9. A Couple of Nasty Surprises on the Way to Castle Death

Xar woke very early the next morning, his right arm aching and burning. He shook Wish awake, and within seconds of opening her eyes, her heart was beating as quick and panicked as that of a small forest creature who knows it is about to be attacked. There was a coldness in the air that they both remembered from before, a chill that sank into the bones and froze the blood and smudged the thoughts, and the hair on Wish’s head rose up with electric, fizzing energy.

For the smell was familiar too: a stinking reek of decaying cat and corpses’ breath and burning hair, with a sulfurous kick of rotten eggs… A smell that brought Xar out in a frightened sweat, for it was the smell of WITCHES.

All around them the animals were waking into instant, terrified alarm, their fur bristling around their necks in ruffs, and the sprites flew shaking up into the air, burning bright with fear, drawing their wands, sharp as thorns, reaching into their spell bags…

Wish felt for the Enchanted Sword, but to her horror she found that for some reason she couldn’t take it out of the scabbard. It was stuck fast.

She could hear her own breath.

There was something under the bridge…

She had a glimpse from between the boards of something dark and feathery, moving slowly, nauseously, greasily beneath them.

“Ruuuuuuuunnnnnnnnn!!!!” yelled Wish at the top of her voice, as with a high unearthly wail…

SLLLLLICCCCCCCCCE!

Three great talons came up from below, piercing right through the planks of the bridge a couple of yards back from where they were standing.

Wish and Bodkin and Xar ran for their lives, alongside the snowcats, the wolves, and the werewolf, along the length of the Sweet Track, with the sprites and Caliburn flying terrified above, and Crusher stumbling to his feet and splashing noisily through the bog, following them all.

Wish looked over her shoulder as the snowcats ran farther, farther along the bridge across the marshes. There were the woods, dark in the distance. There was the broken bridge. There was the place where they had camped. There was the spot where Wish had seen the Witch’s talons, but there was nothing to be seen of those talons now… Where had the Witch gone?

They ran on, on, on, along the Sweet Track, until the woods were just a distant smudge on the horizon, and the snowcats were so tired that their weary paws moved slower, slower, and… slower… still, until they limped and lumbered into a panting walk.

“I think,” puffed Caliburn, “that we’re safe now. That Witch would only have been able to attack us because the explosion yesterday may have broken the Magic that protects the bridge at that particular point.”

“Why couldn’t I draw the Enchanted Sword?” said Wish, puzzled and shaken. “It wouldn’t come out, however hard I pulled it, but it’s coming out really easily now…”

Sure enough, now they were out of danger, she had taken the sword out of the scabbard with one light touch.

“I always said that sword was a bit wayward,” said Caliburn nervously. “It has too much of a mind of its own.”

They all stopped to examine the sword.

“That’s odd…” said Bodkin, noticing something for the first time. “The writing on the blade looks different.”

“It must have gotten scratched or worn away at some point,” said Wish.

It was an unfortunate scratch. For somewhere since their last adventure a deep scrape on the blade had changed the inscription from Once there were Witches… but I killed them to Once there were Wishes… but I killed them.

It was a much gloomier message somehow, the idea of “wishes” being buried, and particularly gloomy when one of your party is actually called “Wish.”

“It’s just a scratch,” said Wish, firmly putting the sword back in the scabbard. “It was an accident. It doesn’t mean anything.”

They kept on walking, trying not to see this as a bad omen, and to put as much distance as possible between themselves and that Witch attack.

But it was only much, much later in the day that Wish’s heart began to beat a little slower again.

That little incident made the spell-raiding band somewhat uneasy, as you can imagine.

But you can’t stay frightened forever.

And over the next few days, there was absolutely not a hint of a Witch, or even a Grindylow or a Greenteeth, only curlews and kingfishers, lapwings and snipe, wheeling and calling and singing over the bog.

They got back into a happier rhythm, walking across the Sweet Track, across the endless marshes, and when they stopped for a rest, Caliburn would give them Magic lessons sitting on the bridge, their legs swinging.

For Xar, the lessons were based around patience, calmness, not losing his temper when he practiced the spells. This was particularly important because Xar was working with his father’s staff rather than his own one, which had been left behind in the Wizard fort when Xar was taken to Gormincrag. Encanzo’s staff was not supposed to be used by beginners, particularly those who have a Witch-stain, so things often went wrong.

For instance, Xar helpfully tried to make Caliburn’s feathers grow back, because the old bird had lost so many from the sheer worry of being Xar’s advisor. He pointed his father’s staff, as calmly as possible… and the feathers went on growing and growing and growing, until Caliburn had a tail as long as a peacock’s, that trailed over the edge of the bridge and into the bog below. Squeezjoos and the hairy fairies were in fits of giggles. It took a couple of hours of concentrated spellwork for Ariel and the sprites to get the feathers to grow small again, and two days later, Caliburn still had an amusingly fluffy bottom.

Caliburn was a dignified bird, so he got very cross if he caught the hairy fairies pointing and laughing at it.

With Wish, Caliburn concentrated on things that were easiest for her first, to build up her confidence. Wish found things made out of iron the simplest to move, so Caliburn had her pushing up her eyepatch a little, and practicing with her pins, making them dance, and moving them like little armies, and even getting them to have pin fights with each other.

“I understand things so much better when YOU’RE teaching me, Caliburn, rather than Madam Dreadlock!” said Wish triumphantly. “Madam Dreadlock is just a little too… shouty… and it’s difficult to focus when someone is yelling at you.”

The key from the Punishment Cupboard had decided it was in love with the Enchanted Spoon.

The head of the key formed a mouth, and every now and then it would shout in its enthusiastic, creaky little voice: “Sppooooon!!! Where are yoooooouuuu?” The Enchanted Spoon was a bit frightened of the key and had taken to hiding, because the key kept on wanting to kiss the spoon.

Wish was so delighted with her success in bringing the spoon and the key and the pins to life that she accidentally did the same with Bodkin’s fork, and regrettably that created a love triangle. The fork decided that it was in love with the key, and that the unfortunate spoon was its main rival. So Bodkin would be trying to eat his supper, and the fork would leap heroically out of Bodkin’s hand to pin the Enchanted Spoon to the ground.

Or the spoon would find himself being stalked… and the fork would challenge him to a fight… and the spoon would stick out his chest like a proud swordsman, and the two of them would conduct a complicated spoon-and-fork fight, lunging and parrying and dueling and ambushing each other across the Sweet Track.

Caliburn progressed from lessons on “moving things” into lessons on “magnetism.” The Enchanted Spoon was very patient when Wish gave him many variations of hairstyles made out of pins that she made magnetically attach to his head.

One day, Wish’s hand slipped on her eyepatch and the spell from her Magic eye was a little too strong. It sent the Enchanted Spoon cartwheeling through the air like a spinning spelling staff, pins scattering in all directions, before he landed upside down, stuck fast to the top of Bodkin’s forehead.

And there the spoon stayed, doing a headstand, his handle moving up and down like a kicking leg, as the key cuddled up to him, cooing, “Poooor sppoooon… poooor spooooon…”

This all passed the time very merrily, until after a week or so, they reached the edge of the Witch Mountains, which rose eerily out of the edge of the marshes.

Castle Death was somewhere on the edge of those mountains, but all the paths on the map had petered out, so there was absolutely no sign of how to get to it.

“Whoever lived in Castle Death long ago didn’t want to be found,” explained Caliburn.

“How are we going to find it then?” asked Bodkin, very reasonably. “This mountain range is huge! We could be searching for this castle for the next twelve months!”

They had to leave the Sweet Track to get to the Witch Mountains.

This led to the SECOND bad thing that happened on the way to Castle Death. And it was far worse than the first, even though in a way it solved their problem of how to find the castle.

Camping on the edge of the marshes, Wish was woken early one morning by a cold presence.

She tried to draw the Enchanted Sword… and for some wayward reason of its own, once again it would not budge, however hard she pulled it.

Crusher reached out his giant hand to protect Wish, the snowcats pounced… too late.

“My spoon!” cried Wish in horror. “He’s GONE!!!! Something’s taken my spoon!”

“What do you think it was?” asked Bodkin. “Was it a Witch? Was it a ghost? Was it a Grindylow?”

But neither Wish nor Crusher had seen what it was, and there were all sorts of nasty creatures who lived in the Witch Mountains.

“It can’t have been anything magical,” argued Xar. “Magic things are afraid of iron… maybe it was a bear or something?”

They searched and searched, but they could not find the spoon anywhere.

Poor Wish was inconsolable. “I should never have led my spoon into all this danger!” she wept. “He’s going to be so frightened…”

And then, a while later, and a hundred feet or so away from the edge of the campsite, the Enchanted Key gave an excited squeak, and it and the fork and the pins came hopping back to Wish, the key crying in its little creaky voice, “We’ve picked up his trail!”

Wish’s heart leaped, and the little party followed the enchanted things, who hopped purposefully ahead, pausing every now and then to smell some scent that only other enchanted things could detect, that was telling them which way the spoon had gone.

At first, Wish was hopeful that they might find him quite quickly, but minutes turned into hours, and darkness fell, and they still had not found the spoon, and eventually they had to decide to camp for the night and carry on looking for him the next day.

And a brokenhearted Wish had to go to sleep without her spoon.

They didn’t find him the next day either.

Or the next.

“Don’t worry, Wish!” said Xar on the fourth day. “We WILL find him, I promise! Don’t give up hope… I know what it can be like, losing a great companion… We’re constantly losing you, aren’t we Squeezjoos? But we always find you again in the end!”

But each night they had to camp without finding him, it got harder and harder, and Bodkin lay awake by the campfire, looking up at the stars, realizing bleakly that adventures were wonderful and exciting, but the stakes were high and the peril was real.

Even Xar understood that they had to find the spoon before they could start looking for Castle Death.

And though the snowcats’ paws were weary, and Wish cried herself to sleep every night for love of the Enchanted Spoon, they followed the Enchanted Key and Fork deeper and deeper into the Witch Mountains.

When, long ago, the iron Warriors were on the warpath, the Witches retreated farther and farther west, driving the giants out of their homeland of peaceful Gigantica, forcing many of them to wade out to sea along the way of the Giants’ Footsteps, never to be seen again. It was the Droods who struck the final blow against the Witches, ambushing them in their stronghold between the woods and the sea, and getting rid of them entirely. That was when the Kingwitch was defeated and put inside the stone…

After that, the country was ruled by a great Wizard called Pentaglion, but something terrible happened to him, no one quite knew what. It was rumored that if anyone dared enter the ruins of Pentaglion’s castle, Castle Death, a giant of unsurpassable size would take revenge with his very last breath.

The Witch Mountains were built on a scale that was unimaginably huge. Up there, the clouds formed and re-formed and fogs descended with such suddenness that it was hard to tell what was land and what was sky. Wish had a horrible feeling they were being followed, but every time she whirled around there was nothing there. Higher and higher they climbed, and the deer paths teetered over impossible crevasses, and at times turned into rope bridges half smashed out, so that they had to clamber across them on the backs of the snowcats in driving rain.

And then they climbed a peak that looked like it might be any other peak, exhausted, having almost given up hope that they would ever see the spoon again.

And it was there.

Not the spoon.

But Castle Death.

The Enchanted Key and the fork jumped in excitement, the fork pointing all its prongs at the castle, and the key squeaking, “The spoon’s in there! The spoon’s in there!”

“We weren’t looking for the castle but we found it anyway!” said Wish in delight. “Oh, Xar, this is marvelous! We can get back my spoon AND the Giant’s Last Breath all at the same time!”

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” moaned Caliburn. “That’s quite a coincidence. I HATE coincidences… because, are they really coincidences, or did someone or something, really intend them all along?”

But Wish was too thrilled thinking that she might find her spoon again, and Xar was too pleased thinking that they were going to get the first ingredient in his spell, to be anxious that this coincidence was a little suspicious.

They pressed forward, even though the castle was not exactly inviting.

Castle Death was half buried in vegetation, a sad corpse of a building, surrounded by a mass of thorns and briars and treacherous fogs, and with such an ominous feeling of decay about it, that hopeful and determined as they were, it was still hard to resist the urge to run away as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

Crusher’s eyes filled with tears. “The halls of my ancestors…” he whispered. “Ah… I never thought to see such a place…”

This had been the ground of many a battle.

In front of the castle was an extraordinary clatter of rock formations, covered in vegetation. But these weren’t exactly what they at first seemed. As Nighteye slipped on a slimy boulder, Xar looked down, and realized it wasn’t a stone at all, but the hilt of an enormous sword, a sword so huge that it could only have been wielded by a giant, wound around and around with layers of brambles and thick with a cushion of a century of moss.