PathFinder by Angie Sage
Marcia left Septimus working out how to DeFrost the horse and rider and waded through the snow to Way XI, where the useless Seal was hanging from the archway like a mist of shredded paper. She gathered the remnants of the Seal in her hands, held them close to her face and caught echoes of a wild, untutored Magyk and some powerful emotions—fear and anger. Marcia replaced the Seal, and this time she added more than a touch of Darke Magyk. One of the advantages to no longer being ExtraOrdinary Wizard was that Marcia could now use the Darke without compromising the pure Magyk of the Wizard Tower.
On her way back to join Septimus and Tod, Marcia aimed a precise, pointy kick at the third Garmin.
Tod watched the Garmin shatter into a thousand shards of ice and she suddenly remembered something. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! The Drummins! They were here. That’s what I heard first—the Drummins shouting. Then the horse neighing. Oh no . . . are they Frozen too?”
Marcia stopped dead. “Yes,” she said. “They will be.”
Anxiously, Marcia surveyed the snow. “I think there’s one here,” she said, kneeling beside a Drummin-shaped bump. Gingerly she broke through the ice crust on top of the snow and had soon revealed a plaited Drummin beard, ice-hard and glistening white.
“Is it easy to melt things?” Tod asked in a whisper, afraid that any loud sound might make the Drummin fall into a thousand shards of ice, just as the Garmin had.
“Ah, you mean DeFrost,” Septimus said. “Well, it is relatively easy to do a DeFrost, but it is not so easy to do a safe one. DeFrosting can be very dangerous for the Frozen. However, it is possible to make it safer by using the person’s name. Who is this one, Marcia?”
Very gently brushing the snow off the Drummin, Marcia revealed a pair of gingery eyebrows. “It’s Fabius,” she said. “Hmm . . . this is tricky, Septimus. He’s Frozen midstride . . . standing on only one leg. Horribly easy to knock him over.”
Septimus squatted down beside Marcia. He placed both hands on Fabius to steady him and whispered, “Fabius Drummin. DeFrost.”
Tod saw a warm, reddish glow emanating from Septimus’s hands. She could feel the Magykal heat in the air as a thin stream of orangey-red mist wrapped itself around Fabius. There was a faint, crackling whisper, like ice on a frozen pond when the sun begins to shine upon it, then Fabius groaned and fell over into the snow. Tod waited for the awful sound of Fabius splintering.
“You can open your eyes, Tod,” Septimus said with a smile in his voice. “See the puddle of water beneath him? He’s DeFrosted.”
Fabius Drummin groaned and began to shiver. “I’ll take him upstairs to the Fire Pit,” Tod offered.
“Good thinking,” said Septimus, eyeing a nearby Drummin-shaped mound. “And with any luck, there’ll be another one in a minute.”
Three DeFrosted Drummins were sitting by their kitchen fire wrapped in blankets when Tod hurried back down to the Hub to watch the DeFrosting of the horse and rider. She found Septimus and Marcia silently sizing up the problem. Tod could tell that this was going to be tough. Septimus must DeFrost both at once, because not only was the horse very delicately balanced on its back legs but the rider looked as though she were about to fall off. And once they were DeFrosted Septimus would have to jump out of the way fast.
Tod waded through the slush and joined the two Wizards, who were looking thoughtfully up at their project. Suddenly Septimus said, “It’s her. It must be.”
“It’s who?” asked Marcia.
“The Snow Princess that Jenna and I took all the way home in the Dragon Boat in the summer. The one that Jen still moans about whenever I see her.”
Marcia had heard about this from her new stepdaughter. “Oh, that Snow Princess,” she said with a smile. “How bizarre.”
“Yes, it is.” Septimus frowned up at the rider, trying to make out her features beneath their glaze of ice.
“You are sure it is her?” Marcia asked. “Because if we use the wrong name . . .”
“I know, I know,” Septimus said snappily. “It’s even more dangerous with the wrong name. I am ninety-nine percent sure.” He turned to Marcia. “It’s a risk worth taking.”
“It’s your call, Septimus,” said Marcia.
“Yes. I know. I shall use her name. It is her. There’s something about the expression—kind of annoyed, but charming even so . . . We’ll do this together?”
Marcia nodded.
Septimus placed his hands on the horse’s raised hooves. Marcia placed hers on the rider’s back to stop her from falling off. Fascinated, Tod watched the two Wizards unfocus their eyes and go somewhere deep inside themselves. In complete synchronization, she saw them take a long, deep breath in and then slowly let it out. She saw a warm glow spread from their hands, spreading across the ice, melting it as it went, revealing the damp fur of the rider’s jacket, the horn of the horse’s hooves. The melt spread fast, the ice crackled and began to fall, then suddenly the white-haired girl tumbled from the horse and landed with a splat in the slush below. In a moment she was on her feet. She spun around, saw Marcia staring at her in surprise and snatched a short, shimmering blue stick from a holster on her belt.
Septimus could do nothing—he was still deep in Magyk, DeFrosting the horse.
“Haii, Magus! Haii, haii!” the girl yelled, advancing on Marcia, stabbing the stick forward like a dagger. Marcia retreated but the stick jabbed her in the shoulder. There was a hissssss, a smell of burning wool and she went staggering backward. Marcia was unwilling to use Magyk on someone so recently DeFrosted. Hands up, Marcia backed away. “Denna!” she said soothingly. “Denna, Driffa. Denna.”
Surprised to hear her own name and language spoken, the girl stopped and stared at Marcia. Taking advantage of the lull, Tod waded in and grabbed the stick. To her shock it was red-hot. She threw it down, sending it sizzling into the watery slush. Princess Driffa was not pleased. She snatched up her stick, and yelling, “Haii! Haii!” she advanced this time on Tod, stabbing the red-tipped stick at her face. Tod ducked and hurled herself at Driffa’s white boots. It was a fine tackle. At the precise moment that Princess Driffa crashed face-first into a pile of slush, Septimus finished DeFrosting her horse. A wild neigh filled the Hub, two great hooves thudded down to the ground and everyone was covered in gritty, ice-cold water.
A sudden exclamation came from the foot of the stairs. “What the—?” Milo Banda gazed at the inexplicable scene in front of him. “Marcia,” he protested. “I can’t leave you alone for five minutes.”
SNOW PRINCESS DRIFFA, THE MOST HIGH AND BOUNTIFUL
Up in the big hall of the Keep, in front of the blazing fire, Princess Driffa sat wrapped in blankets. She was shivering uncontrollably—a delayed effect of the Freezer. Her translucent white skin had a blue tinge to it and her bright blue eyes were the only natural color she had. Her blue ribbons laced through her white braided hair hung limp and wet, and her sparkling blue fingernails peeped out from the blankets as she clutched them to her.
Driffa’s presence took Marcia right back to being a child. As the daughter of traveling Wizards, Marcia had spent a few years in the Eastern SnowPlains as guests of three princesses who had looked remarkably similar.
Tod looked admiringly at Driffa. She had never seen anyone quite so blue and white before. And now that she knew that Driffa had spent two whole days on the Dragon Boat, she was impressed. She handed Driffa a mug of hot chocolate. “I’m sorry I knocked you over,” she said.
Princess Driffa said nothing. She had not gotten over the affront to her dignity. She sniffed the hot chocolate suspiciously.
“Drink it,” said Septimus. “It will warm you up.”
Driffa gave Septimus a wan smile and took a sip of the chocolate. It tasted good. The hot drink did its work and soon Driffa’s shivering had subsided.
Remembering the formality of the Eastern SnowPlains, Marcia said, “Welcome, Snow Princess of the Eastern Plains. I am Marcia Overstrand, and you are an honored guest in my house. May you be so for man
Princess Driffa understood formality. She inclined her head in a brief nod and said, “I, Snow Princess Driffa, the Most High and Bountiful, thank you, O wise Sorcerer.” Then she looked at Septimus, who had not, Marcia noticed, taken his eyes off Driffa. “ExtraOrdinary Wizard Septimus Heap. I thank you for freeing my horse from its foul Enchantment.”
Feeling a little awkward, Septimus bowed his head in acknowledgment. Clearly Driffa did not realize that it was his foul Enchantment that had Frozen her horse—and he wasn’t about to tell her, either.
Haughtily, Driffa handed her empty cup to Tod. Then she turned to Marcia and said, “I pray you, send the servant boy away. There are important matters I wish to discuss.”
Marcia looked puzzled. She didn’t have a servant boy. But Tod understood.
“I am not a boy,” she told Driffa indignantly. “And I am not a servant, either.”
“Ah.” Marcia felt bad. She realized she should have introduced Tod properly. She hurried to make amends. “Snow Princess Driffa, the Most High and Bountiful, may I present to you Alice TodHunter Moon. She, too, is an honored guest in my house.”
Driffa inclined her head very slightly in Tod’s direction and looked away again. Tod thought she was extremely rude. She sat hugging her knees, feeling chilled and alone. A longing to be home, where she needed no introduction to anyone, came over her. Tod picked up her own mug of hot chocolate and stared into it stonily. She was not going to cry. She was not.
While Tod retreated into her own head, the Snow Princess—her thin white hands with their shimmering blue nails fluttering like bird wings—began to speak. At first Tod paid little attention, but as the story unfolded, she found herself listening with increasing interest.
“I, Driffa, am the daughter of the High Emperor of the Great Eastern SnowPlains. We live in the low hills that surround the largest of the SnowPlains. Our people trade and work the precious blue stone, which we take from our Enchanted Blue Pinnacle.”
A smile flitted across Marcia’s face. She remembered moonlit sleigh rides out to the mysterious tall, conical hill of lapis lazuli, always free of snow, in the middle of a vast plain of white.
Driffa held out her hands to show bracelets made of silver and glittering stones of blue and a ring with a piece of polished lapis as big as Tod’s paint-splashed pebble. “This is the stone that the Great Orm has given to us in return for guarding its precious Egg. We are peaceful people. Our pleasure is to build snow towers and polish stones. Our duty is to guard the Egg of the Orm.” The Princess bit her lip and her voice trembled. “Which . . . we have failed to do.”
Tod looked up. So the Snow Princess is human after all, she thought.
Driffa continued. “The Egg of the Orm gives us the Enchantment that covers our lands with beautiful snow throughout the year and allows us to live in towers of ice. Far beneath the Blue Pinnacle is the Chamber of the Egg of the Orm. In the middle of this chamber is the Orm Tube, and at the bottom of the Orm Tube lies the Egg. The Chamber of the Egg of the Orm is a hallowed place, full of silence and sleep. Around it is the Sacred Ice Walk, where we go to contemplate the Egg and give thanks for its Enchantment. Or we did.” The Snow Princess blinked back tears. She got out a white handkerchief and blew her nose loudly. “But now . . .” she said angrily. “Now all is desecrated. By a fiend called Oraton-Marr.”
Tod looked at Driffa with some sympathy. It seemed that the Snow Princess had lost her village too.
Driffa continued. “In our family there is a Time Traveler. She is my great-great-great-grandmother. On my sixteenth birthday I opened a letter from her. It was an invitation to meet her in the House of Foryx.”
Marcia gasped.
“You know this place, O Sorcerer?” asked the Snow Princess.
“I do,” said Marcia. “It is not somewhere I would invite a granddaughter to.”
“I understand what you say, but I did not know what it was then. I thought it was the house where my many-times-great-grandmother lived. When I arrived I found her sitting in the checkered lobby on a chair carved like a dragon. She recognized me at once, but I would never have known her. She was young, no more than ten years older than I am. She took me to her little room high up in one of the octagonal towers and she told me a terrible thing. She said that an evil sorcerer was coming to take away the Egg of the Orm. I asked her how she knew and she said she had seen it.”
“If this has happened,” Septimus said, “it cannot be changed.”
The Princess looked miserable. “That is what I thought too. I asked her why she was taunting me with such terrible news, but all she would say was that some things could be prevented. She did not say what they were. She said it was important for me to do this because we live at the center of the world, where all roads meet and the evil must not travel further. I laughed at her because we live in a dead end. There is but one pass through the hills that leads into our SnowPlain and we see few travelers. Those who come are usually lost. They walk around the foothills looking for a way through to the other side but there is none. We are hospitable people and we offer them shelter and good food and guide them back the way they came. It is hardly the center of the world.
“My grandmother became cross with me for laughing. She told me to leave. I must wait in the dragon chair for a handsome, young ExtraOrdinary Wizard—she described him very well—wearing new robes and carrying a Magykal black stone. I must Go Out with him because that would be the right Time. What I did not know was that the right Time for my great-great-great-grandmother was not the right Time for me. When I returned home, my three younger sisters were old women, my parents were dead and our towers of ice were deserted. Almost everyone had run away.
“And Oraton-Marr was already there. My sisters—who, being princesses, were brave and had not run away—had watched the sorcerer arrive. He did not walk the foothills, looking for a way out as others do, he went straight across the plain to our Enchanted Blue Pinnacle and he set up camp. He took the snow and made it into Iglopuks—big, round houses—leaving the earth bare.” She turned around to Tod and Marcia, smiling. “When we are children we do this. We make a snow house, which is fun, and from where we have taken the snow, the rock is bare. Then we watch the Enchantment bringing the snow back. That is even more fun, to see the snow return.” She shook her head sadly. “But the snow did not return and my sisters became anxious, because they knew this must mean the sorcerer was destroying our Enchantment.
“My sisters sent our most powerful sorcerer to ask the Darke one to leave, but she did not return. They sent the second most powerful sorcerer and he did not return either. The third most powerful sorcerer pleaded not to be sent, and my sisters told me that there seemed little point in losing him, despite the fact they all found him very annoying. They wished they had sent him first.
“There was nothing my sisters could do but watch. They saw Oraton-Marr dig down into the ice beside our Blue Pinnacle. After some months, they said, people began to appear, although no one saw them come. It was very strange. But these wretched, enslaved people were set to work.
“Heaps of black earth and filthy ice began to pile up fast and we knew that soon Oraton-Marr would reach our sacred Chamber of the Egg of the Orm. I had to do something—a princess cannot spend all her life in her tower of ice counting her blue stones. And so early this morning before it was light, I took my best horse, the fair Nona, and I set off to challenge the foul sorcerer.
“I have some snow Magyk—enough to make stupid people think that I am nothing more than a gust of snow. I knew it would not fool Oraton-Marr but I thought it would allow me to get past his guards and get close to him. The Enchantment covered Nona’s tracks with fresh snow and we made no sound, but as we drew near, the sorcerer’s influence came into being, the Enchantment weakened and Nona’s tracks began to show. But we reached the bare earth unseen and with my small Magyk, we moved across the spoil like a gust of Akkilokipok—the soft snow with fat flakes that settles
“From within our tiny blizzard Nona and I saw that a great pit was being dug down into the ground, toward the Chamber of the Egg of the Orm. Guards with spikes on their heads marched around the top of the pit, each with a Garmin on a leash. Nona and I saw hundreds of people working. Some were pushing barrows of earth up steep paths that led out of the pit. Others were hacking at the rock and ice below. All kinds of people were there; even little children were working and all were dirty, cold and utterly wretched. It was a terrible sight.
“There was a path into the pit that was not being used by the workers and I decided to take a closer look. The path descended, circling deep inside the walls around the pit. Nona is a good horse; she bravely went down the path into the darkness of the rock. Suddenly we came upon Oraton-Marr. I challenged him and asked him what he was doing. He laughed and said that he was ‘egg collecting.’” Driffa looked disgusted. “He said it with no respect—as though our precious Egg of the Orm were a chicken egg. I pretended not to know what he meant. I told him there was nothing here for him and he should go away and let his poor slaves go free. But he set his guards on us and I am ashamed to say Nona and I fled. Our way back up was blocked by guards by then, so we had no choice but to go down. We found ourselves descending through a circular tunnel of lapis covered in ice, I expected that soon we would be caught, but I was not going to make it easy for them. And then, to my amazement, Nona cantered into the most wonderful place I have ever seen. A huge blue chamber lit with torches with twelve silver arches and a great spiral of blue for the roof.”