The first training exercise for the Great Orienteering Challenge took place the following Saturday morning. Madoc, who was in charge on the basis that he taught geography and therefore knew about maps, gathered the Year Sevens in the Great Hall after breakfast to give them their instructions.
‘Today you will be playing Capture the Flag,’ he told them. ‘There are three flags planted in three different locations in the surrounding countryside. You will be divided into three groups, which in turn will be divided into teams, each of which will be given the coordinates of one of the flags. The first team in each group to bring back their flag are the winners. Are there any questions?’
‘What are coordinates, sir?’ asked Duffy.
Madoc, who had been practising map coordinates with his students since the beginning of the year, began to feel apprehensive.
‘Does anyone remember?’ he asked.
Jesse’s hand shot up.
‘A map coordinate refers to the latitude and longitude of a position,’ he recited. ‘Longitude lines are perpendicular to the equator, and latitude lines are parallel. A geographic coordinate system enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols.’
‘Excellent, Jesse! I’m glad someone in class was listening.’
Jesse blushed under the unaccustomed praise. Madoc, feeling a little more hopeful, told the students to pick up their Orienteering Survival Packs on their way out.
‘You’ll find maps and compasses, water and packed lunches. Orange waterproofs are hanging by the door, and are to be worn at all times. I repeat, at all times. Even if it isn’t raining.’
‘In case we get lost,’ Jenny explained to Alice, who was looking mystified. ‘So they can find us easily before we die of exposure.’
‘People do get lost, all the time,’ Samira added. ‘And last year someone broke a leg. They had to send a helicopter. Orienteering’s a lot harder than you think.’
Alice, alarmed, glanced at Jesse. This time, when she caught his eye, he didn’t look away, but shook his head with a little smile, like he was telling her to ignore Jenny and Samira, and that everything would be fine. Alice smiled back, relieved. Fergus, watching, felt a stab of jealousy.
*
The sun was out again after a week of rain, and a playful breeze scooted high clouds across a pale blue sky. Despite his misgivings about having Fergus on the team, Jesse was in high spirits. In the week since the incident in the music tower, he had thought a lot about what to do about today’s training exercise. His first idea had been to beg the major to put him and Fergus on different teams, but he was almost one hundred per cent sure that wouldn’t work. Instead, he had emailed Jared (the least annoying of his brothers) for advice. Jared’s answer had been clear.
‘Be the boss, little brother. Take control.’
It was what the knights in his stories would have done too.
The moment Madoc handed out the coordinates, Jesse became bossier than he had ever dreamed he could be. He would plan their route, he declared – the others just needed to follow him. He studied the map in silence while they waited, then nodded and put it in his pocket. There was an obvious route, he said, which the other groups were sure to take. He, Jesse, could do better.
Ready, steady, go! As soon as Madoc declared the exercise started, Jesse hurried Alice and Fergus through the griffin gates ahead of all the other groups. Then, as soon as they came to the first hairpin bend, he pulled them behind a rhododendron bush.
‘What?’ Fergus protested. ‘That hurt!’
They crept after him through the trees, a thick carpet of pine needles muffling their footsteps.
A little further into the undergrowth, they came to a path, just wide enough for one, winding through a pine wood. Jesse checked off landmarks as they went – an abandoned cottage, a pond, the brook that fed it. They were walking north-by-north-east, exactly as he’d planned. He felt a rush of exhilaration. Maps for Jesse held the same power as stories held for Alice. He read them the way most people read books, seeing an actual landscape where his classmates saw only lines on paper. He loved the way maps changed the way he looked at the world around him. As he searched for clues to confirm their location, he saw so much that he would otherwise have missed – a tiny bird’s nest, a badger sett, a caterpillar …
He held up his hand to stop the others.
‘What now?’
‘Up there, on that branch!’
Alice gasped, delighted.
Tufty ears and eyes like black marbles, a plume of a tail and a nut-brown body, four small paws clinging to the trunk of a pine tree, head pointing down towards them, nose and whiskers twitching …
The prettiest thing she had ever seen.
‘A red squirrel,’ Jesse whispered. ‘You don’t get them in the south. Hardly ever, anyway, but they still exist in Scotland.’
A memory stirred, deep inside Alice. Not an actual squirrel, but a picture book, read with her mother in the garden at Cherry Grange, and Mum saying we used to have a pair in the garden when I was a little girl in Poland, they were so tame they used to steal things from the table when we ate outside. Alice had eaten every single meal outside for weeks after that in the hope of a red squirrel of her own. For a fleeting moment, her mother was there in the woods with them, dancing on the grass in the garden, her long dark hair lifted in the breeze, laughing and singing dance with me, little pigeon.
Little pigeon had been her special name for Alice.
Alice blinked. When she looked again, her mother was gone, but the squirrel was still there, staring straight at her with its marble eyes, and it was like her mother had sent it.
For the first time since smashing her phone, Alice smiled.
Fergus felt another stab of jealousy.
Like a lot of very clever people, Fergus saw nothing extraordinary in his own gifts. Instead, though he would never have admitted it, he envied Jesse what he didn’t have himself – his good looks, his gentle kindness, his physical strength. He envied him his family, the serene parents who always seemed so happy together. He even envied Jesse the merciless, teasing brothers, who all descended on the school in a loud noisy group every Visitors’ Day, forever hugging and cuffing their youngest sibling with real affection.
The only family Fergus had was his parents, and they never came to Visitors’ Day, in case they saw each other.
He’d dealt with his envy in the past by laughing at Jesse for his stuffiness over school rules, but today was different. Today, Captain Fussypants was behaving like someone in charge, and Alice couldn’t stop smiling at him.
Alice was Fergus’s friend. She had no business smiling at Jesse like that.
‘I thought we were in a hurry?’ he said, loudly.
The squirrel, startled, pounced. For a few seconds, as it flew across the path high above them, they saw it outlined in full flight against a patch of sky. Then it landed and disappeared, a few swaying branches the only sign that it had ever been there. Still Alice stood, rooted to the spot, hoping for another glimpse, while Jesse waited and clever Fergus marched on ahead, blood boiling, ready to do something really, really stupid.
*
The path widened as they came out of the wood, tracing a wide loop around a lush green meadow dotted with yellow flowers. Jesse stopped to show them the map.
‘We follow the path round the meadow,’ he said, ‘then we start to climb – these circular lines close together mean it’s quite a steep hill – and then on the other side there’s a valley, and that is where the flag is.’
‘Says who?’ asked Fergus.
Jesse frowned. ‘Says the map.’
A little voice at the back of his mind told Fergus he was being an idiot, but he didn’t listen.
‘I think, if you want to save time, you should just walk across the meadow,’ he announced. ‘I think the map’s wrong.’
‘The map is never wrong!’ Jesse protested.
But there was no reasoning with Fergus in this sort of mood.
‘Let’s have a race!’ he shouted, and took off at a sprint across the meadow.
‘Fergus, don’t!’ Jesse shouted. ‘Fergus, come back!’
But Fergus was already running.
He got halfway across the meadow before his feet sank straight into the ground.
‘What’s happening?’ cried Alice.
‘It’s a bog,’ Jesse said, grimly. ‘And he’s stuck.’
‘A bog?’
‘Like a swamp, without the crocodiles. People drown in them all the time.’
Alice took off at a run.
‘Come back! Alice! Oh, for … ALICE, WAIT!’
‘We have to rescue him!’ she shouted, and sank, without warning, up to her knees in mud.
WHOOSH! Jesse, running up behind her, lifted her clear and threw her, then himself, to the ground.
‘We have to distribute our weight, so there’s less chance of sinking,’ he explained. ‘Otherwise we’ll all get stuck, and then …’
‘It’s over my knees!’ wailed Fergus, flailing around.
‘Just stop moving!’ Jesse shouted. ‘I’m coming!’
‘And then what?’ asked Alice.
‘Then, I guess, unless they find us – we all die.
Now, can you drag yourself back to the path? Please? While I help Fergus?’
Flat on her belly, she slithered across the stinking bog, freezing mud seeping in through the collar and cuffs of her weatherproof clothing, until she felt dry ground beneath her. Breathlessly, she watched as Jesse slithered towards Fergus – as Fergus stopped thrashing about and listened – started to slowly, slowly raise one leg clear, and take a step backwards, and then another leg – as he fell flat, like Jesse, and with Jesse dragged himself back to the path, where he collapsed, panting, beside her.
‘And that,’ said Jesse, ‘is why you need to do exactly what I say.’