On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  A Brief Introduction to the World of Aerwiar

  A Slightly Less Brief Introduction to the Land of Skree

  An Introduction to the Igiby Cottage (Very Brief)

  One • The Carriage Comes, the Carriage Black

  Two • Nuggets, Hammers, and Totatoes

  Three • Thwaps in a Sack

  Four • A Stranger Named Esben

  Five • The Bookseller, the Sock Man, and the Glipwood Township

  Six • A Bard at Dunn’s Green

  Seven • Barefoot and Beggarly

  Eight • Two Thrown Stones

  Nine • The Glipper Trail

  Ten • Leeli and the Dragon Song

  Eleven • A Crow for the Carriage

  Twelve • Not the Same as Ships and Sharks

  Thirteen • A Song for the Shining Isle

  Fourteen • Secrets and Cheesy Chowder

  Fifteen • Two Dreams and a Nightmare

  Sixteen • In Books and Crannies

  Seventeen • The Journal of Bonifer Squoon

  Eighteen • Stumbling onto a Secret

  Nineteen • Pain and Woe and Sorrow

  Twenty • Into the Manor

  Twenty-One • The Horned Hounds

  Twenty-Two • The Catacombs Below

  Twenty-Three • The Groaning Ghost of Brimney Stupe

  Twenty-Four • The Road Home

  Twenty-Five • In the Hall of General Khrak

  Twenty-Six • Trouble at the Bookstore

  Twenty-Seven • A Trap for the Igibys

  Twenty-Eight • Into the Forest

  Twenty-Nine • Cave Blats and Quill Diggles

  Thirty • The Untimely Death of Vop

  Thirty-One • Khrak’s Medallion

  Thirty-Two • The Making of a Maggotloaf

  Thirty-Three • Bridges and Boughs

  Thirty-Four • Peet’s Castle

  Thirty-Five • Fire and Fangs

  Thirty-Six • Shadowed Steed and Shadowed Tack and Shadowed Driver Driving

  Thirty-Seven • Talons and a Sling

  Thirty-Eight • An Unpleasant Plan

  Thirty-Nine • Buzzard Willie’s Gift

  Forty • Betrayal

  Forty-One • A Rumble and a Screech

  Forty-Two • Good-bye, Iggyfings

  Forty-Three • A Ghost in the Wind

  Forty-Four • Following Podo

  Forty-Five • A Long Night

  Forty-Six • Water from the First Well

  Forty-Seven • Old Wounds

  Forty-Eight • Shelter

  Forty-Nine • The Jewels of Anniera

  Fifty • The Throne Wardens

  Fifty-One • A Letter from Home

  Appendices

  Permission Forms

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Copyright

  For my brother

  A Brief Introduction to the World of Aerwiar

  The old stories tell that when the first person woke up on the first morning in the world where this tale takes place, he yawned, stretched, and said to the first thing he saw, “Well, here we are.” The man’s name was Dwayne, and the first thing he saw was a rock. Next to the rock, though, was a woman named Gladys, whom he would learn to get along with very well. In the many ages that followed, that first sentence was taught to children and their children’s children and their children’s parents’ cousins and so on until, quite by accident, all speaking creatures referred to the world around them as Aerwiar.

  On Aerwiar there were two main continents divided by one main ocean called the Dark Sea of Darkness. By the Fourth Epoch, the harsh land east of the sea had come to be known as Dang and has little to do with this tale (except for the Great Evil that came to exist there and waged a Great War on pretty much everybody).

  That evil was a nameless evil, an evil whose name was Gnag the Nameless. He ruled from high atop the Killridge Mountains in the Castle Throg, and of all the things Gnag despised in Aerwiar, he most hated the High King Wingfeather of the Isle of Anniera. For some reason no one could guess, Gnag and his wretched hordes had marched westward and gobbled up the Shining Isle of Anniera, where fell the good king, his house, and his noble people.

  Unsatisfied, the Nameless Evil (named Gnag) built a fleet that bore his monstrous army westward across the Dark Sea of Darkness to the continent of Skree. And he ravaged that wide land, nine long years before our adventure begins.

  A Slightly Less Brief Introduction to the Land of Skree

  The whole land of Skree was green and flat. Except for the Stony Mountains in the north, which weren’t flat at all. Nor were they green. They were rather white from all the snow, though if the snow melted, something green might eventually grow there.

  Ah, but farther south, the Plains of Palen Jabh-J covered the rest of Skree with their rolling (and decidedly green) grasslands. Except, of course, for Glipwood Forest. Just south of the plains, the Linnard Woodlands rolled off the edges of all maps, except, one would suppose, those maps made by whatever people lived in those far lands.

  But the people who made their homes on the plains, at the edges of the forest, high in the mountains, and along the great River Blapp, lived in a state of lasting, glorious peace. That is, except for the aforementioned Great War, which they lost quite pitifully and which destroyed life as they knew it.

  In the nine years after Skree’s king and all his lords—in fact, everyone with a claim to the throne—had been executed, the people of Skree had learned to survive under the occupation of the Fangs of Dang. The Fangs walked about like humans, and in fact they looked exactly like humans, except for the greenish scales that covered their bodies and the lizard-like snout and the two long, venomous fangs that jutted downward from their snarling mouths. Also, they had tails. Since Gnag the Nameless had conquered the free lands of Skree, the Fangs had occupied all the towns, exacting taxes and being nasty to the free Skreeans. Oh, yes, the people of Skree were quite free, as long as they were in their homes by midnight. And as long as they bore no weapons, and they didn’t complain when their fellow Skreeans were occasionally taken away across the sea, never to be seen again. But other than the cruel Fangs and the constant threat of death and torture, there wasn’t much to fear in Skree. Except in the Stony Mountains where hairy bomnubbles crept across the land with their long teeth and hungry bellies, and across the frozen wastes of the Ice Prairies where those few who made their home there battled snickbuzzards daily. Farther south, the Plains of Palen Jabh-J were as safe as they were beautiful, except for the ratbadgers that slithered through the tall grass (a farmer from South Torrboro claimed to have seen one as big as a young meep, which is about the size of a full-grown chorkney, an animal that stands about as high as a flabbit).

  Before roaring over Fingap Falls, the River Blapp was wide and peaceful, clear as a spring, and the fish to be caught there were both delicious and docile, except for the many fish that were poisonous to the touch, and the daggerfish that were known to leap into boats and impale the stoutest fisherman.

  An Introduction to the Igiby Cottage (Very Brief)

  Just outside the town of Glipwood, perched near the edge of the cliffs above the Dark Sea, sat a little cottage where lived the Igiby family. The cottage was rather plain, except for how comfortable it was, and how nicely it had been built, and how neatly it was kept in spite of the three children who lived there, and except for the love that glowed from it like firelight from its windows at night.

  As for the Igiby family?

  Well, except for the way th
ey always sat late into the night beside the hearth telling stories, and when they sang in the garden while they gathered the harvest, and when the grandfather, Podo Helmer, sat on the porch blowing smoke rings, and except for all the good, warm things that filled their days there like cider in a mug on a winter night, they were quite miserable.

  Quite miserable indeed, in that land where walked the Fangs of Dang.

  1

  The Carriage Comes, the Carriage Black

  Janner Igiby lay trembling in his bed with his eyes shut tight, listening to the dreadful sound of the Black Carriage rattling along in the moonlight. His younger brother Tink was snoring in the bunk above him, and he could tell from his little sister Leeli’s breathing that she was asleep too. Janner dared to open his eyes and saw the moon, as white as a skull, grinning down on him through the window. As hard as he tried not to think about it, the nursery rhyme that had terrified children in the land of Skree for years sang in his head, and he lay there in the pale moonlight, his lips barely moving.

  Lo, beyond the River Blapp

  The Carriage comes, the Carriage Black

  By shadowed steed with shadowed tack

  And shadowed driver driving

  Child, pray the Maker let you sleep

  When comes the Carriage down your street

  Lest all your dreams be dreams of teeth

  And Carriages arriving

  To wrest you from your berth and bower

  In deepest night and darkest hour

  Across the sea to frozen tower

  Where Gnag the Nameless pounds you

  At Castle Throg across the span,

  A world away from kith and clan

  You’ll weep at how your woes began

  The night the shadows bound you

  Away, beyond the River Blapp,

  The Carriage came, the Carriage Black

  By shadowed steed with shadowed tack

  The night the Carriage found you

  It’s no wonder that Janner had a hard time sleeping once he heard the faint thud of hooves and the jangle of chains. He could see in his mind the forms of the crows circling the Carriage and perched atop it, hear the croaking beaks and the flapping of black wings. He told himself that the sounds were only his imagination. But he knew that somewhere in the countryside that very night, the Black Carriage would stop at some poor soul’s house, and the children there would be taken away, never to be seen again.

  Only last week he had overheard his mother crying about the taking of a girl from Torrboro. Sara Cobbler was the same age as Janner, and he remembered meeting her once when her family had passed through Glipwood. But now she was gone forever. One night she lay in bed just as he was now. She had probably kissed her parents good night and said a prayer. And the Black Carriage had come for her.

  Had she been awake?

  Did she hear the snort of the black horses outside her window or see the steam rising from their nostrils?

  Did the Fangs of Dang tie her up?

  Had she struggled when they put her into the Carriage, as if she were being fed into the mouth of a monster?

  Whatever she had done, it was useless. She had been ripped away from her family, and that was the end of it. Sara’s parents had held a funeral wake for her. Being carried off by the Black Carriage was like dying. It could happen to anyone, at any time, and there was nothing to be done about it but to hope the Carriage kept moving when it rattled down your lane.

  The rattles and clinks and hoofbeats echoed through the night. Was the Black Carriage getting closer? Would it make the turn up the lane to the Igiby cottage? Janner prayed to the Maker that it would not.

  Nugget, Leeli’s dog, perked his head up at the foot of her bed and growled at the night beyond the window. Janner saw a crow alight on a bony branch outlined by the moon. Janner trembled, gripping his quilt and pulling it up to his chin. The crow turned its head and seemed to peer into Janner’s window, sneering at the boy whose wide eyes reflected back the moonlight. Janner lay there in terror, wishing he could sink deeper into his bed where the crow’s black eyes couldn’t see him. But the bird flapped away. The moon clouded over, and the thump-thump of hoofbeats and the creak-rattle of the Carriage faded, faded, finally into silence.

  Janner realized that he’d been holding his breath, and he let it out slowly. He heard Nugget’s tail thump against the wall and felt much less alone knowing that the little dog was awake with him. Soon he was fast asleep, dreaming troubled dreams.

  2

  Nuggets, Hammers, and Totatoes

  In the morning the dreams were gone.

  The sun was shining, the cool of morning was losing ground to a hot summer sun, and Janner was imagining that he could fly. He was watching the dragonflies float across the pasture, putting his mind into a dragonfly’s mind, to see what it saw and feel what it felt. He imagined the slight turn of a wing that sent it zipping across a meadow, whipping left and right, lifting on the wind up over the treetops, or scaling down the craggy drop to the Dark Sea. He imagined that if he were a dragonfly, he would smile while he flew (though he wasn’t sure that dragonflies could smile), because he wouldn’t have to worry about the ground tripping him up. It seemed to Janner that in the last few months he had lost control of his limbs; his fingers were longer, his feet were bigger, and his mother had recently said that he was all elbows and knees.

  Janner reached into his pocket and, looking around to be sure no one was watching, pulled out a folded piece of old paper. His stomach fluttered as it had when he found the paper the week before while sweeping his mother’s bedroom. He unfolded it now to brood upon a sketch of a boy standing at the prow of a small sailboat. The boy had dark hair and gangly limbs and looked undeniably like Janner. Big billowy clouds whitened the sky, and the spray of the waves burst up in splashes that looked so real and wet that it seemed to Janner that if he touched them, he would smear the picture. Beneath the drawing was written “My twelfth birthday. Two hours alone on the open sea, and the best day of my life so far.”

  There was no name on the picture, but Janner knew in his heart that the boy was his father.

  No one ever talked of his father—not his mother, nor his grandfather; Janner knew little about him. But seeing this picture was like opening a window on a dark place deep inside. It confirmed his suspicion that there was more to life than living and dying in the Glipwood Township. Janner had never even seen a boat up close. He had watched them from the cliffs, specks cutting slow paths like ribbons through the distant waves, sailed by a crew on some adventurous errand or other. He imagined himself on his own ship, feeling the wind and the spray like the boy in the picture—

  Janner snapped out of his daydream to find himself leaning on a pitchfork, up to his knees in itchy hay. Instead of feeling the ocean wind, he faced a cloud of chaff and dust shaken by Danny the carthorse, impatiently harnessed to a wagon half full of hay waiting to be carried across the field to the barn. Janner had been working since sunrise and had made three trips already, anxious to finish his chores.

  Today was Dragon Day Festival and the only day of the year that Janner was glad to be in the quiet town of Glipwood.

  The whole village waited all year for Dragon Day, when all of Skree seemed to descend on Glipwood. There would be games and food, strange-looking people from faraway cities, and the dragons themselves rising up out of the Dark Sea of Darkness.

  As far as he knew, Janner had never left Glipwood in all his twelve years, so the festival was the closest he got to seeing the rest of the world—and a good reason to be quick about finishing up with the hay. He wiped sweat from his forehead and looked wistfully over his shoulder at a dragonfly zipping away. Then he dug into the straw with a grunt and pitched it into the wagon. As he did so, his foot caught on a stone hidden beneath the hay and he lurched forward, toppling face first into a neat, fresh pile of Danny the carthorse’s nuggets.

  Janner leapt to his feet, sputtering and wiping his face with fistfuls of hay. Danny
the carthorse looked at him, snorted, and tore up a mouthful of grass while Janner ran, quick as the dragonfly, to the water trough to clean his face.

  Across the field and past the fence, Janner’s brother Tink (whose given name was Kalmar) straddled the cottage roof, two nails between his lips and a hammer in one hand. Tink was trying to repair a loose shingle but having a hard time of it, so violent was his trembling. When he was younger, just riding on his grandfather’s shoulders made him nervous, and though he laughed, his eyes were always wide with fear until he was placed firmly on the ground again.

  Podo, his grandfather, always assigned the reparation of the roof to Tink because he thought it would do him good to face his fear. But Tink, now eleven years old, was still as frightened as ever. Shaking like a leaf, he removed a nail from between his lips and hammered it into the roof as timidly as if he were hammering his own face. He looked out across the field to see Janner trip headlong into the water trough, and he wished he were finished with his chores so he could play a game of Zibzy1 with his big brother at the Dragon Day games.

  Tink was useless on the roof, but when his feet were on the solid ground he could run like a stag.

  With the first tap of the hammer, the nail slipped from between Tink’s fingers. He tried to catch it, missed, and threw himself down, hugging both sides of the hot roof. Nail and hammer clattered down the roof in opposite directions and over the edge. Tink groaned because it meant having to inch his way over the edge and down the ladder again. It also meant that it would be that much longer before they were able to go into town for the festival.

  “Lose something?”

  Tink’s fear turned to grumpiness. “Just throw it back up, will you?”

  Tink heard laughter, then the hammer flew up, end over end, and landed a few feet from him. He gathered his courage to reach near the edge and grabbed the hammer with a trembling hand just before it slid back down.

  “Thanks, Leeli,” he called, trying to sound a lot nicer.