The Secret of Dreadwillow Carse Read online

  The Secret of

  Dreadwillow

  Carse

  Brian Farrey

  ALGONQUIN YOUNG READERS 2016

  FOR MY NIECES:

  Never stop asking “why?”

  AND FOR KATE:

  I borrowed your D&D character’s name.

  Hope that’s okay.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin Young Readers

  Chapter One

  THE QUEEN WAS DYING. THIS MUCH WAS CERTAIN.

  Healers from all parts of the Monarchy had gathered in Nine Towers to examine Her Majesty. For weeks, the halls of the royal palace echoed with their discussions. Everyone had a different theory about the nature of the illness that gripped Queen Sula. In the end, they could agree on only these two facts:

  There was no cure.

  A month more was as long as anyone dared hope she would live.

  It was not unusual for monarchs to take ill and die relatively young. It had, in fact, been the case for as long as anyone could remember. But there had always been a plan. When Jeniah, the queen’s daughter, turned eighteen, her mother would abdicate and allow the princess to ascend to the throne. That was how it had always worked, for the nearly one thousand years their family had ruled.

  But Jeniah had just turned twelve. And if the healers were to be believed, she would ascend to power much sooner than planned.

  When word spread of the queen’s fate, Jeniah locked herself in her bedchambers for three days. No one disturbed her. The servants who’d helped raise the young princess left trays of food near her door so she wouldn’t starve. But no one spoke to the heir apparent. It was impossible to understand what the girl felt.

  Jeniah sat in her room, refusing to cry. She braided her long, black hair with green glass beads. She played her recorder, filling the room with a lullaby her mother had taught her. But she would not cry. She knew the tears would come—and that they would be unstoppable—once her mother was truly gone. Knowing death was coming for the queen didn’t make Jeniah sad. She was too terrified to be sad.

  Jeniah knew nothing about being a queen. She had never been permitted in the throne room when her mother held court. “The time will come for all that,” the princess’s caregivers had promised each time Jeniah asked to watch. “Someday.” Everyone had believed Jeniah had six more years to learn.

  But “someday” turned out to be “now.” She wasn’t ready. She was scared she wouldn’t have time. Surely there was much to learn about being a fair and just leader.

  Jeniah had to turn her terror into resolve. She would learn how to be a queen. The time for tears would come. For now, she had to stay strong. She stared in the mirror, shook her finger at her reflection, and reminded herself to be brave.

  So, when the queen knocked softly on Jeniah’s bedroom door at the end of the princess’s third day of seclusion and whispered for her daughter, the young girl answered with squared shoulders and a straight back. “You should be in bed,” she told her mother. Her words sounded braver than she felt. For months, Jeniah had watched her mother’s health dwindle away.

  The woman who stood at her door was barely recognizable as the one who’d raised her. The queen’s illness made her appear much older than she truly was. Her eyes were swollen; her back was hunched. Where mother and daughter once shared smooth, dark skin, the queen’s was now dry and cracked. Despite all that, Jeniah didn’t have to search hard to find the kindness she’d always seen in her mother’s regal face.

  “Come,” the queen said, her voice wavering. “We’re going to the top of Lithe Tower.”

  As she took her mother’s arm, Jeniah’s breath seized. Lithe Tower was the tallest of the castle’s nine monoliths, twice the size of the others. It was the highest point in all the land, with a view reserved for the monarch. The only exception occurred when an heir apparent was escorted there shortly before the start of a new reign.

  This truth—this hard, hard truth—weakened Jeniah’s march up to the tower entrance. Her knees trembled. This is real, she told herself. For the three days she’d locked herself in her room, her mother’s illness had not been real.

  Jeniah and the queen strode arm in arm down a narrow passage made of rough, silver-dappled stone. As they came to a wooden door at the hall’s end, the queen produced a long key. It had teeth in four directions, like a weather vane.

  “Bring the torch,” Queen Sula instructed as the lock on the door clicked open. Jeniah took a torch from the wall. Together, they crossed the door’s threshold. The spiral staircase beyond was so narrow, they had to proceed single file. They climbed and climbed the endless stairs. The princess moved closer to her mother, where the scent of the rose water and mint salve that eased the queen’s pain overpowered the passageway’s musty smell.

  The queen struggled with each step, keeping one hand on the wall. Despite this, Jeniah imagined that the shadows cowered from her mother’s approach the farther up they went.

  As Jeniah’s legs started to ache, the stairs disappeared into an opening in the ceiling. Queen and princess emerged from the dark stairwell onto the very top of Lithe Tower. They stood on a wide, flat stone circle covered by a clear glass dome. When Jeniah moved to the edge and looked down, she could see the eight other cloud-colored spires that made up the rest of Nine Towers forming a circle around Lithe. Not far from the castle gates, a slender dirt road split the countryside on its way to the nearest town, Emberfell.

  “Look around,” the queen said.

  Jeniah stepped back. Nothing blocked her view. The Caprack Mountains on the horizon joined land and sky like jagged gray stitches. That one seam kept the pair united in all directions.

  Her gaze swept down from the skyline. Rolling fields, lush green forests, and verdant farmland rich with golden harvests stretched out from the base of Nine Towers. A twisting river cut a swath through the west lands, looking like liquid fire in the setting sun. As dusk approached, lanterns from a patchwork of towns and villages made a pinprick mosaic of light across the land.

  It was the most beautiful thing Jeniah had ever seen.

  “This is our Monarchy,” Queen Sula said. “It has been a land of peace and prosperity for a thousand years. Your first duty as queen is, and always will be, to protect that.”

  Jeniah nodded. Standing in place, she turned around slowly. She memorized every inch of the land, as if sealing the promise to serve as guardian. As she did, something curious happened. The tiny dots of warm, amber light that marked every village and town for miles flickered and, one by one, turned bright blue. She turned to her mother, eyebrow raised.

  The queen smiled. “Tonight is what the people call Tower Rise. It’s a rare holiday. It occurs only when a new monarch ascends Lithe Tower for the first time.”

  The queen held up her right hand where she wore two identical rings, each with an opal wrapped in silver fili
gree. Only the monarch could wear these. Queen Sula slid one ring from her own finger onto Jeniah’s. “The people know you’re here, watching over them. They know you are no longer merely a princess. You are now Queen Ascendant. This is their tribute.”

  Jeniah closed her fist. The ring hung so loosely on her finger, she was afraid it would slip off. In the distance, the blue lights winked as if the entire Monarchy were showing approval. Jeniah imagined she should have felt honored by the people’s gesture, but instead she felt embarrassed, as if she’d been caught spying. Still, she continued to survey all that would soon be hers to govern. Her eyes fell just east of the river and stopped.

  Between the rushing river and a thriving forest sat a small patch of land, a blemish scarring the middle of the otherwise gorgeous realm. Jeniah had almost missed it. Even now, as she tried to look directly at it, she found it difficult. Almost as if her eyes didn’t want to see it.

  Determined, she moved to a brass spyglass mounted in a Y-shaped stone at the platform’s edge. She trained the glass’s lens on the dark area. Black trees with black branches and black leaves grappled with one another in an eternal choke hold. Shadows seemed drawn to the unsightly region—a serrated slash shaped like the curved blade Cook used to butcher cows. No light could touch it.

  Or maybe light refused to touch it.

  The queen laid a hand on the princess’s shoulder. “Do you know what that is?”

  Jeniah knew. Her heart had told her, the moment her eyes fell on the spot. “Dreadwillow Carse.” The words thrummed on her lips. For as long as Jeniah could remember, the name had only ever lived as a whisper among the royal family’s servants. A footnote in the lectures of her teachers. An oddity—like a treasonous, distant relative—that was never, ever discussed.

  “And what do you know about it?” the queen asked.

  Never, ever discussed, save one fact that had been repeated to her over and over since Jeniah could first talk. “I’m not to go there. Ever.”

  “Very good,” the queen said. “Wherever you go in the Monarchy, you will be welcomed warmly. But you must never set foot in Dreadwillow Carse.”

  Jeniah, who’d never been good at holding in the thoughts that pressed against her insides, asked the necessary question. “Why?”

  The queen stood as tall as her illness would allow. “It is forbidden. The people rely on us to maintain peace and prosperity. And it is written in the oldest books: if any monarch enters Dreadwillow Carse, then the Monarchy will fall.”

  A chill crawled on spider’s legs over Jeniah’s hands. She’d been told before never to enter. She’d never been told the Monarchy was at stake. “Do you understand?” the queen asked.

  Jeniah knew that tone. It meant the queen wasn’t to be questioned. Yet it was a tone that always inspired questions in Jeniah. “But why—?”

  “You can never go to Dreadwillow Carse,” the queen interrupted. And then she repeated, “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mother. I understand.”

  But Jeniah didn’t understand. Each step she took as they descended the crooked stairs fanned the flames of new questions for which she needed answers.

  What was Dreadwillow Carse? How was it possible they did not rule there? And, most important, why would the Monarchy end if she entered the Carse?

  When they returned to the castle halls, the queen’s gait faltered. Jeniah took her mother’s arm and guided her back to her bedchambers.

  “Time is short,” the queen said. “Tomorrow, you will meet with a new tutor. He will teach you what you need to know to rule over your people justly. Listen to everything he says.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  The queen laced her fingers with her daughter’s. “You will make an excellent queen.”

  THAT NIGHT, LYING in bed, Jeniah tried to think about how badly she wanted to make her mother proud by upholding the legacy of benevolence laid out by her ancestors. She tried to think about how the lives and happiness of everyone in the Monarchy depended on her learning to become a fair and just queen. She tried to think about anything and everything that wasn’t Dreadwillow Carse.

  If any monarch enters Dreadwillow Carse, then the Monarchy will fall.

  She failed.

  Chapter Two

  THE QUEEN WAS DYING AND EVERYONE KNEW IT.

  But as usual, nothing had changed.

  Aon Greenlaw sat on a rock at the western border of Emberfell. She stared at her hometown, where revelry filled the streets. Everywhere she looked, people danced and sang merrily to the reels played by the musicians stationed at every corner. Colorful silk banners zigzagged from rooftop to rooftop. Even here, at the farthest edge of town, she could smell the freshly baked cream puffs that the village bakery made only for special occasions.

  Special? Aon thought. It’s not right. This was something Aon thought often. But she only ever thought it. Saying that—or anything like it—would prompt her father to repeat the same thing he always said.

  “The queen wants her people to be happy,” he would say, and then he’d playfully trace a star on her cheek, connecting her freckles with his finger. That was all anyone said when Aon questioned the joy that filled the land. “That’s what every monarch has wanted for a thousand years. It would be disrespectful not to honor their wishes.”

  And although Aon was told this anytime someone died, or poor weather ended a picnic, or she had any reason to possibly be sad, she had a hard time believing that anyone—queen or not—would want people to be happy that she was dying.

  Three days earlier, when she’d first heard of the queen’s illness, Aon had gone to bed. She’d pretended to have the flu, but really, she was sick with grief. The queen had always been good. She didn’t deserve to die. And then there was Princess Jeniah, only a month older than Aon. What would it be like to rule the Monarchy at this age? How must the princess have been feeling?

  But Aon kept these questions to herself. She had no choice. The Monarchy had always been a rich and thriving land and its people a happy and peaceful populace. She’d learned long ago not to express melancholy or even discuss it. To admit to anyone that she was sad about the queen would mean admitting the very worst thing about herself, the thing she never wanted anyone to know.

  That deep, deep down, in ways she couldn’t understand, Aon was broken.

  She wanted to be happy all the time like everyone else. She wanted to give in to bliss and rest in the knowledge that their monarch kept them all safe and prosperous. But while Aon could fool everyone else into thinking she was just like them, she would never be able to fool herself.

  So, all day long, as Emberfell prepared to celebrate Tower Rise, Aon had played her part. She’d thrown herself into the merriment. She’d danced joyously. She’d laughed as her neighbor friends wove her long, blond hair into a braid that circled her head. She’d appeared, for all to see, thoroughly and unquestionably happy. Until at last, as the sun started to set and the excitement in Emberfell hit a fever pitch, she seized her chance and quietly slipped away. She took the western path to the one place where she felt whole and well and normal.

  With her back to the town, Aon took a deep breath and stared into the maw of Dreadwillow Carse.

  In all other directions, the edges of the village gently faded into the picturesque landscapes beyond. Brown earth gave way to green grass and thick trees. The change was so gentle, it was hard to tell where Emberfell ended and the world beyond began.

  But along the west side, which butted up against the black marsh, there was no mistaking where the village stopped. A pronounced dark line marked Emberfell’s border, as if the ground had been scorched by an invisible wall of flame.

  From an early age, all in Emberfell were advised to stay away from the Carse. The warning was scarcely needed. One look into the unforgiving blackness sent unwary travelers scurrying. Most in Emberfell saw the Carse as a blight to be endured.

  Aon saw it as something else: a remedy.

  Clutching a long, unlit cand
le in her sweaty hand, she inched forward. Her toes just grazed the black border. A tingly mix of excitement and fear buzzed through her. The terrifying thrill of standing at the edge of a cliff, the dizziness of climbing the tallest hill, and the pain of a deep wound that felt like it could never be healed all wrestled inside her. And eagerness. Aon also felt eager.

  Everything—the hair on the back of her neck, the knot in the pit of her stomach—begged Aon not to move forward. The Carse had this effect on anyone who passed by. But Aon wasn’t like anyone else. She alone could ignore that feeling. She lit the candle and walked cautiously onto the black ground beyond.

  One . . . two . . . three . . . She counted the steps in her head like always.

  The earth in Dreadwillow Carse gave slightly. The moist soil rushed in to meet her feet and crept up the edges of her boots. She trod softly, fearing her steps would convince the mire to swallow her whole.

  Thirteen . . . fourteen . . . fifteen . . .

  With each step, a weight pulled at Aon’s shoulders, like the heavy wool cerements the people of Emberfell wrapped around the dead. Something slick and thorny took purchase in her chest. The sadness she felt over the queen consumed her, drowning out Emberfell’s raucous celebration in the distance.

  Twenty-one . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-three . . . Aon paused as something slithered at her ankles. A tangle of mirebramble, the carnivorous vines known for pulling anything that moved down into the Carse’s muck, froze near her heels. She pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth impatiently. When she refused to move, the vines slid off in search of other prey. Aon continued.

  Twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . . twenty-six . . . The farthest she’d ever gone before was thirty-two steps. But today she needed to go farther. She needed to.

  Today is the day, she promised herself as she had so many times before. Today I learn what really happened to Mother.

  A hint of something rank—spoiled milk maybe?—hung in the air. Dreadwillow trees lined the path, their branches with teardrop-shaped leaves drooping under the burden of festering, black moss. They brushed Aon’s shoulders as she passed beneath. Each touch sapped her of hope and convinced her she’d never leave.