, Ida unfolded her arms and took hold of two of the four squares that made up one of the lid pieces. She started moving sides and corners together, fitting each piece into place, over and over, layer by layer, until a solid lid to the box had formed. Then she turned the lid sideways, and started to lower it, in two distinct pieces, onto the top of the box.

  The last sliver of sun disappeared behind a cloud at the horizon. As it did, the thin stone below the bones in the Rover’s box caught the final ray and sparkled in an explosion of a thousand tiny rainbows.

  Ven’s eyes opened wide. It was the same glitter of color he had seen on his first evening in Kingston, from the tower of the Gated City. He stared past Ida, who was nervously watching the darkening sky, into the Rover’s box at the razor-thin stone. In the second when the last ray of sun crossed its surface, a gleaming picture of what looked to be a key appeared with writing below it in a language he had never seen before. The flat surface of the stone glowed with fiery color, then faded immediately to gray again as the light left the sky completely.

  The thin stone faded into the darkness again.

  “Did you see that?” Ven asked excitedly.

  “See what?” demanded Ida, struggling with the lid of the box. The other children shook their heads.

  Inside the Rover’s box, the bones moved.

  Ida gasped.

  The sky darkened eerily and the box began to shake.

  “Ida, hurry!” Clemency choked.

  The wind whipped around the crossroads in a hail of fury, tearing at their clothes and hair. In all places but where the box was, that is—and in that place all was deeply, frighteningly still. A smoky haze rose up from the bottom of the box, thick and blinding.

  Ida set her jaw and gave the lid one more turn, then slammed the top of the box down, locking it with a quick turn of three bands of wood carved into the sides. The rim of the box let loose a puff of gray dust, then the lines separating the top from the bottom disappeared, making it solid with no visible cracks. Ida turned to the others and looked up at them from the depths of the hole, then shuddered.